Gizmorama
February 23, 2011
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Disinfecting UV Scanner kills 99.9% of germs in 20 seconds
http://pd.gophercentral.com/u/3747/c/186/a/474
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Good Morning,
I found so many interesting articles and studies this week,
and I found it tough to select just the normal four. The
result of my indecisiveness; five articles!
The one study that deserves special mention is a fascinating
and revolutionary look into the predatory habits of the pre-
historic Tyrannosaurus Rex. I don't put it past paleontolo-
gists to be able to derive the specific diets of creatures
that lived sixty million years ago--quite the contrary--I
think it's mesmerizing that, parallel to that deduction,
approximately (in variations of answers gathered by a Gallup
poll on creationism) twenty five percent of Americans believe
that Dinosaurs and humans co-existed, or that Dinosaurs
simply did not exist at all...
Check out the details on this study in the third article.
Until Next Time,
Erin
Questions? Comments? Email me at: mailto:gizmo@gophercentral.com
Email your comments
P.S. You can discuss this issue or any other topic in the new
Gizmorama forum. Check it out here...
http://gizmorama.gophercentral.com
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Sunlight's effect on climate to be studied
BOULDER, Colo. - A NASA satellite is set to carry a univer-
sity-designed instrument to study the effect of changes in
the sun's brightness on Earth's climate, officials said.
Developed by the University of Colorado Boulder, the $28
million instrument will be on board NASA's Glory mission,
scheduled to launch Feb. 23 from Vandenberg Air Force Base
in California, a university release said Tuesday. Designed
and built by CU-Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and
Space Physics, the Total Irradiance Monitor will point dir-
ectly toward the sun to measure both short- and long-term
fluctuations in the sun's energy output as it reaches the
outer layers of Earth's atmosphere. Variations in the sun's
radiation can influence long-term climate change on Earth,
TIM principal investigator Greg Kopp says. "We'd like to
know how the sun's energy changes over both the short and
long term," Kopp says. "This spacecraft is carrying extre-
mely sensitive instruments for monitoring solar variability,
which makes the mission especially relevant given climate
change on Earth and the importance of determining the natur-
al influence on those changes." Glory will join five other
NASA Earth-observing satellites as part of the Afternoon
Constellation, a tightly grouped series of spacecraft that
circle the globe several times each day to gather information
on Earth's biosphere and climate.
Nanomaterial filters bacteria from water
BUFFALO, N.Y. - U.S. researchers say they've developed a new
lithium-ion battery that can heal itself, last longer and
provide more safety in today's electronics. Scientists at
the University of Illinois looked at the chemistry of re-
chargeable lithium-ion batteries -- found in cellphones, lap-
top computers, digital cameras and other portable electronics
-- and found that like all batteries they tend to break down
over time, NewScientist.com reported Tuesday. "There are many
different types of degradation that happen, and fixing this
degradation could help us make longer-lasting batteries,"
Scott White, a UI materials engineer, said. One site of dam-
age is the battery's negatively charged terminal, the anode,
which swells and shrinks as the battery is charged and then
discharges over time, eventually creating cracks that can
interfere with the flow of current and, ultimately, kill the
battery. White embedded tiny microspheres in the anode that
would tear open as the anode began cracking, releasing a
liquid metal alloy, indium gallium arsenide, that fills the
cracks in the anode and restores the flow of electricity.
White also developed a system to keep batteries from over-
heating and catching fire in the event of a short circuit
within the battery. "It's not a common occurrence, but when
it happens, the consequences are severe," White said. White
developed a second kind of microsphere made of solid poly-
ethylene, embedded in the anode and other battery components.
If the temperature inside the battery rises above 221 degrees
Fahrenheit, the spheres melt into a thin layer of insulating
material that shuts off the flow of electricity, preventing
a fire. "We've tested this in real batteries," said White,
whose research is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.
"It works beautifully."
