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PURETi

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PURETi PURETi
Smog-killing coating

Titanium dioxide, typically used as a pigment in toothpaste and an active ingredient in sunscreen, can also, in ultraviolet light, act as a catalyst to break down air pollutants. After 10 years of research, PURETi produced a titanium dioxide nanoparticle spray that dries into a clear coating on almost any surface, including rooftops, fabric, windows and roadways. In tests, coating asphalt roads with PURETi decreased smog-causing pollutants by about 50 percent.


Samsung Galaxy Nexus Now Available, for $300

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The Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the newest and best Android smartphone we've ever used (read our review here), had a few key facts kept under wraps for a surprisingly long time, most importantly price and release date. Official word just came in last night: the Nexus is on sale at Verizon stores today (Thursday), at a price of $300, all of which is about as expected.

The Nexus has 32GB of non-replaceable storage, so it's priced on par with phones like the iPhone 4S. You'll need a 4G plan, since the Nexus uses Verizon's frankly awesome 4G LTE network.

[Droid Life]

Amateur Radio Balloon Flies From California to Algeria

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Filling the Balloon The CNSP-11 balloon (for California Near Space Project) is filled with helium before its flight. California Near Space Project

A weather balloon built and powered by amateur radio balloon enthusiasts made an epic three-day journey from California to the Mediterranean, splashing down after it apparently burst somewhere off the Algerian coast. The transcontinental transatlantic flight covered a record-shattering 6,236 miles.

The California Near Space Project launched four balloons Sunday, Dec. 11, from a site near Silicon Valley, two of which were high-altitude explorers and two of which were "floaters," long-distance travelers designed to reach a certain altitude and then float with the prevailing winds.

One of the two floaters apparently crashed in southern Indiana, but the second balloon, call sign K6RPT-11, made its way across half the planet. It was last tracked traveling above the Mediterranean, moving 35 MPH at 14,558 feet.

The balloon was a 1,600 gram Hwoyee model carrying a small radio that enabled tracking via the Automatic Position Reporting System. Radio operators in Nova Scotia apparently lost track of the balloon sometime Tuesday, but it reappeared 11 hours later, moving east toward the Azores, according to the Register.

Ron Meadows, 55, and his son, Lee Meadows, 32, both swimming pool service repairmen, have launched several weather balloons in an attempt to break records, as the San Jose Mercury News reports. In October, their latex balloon set a new altitude record by soaring 136,545 feet and beating the previous record-holder, a Cornell University project, by 1,500 feet. The long-distance balloon nearly doubles the range of the previous record-holder, a transatlantic floater that flew 3,361 miles.

[via Slashdot]

Portable Gamma Camera Displays Radioactivity in Real Time

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The Portable Gamma Camera Toshiba via Tech-On

Tracking down radiation hotspots is tricky and time consuming because it's hard to see where the problem areas are. Radiation doesn't spread itself evenly over an area, and as such it can be hard to find the spots within a contaminated area that require cleanup and differentiate them from the places that do not (typically this is done by walking around waving a handheld meter around, a process that is really, really slow). To simplify the task, Toshiba has developed what it's calling a Portable Gamma Camera that mashes up gamma ray data with image data to create visual radiation heat maps on the fly.

The camera itself is the size of a large camcorder and records both image data through a normal camera sensor and radiation data via embedded semiconductor detection elements built into the camera. Then, via a signal processing device, it combines the two into a single image that superimposes the radiation data onto the visual image on the camera's display.

Color coding like a weather map (red for "danger" down through oranges and yellows to greens for "okay") tells the user where radiation is the highest and how high it is, allowing workers to quickly survey an area and mark it for cleanup. It also serves as a fast and efficient way for cleanup crews to check their work and make sure they've completely cleared an area of all radioactive hotspots before moving on.

Toshiba will field trial the Portable Gamma Camera in collaboration with Fukushima City in Japan this month. If all goes well, the camera could go into regular use within Japan's central and local governments early next year.

