Cool Science Story Of The Day [Continuing Thread]

[masraum]

MIT mathematicians solve age-old spaghetti mystery | MIT News

I'm not quoting the whole article (but it's most of it including the most salient details. If you want the rest, click the link.

MIT mathematicians solve age-old spaghetti mystery

It’s nearly impossible to break a dry spaghetti noodle into only two pieces. A new MIT study shows how and why it can be done.


If you happen to have a box of spaghetti in your pantry, try this experiment: Pull out a single spaghetti stick and hold it at both ends. Now bend it until it breaks. How many fragments did you make? If the answer is three or more, pull out another stick and try again. Can you break the noodle in two? If not, you’re in very good company.

The spaghetti challenge has flummoxed even the likes of famed physicist Richard Feynman ’39, who once spent a good portion of an evening breaking pasta and looking for a theoretical explanation for why the sticks refused to snap in two.

Feynman’s kitchen experiment remained unresolved until 2005, when physicists from France pieced together a theory to describe the forces at work when spaghetti — and any long, thin rod — is bent. They found that when a stick is bent evenly from both ends, it will break near the center, where it is most curved. This initial break triggers a “snap-back” effect and a bending wave, or vibration, that further fractures the stick. Their theory, which won the 2006 Ig Nobel Prize, seemed to solve Feynman’s puzzle. But a question remained: Could spaghetti ever be coerced to break in two?

The answer, according to a new MIT study, is yes — with a twist. In a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers report that they have found a way to break spaghetti in two, by both bending and twisting the dry noodles. They carried out experiments with hundreds of spaghetti sticks, bending and twisting them with an apparatus they built specifically for the task. The team found that if a stick is twisted past a certain critical degree, then slowly bent in half, it will, against all odds, break in two.


Patil adapted this theory by adding the element of twisting, and looked at how twist should affect any forces and waves propagating through a stick as it is bent. From his model, he found that, if a 10-inch-long spaghetti stick is first twisted by about 270 degrees and then bent, it will snap in two, mainly due to two effects. The snap-back, in which the stick will spring back in the opposite direction from which it was bent, is weakened in the presence of twist. And, the twist-back, where the stick will essentially unwind to its original straightened configuration, releases energy from the rod, preventing additional fractures.

“Once it breaks, you still have a snap-back because the rod wants to be straight,” Dunkel explains. “But it also doesn’t want to be twisted.”

Just as the snap-back will create a bending wave, in which the stick will wobble back and forth, the unwinding generates a “twist wave,” where the stick essentially corkscrews back and forth until it comes to rest. The twist wave travels faster than the bending wave, dissipating energy so that additional critical stress accumulations, which might cause subsequent fractures, do not occur.

“That’s why you never get this second break when you twist hard enough,” Dunkel says.

[kach22i]

Confirmed: Water Ice on the Moon
https://www.neatorama.com/

That's pretty amazing. It's really weird to think that the moon, with no air and nothing to protect the surface from the blazing Sun, can have ice, let alone ice on the surface! But they do have protection: the Moon itself.

Article from the first link:
https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/confirmed-water-ice-on-the-moon

Original paper:
Direct evidence of surface exposed water ice in the lunar polar regions
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/08/14/1802345115

Shuai Li, Paul G. Lucey, Ralph E. Milliken, Paul O. Hayne, Elizabeth Fisher, Jean-Pierre Williams, Dana M. Hurley, and Richard C. Elphic
PNAS August 20, 2018. 201802345; published ahead of print August 20, 2018.

[GH85Carrera]

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45667350



Pretty cool!

[masraum]

Originally Posted by GH85Carrera

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45667350



Pretty cool!

I just read that earlier. Very cool.

https://www.iflscience.com/physics/watch-scientists-create-strongestever-indoor-magnetic-field-and-blow-up-their-lab-in-the-process/

Watch Scientists Create Strongest-Ever Indoor Magnetic Field – And Blow Up Their Lab In The Process

Researchers at the University of Tokyo set a new record when they created the strongest controllable indoor magnetic field ever – and subsequently blew up their lab in the process. Both incredible events may have happened in less time than it takes for you to blink your eye, but the entire thing was caught on camera for our repeated viewing pleasure.

