CNN has an article comparing NASA’s new CEV with the Apollo series that took us to the Moon nearly 40 years ago:

Size: The four-person CEV will be 18 feet in diameter, compared with 12.8 feet for the cramped three-person Apollo capsule. Yet CEV will be only 10 to 15 percent heavier, because it will be made from newer materials such as carbon composites and aluminum alloys.

Launch: Apollo was launched by the massive Saturn V, the biggest rocket ever built; the CEV capsule will be launched by a smaller rocket. That’s because the CEV will not go directly to the moon. Instead the crew will meet up with heavier pieces of their moon-going spaceship – launched by a separate rocket – in Earth orbit.

Range: CEV will carry more fuel than Apollo, so astronauts will be able to go anywhere on the face of the moon. Apollo had only enough fuel to land on the lunar equator.

Controls: CEV’s computers will be much more powerful than Apollo’s, enabling all four astronauts to descend to the moon’s surface while their spaceship orbits in autopilot mode.

Landing: When CEV returns to Earth, it will most likely land on dry ground. Apollo capsules landed in the ocean, which exposed them to corrosive saltwater and required expensive recovery efforts involving boats and aircraft.

As for the ability to land on dry ground, this image shows the CEV with the proposed “air bags” on the bottom of the craft that will cushion touchdown. If it were me, however, I’d want a lot more cushion. This is how I’d do it.

[Hat tip: Larry in Colorado for the story.]

Tags: blog | weblog | science | nasa | space | cev

Practical fuel cells are a step closer with news that researchers at UCLA and the University of Michigan “have demonstrated the ability to store large amounts of hydrogen at the right pressure.” All that’s left is to figure out how to keep the hydrogen stored at ambient temperature and we’ll be sporting around in cars powered by clean-burning hydrogen fuel cells.

Tags: blog | weblog | energy | politics | fuel cells | technology | hydrogen | news

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Baxter International of Deerfield, Ill., has announced that it is beginning a Phase II trial of its process of stem cells to rebuild failing hearts, according to this article by UPI.

Baxter told the Tribune researchers will use its Isolex cell separation system to extract stem cells from the many types of cells in bone marrow. The cells will then be injected directly into the heart via catheter in hopes of regenerating damaged areas.

Supporters of stem cell research believe blood vessels leading to the heart can be rebuilt and damaged areas of the heart can be regenerated.

If Baxter’s trial is successful, the therapy would face at least one other trial and would be at least three to five years from winning federal regulatory approval as a standard treatment.

Here’s more on the process from the Baxter website:

This year, more than a million people in the United States will have a heart attack. More than 40 percent will die from it. Most of the rest will suffer permanent damage to the heart that will need to be managed the rest of their lives. Treatment options include medication, angioplasty and bypass surgery, all of which are designed to stabilize the patient and restore blood flow to the heart. But no treatment available today can actually repair damaged heart tissue and reverse the process of cardiovascular injury.

In the future, this may no longer be the case. Baxter technology is playing a key role in an experimental therapy that uses a patient’s own stem cells to grow new blood vessels and regenerate damaged heart tissue….

For an explanation of what a Phase II trial is, see this entry.

Tags: stem cells | health | news | biotechnology | medicine | blog | weblog | pharma | healthcare | isolex | heart surgery | medical breakthroughs

President Bush spoke those words today in Michigan while explaining his Advanced Energy Initiative to the employees of Johnson Controls in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

“I laid out what’s called an Advanced Energy Initiative. And a cornerstone of the initiative is a 22 percent increase in funding for clean energy research at the Department of Energy. And it’s got two major goals, or two objectives. First, to transform the way we power our cars and trucks. And, secondly, to transform the way we power our homes and offices.

So let me talk to you about the first one. Our nation is on the threshold of some new energy technologies that I think will startle the American people. It’s not going to startle you here at Johnson Controls because you know what I’m talking about. (Laughter.) You take it for granted. But the American people will be amazed at how far our technology has advanced in order to meet an important goal, which is to reduce our imports from the Middle East by 75 percent by 2025, and eventually getting rid of our dependence totally.