T. rex not a 'top' predator, study says
BERKELEY, Calif. - Tyrannosaurus rex, long held as the "top
dog" predator of Earth's dinosaur period, was more an oppor-
tunistic feeder than a top hunter, U.S. paleontologists say.
Researchers say that rather than ruthlessly stalking herds
of duck-billed dinosaurs and claiming the role of apex pred-
ator, T. rex was more likely an opportunistic predator, like
the hyena in Africa today, subsisting on both carrion and
fresh-killed prey and exploiting a variety of animals, not
just large grazers, a University of California, Berkeley,
release reported Tuesday. Paleontologists John "Jack" Horner
from the Museum of the Rockies and Mark B. Goodwin of UC
Berkeley say a new census of dinosaur skeletons unearthed in
eastern Montana shows that Tyrannosaurus was too numerous to
have subsisted solely on the dinosaurs it tracked and killed
with its scythe-like teeth. "In our census, T. rex came out
very high, equivalent in numbers to Edmontosaurus, which many
people had thought was its primary prey," Horner, a professor
at Montana State University, said. "This says that T. rex is
not a cheetah, it's not a lion. It's more like a hyena."
Normally, Goodwin said, top predators are one-third or one-
fourth as abundant as their prey, because of the larger
energy needs of carnivores. Opportunistic hunters like the
hyena, however, can be twice as abundant as the top preda-
tors. "If you count the lions and the leopards and the chee-
tahs in the Serengeti, the number still does not equal the
number of hyenas, because hyenas have a much wider food
source," Horner said. A hyena will eat "anything else that
it can catch or is dead," he said. Similarly, T. rex was
eating anything it could, he said. "There's no evidence that
T. rex could run very fast, so it wasn't out there being a
cheetah. If it could get a sick animal, it would."
Volcanic magma could be power source
DAVIS, Calif. - U.S. scientists drilling near an Icelandic
volcano say hitting magma, molten rock from Earth's core,
could point to an alternative source for geothermal power.
The team intended to drill 15,000 feet into the Krafla
caldera to test whether very hot water under very high pres-
sure could be used as a source of power when magma flowed
into the well at 6,900 feet, ScienceDaily.com reported.
"Because we drilled into magma, this borehole could now be
a really high-quality geothermal well," Peter Schiffmann,
professor of geology at the University of California, Davis,
said. The magma well produced dry steam at 750 degrees
Fahrenheit, which researchers estimated could generate up
to 25 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 25,000 to
30,000 homes, ScienceDaily.com reported. A typical geothermal
well, harvesting steam from heat found deep in the Earth's
crust but not involving magma, produces about 5 to 8 mega-
watts, the researchers said. Iceland already gets about one-
third of its electricity and almost all of its home heating
from geothermal sources, project leader Wilfred Elders, a
geology professor at UC Riverside, said.
Space probe set to enter Mercury orbit
WASHINGTON - NASA's Messenger is preparing to enter orbit
around the planet Mercury, a world one U.S. scientist says
has been "under-appreciated." The spacecraft, due to settle
into an orbit around Mercury on March 17, is the first vis-
itor to the solar system's innermost planet since the Mariner
10 probe visited in 1974, sending back pictures of what
seemed at the time an uninteresting planet when compared to
Venus, Mars and the system's gas giants, the BBC reported
Monday. Nancy Chabot, who is Messenger's instrument scien-
tist, says Mercury was "under-appreciated" and in fact may
be unique among the planets. It has a giant metal core unlike
that any of the other inner Solar System planets, and scien-
tists say understanding Mercury might be the key to under-
standing how all the inner rocky planets formed. "What you
can learn when you are in orbit is so different from when
you are just flying past by gathering data as you go," Chabot
said. "This is really going to revolutionize what we know
about this planet." Currently three theories have been put
forward to explain Mercury's outsized metal core: that it
was somehow created that way; that the planet used to be
much larger and a giant impact ripped off much of the rocky
crust; or, most intriguingly, that Mercury was once much
larger but an early massive solar event partially vaporized
its surface. Messenger scientists will eagerly await data to
start testing the competing theories.
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