The cool science thread

[Paul McEnery]

Here's your starter for ten.

The Eden Project (http://www.edenproject.com/) is a totally cool biosphere project in Cornwall in the South of England.

And they've figured out how to power themselves using hot rocks.

The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environmen...ermal-energy):

Plans to build the UK's first geothermal plant that would use heat from granite outcrops beneath the Earth's surface to power a small town were unveiled today.

Initially the plant would be used to supply the Eden Project in Cornwall but could potentially feed spare carbon-neutral electricity winto the National Grid.

Eden and its commercial partner claim, EGS Energy, believe this is the first in a series of projects that could lead to Cornwall's "hot rocks" supplying up to one-tenth of the UK's electricity.

The government is watching the plans closely and Ed Miliband, the secretary of state for energy and climate change, attended the launch of the scheme in Westminster.

Matt Hastings, Eden's energy manager, said: "It's a massively exciting project - a way of making sure Eden has a source of green power but also of feeding heat and power into the local community and into the National Grid. We will only need a quarter or a fifth of the electricity that will be generated. Cornwall leads the way in wind and wave energy technology. Now we're trying to do the same in geothermal power."

For many centuries geothermal power has been used by humans but only when it bubbled or spurted naturally to the surface in the form of hot springs.

Scientists have long looked for reliable and practical ways of drilling down into hot rocks and harnessing the power of the heat that is found there naturally.

Cornwall is considered an ideal location for a "hot rocks" project because its granite outcrops are relatively close to the surface - around 4km (two and a half miles) down.

If it gets planning permission, the power plant at Eden will consist of two boreholes, both between 3km and 4km deep, built within the same disused clay quarry as the centre.

Water will be pumped into an injection hole and then allowed to percolate through the hot rocks and heat up. The water will then be pumped back out through a second hole, returning to the surface at around 150C. The heated water will be converted into electricity via a heat exchanger.

The remaining heat in the water can be used to heat local buildings, hopefully not just at Eden but in surrounding areas. Spare heat could be used by Eden for growing exotic fruit and vegetables out of season or possibly in a spa.

It is estimated that the plant, which could be ready by 2012, could generate enough electricity to supply the equivalent of almost 5,000 homes.

[Tages]

http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/front/Do...5&sid=10522330

A Swiss stroke victim has an invisible "arm" that can scratch and doesn't pass through solid objects.

Best part?

Khateb and his colleagues examined the patient's brain using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a tool that allows doctors to see whether the brain is truly stimulated, and to pinpoint where. In this case, the investigations revealed that the woman actually experienced what she described.

Researchers instructed the woman to move her right hand. As expected, the motor cortex and visual processing areas in the left side of her brain became mobilised.

The same effects were observed to a lesser extent when the woman simply imagined moving her right hand. Imaginary movements of the woman's paralysed left hand prompted the same activity in the brain, but on the right side.

But when doctors asked her to move her phantom arm, her brain reacted as though the arm really existed and could be moved. In addition, the patient's visual cortex was also activated, indicating the she actually saw the imaginary limb.

And when she was instructed to scratch her cheek, regions of the brain relating to touch were activated.

[FunkyGreenJerusalem]

http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/front/Do...5&sid=10522330

A Swiss stroke victim has an invisible "arm" that can scratch and doesn't pass through solid objects.

Best part?

That's a hell of a headline for the date it was posted...

[Paradox]

Cool science? You mean like cryogenics?

[FunkyGreenJerusalem]

Cool science? You mean like cryogenics?

I'm pretty sure that's a bannable offense!

[Paul McEnery]

Cool science? You mean like cryogenics?

I believe the word the cognoscenti use is "cryonics".

[morna]

I always liked this one

http://www.techdo.com/images/largest-known-star-.gif

[Tadhg]

For the Monkey, the solution is fire:

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/...burning-it.ars

[FunkyGreenJerusalem]

I always liked this one

http://www.techdo.com/images/largest-known-star-.gif

I hate that one!

Nothing makes you feel insignificant like watching the star bigger than all the planets in our solar system combined get bumped off the page for being too small.

