JMH Techtronics

The major headline of the first time creation of magnetic soap is that it could have a major impact on environmental cleanups such as oil spills. It could work for many other applications as well such as scientific experiments to industrial settings.

LEt’s not get a head of ourselves though. What exactly is magnetic soap? Scientists have long been searching for a way to control soaps (or surfactants as they are known in industry) once they are in solution to increase their ability to dissolve oils in water and then remove them from a system. Scientists from Bristol University have developed a soap, composed of iron rich salts dissolved in water, that responds to a magnetic field when placed in solution. Previously they worked on soaps sensitive to light, carbon dioxide or changes in pH, temperature or pressure. Their latest breakthrough, reported in Angewandte Chemie, is the world’s first soap sensitive to a magnetic field.

Ionic liquid surfactants, composed mostly of water with some transition metal complexes (heavy metals like iron bound to halides such as bromine or chlorine) have been suggested as potentially controllable by magnets for some time, but it had always been assumed that their metallic centres were too isolated within the solution, preventing the long-range interactions required to be magnetically active. Surely something that would qualify for stimulusfunding small business loans.

The team at Bristol, lead by Professor Julian Eastoe produced their magnetic soap by dissolving iron in a range of inert surfactant materials composed of chloride and bromide ions, very similar to those found in everyday mouthwash or fabric conditioner. The addition of the iron creates metallic centres within the soap particles. more

Filed under: Environment, Oceans and Marine Life, Science by JMH
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Every January, John Brockman, the literary agent who presides over the online salon Edge.org, asks his circle of scientists,and scholars to answer a question. In the past he has asked such questions as: “how is the Internet changing the way you think?” and “what is the most important invention in the last 2,000 years?”.

This year, he posed the open-ended question “what is your favorite deep, elegant or beautiful explanation?”. (I added the “scientific” part to the title myself, which in hindsight was probably not the correct thing to do. I assume it was worded this way carefully, and I made a mistake adding the word. I was just trying to simplify what it was likely about by adding the word, but clearly it is not my question so I probably shouldn’t have. Without the word it becomes much more open-ended, which is the clear intent, but I won’t remove it now since it is already archived.)

This is a question that I find quite interesting. Personally, I am no scientist so I would have absolutely NO IDEA how to answer it. I can certainly appreciate the passion that scientists would have answering it, however. Listening to passionate scientists is always something that is highly entertaining, and informative to me. While I can think critically, and logically, I have never spent a good deal of time studying any scientific discipline exclusively to be considered more than someone that just likes to know things about the world. Something I assume many others do, and find it to be something we all should at least try to do. After all, the search for truth and understanding is always something I feel is important even to the point of figuring out how a signal booster cell phone works. Science is always something I am interested in and if there is one thing I can thank religion for it is that it got me much more interested in science. Not to figure out what religion had to say about it, but to actually understand what religion is too lazy to look for, and answers rather than just make up things to fill in the gaps.

I will not attempt to explain any of these explanations myself. If you go to the blog post about this you will find 192 responses already to the question and you can see them for yourself. It is a fascinating read and one I hope you will take the time to view.

Filed under: Fun Stuff, Science by JMH
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Preposterous.

As we all know, we have to think about which day holidays fall on every year. This year Christmas fell on a Sunday, next year it will be a Monday, etc. Due to the way the months are organized with some having 30 and others having 31 days, the calender is different every single year.

A couple of Johns Hopkins University researchers have a better way to make a calender in their opinion. One which will have all days the same every year. One calender that is always the same and only the year changes. Christmas would always be on the same day of the week. Always.

Using computer programs and mathematical formulas, Richard Conn Henry, an astrophysicist in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and Steve H. Hanke, an applied economist in the Whiting School of Engineering, have created a new calendar in which each new 12-month period is identical to the one which came before, and remains that way from one year to the next in perpetuity.

“Our plan offers a stable calendar that is absolutely identical from year to year and which allows the permanent, rational planning of annual activities, from school to work holidays,” says Henry, who is also director of the Maryland Space Grant Consortium. “Think about how much time and effort are expended each year in redesigning the calendar of every single organization in the world and it becomes obvious that our calendar would make life much simpler and would have noteworthy benefits.”

Then we can wear funny t shirts that say “Remember when Christmas was on a Tuesday?”

Filed under: Fun Stuff by JMH
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The Sense About Science (SAS) campaign created its list of the greatest abuses against science this week that tells of the most ridiculous public spectacles in which science is misunderstood in the media. It is the 2011 Celebrities and Science review.

Started in 2007 with much frustration hearing celebrities butcher science, the review has become an annual tradition. Celebrities are just lucky they don’t need to worry about malpractice insurance. They would never get covered.

This year we have seen a strange difficulty with understanding the sea! US political commentator Bill O’Reilly claims we have no understanding of how the tides work, while reality TV’s Snooki Polizzi put forward her own theory for why the sea is salty (too much whale sperm). Amongst the many short-cuts to better health, supplements proved especially popular; with Suzi Quatro stopping all illnesses by taking colon cleanser, and Simon Cowell preferring his vitamins drip-fed.

