Can Hydrogen Replace Gas?

Soon people in the UK may be getting hydrogen pumped through their GasMain instead of Gas. This is to do with the UK Governments desire for a Zero target for CO2 emisions by 2050. The £7 million project is backed by Ofgem’s Network Innovation Competition.

Richard Dawkins: "The God Delusion" (Full Documentary)

A documentary with content for consideration in debates between theists and atheists.

Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS FRSL (born 26 March 1941) is an English ethologist, evolutionary biologist, and author.

He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008.

Why Do We Sleep?

Why Do We Sleep?

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Flight of an aeroplane with solid-state propulsion.(via Ion...

Flight of an aeroplane with solid-state propulsion.

(via Ion drive: The first flight - YouTube)

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Why Do We Sleep?

Why Do We Sleep?

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Flight of an aeroplane with solid-state propulsion.(via Ion...

Flight of an aeroplane with solid-state propulsion.

(via Ion drive: The first flight - YouTube)

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These gloves will make virtual reality feel even more immersive.New Thin, Light VR Gloves Provide...

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How light could help superfast mobile reach even further.How light could help superfast mobile reach...

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Girl Finds 1500 Year Old Sword

Girl Finds 1500 Year Old Sword

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International Literacy Day 8 SeptemberToday is International Literacy Day

International Literacy Day 8 SeptemberToday is International Literacy Day

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Could Be a 38% Chance We Are the Only Civilization in the Known Universe

Could Be a 38% Chance We Are the Only Civilization in the Known Universe

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Alternate realities, parallel universes, new dimensions: Doctor Who, Star Trek, Stranger Things and the science they get wrong

Alternate realities, parallel universes, new dimensions: Doctor Who, Star Trek, Stranger Things and the science they get wrong

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Can We Improve Our Transportation Network Using...Biology?

Wanis Kabbaj wants traffic to flow smoothly and efficiently, like the blood in our veins. He says driverless cars may be the solution to today's highway gridlock.

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Tesla Model X: “A Bigger, Better Honda CR-V”

Article re posted from http://www.popsci.com/tesla-model-x-bigger-better-honda-cr-v

Kristen Hall-Geisler

Tesla Model X P90D Falcon Wing Door

The Tesla Model X is taking a 30-city tour of the United States to meet its fans. Not just any fans, though – these are the buyers who put down deposits ages ago in anticipation of driving home the company’s first SUV.
Asoka, a lanky middle-aged guy in jeans and wire-framed glasses, attended the meet-and-greet in Portland, Oregon. He was one of the first to make a reservation for the Model X; he’s got a Tesla Roadster (license plate NV MYEV) but not a Model S sedan. He does have a Honda CR-V for the mix of utility and decent gas mileage. That’s why he was so eager to get in line for the Model X. “It’s a bigger, better Honda CR-V,” he said.
The Model X is based on the same platform as the Model S – same batteries, same drive train. The body shape is the biggest difference, but it is a huge difference in several ways.
The Model X can seat up to seven in three rows, and the company says the show-offy Falcon Wing doors will allow for graceful entrances and exits, but that seemed unlikely. Until I saw it with my own eyes. People were as eager to climb into the back seats to test the fit as they were to sit in the driver’s seat. I got in and out with a giant messenger bag full of gear in tow, and the aisle between the middle seats as well as, yes, the winged doors made it less awkward than third-row seats usually are.

The body shape is the biggest difference, but it is a huge difference.

Another surprise for an electric SUV: the Model X is rated to tow up to 5,000 pounds with 713 lb-ft of total torque from both of its motors. Asoka was already planning on buying a utility trailer for trips to the farmers’ market in their Model X after making his wife hold a large plant in her lap in the Roadster on the way home last summer.

Pilots Claim Their Drone Is First To Cross The English Channel

Article re posted from http://www.popsci.com/pilots-claim-their-drone-is-first-to-cross-english-channel

Screenshot by author, from YouTube

Team Ocuair Drone Above The English Channel

The English Channel is a barrier. Ever since William the Bastard crossed the narrow band of sea in 1066 and earned the title William the Conqueror, the channel has stood as an impenetrable barrier to invaders.