[Tech-On]

Video: A Water-Propelled 'Dolphin Jetpack'

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The Flyboard

Some people go swimming with dolphins, enthralled with their easy movement through the water and the grace with which they occasionally breach the surface. Others, like Franky Zapata, make dolphins look pretty lame by comparison. Zapata, a professional jet ski racer and designer of the watercraft has created what he calls a Flyboard, a wearable apparatus that makes him part aquatic Iron Man, part dolphin analog, and all awesome.

The Flyboard is something like the water-powered jetpacks we've seen before, but unlike those previous iterations that simply let a user hover above the water's surface, the Flyboard propels Zapata both beneath the surface and above it, lifting him more than 30 feet in the air via water jets attached to the feet and hands.

The cost to you: $6,400. We think you'll agree it's a small price to pay to be able to do what Zapata does in the video below.

[ITN]

Wound-Treating Jelly Regenerates Fresh, Scar-Free Skin

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Fixing a Burn Injury PNAS

Tissue engineering and tissue healing have a common complication - it's difficult to build new blood vessels throughout the rebuilt skin, but vasculature is required to keep the skin alive. This is especially problematic for victims of severe burns. A new customized sugary gel substance can work wonders to re-grow skin and the associated blood vessels, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University.

The method involves a specially designed hydrogel, a water-based polymer. This one is made of mostly water with dissolved dextran, a type of sugar, and polyethlyene glycol (a common substance found in everything from antifreeze to laxatives).

We have seen hydrogels used before in creating artificial skin - last winter, Rice University researchers used a PEG hydrogel, doped with human growth factors and platelets, to induce the growth of artificial vessels. But this new one is interesting because the researchers didn't add anything - no growth factors or anything else. This particular hydrogel's physical structure apparently rendered that unnecessary. The researchers aren't even certain how this happened.

Sharon Gerecht, an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, and her postdoc Guoming Sun set out to use their hydrogel as a wound dressing for severe burns. An artificial skin dressing offers greater protection against infection and promotes healing better than other types of wound coverings, they say in their paper, published in this week's edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In a study involving mice, the researchers removed badly burned skin from the center of a burn wound, and covered this opening with the hydrogel. As a control, they covered some wounds with a material derived from cow collagen, which is currently used to treat human burn victims at the Hopkins Burn Center. The other wounds were left alone with just the hydrogel.

After three weeks, the hydrogel worked even better than the control, the researchers say. This was a surprise, so the team worked out a supplementary study to determine why the hydrogel breaks down so readily and how the animals' bodies were able to use it to generate new dermal tissue. It turns out that the body's natural inflammatory response - involving neutrophils and macrophages - accumulated easily inside the hydrogel. Its physical structure enabled their easy entry, which promoted the breakdown of the hydrogel and enabling blood vessels to fill it in. Gerecht also believes the hydrogel might recruit bone marrow stem cells, which are naturally induced to differentiate into skin and blood vessel cells.

This is good news, because the faster this process happens, the less chance there is for scarring, Gerecht said in a Hopkins news release.

"Our study clearly demonstrates that dextran hydrogel alone, without the addition of growth factors or cytokines, promotes rapid [vessel growth] and complete skin regeneration, thus holding great potential to serve as a unique device for superior treatment of dermal wounds in clinical applications," they write.

[ScienceDaily]

Next-Gen GPS Satellite, Accurate to Within Three Feet and Indoors, is Ready for Testing

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GPS Satellite NASA via Wikimedia

Were America's NavSat handlers perhaps feeling slighted when it was revealed that the new Apple iPhone 4S would augment its existing GPS coverage with Russia's GLONASS constellation? The U.S. is getting ready to launch a new generation of Global Positioning System satellites starting in 2014--part of a $5.5 billion upgrade--and the first prototype has been delivered for testing to Lockheed Martin.