The generator was built in a specially designed lab produced to test its material properties, which uses a method known as electromagnetic flux compression. The team was expecting the magnetic field to peak at around 700 Teslas (the standard unit for measuring magnetic field strength, not Elon’s), but wound up at around 1,200. That means it's some 400 times higher than the fields generated by the powerful magnets used in MRI machines and about 50 million times stronger than the Earth’s own magnetic field. As Motherboard points out, a fridge magnet has a strength of just 0.01 Tesla.

Let’s be clear here: It’s not the largest magnetic field ever produced. In 2001, Russian researchers created a magnetic field using explosives that reached 2,800 Teslas, which was so strong and uncontrollable it also blew up their equipment, but it couldn’t be tamed.

Physicists with the university say their (mostly) controllable indoor magnetic field will further our understanding of how to reach the “quantum limit” necessary for nuclear fusion, a theoretical power generator that uses nuclear energy to produce heat for electricity in a bid for clean energy.

“With magnetic fields above 1,000 Teslas, you open up some interesting possibilities,” said UTokyo physicist Shojiro Takeyama in a statement. “You can observe the motion of electrons outside the material environments they are normally within. So we can study them in a whole new light and explore new kinds of electronic devices. This research could also be useful to those working on fusion power generation.”

Lasting thousands of times longer than any of the world’s strongest magnetic fields, UTokyo’s magnetic field was so quick, it lasted just one-thousandth of a blink of an eye, yet it was sustained longer than any other attempt with similar strength, which is also promising.

“One way to produce fusion power is to confine plasma – a sea of charged particles – in a large ring called a tokamak in order to extract energy from it,” explained Takeyama of the results published in the Review of Scientific Instruments. “This requires a strong magnetic field in the order of thousands of teslas for a duration of several microseconds. This is tantalizingly similar to what our device can produce.”

[masraum]

Self-healing material can build itself from carbon in the air | MIT News

Self-healing material can build itself from carbon in the air

Taking a page from green plants, new polymer “grows” through a chemical reaction with carbon dioxide.

David L. Chandler | MIT News Office
October 11, 2018

A material designed by MIT chemical engineers can react with carbon dioxide from the air, to grow, strengthen, and even repair itself. The polymer, which might someday be used as construction or repair material or for protective coatings, continuously converts the greenhouse gas into a carbon-based material that reinforces itself.

The current version of the new material is a synthetic gel-like substance that performs a chemical process similar to the way plants incorporate carbon dioxide from the air into their growing tissues. The material might, for example, be made into panels of a lightweight matrix that could be shipped to a construction site, where they would harden and solidify just from exposure to air and sunlight, thereby saving on the energy and cost of transportation.

The finding is described in a paper in the journal Advanced Materials, by Professor Michael Strano, postdoc Seon-Yeong Kwak, and eight others at MIT and at the University of California at Riverside

“This is a completely new concept in materials science,” says Strano, the Carbon C. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering. “What we call carbon-fixing materials don’t exist yet today” outside of the biological realm, he says, describing materials that can transform carbon dioxide in the ambient air into a solid, stable form, using only the power of sunlight, just as plants do.

Developing a synthetic material that not only avoids the use of fossil fuels for its creation, but actually consumes carbon dioxide from the air, has obvious benefits for the environment and climate, the researchers point out. “Imagine a synthetic material that could grow like trees, taking the carbon from the carbon dioxide and incorporating it into the material’s backbone,” Strano says.

The material the team used in these initial proof-of-concept experiments did make use of one biological component — chloroplasts, the light-harnessing components within plant cells, which the researchers obtained from spinach leaves. The chloroplasts are not alive but catalyze the reaction of carbon dioxide to glucose. Isolated chloroplasts are quite unstable, meaning that they tend to stop functioning after a few hours when removed from the plant. In their paper, Strano and his co-workers demonstrate methods to significantly increase the catalytic lifetime of extracted chloroplasts. In ongoing and future work, the chloroplast is being replaced by catalysts that are nonbiological in origin, Strano explains.