This has also made it the site of a bit of aerial sport. Despite the channel being just over 20 miles across at its narrowest point, aviators since the dawn of aviation have clamored to be the first to fly across the channel with a new craft. In 1909, Louis Blériot became the first person to do so, but records have been claimed as recently as last year, when the first two entirely electric airplanes crossed the channel, each claiming to be the first plane like that to do so (it’s still disputed which one was first). This week, we might be able to add a new craft to historic channel crossers: an unmanned quadcopter piloted by Richard Gill of Team Ocuair as he sat from inside a little boat.

The flight took place on February 16th, with the custom-built quadcopter flying almost 22 miles in 72 minutes. The pilot at all times was within 1600 feet of the drone, to comply with local laws, but “with GPS guidance and automated flight it is perfectly feasible that the drone could have made this flight independently,” Gill and his team write in their summary of the video on YouTube. The point of crossing the channel is, like that of all who flew over it before them: to prove that the flying machine can fly that far, and to do it over water so there’s risk if it can’t.

Watch a short telling of the flight below:

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Overload Of Gut Bacteria Can Stunt Children's Growth

Article re posted from http://www.popsci.com/too-many-gut-bacteria-is-stunting-childrens-growth

UVA Health System via Eurekalert

Intestinal bacteria and stunted growth

A child in a slum in Dhaka, Bangladesh walks near an open sewer. High numbers of bacteria found here might be limiting a child's nutritional uptake and stunting his growth.

When you were a kid, you were probably told once or twice that certain substances would stunt your growth, such as coffee (that’s a myth), smoking (maybe true), or not drinking enough milk (that’s calcium, and it’s likely true). But stunted growth doesn’t just mean that you don’t grow as tall as you might have otherwise—many of the 165 million children who are stunted have cognitive disabilities and a greater likelihood of death before they turn five.

It turns out that too many bacteria living in the large intestine may play a role in stunting growth, according to a study published yesterday in the journal mBio. By understanding the relationship between intestinal bacteria and nutrition, researchers could find treatments for stunting.

The researchers looked into a condition called Small Intestine Bacterial Overgrowth (SIBO), an infection thought to inflame the intestine and limit the nutrients a person can absorb from food. The condition is more common among children who live in slums, possibly due to the presence of open sewers.

The researchers evaluated 90 children raised in the slums of Dhaka, Bangladesh. They followed the children from birth to age two to track the association between SIBO and stunted growth. Though the families were given access to medical care and nutritional counseling, and the children were vaccinated, the number of children with stunting nearly tripled during the first year of their lives, from 10 percent to 28 percent. Using a breath test, the researchers found that about 17 percent of children in the cohort had SIBO. Children living near a sewer were much more likely to have SIBO. In the slum environment, even the kids that didn’t have SIBO had some degree of intestinal stress, the researchers suspect.

The researchers believe that SIBO is causing malnutrition, which is resulting in stunted growth, though future studies into the long-term relationship and mechanism would need to confirm that. If researchers can confirm the mechanism linking the two, they could help public health officials better treat stunting before it permanently affects a child’s development.

Treating that damage to the gut, though, would be a much larger public health issue. The researchers didn’t weigh in on a long-term treatment for SIBO; antibiotics would provide a quick fix, but extended use could breed antibiotic resistance, especially since many of the most vulnerable children live near bacteria-infested sewage.

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How A Robotic Octopus Could Help Us Control Autonomous Drone Swarms

Article re posted from http://www.popsci.com/raytheon-engineer-is-learning-for-octopi-to-build-autonomous-robots

Raytheon, used with permission

James Crowder With Robot Roaches

Evolution goes like this: cockroach, octopus, robot swarm. At least, that’s the rough impression I got after talking to James Crowder, a Raytheon engineer who’s working on solving the problems of artificial intelligence.

Crowder’s focus is on systems that reason and learn on their own. For a decade, this meant building a robotic cockroach that’s afraid of light. Now, it means an octopus-inspired robot with a central brain that filters responses from smaller sub-brains. In the future, lessons from this octo-bot could power autonomous swarms of drones.

“My thought is that if I can’t build self-evolving lifeforms at the cockroach level, I’ll never build C-3PO,” Crowder told Popular Science. “Can I build something that will self-adapt at a lower brain level, because if I can’t do it at that level, I’ll never do it at an adult human level.”

His robo-roach is a success: it can detect light, and moves away from the light either by turning or, if it can’t turn, by backing up.

So why the leap from roach to octopus?

