Tech Tuesday 7/18/17 – Hagfish Edition
Aerospace
Aero1 – Radiation in space is a serious concern. A new space suit may help with that. And if it is cheaper and
lighter weight than gold foil, it could protect satellites as well.
Aero2 – The USS Bruce Willis is all set to… Oh, wait, that’s not it’s name. And it doesn’t involve oil rig workers, or drills, or cheesy nuclear warheads.
Aero3 – Getting a good look at Jupiter’s wine stain of a storm. And if you are tired of hearing about the Jovian, here is Pluto once again.
Aero4 – Runaway stars. Likely the result of a bad relationship that finally exploded. How fast are they moving? 400 kps plus whatever orbital speed they had at the time of escape.
Aero5 – New ceramic coating may give new momentum to hypersonic vehicles (Mach5+).
Aero6 – For some reason, this sounds really familiar, but it’s being presented as new research (maybe I saw the working paper?). Anyway, owl wings and wind turbine noise.
Aero7 – Using a gecko to clean up space junk. Well, a robotic gecko. OK, a robot with gecko inspired grippers.
Bio-Medical
Bio1 – Purple, anti-oxidant rich ric… oh, never mind, the anti-GMO folks will just destroy those crops as well. Yeah for the purity of Gaia…
Bio3 – Vitamin A rich bana… This is just asking for trouble, people. Just stop trying to help the poor an malnourished with science and evil GMOs, there are moral souls at stake here!
Bio2 – A vaccine for killing tumors.
Bio3 – Storing data in DNA. I mean, we actually did it, a whole video. And a computer virus and an Amazon gift card. One TB of data, 150 grams of DNA.
Bio4 – A soft, fully functional, 3D-printed artificial heart.
Energy
Enrg1 – I would be surprised if something like this would scale to compete directly with a HAWT or VAWT, but it certainly could work on the small scale, or as an large scale array, since they could probably be sited much closer together. Actually, a CFD simulation of a field of these would be pretty interesting…
Enrg2 – A technology demonstrator using Formic Acid as an energy source. For those of you not familiar with formic acid, it’s HCOOH. So what the tech does is extracts the H2 and releases the CO2. The CO2 is then recycled to make more formic acid.
Enrg3 – Plans to build the worlds largest flow battery, in a giant salt cavern.
Environment
Env1 – Remember the Deepwater Horizon? Remember how most of the oil from the broken well head never made it to the surface where we could clean it up? Remember how a lot of it also just sort of vanished? Well, it didn’t vanish, it got eaten, by a microbe. And now we know which one.
Env2 – This one is for Kristin, in honor of her post. And if concrete isn’t your thing, how about origami?
Materials
Mat1 – The secret to long standing Roman marine concrete? Seawater. Figuring this out will have long term benefits, not just by allowing us to build stronger, more durable piers and wharves, but sea walls as well, not to mention concrete hulls for floating houses, or whole islands.
Mat2 – Graphene to the rescue once again, this time in dialysis machines that are 10 to 100 times faster than current designs.
Mat3 – Artificial spider silk made at room temperature, without solvents or large energy inputs, that is non-toxic and 98% water. I will now sit here and eagerly await the day when I can order my very own Spider-Man webshooters from Amazon.
Physics
Phys1 – Redefining the kilogram through Planck’s Constant. In your everyday existence, having a super precise measurement standard for a unit of mass is no big thing, but it’s pretty damn important regardless. Being able to mathematically define that standard through a physical constant not only alleviates the need to maintain physical representations of those standard measures, it also makes the standard open source, in that when you need to re-calibrate highly sensitive measuring equipment, you don’t need to wait for one of the standards to become available, you just dial it in mathematically.
Phys2 – Oh LHC, Charmed, I’m sure.
Technology
Tech1 – Smart windows are getting smarter by being self powered.
Tech2 – New materials to speed up recharge rates.
Tech3 – Introducing the worlds sharpest laser! Wait, what? How is a laser sharp?
Tech4 – A 34 ft LED flat screen. Yes, that is feet, not inches.
Tech5 – Using the fuel to form the nozzle.
Transportation
Tr1 – That is certainly ambitious. Good luck, Volvo.