The material the researchers used, a gel matrix composed of a polymer made from aminopropyl methacrylamide (APMA) and glucose, an enzyme called glucose oxidase, and the chloroplasts, becomes stronger as it incorporates the carbon. It is not yet strong enough to be used as a building material, though it might function as a crack filling or coating material, the researchers say.

The team has worked out methods to produce materials of this type by the ton, and is now focusing on optimizing the material’s properties. Commercial applications such as self-healing coatings and crack filling are realizable in the near term, they say, whereas additional advances in backbone chemistry and materials science are needed before construction materials and composites can be developed.

One key advantage of such materials is they would be self-repairing upon exposure to sunlight or some indoor lighting, Strano says. If the surface is scratched or cracked, the affected area grows to fill in the gaps and repair the damage, without requiring any external action.

While there has been widespread effort to develop self-healing materials that could mimic this ability of biological organisms, the researchers say, these have all required an active outside input to function. Heating, UV light, mechanical stress, or chemical treatment were needed to activate the process. By contrast, these materials need nothing but ambient light, and they incorporate mass from carbon in the atmosphere, which is ubiquitous.

The material starts out as a liquid, Kwak says, adding, “it is exciting to watch it as it starts to grow and cluster” into a solid form.

“Materials science has never produced anything like this,” Strano says. “These materials mimic some aspects of something living, even though it’s not reproducing.” Because the finding opens up a wide array of possible follow-up research, the U.S. Department of Energy is sponsoring a new program directed by Strano to develop it further.

“Our work shows that carbon dioxide need not be purely a burden and a cost,” Strano says. “It is also an opportunity in this respect. There’s carbon everywhere. We build the world with carbon. Humans are made of carbon. Making a material that can access the abundant carbon all around us is a significant opportunity for materials science. In this way, our work is about making materials that are not just carbon neutral, but carbon negative.”

The research team included Juan Pablo Giraldo at UC Riverside, and Tedrick Lew, Min Hao Wong, Pingwei Liu, Yun Jung Yang, Volodomyr Koman, Melissa McGee and Bradley Olsen at MIT. The work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy.

[GH85Carrera]

This is amazing.

https://www.dvidshub.net/video/635465/ftm-45

As I understand the interceptor is moving at Mach 15.

[IROC]

Literally a "cool science story", I watched a screening of the movie "Let There Be Light" last week at work (since we are center for ITER work here in the US). I was pleasantly surprised. Very good movie:

https://www.amazon.com/Let-There-Light-Mark-Henderson/dp/B077SP3KJZ?crid=1P81BFC39XXYK&keywords=let+there+be+light+movie&qid=1540827252&sprefix=let+there+be+light%2Caps%2C130&sr=8-2&ref=sr_1_2

[sammyg2]

From another thread, seems appropriate (for some of the stuff in this thread):

Originally Posted by sammyg2

When my son was about 5 years old he liked reading his grandfather's popular mechanics magazines so we got him a subscription. he'd read them over and over, just like I read car magazines when I was a kid.

By the time he was about 12 or 13 he lost interest in them so I asked him about it.
He said something like the magazines are for people who don't understand the technology and don't really care, they just like to dream about stuff that isn't quite real.

Popular science magazine talks briefly about "amazing" new stuff and hints that it might be or could be real someday, but in reality isn't, or it's distorted or exaggerated. More fluff and hype than science.
I doubt many real scientists read it except for laughs.

But there is a market for stuff like that, there are lots of people who really like fantasy science stuff that almost seems real.

[IROC]

Well, Sammy, my take-away from your post(s) is that you don't understand science, so you write it off as fluff and hype (paraphrasing your story above).

That's fine. We'll just keep doing amazing new stuff.

[GH85Carrera]

Sammy, it is much like some of the astronomy shows on the Science channel. They are packaged as fare for adults, but they explain it at a grade school level with scientists trying hard to be actors. I would far prefer the simple clear explanation from a Issac Asimov or Carl Sagan. Unfortunately, those guys are dead, and Neil deGrasse Tyson is busy.