The new satellites, called Block III, are set to make America's GPS constellation more powerful, more reliable, and more accurate on the ground. Right now, GPS is reliable for a location fix to within ten feet of a person's actual location. Block III satellites should cut that margin of error down to within three feet. Boosted signals should also boost penetration and coverage, making receivers on the ground more accurate when under tree canopies or in so-called urban canyons where coverage is presently spotty. It should even make indoor GPS somewhat better.

What's good for the military is good for you. Air Force Space Command oversees the U.S. GPS constellation, but the aforementioned upgrades will translate to civilian GPS applications. For its part, the military is getting its own private upgrade. A new military signal called M-code will be much harder to jam, giving troops on the ground an added layer of security. That's also good for civilian users of GPS (which is basically everybody these days), as sending two separate signals will also allow for better error correction should a satellite get slightly out of sync with the rest of the constellation.

That's about all we civilians get to know for now, aside from the fact that the Pentagon eventually expects to field 32 Block III satellites (hence the hefty price tag). And that rhetorical question that opened this post? That's just a little good-natured ribbing. In actuality, the U.S. and other countries around the globe are working toward a new common civilian positioning signal so your Garmin can use whatever satellites are best for the job regardless of which nation they belong too. That means not only is the U.S GPS constellation getting an upgrade, but GPS coverage on the whole should get a lot better.

[AP via Discovery News]

Chimps are Unnecessary for Most Research and Should Be Used Sparingly, Report Says

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Chimpanzee Chi King via Flickr

Chimpanzees are only necessary as research subjects in a very limited number of cases, according to an expert committee convened by the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine, part of the National Academy of Sciences. And the apes' future use as lab animals - which is not being banned outright in this country - should be determined according to a new set of specific criteria, the committee said.

Chimps have long been used to research treatments and cures for a host of diseases, even traveling to space so humans could get a better grasp on what would happen to our primate species when our turn came. But animal rights groups and bioethicists have also long debated the ethics of using our closest animal cousins as lab animals. The report was in part sparked by a two-year debate about bringing retired chimps back to work as research subjects.

The report only governed the use of chimps in publicly funded research, which the New York Times notes is 612 of 937 total American research chimps. It also does not recommend stopping the use of chimps outright, which Congress has debated for the past two years. The European Union banned chimp research in 2010. But the NRC committee recommends that chimps could still be used when they would be necessary to study diseases that endanger people, like a major disease outbreak. "Although the necessity of chimpanzees in research is quickly declining, animal research remains a critical tool in protecting and advancing the public's health," the report concludes.

We are not sure what this means regarding chimps sent into Earth orbit or to Mars, however.

[National Academies]


Toshiba Qosmio F755-3D290

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Toshiba Qosmio F755 Toshiba
Onboard webcam tracks your eyes to show you better 3-D

Glasses-free 3-D screens allow viewers to ditch the dorky shades, but with a trade-off: Images are sharp only in a narrow sweet spot; move, and the picture distorts. The Qosmio F755 adjusts its sweet spot as the viewer shifts. The 15.6-inch LCD directs left and right images to the corresponding eyes using a thinly striped overlay, known as a parallax barrier. A built-in webcam tracks the viewer's eyes and tells the graphics processor to shift the barrier microscopically to match any ticks in head position. $1,700

SecuraSeal Sliding Patio Door

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SecuraSeal Sliding Patio Door Courtesy SecuraSeal
Jimmy-proof jamb

Anyone who has ever had a sliding patio door knows the drill: The lock latches at a single, easily jimmied point, so real security requires keeping a broomstick or dowel rod stowed in the track of the door. The SecuraSeal Sliding Patio Door turns the entire 76-inch floor-to-ceiling edge of the door into a single, sturdy locking mechanism. The groove along the door's edge surrounds an expandable flange in the doorjamb. A switch on the jamb (rather than the door handle) engages the lock, further thwarting any attempt to disengage the lock from the outside.