[Paul McEnery]

I always liked this one

http://www.techdo.com/images/largest-known-star-.gif

And yet they are all small enough to fit inside my magic crystal tellybox.

[Paradox]

Paul McEnery corrects:

I believe the word the cognoscenti use is "cryonics".

What do I care what they call it in Italy?

[Paul McEnery]

Clone organ transplants!

"IT'S amazing, absolutely beautiful," says Doris Taylor, describing the latest addition to an array of tiny thumping hearts that sit in her lab, hooked up to an artificial blood supply.

The rat hearts beat just as if there were inside a live animal, but even more remarkable is how each one has been made: by coating the stripped-down "scaffolding" of one rat's heart with tissue grown from another rat's stem cells.

Taylor, a stem cell scientist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, now wants to repeat the achievement on a much larger scale, by "decellularising" hearts, livers and other organs taken either from human cadavers or from larger animals such as pigs, and coating them in stem cells harvested from people.

This could lead to a virtually limitless supply of organs for transplantation that are every bit as intricate as those that grow naturally, except that they don't provoke the catastrophic immune response that obstructs the use of traditional "xenotransplants".

More at link:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...-shortage.html

[FunkyGreenJerusalem]

Clone organ transplants!



More at link:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...-shortage.html

I'm getting back on the smokes!

[Paul McEnery]

I'm getting back on the smokes!

It's the quickest way to getting spotless lungs!

[Paul McEnery]

Oooh. Quantum entanglement. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8081058.stm)

Scientists have "entangled" the motions of pairs of atoms for the first time.

Entanglement is an effect in quantum mechanics, a relatively new branch of physics that is based more in probability than in classical laws.

It describes how properties of two or more objects can be inextricably linked over "vast" distances.

The results, published in Nature, further bridge the gap between the world of quantum mechanics and the laws of everyday experience.

This is the first time entanglement has been seen in a so-called "mechanical system".

The phenomenon suggests that a measurement performed on one object can affect the measurement on another object some distance away.

<...>


The intertwining involved four electrically charged atoms, or ions - two beryllium and two magnesium ions. These are prepared in a device called an ion trap that uses electric fields to manipulate the charged particles.

The positively charged ions repel one other, and behave as if they are connected by a spring. This "spring" has a natural resonant frequency, just like a pendulum, which can be excited with the "kick" of a laser of just the right colour.

First, a laser is used to entangle the internal energy states - the "spins" - of the two beryllium ions.

The four ions are then separated into two pairs, each made up of a beryllium and a magnesium ion four micrometres apart. The pairs themselves are separated by 240 micrometres - just a few hairs' breadths, but an enormous distance in the atomic world.

The magnesium ions are cooled with lasers, which in turn removes excess energy from the beryllium ions.

Further laser pulses then provide an energetic "kick" to ensure the beryllium ions are no longer entangled via their spin states, but are now entangled via their motions.

The entangled pairs move in perfect unison despite their separation distance.


The entangled spins become entangled vibrations using laser pulses
The work closes some of the gap between two directions of research that investigate where the quantum world ends and our everyday, classical world begins.

"We're using a bottom-up approach where you start with a very simple mechanical system; you can imagine that adding more and more ions to this, you could scale it up," Mr Jost explained.

"But there's a whole field of research in so-called nano-mechanical resonators: they're taking the top-down approach, trying to use a tiny beam of atoms - still composed of millions of atoms - and cooling it down until they see these quantum mechanical effects."

IQOQI researcher Christian Roos said: "There is certainly an interest to see two objects in a different kind of entanglement than the one that has been investigated so far" .

"At the moment it's pure curiosity, to see how far it can go," he added.

Nothing in quantum mechanics precludes entanglements of larger numbers of atoms, but as the bottom-up and top-down pursuits meet in the middle, researchers might discover there is more to quantum mechanics than they currently understand.

"There are theories that there are mechanisms that are not yet understood that prevent macroscopic systems becoming entangled once they become more massive," Dr Roos told BBC News.

"So from that point of view it's certainly interesting to see entanglement at a very small scale, and then to see whether it is possible to entangle heavier objects."