cafecuriosity

DelFly Micro Causes a Buzz

Last time I caught up with the engineers at Delft U, they had just received funding for their RoboSwift. TU Delft has continued their engineering obsession with ever smaller micro air vehicles with the unveiling of their DelFly Micro. The Micro stretches 10 cm from wingtip to wingtip and at 3 grams barely troubles the scales. Based on the flapping motion of the dragonfly, the Micro carries a tiny camera and runs image recognition software for its 3 minute flights at 5 meters per second. It is an evolutionary step between the DelFly II (which could fly horizontally, hover and fly backwards) and the projected DelFly NaNo which will have a wingspan of just 5 cms, weigh 1 gram and be capable of independent flight when it eventually debuts. Naturally, the military and police are keen observers of TU Delft's advances in miniaturisation. http://www.tudelft.nl/live/pagina.jsp?id=43c2fd1b-f4e3-4a12-91a9-adfd518c2c88&lang=en  Image: DelFly micro air vehicle, TU Delft

Cosmic Ghost in the Machine

Astronomy has long held a 'special' relationship with amateurs. While other professions have derided amateurs as dilettantes and retreated behind tall walls offered by formal qualifications, astronomy has burbled along happily. Comets and super nova are frequently spotted by dedicated enthusiasts and astronomers for their part have learned to tap the power of social networks. Projects such as Astronomy Zoo enable the public (150,000 participated, classifying 1 million images) to participate in online astronomical research. Hanny van Arkel a Dutch school teacher found an astonishing nugget in the online catalogue of galaxy images - discovering a new class of celestial object in the process. The image had been sitting quietly in the archives for decades until Henny came across it. That object (Voorwerp in Dutch) proved to be over 16,000 light years across and astronomers have no idea how it formed - some 'ghost'!   http://opa.yale.edu/news/article.aspx?id=5934   Image: Hanny's Voorwerp and IC2497, Dan Smith, Peter Herbert, Matt Jarvis & the ING

Ventmobile Breezes Past

Competitors in the Aeolus Race in Den Helder (Netherlands) will be looking over the shoulders after Stuttgart University's Team InVentus unveiled their latest wind powered prototype - the 'Ventmobile'. Five teams from European universities and research institutes will be challenging for glory on the three kilometer track. Designed as a renewable energy demonstrator, the three wheeled 'Ventmobile' (which looks it should be sailing down a beach somewhere) relies solely on the wind for locomotion, directed via its two meter diameter two bladed rotor. Somehow I can't seeing it blasting down Shaik Z Road in Dubai!  http://www.uni-stuttgart.de/aktuelles/presse/2008/70.html   Image: Ventmobile prototype, Tobias Klaus

Weird Ring Serendipitously Stumbled Upon

Quote of the week surely goes to NASA Spitzer Science Center's Stefanie Wachter when she observed, "The universe is a big place and weird things can happen." Wachter was referring to her serendipitous discovery of a ring of material surrounding the magnetic corpse of a massive dead star (magnetar) seductively named SGR-1900+14. Trawling through Spitzer's archived data - a dull job at any time, Wachter happened to notice the odd ring formation around the magnetar. Believed to have formed in 1998, when the surface of the magnetar cracked, emitting an energy blast that blew out a nearby dust cloud, creating a cavity around SGR-1900+14 which was subsequently lit up by a surrounding cluster of stars. This type of ring has never been seen before but as Wachter's theory goes, if there is one out there, there might be more and someone has to find them! 

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2008-086   Image: Ghostly ring 7 light years across around a massive dead star, NASA/JPL-Caltech

More On the Universe's Missing Matter

Last week the European Space Station announced they had found the location of the Universe's missing matter. Apparently, it was messing about in the spider web structure that links galaxies. This week, the University of Colorado at Boulder went one better and found about half the Universe's missing matter (called baryons) in that same cosmic web that spans the gaps between galaxies. Using the Hubble telescope and NASA's Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (try saying that quickly!), astronomers found highly ionized oxygen and other elements - hinting at vast reservoirs of unseen hot ionized hydrogen - too hot to be seen in visible light, yet too cool to show up as x-rays. The team is now seeking to map the structure of the cosmic web, measure the heavy metals inside it and get a fix on its temperature in order to understand how galaxies form.

http://www.colorado.edu/news/r/81c6b13ada69601e23e0def24a37bdd6.html   Image: Illustration of how the Hubble Space telescope searches for missing ordinary matter by looking at the light from quasars several billion light-years away, Space Telescope Science Institute, NASA

Hand (and Eye) of Fate

There is nothing like a war to stimulate new ideas and technology developments and as usual, the Germans have been beavering away on the engineering front. Two interesting examples came across my desk last week. First we have yet another artificial hand - the Fluidhand. Developed in Karlsruhe, this artificial hand employs biomimickery to simulate the human hand's moveable finger joints. To flex each joint, elastic chambers within the finger are pumped up using miniature hydraulics, enabling the index and middle fingers and the thumb to move independently. It uses a similar biological engineering approach to the one powering spider legs. Fluidhand provides a better grip than other prosthetic hands thanks to its large contact area and soft finish. Thanks to its programmable grip, power feedback and easily adjustable controls, it can hold a credit card, use a keyboard and lift a 20kg bag. Unfortunately, it's not a prototype only and not in production.

