"The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time"
American Graphite Technologies Inc. (OTCBB: AGIN), a mineral exploration and technology development company, announces Letter of Intent with a European institute for research and development collaboration for 3D printing.
American Graphite Technologies, in collaboration with the National Academy of Science of Ukraine; National Science Centre; Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology (“KIPT”), Kharkov, Ukraine, will research the properties of graphene contained matter as working material for 3D printing. More details will be released shortly.
Graphene is a nano-material directly derived from graphite. It is a single layer of carbon only one atom thick, and it is very cheap. Graphene has been described as the “miracle material” of the 21st Century. According to mechanical engineering professor James Hone, of Columbia University, graphene is strongest material ever measured, some 200 times stronger than structural steel.
In addition, Graphene is ultra thin, transparent, flexible and electrically conductive. Because of these remarkable properties Graphene can be used to make excellent transistors, gas sensors, lower cost solar cells and display screens in mobile devices etc.
Watch [above] the short film produced by the European Graphene-Flagship initiative, “introducing graphene”.
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!
Scientists trying to engineer tissue typically start with biodegradable solid or gel scaffolds and then seed living cells onto them. But having greater control over cell spreading and tissue growth would be a big plus for researchers.
A scaffold made of liquid compartments could provide that versatility. A method for fabricating such frameworks has been reported by a team led by Hagan Bayley of Oxford University (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1229495).
To create liquid scaffolds, the researchers custom-built a three-dimensional printer—a device that usually constructs solid objects layer by layer—to squirt tiny liquid droplets from its nozzles. When the machine prints lipid-coated water droplets onto a platform submerged in an oil bath, the 50-µm-diameter droplets adhere to one another. Oil-water repulsion partly drives the interaction.
“Instead of fusing to form a larger droplet, the tiny droplets ‘kiss’ and form a very thin bilayer interface” because of their lipid coatings, says former Oxford graduate student and the report’s lead author Gabriel Villar….
San Francisco’s Exploratorium, which in 1969 rebooted the science museum concept into an immersive, participatory experience, is set to reopen in shiny new digs today at Pier 15. If you’ll be traveling to Maker Faire next month, you may want to pencil in a day for this. From a CNN article:
The culture of the Exploratorium has long been intertwined with the Maker Faire, the Bay Area festival that celebrates do-it-yourself projects. And its new shop, tinkering space and learning space expand on that maker spirit. The area where exhibits are tested and built with an impressive collection of large machinery is situated at the heart of the museum, now completely open so anyone can watch and chat up the staff and students at work.
Very glad to hear this is actually in the works! Via Universe Today:
Rumors have been leaking out for over a week, but now according to Alan Boyle at NBC News’ Cosmic Log, a senior Obama administration official has confirmed that $100 million is being sought for NASA’s budget request for the coming fiscal year for work to allow a robotic spaceship to capture a small asteroid and park it near the Moon for astronauts to explore. The spacecraft would capture a 500-ton, 7- meter (25-foot) asteroid in 2019. Then using an Orion space capsule, a crew of about four astronauts would station-keep with the space rock in 2021 to allow for EVAs for exploration. This plan would accelerate NASA’s deep space missions with Orion and prepare crews for going to Mars.
NBC news quoted the official — who spoke on condition of anonymity because there was no authorization to discuss the plan publicly — as saying the mission would “accomplish the president’s challenge of sending humans to visit an asteroid by 2025 in a more cost-effective and potentially quicker time frame than under other scenarios.”
A week ago, Aviation Week reported that NASA was considering this asteroid mission, which was proposed by the Keck Institute for Space Studies last year. Keck’s proposal had a price tag of $2.6 billion, but no cost estimate for the space agency’s version has yet been released.
Then on April 5, the Associated Press quoted U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Florida, Nelson, chairman of the Senate science and space subcommittee, that President Obama is putting $100 million in planning money for the accelerated asteroid mission in the 2014 budget that comes out next week. The money would be used to find the right small asteroid.
“It really is a clever concept,” AP quoted Nelson said in a press conference in Orlando. “Go find your ideal candidate for an asteroid. Go get it robotically and bring it back.”
This would be the first time ever an object in space of this size would be manipulated in such a manner.
Michael Eisen doesn’t hold back when invited to vent. “It’s still ludicrous how much it costs to publish research — let alone what we pay,” he declares. The biggest travesty, he says, is that the scientific community carries out peer review — a major part of scholarly publishing — for free, yet subscription-journal publishers charge billions of dollars per year, all told, for scientists to read the final product. “It’s a ridiculous transaction,” he says.
Eisen, a molecular biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, argues that scientists can get much better value by publishing in open-access journals, which make articles free for everyone to read and which recoup their costs by charging authors or funders. Among the best-known examples are journals published by the Public Library of Science (PLoS), which Eisen co-founded in 2000. “The costs of research publishing can be much lower than people think,” agrees Peter Binfield, co-founder of one of the newest open-access journals, PeerJ, and formerly a publisher at PLoS.
But publishers of subscription journals insist that such views are misguided — born of a failure to appreciate the value they add to the papers they publish, and to the research community as a whole. They say that their commercial operations are in fact quite efficient, so that if a switch to open-access publishing led scientists to drive down fees by choosing cheaper journals, it would undermine important values such as editorial quality.