[kach22i]

Nov 15, 2018
Rare microbes lead scientists to discover new branch on the tree of life
https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/hemimastigotes-supra-kingdom-1.4715823

This is an electron microscope image of Hemimastix kukwesjijk, named after Kukwes, a greedy, hairy ogre from Mi'kmaq mythology. Its 'mouth' or capitulum is on the left. (Submitted by Yana Eglit)

"There's nothing we know that's closely related to them."

In fact, he estimates you'd have to go back a billion years — about 500 million years before the first animals arose — before you could find a common ancestor of hemimastigotes and any other known living things.

[masraum]

Originally Posted by GH85Carrera

Sammy, it is much like some of the astronomy shows on the Science channel. They are packaged as fare for adults, but they explain it at a grade school level with scientists trying hard to be actors.

You'd think that. I suspect they are explaining it in a way that 60-70% of the population (adult) might, maybe understand it.

[masraum]

Originally Posted by kach22i

Nov 15, 2018
Rare microbes lead scientists to discover new branch on the tree of life
https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/hemimastigotes-supra-kingdom-1.4715823

It's amazing how little we still know.

[masraum]

gurgling mudpot creeps across Cali

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/gurgling-mud-pot-crawling-across-southern-california-180970787/

A Gurgling ‘Mud Pot’ Is Crawling Across Southern California
Scientists don’t know why the muddy spring is moving, but it poses a threat to the infrastructure in its path



At the southern end of the San Andreas Fault in California, where the North American and Pacific tectonic plates famously touch, sits a stinky, gurgling pool of mud. Scientists have been aware of this “mud pot,” as the geothermal feature is known, since the 1950s. But it has recently become a cause for concern because, as Robin George Andrews reports for National Geographic, the mud pot is on the move.

Called the “Niland Geyser” because it is located near the township of Niland in Imperial County, the mud pot began its sludgy trudge at some point between 2015 and 2016. The bubbling pool has since moved about 20 feet each year, carving a 24,000 square foot basin in the ground. Its pace is not particularly quick, but officials are nevertheless worried about what lies in its path.

According to Alejandra Reyes-Velarde and Rong-Gong Lin II of the Las Angeles Times, the mud is creeping in the direction of Union Pacific freight railroad tracks, a petroleum pipeline, fiber optic telecommunications lines owned by Verizon, and part of Highway 111, which connects the Coachella Valley to California’s border with Mexico. To date, attempts to stop the mud pot’s forward march have not been successful. Union Pacific tried to build a 100-foot wall that extended 75 feet into the ground to stop the mud from reaching its railroads. The mud simply oozed beneath the wall.

“It’s a slow-moving disaster,” Alfredo Estrada, fire chief and emergency services coordinator of Imperial County tells Reyes-Velarde and Lin.

Mud pots are not an uncommon geologic feature in volcanic areas; you can see them, for instance, in Yellowstone National Park. According to Live Science’s Laura Geggel, the one in Imperial County resulted from historic earthquakes that formed deep cracks beneath the Earth’s surface, allowing gases to rise upwards. The mud pot’s bubbles, in fact, are caused not by hot water, but by carbon dioxide welling up from underground.

“The carbon dioxide is probably being formed as a result of the geologic processes deep underneath this part of California,” Reyes-Velarde and Lin explain. “As thousands of years of loose sediment dumped by the Colorado River get pushed deeper underground, where there’s more pressure and heat, the material is getting cooked and transformed into sandstone or greenschist rock, which produces carbon dioxide.”

The mud pot’s funky smell comes from the presence of hydrogen sulfide, which creates a rotten egg-like stench. According to Andrews, it is possible that the mud pot is drawing from a reservoir filled with agricultural runoff water, which fosters algal blooms. When algae die, the bacteria that feed on them produce hydrogen sulfide.

While there is nothing inherently strange about the existence of the mud pot, this one is unusual for several reasons. For one thing, mud pots typically form when there are limited quantities of hot water, but the Niland Geyser is producing large quantities of water—up to 40,000 gallons per day. Also, mud pots do not typically move.

“No one has seen a moving mud pot before,” David Lynch, a physicist who studies geothermal features in the area, tells Andrews.