Weird, Wacky, and Wonderful
Www1 – Oh look, it’s a revolutionary dumb-waiter, for people…
Www2 – Our stupid obsession with the perfect lawn.
Www3 – What happens when Cthulhu sneezes all over the road. Take a moment to read the whole FAQ, it’s amusing.
Image by checoo 
Tr2 – headline
In the press release
(em added)
*thinkingface.jpg*Report
What is a mild hybrid car?Report
Runs on menthol?Report
I’m a mild hybrid person.Report
Kinetic energy recovery systems, which is mostly what we have now. All of the electrical energy involved is directly or indirectly derived from the gas/diesel in the tank.Report
So no battery storage, or very limited battery?Report
Limited battery, say 1.5-2 kWh. Enough to allow the set of obvious efficiencies: regenerative braking, use of an undersized gasoline engine with electric boost as needed, shutting down the engine entirely under a variety of conditions. Those typically kick the city mileage up into the mid-40s mpg in US ratings.
Interestingly, this is about the same energy storage used in Le Mans Prototype cars (the top Le Mans classification, where hybrid drive systems are now mandatory). The software in the race cars is set up for a different kind of performance: up to a 400 hp boost for a few seconds.Report
PS Technically, they are all electric cars, some are just more electric than others.Report
If I didn’t know better, I’d think Volvo is trying to get a system that can, when needed, divert energy away from propulsion and into a rail gun.Report
If that railgun is mounted on the Volvo, my interest in Volvo ownership will increase considerably.Report
Whoever wrote that hagfish faq is a comedic genius.Report
Ichthyologists and herpetologists, in my experience, tend to have the best senses of humor of all the organismal biologists.Report
Bio4: The working heart isn’t 3D printed. A model is 3D printed, and the actual heart produced by a conventional lost-wax casting process.
Is it just me, or is the frequency of errors getting past the editing processes increasing? The first three or four of these stories that I pulled up all had small but obvious errors.Report
Sorry, that is on me. Errors are usually the result of stories I find as the deadline approaches, and they get a skim instead of a full read. I’ll get better about making sure the blurb is either accurate, or intentionally woefully incorrect.Report
Not a big deal. One of the first applications for 3D printing has been faster, easier creation of complex molds for cases where you need either many identical copies, or things made from materials not suited to 3D printers.
I’ve been considering getting a small 3D printer for hobby purposes. So far I’ve been put off by literature that shows, for example, a small plastic enclosure with a note like “Printing time, 6.4 hours.”Report
I’ve been kicking around the idea of just building my own printer. But first I need a shop space, which is in the works, but still a few years away.Report
Just buy a big printer to print out the smaller printer.Report
@michael-cain
OK, I just re-read that article, & I was not entirely wrong. The heart is 3D-printed, with a lost wax printer.
If you want to print something out of a material that has a long set time (like silicone), you print it with a printer with two nozzles, one prints in silicone, the other with wax. The wax nozzle prints out a mold, and the silicone nozzle fills in the silicone. The wax holds it’s shape so the silicone can cure. Then, after the silicone cures, you melt the wax.
At least, I think that is what they are talking about, it’s hard to tell, because you can also just print the heart in wax, build a plaster mold around it, then cast with silicone in a traditional lost wax process.
But I will still be more careful.Report
The photographer makes the hagfish’s mouth look like some kind of therapeutic shower head.
…Now you can’t unsee it, and will have to try hard to distract yourself from thinking about a massive hagfish hanging over your head the next time you groom yourself. You’re welcome.Report
@burt-likko
Are you talking about the featured image? That isn’t a hag fish mouth, that is ferrofluid.Report
I imagine I wouldn’t want that in my shower, either, although for different reasons.Report
Enrg2: Holy crap, so fire ants might be good for something after all? (Formic acid is part of their sting)Report
So now I have this image in my head of someone in a white lab coat “milking” a fire ant for its formic acid, much as we milk snakes for venom.Report
well, I was thinking more on the order of like an olive press for olive oil, but I suppose the animal-rights lobby wouldn’t like that.Report
The soft artificial heart story includes this line:
I know that I’ve heard of new artificial hearts that just constantly circulate blood without the thumpthump (remember this story?) but I would like to know more about the consequences for the patients that live pulselessly.