$1,900

Nano-Engineered Bioconstructs Perform Photosynthesis Faster Than Nature Does

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Cyanobacteria Synechococcus PCC 7002, a type of cyanobacteria. Wikimedia Commons

Scientists have been trying for a while now to recreate the process of photosynthesis, using sunlight and water to spark chemical reactions. Now a team from Penn State University has done one better, producing an engineered biological system that can produce a hydrogen biofuel twice as fast as nature.

The system uses a molecular wire to facilitate fast movement of electrons between light-capturing enzymes, which are used to split water into molecular oxygen and hydrogen. It could someday serve as a fast and reliable way to derive hydrogen for use in fuel cells.

Researchers led by Carolyn Lubner at Penn State worked with a cyanobacterium called Synechococcus and another bacterium, Clostridium acetobutylicum. In nature, photosynthetic organisms use light-capturing enzymes nicknamed Photosystem I and II, which absorb light and excite electrons to a higher energy state. Another enzyme called FNR then uses these electrons to produce an energy-storage molecule. This molecule is used to make sugars to keep the organism alive, and that's your basic photosynthesis process.

Lubner et al replaced the FNR enzyme with a hydrogenase enzyme, which combines electrons with hydrogen ions to make molecular hydrogen (instead of a sugar-producing system). Then they used this enzyme to stitch together iron-based terminals of a Photosystem I enzyme from each of the bacteria. This stitch served as a molecular wire, easily and quickly transferring electrons. The researchers doped it with vitamin C, which served as the electron feedstock.

The result was a high-throughput hydrogen-producing system - electron flow was more than twice as high as the bacteria's individual rates, the authors say. It produced hydrogen molecules for several hours, as long as it had vitamin C to use. The system is easily adaptable to other enzyme terminals and other bacteria, the authors say. As such, it could be used to produce a wide range of potential biofuels.

The study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[via PhysOrg]

DeLorme inReach

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DeLorme inReach inReach
Text from anywhere, via satellite

Cell towers and landlines cover only 10 percent of the Earth, but satellite networks reach pretty much everywhere. The inReach communicator relies on Iridium and GPS satellite signals so users can send preloaded messages and allow designated contacts to track their travels. Pair it with an Android smartphone using the free DeLorme Earthmate app to compose and receive texts as well. $250, plus $10/month subscription

Telescope Would Voyage to the Edge of the Solar System to Escape Zodiacal Light Pollution

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ZEBRA (Zodiacal dust, Extragalactic Background and Reionization Apparatus) NASA/JPL/Caltech

When space agencies or institutions want to erect a space telescope, they usually look to some remote area like Chile's Atacama desert where clouds are few and light pollution is likewise scarce. But a team of NASA/Jet Propulsion Lab researchers wants to go even further off the grid to escape the likes of clouds and light pollution. Many millions of miles off grid in fact. The team is exploring the idea of tethering a space telescope to the next space mission to the outer solar system so they can gather optical data from beyond the asteroid belt.

Their target is a better reading of the extragalactic background light (EBL), which is essentially the total combined light pouring into our galaxy from other sources across the universe. It's like an optical tally of everything else that's out there. But from our vantage point, it's hard to get a good read on the EBL. Zodiacal light--sunlight reflected by grains of dust in the asteroid belt or light from grains that are radiating themselves--pollutes our view of the EBL. There's no good way to accurately extract that noise from data collected by telescopes on and around Earth, so our picture of the EBL remains blurry at best.

But at about five astronomical units outward--at roughly Jupiter's orbit--the view of the EBL becomes about 30 times clearer. At Saturn's orbit, that number jumps to 100 times clearer. ZEBRA, the Zodiacal dust, Extragalactic Background and Reionization Apparatus would pack three optical and near-infrared instruments and piggy-back on a mission already headed to the outer solar system to get a better vantage point on the EBL. It would then correlate that data with data collected from the ground.