Filed under: Fun Stuff by JMH
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Haller’s rule: is that larger animal species though having absolutely larger brains have relatively smaller brains than related smaller species. It was first proposed by Albrecht von Haller in 1762. It applies both to brains of invertebrates and vertebrates. The rule also applies to eyes.

As the rule above states, the smaller an animal gets the larger percentage of their total body mass is dedicated to brain function. Studies on spiders have shown some interesting results due to the large amount of species available to study. The smallest of them all have brains that extend into about 25% of their legs. They need it to do the complexities of weaving webs. Our measly 2-3% is smart enough to search for deals like pottery barn coupons.

“The smaller the animal, the more it has to invest in its brain, which means even very tiny spiders are able to weave a web and perform other fairly complex behaviors,” said William Wcislo, staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. “We discovered that the central nervous systems of the smallest spiders fill up almost 80 percent of their total body cavity, including about 25 percent of their legs.” Journal entry

Filed under: Animals by JMH
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I’m sure a lot of you watch Mythbusters regularly so there isn’t much to explain. Couple of dude do science experiments with the end game of disproving myths and rumors that they run a crossed. Anyways, a recent show went from a fun experiment to a possible neighborhood tragedy.

In the experiment the crew fired a homemade cannon toward huge containers of water at the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department bomb-disposal range. Nothing stopped it. It went on a path of destruction that went into the neighborhood below at 4:15 PM where children were returning home from school.

The cantaloupe-sized cannonball missed the water, tore through a cinder-block wall, skipped off a hillside and flew some 700 yards east, right into the Tassajara Creek neighborhood, authorities said.

There, the 6-inch projectile bounced in front of a home on quiet Cassata Place, ripped through the front door, raced up the stairs and blasted through a bedroom, where a man, woman and child slept through it all — only awakening because of plaster dust.

It exited the house, leaving a perfectly round hole in the stucco, crossed six-lane Tassajara Road, took out several tiles from the roof of a home on Bellevue Circle and finally slammed into the Gill family’s Toyota Sienna minivan in a driveway on Springvale Drive.

The show will be stopped momentarily while they investigate the accident. Obviously everyone is grateful that nobody got hurt, and feels a big sigh of relief. Now just the investigation to figure out exactly what went wrong.

Filed under: Science by JMH
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Been looking for a new pa system for my buddy at his restaurant. He runs a place with bands and a lot of music so he needs to hook something up pretty nice.

Really not sure what to look for though. If anyone has any ideas let me know and help me figure out what the best kind of PA System is for a restaurant/bar that seats roughly 150 people.

Filed under: Good Advice by JMH
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That artist rendition above sure is freaky eh? Well probably not yet until you hear this: University of California, Berkeley, astronomers have discovered the largest black holes to date ‑- two monsters with masses equivalent to 10 billion suns that are threatening to consume anything from your north face fleeceto even light, within a region five times the size of our solar system.

Found near 300 million light years from Earth these black holes are at the centers of two galaxies.

“In the early universe, there were lots of quasars or active galactic nuclei, and some were expected to be powered by black holes as big as 10 billion solar masses or more,” said Chung-Pei Ma, UC Berkeley professor of astronomy. “These two new supermassive black holes are similar in mass to young quasars, and may be the missing link between quasars and the supermassive black holes we see today.”

Filed under: Astronomy, Space by JMH
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Over the past year, NASA’s Voyager 1 has been sending back data from outside our solar system where it now resides. The spacecraft is about 11 billion miles from the sun, and not yet in interstellar space.

“Voyager tells us now that we’re in a stagnation region in the outermost layer of the bubble around our solar system,” said Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “Voyager is showing that what is outside is pushing back. We shouldn’t have long to wait to find out what the space between stars is really like.”

An area of space little thought about by most I would assume. While we visualize solar systems, stars, and all the stuff orbiting around them, we often forget about all the open space in between these systems.

In the latest data, the direction of the magnetic field lines has not changed, indicating Voyager is still within the heliosphere, the bubble of charged particles the sun blows around itself. The data do not reveal exactly when Voyager 1 will make it past the edge of the solar atmosphere into interstellar space, but suggest it will be in a few months to a few years.

Fascinating research coming in the next few years I imagine if you are a working at
Veterinary Technician Jobs, or a budding astronomer.

Filed under: Astronomy, Space, Space Tech by JMH
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Before there were landmine sniffing rats, there were landmine sniffing dogs. The problem? A very ugly one. Dogs were heavy enough to detonate some of these mines. Something I am guessing most of us don’t find all that humane.

Rats have something in common with the dogs that were once used. They have a highly developed sense of smell that is perfect for detecting the metals used in the mines. The best part is that their light weight makes it highly unlikely that these tiny rats will detonate the mines.

The rodents could play an important role in making conflict-wracked Colombia safer. They are in the final stages of a training program to find landmines that kill or injure hundreds of people each year in Colombia.

The government project, which began in 2006, trains specially bred rats to detect the metals used in landmines, thousands of which have been laid during the country’s decades-long conflict with left-wing guerrillas. Give these men some flavored cigars.

Read more about LANDMINES ARE A CONSTANT MENACE

Filed under: Animals by JMH
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