The first objective is to change the way we power our cars and trucks. Today’s cars and trucks are fueled almost exclusively by gasoline and diesel fuel, which, of course, comes from oil.
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The most promising ways to reduce gasoline consumption quickly is through hybrid vehicles. Hybrid vehicles have both a gasoline-powered engine and an electric battery based on technologies that were developed by the Department of Energy. In other words, this technology came to be because the federal government made a research commitment. That’s why I think it’s double – important to double research as we go down the next decade. The gasoline engine charges the battery, which helps drive the vehicle. And the twin sources of power allow hybrid cars and trucks to travel about twice as far on a gallon of fuel as gasoline-only vehicles. That is a good start when something that can go twice as far on a gallon of gasoline than the conventional vehicle can.

Breakthrough in solar power

The President’s second objective – changing how we power our businesses and homes – is about to get a significant boost if a reported breakthrough in solar power generation is borne out.

According to an article at IOL.com A team of South African researchers from the University of Port Elizabeth, University of Pretoria, and Rand Afrikaans University (RAU), have developed an efficient solar power technology that they say will enable homes to obtain all their electricity from the sun:

The panels are able to generate enough energy to run stoves, geysers, lights, TVs, fridges, computers - in short all the modern conveniences of the modern house.

The new technology should be available in South Africa within a year and through a special converter, energy can be fed directly into the wiring of existing houses. New powerful storage units will allow energy storage to meet demands even in winter. The panels are so efficient they can operate through a Cape Town winter, while direct sunlight is ideal for high-energy generation, other daytime light also generates energy via the panels.
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Production will start next month and the factory will run 24 hours a day, producing more than 1 000 panels a day to meet expected demand.
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The South African solar panels consist of a thin layer of a unique metal alloy that converts light into energy. The photo-responsive alloy can operate on virtually all flexible surfaces, which means it could in future find a host of other applications.

Alberts said the new panels are approximately five microns thick (a human hair is 20 microns thick) while the older silicon panels are 350 microns thick. the cost of the South African technology is a fraction of the less effective silicone solar panels.

An article published last October at iAfrica.com has more details:

Just one-quarter the cost and significantly more efficient than conventional solar panels, the thin film technology is jointly owned by the University of Johannesburg and the head of its physics department, professor Vivian Alberts.
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Professor Alberts says the thin film technology he and his team developed can generate up to 150 watts of electrical power at a cost below R10 ($1.66 U.S.) per watt peak. He adds that it has demonstrated not only high efficiency, but also long-term performance stability. “The pilot plant demonstrated that these thin film solar modules could be produced by highly scalable and proven industrial technologies such as physical vapour phase deposition and diffusion processes.” Commercial-scale thin film modules are being produced with output powers between 10 and 40W in direct sunlight.

Quoted costs of R10/Wp ($1.66/Wp) look highly favourable against the cost of “traditional” electricity. And better still against the R35 ($5.81) per watt production cost of conventional modules. The import price locally of a silicon-based 50W solar panel is about R2000 ($331.97) (R40/Wp or $6.64).

The material that absorbs sunlight and converts it to electrical energy is a semiconductor material consisting of copper indium gallium selenium sulphide or Cu(In,Ga)(Se,S)2.

The metals are deposited on a glass substrate by sputtering, a standard industrial process. (Sputtering is used commercially for reflective coatings, for instance.) The coated glass is then reacted in a diffusion furnace with specialised gases that transform the metallic layers into high-quality semiconductor films.

Tags: solar power | breakthroughs | science | news | blog | weblog

The Veridicator, a device invented by science fiction author H. Beam Piper, was a combination polygraph and brain scanner that could infallibly prove whether a person was lying.

Testimony under a veridicator was so reliable that the only legal strategy for the guilty was to avoid being tested. Upon being convicted of a crime, punishment was carried out quickly (conviction for a capital crime resulted in execution within hours of a guilty verdict, for instance). And why not? There was no possibility of mistake.

Something like the veridicator would vastly improve our justice system, and it may be coming. According to this BREITBART article, Massachusetts company No Lie MRI, Inc. will soon be offering brain-scanning services that are said to be 90% accurate at detecting lies.

The process uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to determine whether a suspect is lying by scanning his brain.

