Very imaginative and mesmerizing animation drawn on a wall.
http://youtu.be/uuGaqLT-gO4
Thursday, November 29, 2012
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
Third world solar autoclave
http://www.popsci.com/bown/2012/product/mit-solarclave
Boiling water isn’t enough to sterilize medical instruments, which is part of the reason that a quarter of surgery patients in rural clinics in developing countries end up with infections. What’s really needed is an autoclave, which blasts tools with 250°F steam under pressure. MIT researchers figured out how to build an autoclave that requires only inexpensive, commonly available materials—a pressure cooker, small mirrors, and buckets—which together concentrate solar rays and produce microbe-killing conditions in 90 minutes.
Green tech: dyeing fabric without gallons of pollution.
"It takes between 25 and 40 gallons of water to dye 2.2 pounds of
fabric. Multiply that by the millions of T-shirts, track pants, and
other textiles made each year, and you get two huge environmental
problems: millions of tons of chemical-laden wastewater and depletion of
freshwater.
Instead of H2O, DyeCoo’s process uses supercritical carbon dioxide, which has fluidlike properties. The fabric absorbs nearly all the dye while generating no wastewater, and 95 percent of the CO2 is recycled into the next batch. Plus, reduced energy and chemical use cuts production costs 30 to 50 percent. Nike, which has a partnership with DyeCoo, used it to dye an Olympic singlet for Kenyan marathoner Abel Kirui, and Adidas put its first 50,000 DryDye T-shirts on sale this summer."
http://www.popsci.com/bown/2012/product/dyecoo-textile-systems
http://www.dexigner.com/news/25160
Instead of H2O, DyeCoo’s process uses supercritical carbon dioxide, which has fluidlike properties. The fabric absorbs nearly all the dye while generating no wastewater, and 95 percent of the CO2 is recycled into the next batch. Plus, reduced energy and chemical use cuts production costs 30 to 50 percent. Nike, which has a partnership with DyeCoo, used it to dye an Olympic singlet for Kenyan marathoner Abel Kirui, and Adidas put its first 50,000 DryDye T-shirts on sale this summer."
http://www.popsci.com/bown/2012/product/dyecoo-textile-systems
http://www.dexigner.com/news/25160
One motor adjusts many solar panels.
Having a single motor travel along a track to adjust a whole array of solar panels reduces the complexity of the system a lot. It is claimed to withstand severe weather, but it's hard to imagine the monorail wheels getting clogged with dust and disabling the entire system. -TE
Monday, November 26, 2012
Aventura Spa Palace - Palace Resorts' Adults-Only Resort
Recommended spa resort in Mexico
http://www.aventura-palace.com/
85 acres of pools, spa, beaches, restaurants and more near Cancun.
http://www.aventura-palace.com/
85 acres of pools, spa, beaches, restaurants and more near Cancun.
Monday, November 19, 2012
Hard-boiled Eggs without Peeling
Tips: add baking soda to the water...crack open both ends of the egg and blow:
http://youtu.be/PN2gYHJNT3Y
http://youtu.be/PN2gYHJNT3Y
Foam overwhelms Aberdeen
From PopularScience:
According to a 2011 paper by several Austrian scientists called "Foam in the Aquatic Environment," the answer is--somewhat unhelpfully--yes, and yes. In order for foam to form, you need air, water, and a key third ingredient called a "surfactant"--a kind of sticky molecule that clings to the surface between water and air. This surfactant ingredient can come from a lot of places; human-made sources include fertilizers, detergents, paper factories, leather tanneries, and sewage. But surfactants also come from the proteins and fats in algae, seaweed, and other marine plant life.
There are lots of different molecules that can act as surfactants, but they all have one thing in common: one end of the molecule is hydrophilic (attracted to water) while the other end is hydrophobic (repelled by water). When a bunch of surfactant molecules get mixed together with plenty of water and air, they all want to line themselves up right at the boundary, with one end (hydrophilc) facing the water and the other (hydrophobic) facing the air. They'll even line up back to back, so that the hydrophilic ends are pointed at each other, with a thin layer of water in between. That thin layer of water takes the shape of a sphere, because a sphere requires the least energy of any shape, and voila, it's a bubble. Things get slightly more complicated when there are many bubbles packed together--as you might have noticed while taking a bubble bath as a kid (or as an adult), foamy bubbles aren't perfect spheres--but the basic idea is the same. It's all about the surfactant.
"Foam in the Aquatic Environment" mentions several reports of "unusual quantities" of foam forming near large algal blooms. "Great amounts of carbohydrates and proteins are released by the mucilaginous cell colonies," the authors write, giving rise to "copious amounts of viscous foams and mucus in the water column."
When the algal proteins or carbohydrates get close to shore, the waves "act like a big blender," explains Raphael Kudela, a marine ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "Physical agitation breaks them up and lets them reform," as foam; the foam is then swept ashore, where it accumulates.
So the foam at Rockaway Beach may or may not have been "natural"--there was, after all, the funky odor I noticed after diving into the waves--but in any case it's clear that significant sea foam onslaughts--like the one that blanketed a small Scottish fishing village at the end of September--can happen naturally.
Friday, November 16, 2012
River-crossing trucks becomes river crossing trucks.
These guys never heard that discretion is the better part of valor. An accident waiting to happen.
http://youtu.be/EqI8QsAZAYQ
http://youtu.be/EqI8QsAZAYQ
Thursday, November 15, 2012
Erase hard drive on a MAC
Use the 'Erase' command in the Disk Utility application.
From Popular Science Oct 12 p. 78.
From Popular Science Oct 12 p. 78.
Geothermal heat for a pool
From a renewable energy forum.
"We installed a 5 ton geothermal water-to-water system to heat the radiant floors in our house. In our Maryland climate, our pool (25' x 50', 60,000 gal) gets too hot in the summer, so I ran supply and return lines from the house geo unit 400' underground to the pool for cooling in the summer. It works great! We also heat the pool during the shoulder seasons and that works great too. We turned the heating back to the floors in the house in late October, but we swam until then in 90 degree water. Geo works great for heating and cooling a pool, and our unit is 3 tons undersized for the quantity of water we heat and cool in the pool."
http://ths.gardenweb.com/forums/load/energy/msg061645333159.html
"We installed a 5 ton geothermal water-to-water system to heat the radiant floors in our house. In our Maryland climate, our pool (25' x 50', 60,000 gal) gets too hot in the summer, so I ran supply and return lines from the house geo unit 400' underground to the pool for cooling in the summer. It works great! We also heat the pool during the shoulder seasons and that works great too. We turned the heating back to the floors in the house in late October, but we swam until then in 90 degree water. Geo works great for heating and cooling a pool, and our unit is 3 tons undersized for the quantity of water we heat and cool in the pool."
http://ths.gardenweb.com/forums/load/energy/msg061645333159.html
Thursday, November 8, 2012
Robot Dragonfly | Indiegogo
Flies like a dragonfly, weighs what a AA battery does, motherboard is smaller than a stick of gum. Nice work!
http://www.indiegogo.com/robotdragonfly
http://www.indiegogo.com/robotdragonfly
Wednesday, November 7, 2012
Thursday, November 1, 2012
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