Developages - Development and Technology Blog

This is a pretty interesting idea, taking the word chemical “back” as something good… or at least not “poisonous″… I agree!

The Royal Society of Chemistry is today reclaiming the word chemical from the advertising and marketing industries.

It has been misappropriated and maligned as synonymous with “poison”. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) recently defended an advert which perpetuated the myth that natural compounds are free of chemicals.

The truth, as any right-minded person will say, is that everything we eat, drink, drive, play with and live in is made of chemicals - both natural and synthetic chemicals are essential for life as we know it.

If, as the ASA says, the public believes materials can be “100% chemical free″, the RSC will soon be inundated with examples from people wishing to claim the £1 million pound bounty announced today by the RSC.

Dr Neville Reed, a director of the RSC, said today: “I’d be happy to give a million pounds to the first member of the public who could place in my hands any material I consider 100% chemical free.

“Should anyone do this, we will see thousands of years’ worth of knowledge evaporate before our eyes. We would have to tear up the textbooks, burn the degree certificates and retrain the teachers.”

The manufacturers of a popular “organic” fertiliser recently drew the attention of the public when it claimed in promotional materials the product contained no chemicals whatsoever.

The product’s manufacturer makes the fantastic claim to be “100% chemical free” in its advertising and on its packaging. The back of the packaging lists its chemical-free ingredients, which include phosphorus pentoxide and potassium oxide.

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The Chemistry gift guide - Celebrating chemistry and inspiring the next generation of chemists!

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Original post by Phillip Torrone

Robert Bruce Thompson (author of Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments) and Barbara Fritchman Thompson (co-author with Bob on Illustrated Guide to Astronomical Wonders) are hard at work on a new book that is going to bring DIY CSI to your home or basement lab: Illustrated Guide to Forensics Investigations (coming from MAKE in 2009).

One of the tech reviewers on the book is Dennis Hilliard, Director of the Rhode Island State Crime Lab. I stopped by the lab recently, and Dennis treated me to a full tour of it. It’s a really impressive facility. They provide forensics services to state and local police, and in some cases federal authorities.

Although I’ve been told that real forensics is not all that much like what you see on TV, it’s actually not that far off. There are many computers, lots of test firings, and plenty of hands-on science.

There doesn’t seem to be any of the soap opera-like drama you see on TV, and Dennis tells me that in much of the US, the scientists are not police officers. Because of this, the forensic scientists often work with police officers to teach them how to gather, preserve, and process evidence, and also a bit of the scientific method.

But the key difference is that unlike TVs, the computers don’t do all the work. Instead, scientists use the computers to reduce uncertainty (always comparing the known to the unknown), and make the call themselves.

Flickr set: November 2008 visit to the RI State Crime Lab

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Original post by Brian Jepson

gaijinsr writes “The damage done in what CERN calls the ‘₎ Incident’ (and what other people call a major explosion in the cryogenics system) is much more serious than originally admitted: The earliest possible restart date is late summer next year, but with some proposed improvements to avoid repetitions of the incident, it looks more like 2010. They kept this pretty quiet up to now, not the kind of information policy I would expect from CERN.”

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Original post by timothy

Astronaut Dr. Don Pettit demonstrates what is likely the most convenient method for enjoying a beverage in space - using a simple cup with airplane-wing-like shape which uses a liquid’s surface tension to draw the beverage evenly towards the mouth -

When Dr. Don Pettit lived aboard the International Space Station in 2002, he became known for his “Saturday Morning Science” sessions, during which he would demonstrate really cool, simple microgravity experiments.

Earlier this month, Pettit returned to space, this time as member of space shuttle Endeavour’s crew on a mission to upgrade the outpost. After 10 days of hard work, the STS-126 crew got some time off Sunday morning and Pettit took the opportunity to film a special episode of Saturday, err, Sunday Morning Science.