…[fMRI] is a standard tool for studying the brain, but research into using it to detect lies is still in early stages. Nobody really knows yet whether it will prove more accurate than polygraphs, which measure things like blood pressure and breathing rate to look for emotional signals of lying.

But advocates for fMRI say it has the potential to be more accurate, because it zeros in on the source of lying, the brain, rather than using indirect measures. So it may someday provide lawyers with something polygraphs can’t: legal evidence of truth-telling that’s widely admissible in court. (Courts generally regard polygraph results as unreliable, and either prohibit such evidence or allow it only if both sides in a case agree to let it in.)

…[The] idea of using fMRI to detect lies has started a buzz among scientists, legal experts and ethicists. Many worry about rushing too quickly from the lab to real-world use. Some caution that it may not work as well in the real world as the early lab results suggest.

And others worry that it might.

Unlike perusing your mail or tapping your phone, this is “looking inside your brain,” Hank Greely, a law professor who directs the Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences, told me a few days before my scan.

It “does seem to me to be a significant change in our ability … to invade what has been the last untouchable sanctuary, the contents of your own mind,” Greely said. “It should make us stop and think to what extent we should allow this to be done.”

But Dr. Mark George, the genial neurologist and psychiatrist who let me lie in his scanner and be grilled by his computer, said he doesn’t see a privacy problem with the technology.

That’s because it’s impossible to test people without their consent, he said. Subjects have to cooperate so fully _ holding the head still, and reading and responding to the questions, for example _ that they have to agree to the scan.

“It really doesn’t read your mind if you don’t want your mind to be read,” he said. “If I were wrongly accused and this were available, I’d want my defense lawyer to help me get this.”

So maybe the technology is better termed a “truth confirmer” than lie detector, he said.

Whatever you call it, the technology has produced some eyebrow-raising results. George and his colleagues recently reported that using fMRI data, a computer was able to spot lies in 28 out of 31 volunteers.

Truth confirmer now, sure. Use it to get the falsely accused and convicted released. But maybe in five to ten years, when they’ve shrunk an fMRI scanner from the size of a small storage shed to a helmet that fits on your head, it’ll be a lie detecting veridicator.

When that happens, criminals will receive swift and sure justice, society in general will be more honest, and we’ll all be safer. Plus there’ll be a lot of unhappy lawyers – Bonus!

Tags: death penalty | blog | weblog | execution | crime | polygraph | technology | science fiction | scifi | sci-fi | beam piper | mri

According to an article at PhysOrg.com, scientists have built a molecular motor powered solely by sunlight.

By acting like pistons that move back and forth, these motors, which are only nanometers or billionths of meters across, could help read out data as ones and zeroes “for molecular photonics and electronics, two rapidly growing fields aimed at the construction of chemical computers,” said researcher Vincenzo Balzani, a chemist at the University of Bologna, Italy.

Such motors could also operate nanovalves covering the surfaces of porous silica-based nanoparticles. Scientists could then use light to fill and empty the pores of these nanoparticles with molecules such as anti-cancer drugs. After doctors target cancers with these nanoparticles, “then light is used to trigger the release of the drug,” said researcher J. Fraser Stoddart, a nanochemist at the University of California at Los Angeles.

The motor was designed and built over six years by researchers at the University of Bologna and UCLA. It essentially resembles a dumbbell roughly 6 nanometers long that threads a ring about 1.3 nanometers wide. The ring can move up and down the rod of the dumbbell but cannot go past the bulky stoppers at its ends.

A 6-nanometer length is about as long as a chain of 60 water molecules. These nanomotors are actually tinier than hemoglobin molecules (the substance that gives blood its red color). Still can’t grasp how small that is? Try this: If you stretched 13,000 of the nanomotors end-to-end, that chain would be the width of a human hair!

Noteworthy is the fact that this molecular motor does not require a chemical fuel to operate,” said Devens Gust, a chemist at Arizona State University in Tempe who did not participate in this study. “Previous motors require fuel, including biological motors. The power for this system comes directly from light, with no need to move fuels around, consume them, and generate waste products. The analogy would be a solar-powered car vs. one fueled by a gasoline engine.”

Read the whole article.

Tags: technology | science | news | nanotechnology | nano | blog | weblog