How to Be Spider-Man, Walk on Walls
Were you the kind of kid that encouraged spiders to bite you in hopes that they were radioactive runaways whose venom would give you mysterious powers? Did you idolize Spider-Man, wishing in vain that one day you would be able to sling webs at your enemies, walk easily across walls and ceilings and swing from building to building? Or were you like me and watched The Fly first, then became too grossed out to think about it anymore?
Either way, the days where we are able to walk along walls may not be too far away. Researchers have devised a high-tech suction device that mimics the ability of beetles to hold onto an object with a force 100 times its weight (Beetleman, anyone?). The device is called a “Switchable Electronically-controlled Capillary Adhesion Device” (SECAD). The name pretty much explains how it works. The SECAD consists of two plates: The top plate has hundreds of tiny holes, and the bottom plate houses a thin layer of water. In between both of these is a porous middle layer. A 9-volt battery is used to create an electric field that causes the water to squeeze through the pores of the top layer. The droplets exposed on the top layer can be used to adhere to another surface. When you want to come down from your new perch on the wall, just flick the off switch, and get ready to catch your fall. The creative team behind SECAD supplied a video of the device at work, holding up a tasty Hershey’s bar.
The device uses the well known property of water called adhesion. Adhesion is the tendency for water molecules to stick to other surfaces – the same property responsible for the incredible soaking properties of a towel. Even with one tip of a towel immersed in water, very soon the entire towel can become damp because water molecules pull on each other and other surfaces so strongly that they can defy gravity and move “up” a surface.
According to professor Paul Steen of Cornell University, “In our everyday experience, these forces are relatively weak. But if you make a lot of them and can control them, like the beetle does, you can get strong adhesion forces.”
The device is just a prototype, but can already hold a man up against a vertical Plexiglass surface. Well, a Lego man, at least. More work would be required to make a version of the SECAD that could support human weight.
Source: Live Science
Light Speed Kills
Traveling at light speed seems like it shouldn’t be all that complicated. After all, nearly every movie, show or book set in space features a form of near-light speed. Unfortunately, anyone working off of the prototypes of near-light speed travel would be cursing the names of Spock, Kirk and Starbuck if they decided to give it a go themselves.
The problem lies with Einstein’s theory of relativity. Space and time distort at different speeds, and at near light speed, they become compressed. What used to be a few dozen hydrogen atoms bouncing off the hull at cruising speed becomes a debilitating ray at light speed. Hydrogen atoms, which number in the billions upon billions in our own atmosphere, can only be found two per cubic centimeter in space. They’re infinitesimal, inconsequential… what harm could they possibly do to a space ship weighed by the tonnage?
As speed increases, the kinetic energy increases. At 99.999998 percent the speed of light, the kinetic energy of hydrogen atoms raises to 7 tetraelectron volts. I have no idea how hot that is, but I can’t imagine anything coming at me at near the speed of light being anything but incredibly painful. The good folks at the LHC compared it to “standing in front of a proton beam” during one of their experiments. That’s certainly too much beam for a human to take, but even a ship with a 10 cm thick aluminum hull could only absorb less than 1 percent of the tetraelectron beam. Ouch.
If you don’t perish from the kinetic energy attack, you’d certainly fall victim to the Hydrogen atom’s casting of ionizing radiation. Ionizing radiation is measured using a unit called the sievert (Sv), which is a measure of the effect of radioactivity on biological tissue. 1 Sv is an above-normal dose of radiation. This causes cell damage. No biggie, since the body can typically replace damaged cells without too much fuss. At 2 Sv, cells are dying at such a rapid rate that they cannot be replaced quickly enough and your immune system will begin to fail. At 7 Sv, 50 percent of irradiated people will die within 60 days. A crew of intrepid space travelers would be bombarded with nearly 10,000 sieverts worth of radiation if they attempted near light speed travel.
With this evidence I think we can safely table the motion of near light speed travel. Hey, at least we still have the warp drive. Or… maybe not.