Scientists do not yet know why the Niland Geyser is creeping across California. They can, however, say with certainty that it is not being driven by surges in seismic activity. Ken Hudnut, a research geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey, tells Andrews that the San Andreas Fault is heavily monitored, and there are no signs that a large earthquake is brewing. Californians, in other words, can rest assured that the Niland Geyser’s crawl is not an indication that the “Big One” quake is imminent.

In spite of the potential damages it may cause, the mud pot has been given a much less ominous nickname: the “Slow One.” And as its moniker suggests, the mud pot’s steady pace is giving officials time to prepare for its possible intersection with human infrastructure. Detour plans for Highway 111 are already in place, according to Reyes-Velarde and Lin of the Los Angeles Times, and Union Pacific may also consider building a bridge to circumvent the gurgling geyser.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-6343583/The-bubbling-stinking-mud-pool-cause-chaos-San-Andreas-fault.html

[john70t]

I'd never heard about metal-air batteries, but they are supposed to be lightweight but non-rechargable.
Not sure how this tech compares to super-capacitors.
Anyways, now they have a longer shelf life:

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/these-fragile-futuristic-batteries-run-longer-little-oil
Each aluminum-air battery cell contains two electrodes, an aluminum anode and a cathode, separated by a liquid called an electrolyte. Oxygen molecules sucked from the air enter the cathode, where they react with electrons and aluminum particles that flow through the electrolyte from the anode, releasing energy to power electronics. Unfortunately, when the battery is on standby, the watery electrolyte eats away at the aluminum anode.

[john70t]

Ion aircraft drive systems might become two-fer rainmakers. Who knows.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/air/an-airplane-with-no-moving-parts
MIT researchers have flown the first airplane that has no moving parts. The aircraft, packed with lithium-ion batteries, used an ion thruster to fly the 60 meters that were available in the indoor flight area.

The plane weighs a little over 2 kilograms (5 pounds), and its engine has a thrust-to-weight ratio roughly comparable to that of a jet engine. Its lithium-ion batteries put out about 500 watts.

[john70t]

Hooking up LEDs backwards creates a cooling light?



https://phys.org/news/2019-02-reverse-cool-future.html
In a finding that runs counter to a common assumption in physics, researchers at the University of Michigan ran a light emitting diode (LED) with electrodes reversed in order to cool another device mere nanometers away.

The approach could lead to new solid-state cooling technology for future microprocessors, which will have so many transistors packed into a small space that current methods can't remove heat quickly enough.

[kach22i]

2011
Leonardo da Vinci's 'machine gun' cannon discovered by archeologists
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/croatia/8569045/Leonardo-da-Vincis-machine-gun-cannon-discovered-by-archeologists.html

The bronze cannon, from the late 15th century, bears a striking resemblance to sketches drawn by the Renaissance inventor, notably in his Codex Atlanticus - the largest collection of his drawings and writing.

TRIPLE BARREL CANNON
https://busy.org/@getonthetrain/leonardo-da-vinci-s-weapons-of-war

One of these was discovered in a fort in Croatia in 1968, the only known surviving Da Vinci invention.

[john70t]

A new method of printing microchips and more at the atomic level.
Brings new meaning to the term "microcomputer".

(these will be made for everything including identification, theft-proofing, tracking, communications, bio-sampling the G.I. tract for medicine, energy generation, and much more. All of which of course will be abused at some point in time.)

https://phys.org/news/2019-05-atoms-electron.html
"Now, scientists at MIT, the University of Vienna, and several other institutions have taken a step in that direction, developing a method that can reposition atoms with a highly focused electron beam and control their exact location and bonding orientation. The finding could ultimately lead to new ways of making quantum computing devices or sensors"

[Pazuzu]

Originally Posted by sammyg2

From another thread, seems appropriate (for some of the stuff in this thread):

Change magazines. Ignoring the blatant liberal bend of the AAAS these days, this magazine (and presumably Nature as well) is still 50% hardcore science, more science that any science nerd can handle in a week, when the next one comes.

All for $99 a year? Yes please. This is the closet thing to a research journal that a "normal" person can get to.