Not sure if it’s safe enough to use around a sensitive control panel, but very cool all the same. - Sunday Morning Science

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Original post by Collin Cunningham

Make a device that identifies dangerous liquids by analyzing light - By Eric Rosenthal…

After air travel security banned bottled water and baby formula, I began wondering why they didn’t use a device to determine the contents of liquids. If a liquid was detected to be safe, security could allow it on the plane. Spectrometers can identify the chemical makeup of a material by shining light on it and analyzing the precise mix of colors that bounce back.

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Original post by Phillip Torrone

Make a device that identifies dangerous liquids by analyzing light - By Eric Rosenthal…

After air travel security banned bottled water and baby formula, I began wondering why they didn’t use a device to determine the contents of liquids. If a liquid was detected to be safe, security could allow it on the plane. Spectrometers can identify the chemical makeup of a material by shining light on it and analyzing the precise mix of colors that bounce back.

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Original post by Phillip Torrone

holy_calamity writes “Some grainy black and white movies are receiving rave reviews from scientists. They are taken by a new microscope which, thanks to a ’strobing’ electron gun, can image movement at sub-nanometer scales. Until now, only still images that smeared out movement were possible at such scales. The press release notes, ‘The researchers first blasted the sample with a pulse of heat. The heated carbon atoms began to vibrate in a random, nonsynchronized fashion. Over time, however, the oscillations of the individual atoms became synchronized as different modes of the material locked in phase, emerging to become a heartbeat-like “drumming.”‘ Further details and a few animations are available at Caltech’s site.”

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Original post by Soulskill

How about a nice flashy sports car to wind down for the day on a lazy Friday afternoon? The Honda FC Sport concept is no ordinary sports car though, since it runs on hydrogen power and uses the same fuel-cell technology first seen on the Honda FCX Clarity. It was designed at Honda′s Advanced Design Studio in California and is intended to be a working prototype for production sports car that uses fuel-cell technology. Strangely there doesn’t seem to be any information floating about on horsepower or speed, but we do know it’s a mid-engine design that’s been streamlined and lowered to hug the road, so it’s got to be quite nippy. It’s a bit of a marmite design in terms of looks - you’ll either love it or hate it - but if this is the kind of thing we have to put up with to get someone to design an efficient zero-emission engine then so be it. Click the link below for some more images before you make up your mind. - Paul Lester [CarMagazineOnline] sports car concept fuel cell

Original post by nafiz

10 Years of the ISS in pictures @ Universe Today.

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Original post by Phillip Torrone

Hugh Pickens writes “Discover magazine has an interesting article on the multiverse theory — a synthesis of string theory and the anthropic principle that explains why our universe seems perfectly tailored for life without invoking an intelligent creator. Our universe may be but one of perhaps infinitely many universes in an inconceivably vast multiverse. While most of those universes are barren, some, like ours, have conditions suitable for life. The idea that the universe was made just for us — known as the anthropic principle — debuted in 1973 when Brandon Carter proposed that a purely random assortment of laws would have left the universe dead and dark, and that life limits the values that physical constants can have. The anthropic principle languished on the fringes of science for years, but in 2000, new theoretical work threatened to unravel string theory when researchers calculated that the basic equations of string theory have an astronomical number of different possible solutions, perhaps as many as 101,000, with each solution representing a unique way to describe the universe. The latest iteration of string theory provides a natural explanation for the anthropic principle. If there are vast numbers of other universes, all with different properties, at least one of them ought to have the right combination of conditions to bring forth stars, planets, and living things.”

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Original post by kdawson

KentuckyFC writes “An international team of physicists has applied the ideas of cloaking to the quantum world and worked out how to hide quantum objects such as molecules. In the quantum world, seeing is equivalent to detecting a quantum object. In the case of molecules, that means looking for the terahertz radiation they produce when they vibrate (abstract). By designing a ‘quantum corral,’ an elliptical nanostructures that absorbs terahertz waves at a precise frequency, the team says it is possible to hide molecules that emit at exactly that frequency. They say their quantum corral would be ideally suited to detecting molecules of specific species while ignoring others. And that may mean a new generation of molecular detectors on the horizon.”