“A biologist suggested I try a distributed brain model like an octopus,” Crowder said, “because an octopus has like mini-brains in each leg and then a central mediator that mediates how they interact with each other and how they work. The mediator carries the objectives and goals but each of the other distributed neuro pieces does what it needs to to accomplish those.”

This is cool science, but Raytheon isn’t into research just because it's interesting. Going from a roach to an octopus (or, currently, a two-limbed robotic dipus) will teach the defense giant how to make better, smarter drones.

“Right now it takes multiple people to run one UAV,” said Crowder. “We’d like to get to where one person can run multiple UAVs, but that requires them to have some degree of autonomy.”

So if drone swarms are going to be a thing, with humans controlling multiple robots all at once, then robots are going to have to handle the basic tasks themselves. And to do that, they’re going to need to learn from a robotic octopus.

Read more about Crowder’s work at Raytheon.

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This New Bio-Inspired Material Harvests Water Out Of Thin Air

Article re posted from http://www.popsci.com/new-nature-inspired-material-can-harvest-water-from-air

Mbrk A. Madhi

Water, water everywhere

What do you get when you combine a beetle, a cactus, and a pitcher plant? A whole new way to harvest water out of thin air.

In a paper published today in Nature, researchers explain how they combined the water-collecting traits of two desert-dwellers (a Namib desert beetle and a cactus) to create a new material adapted to pull water out of the air — even really warm air that would normally be very difficult to retrieve any water from.

The beetle's contribution to the textured material was the design of the bumps, which grow on its back. These bumps not only allow water to condense more quickly, but also cause it to form larger droplets, which are easier to retrieve than droplets formed on a smooth, flat surface.

But once the water droplets condense on the bumpy surface, where do they go? That's where the cactus comes in. By mimicking the asymmetrical spikes of a cactus, the researchers were able to develop a texture that swiftly funnels water droplets into even larger drops, even moving them against gravity to collect every last drop from the surface.

A third biologically-inspired trait was incorporated from a pitcher plant, a carnivorous plant that traps small prey in a bulbous opening. The researchers added a coating that mimicked the slippery interior of a pitcher plant, which allowed the new material to drain water even quicker.

The technique could be useful in areas where every drop of water counts, letting communities in arid places harvest water from the air. It could also be useful in more industrial applications like desalination plants, dehumidifiers, and other machines where it is useful to get water out of the air quickly.

In order for any of that to happen, however, researchers will first have to figure out how to incorporate the biology-inspired designs into industrial manufacturing, a process that could take quite some time.

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Optogenetics Make Mouse Brains Forget Drug Associations

Article re posted from http://www.popsci.com/optogenetics-make-mouse-brains-forget-drug-associations

DEA Drug Enforcement Agency via Wikimedia Commons

Researchers trained mice to associate a particular space with cocaine, a highly addictive drug, shown above.

Combatting an addiction is far more complicated than stopping the chemical cravings—a person can associate places or other people with drug use, making the habit much harder to kick. Now a team led by neuroscientists from the University of Oxford have used light to alter mice's memories so that they no longer associate particular locations with cocaine, according to a study published this week in Nature Neuroscience. Eliminating that association might present a whole new way to treat drug addiction.

In the study, the researchers trained mice to associate a particular space with cocaine. Over time, they preferred to hang out in that space over the other places that were associated with a simple saline solution. They suspected that neurons in the hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped part of the brain that is essential for long-term memory and spatial navigation, were responsible for that association, but they didn’t know exactly which neurons were responsible.

To figure it out, the researchers injected the mice with a chemical that caused the neurons to produce a light-sensitive protein when the mouse was in the cocaine-associated area. They found 133 neurons that lit up and implanted light-transmitting fibers near the neurons in the mice’s brains. When the researchers used light to turn off those spatial mapping neurons in the hippocampus, the mice no longer preferred the cocaine-associated area. To the study authors, that meant that the mice’s memories had been altered to forget the drug-related association.

This isn’t the first study to suggest that altering memories and making the brain forget could reduce addiction in humans. And this one isn’t exactly the most feasible—it wouldn’t be very practical for people to walk around with optical cables implanted in your brain. But the researchers do believe that their findings show that altering the spatial memories associated with drug use could be a good way to reverse drug addiction, or other compulsive and harmful habits. If the researchers could use their findings to discover a less invasive way to limit neuron function in the hippocampus, the technique could someday be useful in clinical practice.

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Here’s How Virtual Reality Could Help Doctors Treat Cancer