…
Data from the consulting firm Outsell in Burlingame, California, suggest that the science-publishing industry generated $9.4 billion in revenue in 2011 and published around 1.8 million English-language articles — an average revenue per article of roughly $5,000. Analysts estimate profit margins at 20–30% for the industry, so the average cost to the publisher of producing an article is likely to be around $3,500–4,000.
Most open-access publishers charge fees that are much lower than the industry’s average revenue, although there is a wide scatter between journals. The largest open-access publishers — BioMed Central and PLoS — charge $1,350–2,250 to publish peer-reviewed articles in many of their journals, although their most selective offerings charge $2,700–2,900. In a survey published last year2, economists Bo-Christer Björk of the Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki and David Solomon of Michigan State University in East Lansing looked at 100,697 articles published in 1,370 fee-charging open-access journals active in 2010 (about 40% of the fully open-access articles in that year), and found that charges ranged from $8 to $3,900. Higher charges tend to be found in ‘hybrid’ journals, in which publishers offer to make individual articles free in a publication that is otherwise paywalled (see ‘Price of prestige’). Outsell estimates that the average per-article charge for open-access publishers in 2011 was $660.
This is the raw data from the Planck mission of the intensity fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background. At the highest resolution it includes 50 million pixels of information.
For a selection of scientific papers on the subject see this paperscape graph. For some commentary on Planck’s results, try the blog entries here,here or here. See the Planck Chromoscope for flat 2D maps.
You can use your mouse to control the view: click-drag will change the latitude/longitude, double click zooms in, and mouse scroll-wheel zooms in and out.
The following key bindings are also available: left, right, up, down (scroll the view), +, – (zoom), r (reset view).
The raw data is tiled over a sphere using this scheme. WebGL and thethree.js library are used for rendering.
Today would be the 100th birthday of legendary Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős. Among his many accomplishments, Erdős is perhaps best known for being the most published mathematician of all time (1500+ papers), and his extensive collaborations with other mathematicians, which is reflected in the establishment of the Erdős number.
[He] was an influential mathematician, who spent a large portion of his later life living out of a suitcase and writing papers with those of his colleagues willing to give him room and board.[1] He published more papers during his life (at least 1,525[2]) than any other mathematician in history.[1]
The idea of the Erdős number was created by the mathematician’s friends as a humorous tribute to his enormous output as one of the most prolific modern writers of mathematical papers. The Erdős number has become well known in scientific circles as a tongue-in-cheek measurement of mathematical prominence.
This exceptional image of the Horsehead nebula was taken at the National Science Foundation’s 0.9-meter telescope on Kitt Peak with the NOAO Mosaic CCD camera. Located in the constellation of Orion, the Hunter, the Horsehead is part of a dense cloud of gas in front of an active star-forming nebula known as IC434. The nebulosity of the Horsehead is believed to be excited by the bright star Sigma Orionis, which is located above the top of the image. Just off the left side of the image is the bright star Zeta Orionis, which is the easternmost of the three stars that form Orion’s belt. Zeta Orionis is a foreground star, and is not related to the nebula.
Back in the fall of 2008, the Large Hadron Collider experienced a setback when a section of the liquid helium coolant exploded. Aside from the damage caused by the explosion, there was damage to the electrical system. The lack of coolant resulted in a loss of superconductivity, which caused the temperature of the conductors to rise to damaging levels — the conductors were still carrying thousands of amps of current, but their resistance had increased by several orders of magnitude. Ohm, the humanity!
To help prevent such an occurrence in the future, the LHC team has begun installing special shunts, which will help lower the resistance of the conductors at non-cryo temperatures, in order to prevent similar damage from happening again.
On 19 September 2008, during powering tests on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a fault occurred in a superconducting interconnection between two magnets – a dipole and a quadrupole – resulting in mechanical damage and release of helium from the magnet cold mass into the tunnel. Proper safety procedures were in force, the safety systems performed as expected, and no-one was put at risk. But the fault did delay work on the LHC by six months.
After the incident, CERN engineers decided that such interconnections should be upgraded to avoid similar electrical faults in future. As a precaution, beams in the LHC were accelerated below the LHC’s design limit for the first three years of running. Upgrading the interconnections will be one of the main activities at the LHC during its two-year shutdown, allowing the LHC to run at 7 TeV per beam when it starts up again.
There are 10,000 “splices” – superconducting connections between magnets – on the LHC. Each splice carries 13,000 amps.
In the video above, Jean-Phillipe Tock of the Technology department explains how, over the next 18 months, technicians will add an additional piece – a “shunt” – to each splice. The shunt is a low-resistance connection that forms an alternative path for a portion of the current in the event that the splice loses its superconducting state. A total of 27,000 shunts will be installed in the 27-kilometre accelerator.
Reporting in the journal Nature Physics, William Irvine and Dustin Kleckner, physicists at the University of Chicago, describe the knotted fluid vortex they created in the lab — a scientific first, they say. The knots resemble smoke rings — except these are made of water, and they’re shaped like pretzels, not donuts. Understanding knottiness has extra-large applications, including untangling dynamics of the sun.
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