And then I read *THIS* line:
Now I’d really, really like to know more about the assumed consequences for the patient.Report
Re Env1, its not really a surprise that such oil eating bacteria exist. After all in the gulf there are numerous natural oil seeps and for bacteria these provide good feeding. I suspect that other areas that have oil seeps tend to also have bacteria that eat the results of the seeps. So one metric for allowing drilling might be are there natural seeps in the ocean floor in the area to be drilled, because then clean up bacteria likley exist locally. There is still a lot of marine biology that is unknown, after all until recently the life around deep hot vents that lives off sulfur was unknown. For the bitumen it may be that the time constant is longer but since there are bitumen seeps I suspect that bacteria exist to eat them to.Report
Really good oil-eating bacteria have been created in the past using the standard selective breeding techniques. Getting permission to distribute them has been difficult in many jurisdictions — no one wants to be responsible for introducing them and having a rogue mutation turn them into diesel- or gasoline-gobbling critters.
Many years ago, I recall someone breeding bacteria that would, slowly but steadily, eat petroleum-based plastics, with the entirely good intent of cleaning up landfills. I heard about it because I worked in telecom at the time, and the horror story that killed the idea was “What happens if they get loose and start eating the insulation on the wire pairs in the telephone company’s cables?”
It’s not an uncommon meme in science fiction. IIRC, the collapse of technology in Ringworld was due to an engineered bacterium that ate the room-temperature superconductors everything depended on.Report
However the post on the oil suggests that left to its own devices evolution can produce similar organisms to those that are selectively bred if the ecological niche is large enough. In particular if we want to look for bacteria it seems that cold seeps of petroleum are a good place to start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_seep The bacteria in question are chemosynthetic.Report
The smart thing to do it identify the local chemo-synthetic strains and keep an eye on them. If there is an oil spill, go get some of the local microbes and give them a leg up doing the long term clean-up.Report
No argument from me. IIRC, though, the specially-bred bugs (and at least one genetically engineered version eat about an order of magnitude more oil per unit time than the naturally evolved ones.Report
Michael,
And then they put peanut oil in the optical cables, and the squirrels started eating them.
National Security issue that.Report
Squirrels (also ground squirrels, prairie dogs, etc) will chew on all sorts of cables — the outer jacket is a nice consistency for them to chew on to wear their incisors down at the proper rate. Bell Labs used to have a couple of researchers who looked for compounds with three properties: (1) squirrels hated the taste, (2) it didn’t kill the squirrels, and (3) it didn’t compromise the strength of the jacket when mixed into the plastic.Report
“Engineered” by aliens for the express purpose of causing the collapse of civilization.Report
Of all the links, there are two that I think are pretty significant in the immediate, mat1 & mat3.
Mat1 because a concrete that can not only resist seawater, but actually gets stronger through exposure, could potentially open up our ability to exploit coastal regions, and especially shallow water regions.
Mat3 for a number of reasons, but primarily because of the ease of production with aerogels (which are also easy to produce). Sure, it’s not the strongest silk, but it’s as strong as other synthetic silks, much cheaper to produce, and I would not be surprised if the next step was to combine the aerogels with the proteins that make spider silk crazy strong & see if the proteins will self assemble & entangle as desired.
The benefits of super strong, easy to produce textiles are legion. This could be huge.Report
Mat1
I’m surprised at the surprise, because my understanding of how the Romans had built the Port of Ostia in Imperial times (which is nothing like a natural port, and it was rubish in winter, jeopardizing food supplies to Rome) involved loading galleys with concrete pre-mix, and then sinking those, the mix hardening into concrete in the sea water, to act as foundation for breakwaters.
Hence, I thought this was old history. I guess what has been (re)discovered is the actual mix, and not the concept.Report
It wasn’t the fact that the Romans knew that concrete will cure underwater. That is common knowledge (for those who don’t know – concrete hardens by way of chemical reaction – as long as you can prevent the concrete from flowing away, it will harden underwater). The thing that had scientists stumped was the fact that the concrete formulation that the Romans used got stronger the longer it sat under seawater, whereas the concrete we use weakens as it is exposed to seawater.
Now they think they have the ingredients list for Roman marine concrete, and it’s just a matter of playing with the ratios of the ingredients.Report