Doing so would tell astronomers a lot of things, namely by shedding light on the Era of Reionization. At this point in cosmic history--roughly 450 million years after the Big Bang, or more than 13 billion years ago--the first stars began to pour UV radiation into the intergalactic medium, stripping away electrons and reionizing hydrogen that had been neutral throughout the so-called Dark Ages of the universe's early history. This phase change marked a serious transformation for the universe and greatly shaped the universe we have today.

So naturally, the Era of Reionization is of great interest to astronomers, as is a clearer reading of the EBL. ZEBRA could provide a window to both. All it needs is $40 million and a ride.

Catch an interview with two of the scientists behind ZEBRA over at Universe Today.

[Universe Today]

DARPA's 'Membrane Optics' Spy Satellite Could Capture Close-Up Video of Earth from Orbit

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Just when the drone war was starting to get good, DARPA is looking for a way to make stealthy reconnaissance drones--like the not-so-stealthy RQ-170 that ended up in Iranian hands a couple weeks ago--obsolete. The DoD's blue sky research arm is looking to develop recon satellites with optics so good that they can hover way up in geosynchronous orbit and still capture live high-res video of any spot on the planet's surface.

The problem: the network of spy satellites already in orbit can take still images in pretty impressive resolutions, but they cannot capture video. In order to orbit at the low altitudes needed for their optics to capture decent imagery, they have to move very fast--way too fast for video capture. Geosynchronous orbit--wherein satellites move at the same rate as the Earth's location and thus remain stationary in the sky relative to the Earth--is much higher up at about 22,000 miles.

Capturing live video across 22,000 miles of Earth atmosphere isn't easy, and launching satellites with the massive optics required to do so has proven pretty unfeasible in the past. But naturally DARPA has something new up its sleeve: membrane optics. This sort of thing has never been tried, but it might just make video from geosynchronous orbit a reality.

The idea currently described in a proof of concept from Ball Aerospace--working under a DARPA contract--envisions a lightweight satellite that would unfurl a huge flexible membrane once in orbit. That membrane would deploy at the end of several extensions that would hold it some distance away from the satellite itself, basically creating a huge lens. The entire array would function as a huge aperture telescope--DARPA wants a collection aperture of nearly 66 feet eventually (that's three times bigger than the James Webb Space Telescope)--that would be capable of capturing video of individual military vehicles (like mobile missile launchers; specifically the program calls for "probability of detection for a SCUD-class launch of 0.99, with less than one false alarm per month") on the ground. That means ideally it would see things less than 10 feet long.

For starters, Ball plans to create a 16-foot membrane optics array for testing followed by a 32-foot membrane ‘scope for actual flight tests on orbit. If that successfully delivers the kind of imagery DARPA is looking for, the satellite video capturing technology promised by every James Bond movie since 1980 could be hovering in geosynchronous orbit by decade's end.

[Innovation News Daily]

Brain-Enhancing Drug Shown to Greatly Improve Mouse's Memory

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A new drug that blocks a stress-provoked immune molecule in the brain can dramatically improve memory and learning abilities in mice, a new study says. A future pill that can suppress this molecule could show promise as a therapy for Alzheimer's disease in humans, researchers say.

The treatment involves the enzyme PKR, which protects against viral infections. It serves two functions in the brain, acting as a stress responder that can cause cell death (such as in the case of a viral invasion) and regulating synaptic activity as it relates to the formation of memories. The brains of patients with Alzheimer's, Huntington's and other neurological diseases have been found to experience PKR activation. Researchers at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and McGill University in Montreal wanted to study the effects of PKR deficiency.

They genetically modified some mice to lack a gene that codes for PKR formation, and subjected the mice to some memory tests. A spatial memory test required mice to use visual cues to find a hidden platform inside a circular pool, for instance. Regular mice had to repeat the task a few times over a few days to remember where the platform was located, but the PKR-deficient mice figured it out after just one training session, according to a Baylor news release. Dr. Mauro Costa-Mattioli, assistant professor of neuroscience at BCM and lead author on the paper, said the researchers found that another immune enzyme, gamma interferon, took over some of PKR's memory functions. It increased synaptic communication among neurons and gave the mice a sort of "super-memory," Costa-Mattioli said.