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Original post by kdawson

Featuring our own Robert Bruce Thompson, author of the Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments (where you can learn how to set up a home chemistry lab and keep your local public officials on their toes):

HOBBY CHEMISTS will tell you that home labs have been the source of some of chemistry’s greatest contributions. Charles Goodyear figured out how to vulcanize rubber with the same stove that his wife used to bake the family’s bread. Charles Martin Hall discovered the economical electrochemical process for refining aluminum from its ore in a woodshed laboratory near his family home. A plaque outside Sir William Henry Perkin’s Cable Street residence in London notes that the chemist “discovered the first aniline dyestuff, March 1856, while working in his home laboratory on this site and went on to found science-based industry.”

Even in the 21st century, when home labs tend to be more synonymous with methamphetamine than major discoveries, there are some professional chemists who pursue their science at home. Just 90 miles southeast of Deeb’s house, Osamu Shimomura, one of the scientists who shared this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry, runs a small lab in the basement of his Falmouth, Mass., residence, where he studies bioluminescent materials from animal tissues.

Underground Science: Chemistry hobbyists face a labyrinth of local and state regulations

In the Maker Shed

Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments - For students, DIY hobbyists, and science buffs, who can no longer get real chemistry sets, this one-of-a-kind guide explains how to set up and use a home chemistry lab, with step-by-step instructions for conducting experiments in basic chemistry. Learn how to smelt copper, purify alcohol, synthesize rayon, test for drugs and poisons, and much more. The book includes lessons on how to equip your home chemistry lab, master laboratory skills, and work safely in your lab, along with 17 hands-on chapters that include multiple laboratory sessions.

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Original post by Brian Jepson

From the MAKE Flickr photo pool

Eric “ALH84001″ Archer conducted some testing on the ability of a neon sign transformer to improve beverage enjoyment -

Round 1: Lone Star (the national beer of Texas). 1 cm arc discharge to surface of cold beer for about 15 seconds. Slight foaming occured at the point of arc contact. Panelist 1 (EA) noted the acrid flavor of ozone in the beverage and tossed it over the fence.

Round 2: inexpensive red wine. both electrodes beneath liquid surface, about 10 seconds. transformer hummed but no visible arcing. Panelist 2 (DF) noted a decrease in the “bite” of the wine.

For more results see here - Apparatus for High Voltage Treatment of Alcoholic Beverage

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The Boiler Bar at Maker Faire

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Original post by Collin Cunningham

Congrats India!

A probe from India’s Chandrayaan-1 lunar mission has landed on the Moon, officials at the Indian Space Research Organisation said on Friday.

The Moon Impact Probe detached itself from Chandrayaan-1 about 100 km from the Moon’s surface and crash-landed on the south pole of the Moon at 1501 GMT, officials said in Bangalore.

“It was a flawless operation,” said SK Shivakumar, director of ISRO Telemetry’s tracking and command network.

The probe, to be named “Aditya”, aimed to kick up some dust, which instruments in the mother craft would analyse. It had already sent images from its descent to the mother ship, Shivakumar said. At the time of this posting, the images had not yet been published on ISRO’s website.

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Original post by Phillip Torrone

It’s time to break out the Alsatians people; our future robot overlord masters now have a face. ‘Jules’ is the name of their equivalent of Adam, and was developed as part of a project called ‘Human-Robot Interaction’ at Bristol’s robotics lab by a team of engineers. For the time being its sole job is to mimic people’s facial expressions by mapping them onto electronic motors under the flexible rubber skin. Developer Peter Jaeckel (we’ll start getting scared when Robert Hyde gets signed to the project) sees application of the technology on robots in the workplace, care, education and in space. “Robot appearance and behaviour need to be well matched to meet expectations formed by our social experience. If people were put off, it would counteract all efforts to achieve trustworthiness, reliability and emotional intelligence” he says. Peter seems oblivious to the fact that ‘trusting’ robots is the first step towards damnation, but unless anyone fancies travelling back in time to stop him, it looks like the research will continue. Of course such a story wouldn’t be complete without a freaky video showing the thing in action, you can check it out below. - Paul Lester [DailyMail] robot bionics future

Original post by nafiz