Source: NewScientist
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King Tut Was Malarial, Club-Footed
King Tut was thrust into the role of Pharaoh when he was only nine years old. Despite having powerful and wise advisors, he was still heir to an Egyptian kingdom that had just been ravaged by the plague, split by countless Hittite invasions and survived violent uprisings against the monotheistic cult of Aten, which his father, “the heretic king,” had begun during his own reign.
Since the discovery of Tut’s nearly intact tomb in 1922, archeologists have been trying to find the cause of his sudden death at the tender age of 19. The popular theory is that he was murdered – a valid suggestion, considering the political climate and the infamous reign of his father before him. However Zaha Hawassi, director of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, wanted a more thorough investigation into the causes of King Tut’s death. He contacted Carsten Pusch, a geneticist at the University of Tübingen in Germany and asked him to run a DNA analysis on the boy pharaoh.
What they found was astonishing: King Tut was the product of an incestuous relationship, resulting in a frail, diminutive boy who suffered from Koehler’s disease and a club foot. Along with the wealth of gold and other precious items found in his tomb, there had been over 100 walking sticks, a clear sign of his frailty. “This is confirmed by images of him sitting while shooting an arrow, which normally would have been done standing up,” states Hawassi. “He cannot stand.”
King Tut likely perished due to complications after fracturing his leg. “Death, [the authors assert] was not attributable to foul play,” explained Howard Markel of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan. “A sudden fracture of the leg progressed to a life-threatening condition because of his malarial infection.”
Researchers were also able to piece together a tentative family tree. By running DNA analysis on several unidentified mummies found entombed with King Tut, they were able to identify his father, Akhenaten, and his mother, who was Akhenaten’s sister. Brother-sister pairings were not uncommon in those days. Since pharaohs were regarded as deities, they often searched within their own bloodlines to find consorts worthy of them. They may have searched for their consorts elsewhere if they had known of the debilitative effects of inbreeding.
Source: Discovery News
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Searing Conditions After Big Bang Create Rules-Breaking Plasma
Since 2000, researchers at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory have been trying to recreate the conditions of the universe in its infancy, just a few microseconds after the Big Bang occurred. Before atoms or nuclei even existed, their constituent particles, quarks and gluons, freely existed in a quark-gluon plasma (QGP).
To recreate the QGP, researchers at RHIC have been colliding gold nuclei, sending them through a 2.4 mile underground ring at speeds of nearly 99.995 percent the speed of light. When the gold atoms collide, the protons and neutrons within the nuclei melt and release quarks and gluons, the even tinier particles that they are made of. The speed at which the gold atoms collided with one another created an intense heat measured at a searing 4.7 trillion degrees Celsius – that’s 250,000 degrees hotter than the center of the sun and is the hottest temperature to ever be created in a lab.
Further, the very laws of physics appear to be randomly and opportunistically broken within the QGP, specifically the law of mirror symmetry and the law of charge parity. The law of mirror symmetry states that events occur in exactly the same way, regardless of whether or not you were to view them in the mirror. After two gold nuclei collide, researchers found that positively charged particles moved parallel to the magnetic field that was created, while negatively charged particles moved in the exact opposite direction. These movements would appear reversed if viewed in a mirror, thus breaking mirror symmetry.
Charge parity states that for every bit of energy that is converted into mass, or mass into energy, an equal amount of particles and oppositely charged particles, called antiparticles, must be created or annihilated. Can you spot the problem with this? When antiparticles and particles exist in equal amounts they will annihilate one another, leaving us with photons in the form of high-energy gamma rays. Thankfully, this change parity law was broken at some point early on in the creation of the universe, otherwise we wouldn’t exist. In fact, not only was the charge parity symmetry broken, but it was broken in such a way that there is more matter in the universe than antimatter. During the experiment, the bubbles within the QGP seem to break the charge parity symmetry.
Lauren Admire stumbled upon Miss Klingon Empire during her research this week.
Yeah.
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Published: Feb 22, 2010 10:00 pm