The next step is the most interesting part, and could hold the most promise for research on Alzheimer's and other neurological disorders. Costa-Mattioli and colleagues figured out a PKR inhibitor and injected it into the stomachs of normal, non-genetically-modified mice. It worked to suppress the PKR, the researchers said. The success of a gut-injected form suggests a pill form could also work well.

That's several years and several human trials away, of course, but Costa-Mattioli said it could eventually help people who suffer from memory loss. The research appears in the journal Cell.

[Vancouver Sun]


Video: Swarming Teams of Robo-Farmers Will Change the Face of Agriculture

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Farming has always been about man, says David Dourhout, but man is now the limiting factor in agriculture. The future of farming is not about getting more efficiency out of each farmer--the human farmer has already been pretty well optimized by technology. Rather, the future is about getting more production out of each tract of farmland. The future, in other words, is Prospero, Dourhout's swarming, game-theory-crunching fleet of autonomous robo-farmers.

Prospero is a prototype for a larger, singular robotic organism that Dourhout is working toward in his spare time (he's an entomologist by trade and a roboticist by hobby, which makes him very good at his hobby). Right now, he's got a small fleet of six-legged robots capable of working together to optimize the planting of a given piece of farmland using swarm technology and software running game theory. Via infrared, the robots communicate with each other, marking places that have already been planted and signaling to each other when one needs help seeding a particular plot.

The result is a system that can optimize things like seed spacing and remember where each individual seed is planted. It can also make very good decisions about when and where to plant seeds based on varying soil types, even within the same field. It's essentially fully customizable seed planting on a foot-by-foot basis, Dourhout told Discovery News.

Moreover, Prospero is simple. Eschewing data-dense systems like GPS, Dourhout instead designed the Prospero bots to recall locations of seeds by simply talking to each other as they amble along. Following the model of ants, which mark places of interest (read: food) with pheromones so other ants can find them, he designed his ‘bots to mark planted seeds with a shot of white spray paint that changes the reflectivity of the soil around the site. Other robots register this change in reflectivity, allowing them to see every seed in the field.

Prospero is just the beginning, Dourhout says. He wants to build a robot that can plant, maintain, and harvest an entire crop all autonomously and, more importantly, in the most efficient way possible. Robo-farmers could work around the clock to help keep a field in optimal conditions, fighting pests and other invasive plants without chemicals and increasing both crop yield and crop health. His six-legged robo-farmer is the first step. See Prospero in action, as well as Dourhout's robo-centric vision of the future of farming, in the video below.

[Discovery News]

How a Decade of IEDs Has Reshaped Bomb Disposal Tech

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A Man, a Robot, and a Mission Courtesy G4
The technological toolbox of the military's Explosive Ordnance Disposal units is completely different from ten years ago

When American and coalition troops rolled into Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, they quickly began doing exactly what any military playbook said they should do, leveraging their superior firepower and aerial superiority into a string of quick victories. In both engagements, coalition forces quickly hammered conventional military threats into submission and settled into a long role of occupation and rebuilding. That's when the bombs started going off.

Improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, were claiming casualties and leveling a battlefield that once sloped steeply in the coalition's favor. The IED quickly emerged as the insurgency's weapon of choice and the single biggest killer of U.S. troops. The military needed a new set of 21st-century tools to help stop the bleeding and mitigate the IED threat. And that's exactly what it got.


Click to launch the photo gallery

On its two biggest fronts, the U.S. military and its allies found themselves battling an enemy unbound by normal conventions of war and unrelenting in its creativity. Insurgent fighters were turning just about anything--jerry cans, surplus artillery shells, even pressure cookers and other household appliances--into remotely detonated land mines capable of turning an unarmored Humvee into twisted, charred wreckage. The enemy didn't even have to show up to the battle. By 2007 the "roadside bomb" was responsible for well more than half the coalition deaths in Iraq.