Our other example of Germanic ingenuity is the 'Kolbi Cordless'. I know that sounds like a sewing machine or an electric drill but in real life it's a nifty three-dimensional imaging camera. Developed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering IOF in Jena, the mighty 'Cordless' comprises two camera with a projector mounted between them. It works by projecting a pattern of stripes one the object being imaged. Recording the disruption to the stripes allows the geometry of the object to be imaged. While other 3-D devices exist, they are twice the size and too heavy to be really portable. The breakthrough came through substituting light emitting diodes for the then-standard halogen light in the 'Cordless's' projector. This enabled significant reductions in size and weight, making the 'Cordless' cordless operational possible. The 'Kolbi Cordless' will image everything from tire tracks in a muddy road (useful for frustrated CSI types) to the human face.

http://www.klinikum.uni-heidelberg.de/ShowSingleNews.7870.0.html?&cHash=9e3ce13ea3&tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=7868&tx_ttnews%5BpS%5D=1209114667&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=3730   http://www.fraunhofer.de/EN/press/pi/2008/04/ResearchNews42008Topic3.jsp   Image: 1. Fluidhand, Orthopedic University Hospital in Heidelberg, 2. A 3-D sensor, Fraunhofer IOF, 3. Three dimensional image of a ar tyre track,Fraunhofer IOF

The Universe's Missing Matter Found

One of the most intriguing mysteries in science is the hunt for the Universe's missing matter. According to current cosmic theory, only about 5% of matter is the usual suspects - protons, neutrons and electrons. Around 23% is the shy and retiring 'dark matter', while 'dark energy' accounts for the rest. By present estimations, around half the normal matter is missing. A decade ago, scientists reckoned the missing normal stuff was lurking in the vast spaces between galaxies. Scientists predicted its existence as a very hot gas which would emit low-energy x-rays. Unfortunately, the gas' low-density would also make it tricky to detect - until now! Thanks to the ESA's orbiting X-ray observatory XMM Newton, astronomers have observed a bridge of hot gas connecting the Abell 222 and Abell 223 clusters of galaxies. This hot gas is presumed to form over half of the normal matter in the Universe. Now scientists know where (and what) to look for, the next step is to scrounge funding for a dedicated probe to explore the cosmic web. In the interim, we can sit back, comforted with the knowledge that our missing matter is no longer missing!

http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMQLPZXUFF_index_0.html   Image: 1. Composite optical & x-ray image of galaxy clusters Abell 222 and 223, ESA/XMM-Newton/EPIC/ESO, J. Dietrich/SRON, N. Werner/MPE, A Finoguenov, 2. Cosmic web, Springer et al, Virgo Consortium

When Soap Bubbles Go Bad

Curiosity sets us exploring the most unlikely phenomena. No where is this more so than at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). Their boffins study our atmosphere using, amongst other models, soap bubbles! It seems soap bubbles make very good atmospheric models indeed! Like the Earth's atmosphere, soap bubbles have a very thin film in relation to their diameter. Now when the pointy heads took a quietly unassuming soap bubble, heated it in the middle and cooled it at the ends, they created a single vortex - a cyclone in perfect miniature. What they saw then surprised them. The movement of the vortex behaved in exactly the same random way as recent hurricanes. For the first time, researchers could understand the random factor that associated with a vortex's movements. Is this useful? Well, scientists may get better at predicting the behaviour of hurricanes and cyclones and they do have the pleasure of blowing some beautiful bubbles while they're doing it!

http://www.cnrs.fr/index.html   Image: Thermal convection bubble with large vortex in the upper part of the picture, American Physical Society

Europe Loses Another Invention To the East

The UN cops a lot of flak but it recently brought together a team which turned a small slice of art history on its head. When 18 European countries came together ot fund a synchrotron they were hoping for breakthroughs in phareceuticals, cosmetics, petrochemicals and microelectronics. They probably weren't thinking of messing with 7th Century AD Buddhist cave paintings. Yet the same technology which makes a synchrotron ideal for analysing very thin layers of compounds in cosmetics and petrochemicals also works when focused on the layers of pigment used to depict aspect of Buddist life in the Bamiyan caves. Combining four synchrotron specialities; micro spectroscopy, micro x-ray fluorescence, micro x-ray absorption spectroscopy and micro x-ray diffraction researchers discovered Bamiyan's long-forgotten artists had developed oil based paints hundreds of years before it was 'invented' by Europeans. Sadly, the Bamiyan caves last achieved a world audience when the Taliban turned its artillery on two ancient gigantic standing statues carved into the cliff face in 2001.

http://www.esrf.eu/news/general/bamiyan/   Image: 1. Researchers take paint samples from a Bamiyan cave, National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, Tokyo, 2. Detail from a cave painting, National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, Tokyo

Behold the Earth's Mighty Magnetotail

For decades, we've become accustomed to viewing the Moon as a dead world where nothing much has happened for millennia. Now astronomers have discovered that something weird happens to the Moon every month when the Earth's magnetic tail sweeps across it. Each month three days before the full moon, the moon enters the earth's magnetotail. Six days later it pops out the other side. What happens during those six days is kind of cool. Massive sheets of hot charged particles lash the moon's surface. On the cold dark side, these electrons accumulate producing surface voltages of hundreds, even thousands of volts. Fine particles of moon dust may float into the air, repulsed by this electrostatic charge. The plasma may even generate a soft lunar wind with dust particles drawn from the strongly-positive dark side to the weakly-negative day side. Interesting, no one has ever witnessed the phenomenon. None of the Apollo missions landed during a full moon. The next generation of NASA astronauts may fill in this gap is NASA manages to fund its ambitious plans for a permanent moon base.

PS. The Earth's magnetic field stretches out into space, far beyond the moon. When Earth's magnetic field encounters the solar wind it streams downwind in a spectacular 'magnetotail'

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/moonmars/features/magnetotail_080416.html   Image: 1. The Moon, NASA, 2. Conceptual image of the Earth's magnetic field responding to the solar wind, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center