Military conflicts have historically served as effective technology accelerators as the threat of casualties drives military planners to solve problems as quickly as possible. In Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade, the story is no different. Today, ten years after boots first hit the ground in Afghanistan, the military's technological toolbox has been drastically transformed by the landscape of the last decade, shaped largely by the persistent IED threat. And perhaps no job in the U.S. military has been reshaped by technology quite like Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD).

These are the guys who make regular work out of dealing with a grunt's worst nightmare: unseen explosives buried under footpaths and roadways and rubble, waiting to make unsuspecting victims out of a foot patrol or convoy. EOD technicians are first and foremost highly trained problems solvers, but ten years into the long war the technology at their disposal has become sharper, more reliable, and safer to deploy. That's a good thing, because EOD teams in Afghanistan are still getting plenty of work.

Over the past several weeks, that new technological toolbox has been on display via G4 Network's documentary series Bomb Patrol: Afghanistan, in which a camera crew rides shotgun with elite Navy EOD Platoon 342 as it hunts IEDs in Faryab and Kunduz Provinces in Afghanistan. To get a closer look at how the EOD toolbox has changed during the decade of the IED, we asked Chief Petty Officer John Groat (a Navy EOD tech and one of the subjects of the G4 series) and Richard Graves, the technical advisor for Navy EOD Group 2 at Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek-Fort Story in Virginia, to walk us through the gear that Navy EOD techs take to work every day.

Some of is fairly conventional, some of it extremely high tech, and much of it highly explosive. Click through the gallery to see what Navy EOD teams have learned from ten years of battling IEDs. And check out Bomb Patrol: Afghanistan Tuesday at 10 p.m. Eastern on G4. The season wraps up on December 27th.



Eco-Friendly Battery Runs on Old Newspapers

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Paper-Powered Battery Sony

I'll start you guys off with a quote here: In talking about Sony's new battery technology, which uses old cellulose product like newspapers and cardboard to generate electricity, the BBC says: "Their work builds on a previous project in which they used fruit juice to power a Walkman music player." Thank you, crazy Sony recycling-engineers.

This new tech relies on turning cellulose products (including, lest we forget, the paper greeting cards all you Earth-hating monsters are exchanging this time of year) into glucose sugar. That's done by introducing the old paper products to a solution of water and cellulase, an enzyme found in nature, and, um, shaking it. The cellulase solution decomposes the cellulose to form that necessary glucose, which is in turn combined with oxygen and some other unnamed enzymes, producing electrons and hydrogen ions, the former of which is fed into batteries to charge them.

If you're wondering where in nature this wood-eating cellulase enzyme is found, look no further than the termite. Cellulase is naturally occurring in the wood-eating species, and in fact the Sony researchers involved in the project actually compared their technique to that of a termite.

As with all new battery tech, especially in the early stages like this one is, the battery isn't powerful enough to run high-demand gear. A portable music player, like the Walkman™, is about all it can handle at the moment. But as the byproducts are basically harmless (water and gluconolactone, a neutral product often used in anti-aging cosmetics), it's definitely a tech we'd like to see improve and become viable.

[BBC]

Hubble Spots Complex Carbon Compounds, Possibly Organic, on Pluto's Surface

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Final Release of Hubble, May 2009 Space Telescope Science Institute

The Hubble Space Telescope has sniffed out evidence of complex carbon molecules, the building blocks of life in this corner of the cosmos, lying on the frozen surface of Pluto. The distant dwarf world is known to harbor methane ice and other frigid compounds, but this is the first time scientists have suggested there could be other complex carbon chemicals, too.

Something is absorbing ultraviolet light on Pluto's surface, and it may be organic compounds or some nitrogen-containing material, according to scientists at the Southwest Research Institute. That's organic not as in life, but as in carbon-based compounds that make up the building blocks of life as we know it right now.

The chemicals could be produced as weak sunlight or cosmic rays bombard Pluto and break apart methane and carbon monoxide ice on the dwarf planet.

"This is an exciting finding because complex Plutonian hydrocarbons and other molecules that could be responsible for the ultraviolet spectral features we found with Hubble may, among other things, be responsible for giving Pluto its ruddy color," said Alan Stern of SwRI in a statement.

The team found the high UV absorption using the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, a new instrument installed during the final Hubble servicing mission in 2009. The new data marked the first time the COS was turned to Pluto and its largest companion, Charon. The COS is designed to split light apart and measure its components.

During measurements made in 2010, the team also discovered evidence of changes in Pluto's ultraviolet spectrum compared to earlier measurements from the 1990s. This indicates the dwarf planet's surface might be changing, due to some unknown influence, or its atmosphere might have increased in pressure. The paper, published in the Astronomical Journal, shows there's a lot left to be learned about Pluto, Stern said. NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will be able to answer some questions when it arrives in 2015.

[SwRI]

Newly Discovered "Fried" Planets Are Smallest Ever

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Fried Planets Two scorched planets, both smaller than Earth, survived being swallowed up by their star when it mushroomed into a red giant. Stéphane Charpinet/Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie
Yesterday's smallest-ever exoplanets held that record for just about 24 hours

Two more little Earth-sized planets have been discovered orbiting a distant star, astronomers said Wednesday, and their bizarre baked death may foreshadow the destiny of our own solar system. The publication comes a day after the announcement of the first Earth-sized planets ever confirmed outside our solar system. Already firmly in the exoplanet age, we're apparently entering an era of exo-Earths, full of small worlds with a past and a future very much like our own.

These newest small worlds have been swallowed up by their bloated red giant of a star and lived to tell the tale. One planet is 0.76 times the radius of Earth and one is 0.87. (The planets announced on Tuesday are 1.03 and 0.87 Earth radii.) But they were probably much larger earlier in their lives, and lost much of their mass as they were engulfed in their dying star's outer gas shell, researchers said.

"If a tiny planet like the Earth spends 1 billion years in an environment like that, it will just evaporate," Elizabeth ‘Betsy' Green, an associate astronomer at the University of Arizona who participated in the research, said in a UA news release. "Only planets with masses very much larger than the Earth, like Jupiter or Saturn, could possibly survive."

Astronomers think the planets might have played a role in the star's own death, too, by stripping away its outer layers of diffuse gas. "During that episode, the planets may have been stripped down, losing their gaseous layers and being left only with their inner rocky/iron cores, which would be exposed," the authors write.

The star, known as KIC 05807616, shrunk back down about 18 million years ago and is now considered a hot B subdwarf. The Kepler Space Telescope has been observing it because of its pulsating oscillations, which are interesting to astrophysicists. The star has an exposed core and asteroseismologists are studying the pulsations to examine its interior structure.

While analyzing stellar data, lead author Stéphane Charpinet of the Astrophysics and Planetary Research Institute in Toulouse, France, noticed two tiny variations, repeated in 5.76- and 8.23-hour intervals. Other astronomers checked it out and found the same thing. These regular pulses suggested two small planets orbiting very close to their star. Based on the parameters of the star and these light curve dips, the planets, dubbed KOI 55.01 and KOI 55.02, are the smallest yet discovered orbiting around a still-living star.

On Tuesday, astronomers using NASA's Kepler Space Telescope announced they had published findings on the first two truly Earth-sized planets, one just a tad bigger than Earth and one just about the size of Venus. Those planets also orbit pretty tightly, although not as much as these new ones.

The consumed planets may have started out much larger than Earth, but their continued survival suggests not all will be lost when our own sun bloats into a red giant about 5 billion years from now. When it swallows the planets, there may be some remnants left over - not of Earth, unfortunately, but maybe the gas giants, if the sun bloats a whole lot. Somewhat comforting news.

The paper is published online today in the journal Nature.

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