Feb 05
When the ground beneath you stops being solid, what do you do? Jump on it like a trampoline! Seriously, it may be a little dangerous but it looks like oodles of fun. Like you’re walking on water only it’s really still the ground.
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Feb 04
Researchers at Scotland’s Abertay University are getting a brand new look at the seemingly nondescript world hidden in plain sight—the soil beneath our feet.
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Dec 11
As the immediate aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster has passed, Japan is faced with another conundrum: Where to store thousands of tons of radioactive soil that have been harvested from around the region. This week, officials unveiled a $970 million plan to build a massive storage facility to house the stuff.
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Sep 27
We already knew Mars was blanketed in ancient riverbeds, which points to the existence of water in the distant past. What we didn’t know, however, is that H2O exists on Mars in the here and now — albeit embedded in Martian soil. A paper recently published in the journal Science revealed that as much as two percent of dirt from the Red Planet contains the precious liquid. The Curiosity rover gathered samples of the sand from the “Rocknest” area near the Gale Crater back in August of 2012 and delivered it to the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument inside its belly. After heating the sample to around 835 Celsius, SAM was able to detect a surprising amount of carbonate materials, which are formed in the presence of water.
Laurie Leshin, dean of science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the study’s lead author said the findings are conclusive: “If you took about a cubic foot of the dirt and heated it up, you’d get a couple of pints of water out of that — a couple of water bottles’ worth that you would take to the gym.” Another SAM discovery is a mineral called perchlorate that could interfere with thyroid functions if ingested. Still, if we could work around that, the findings could prove tremendously useful for future Mars explorers. “When we send people,” Leshin said in the paper, “they could scoop up the soil anywhere on the surface, heat it just a bit, and obtain water.” We’re likely years away from having fishing expeditions in Mars, of course, but this does soften the blow about the possible lack of life.
Via: Science Daily
Source: Science
Aug 05
Envious of your pet hermit crabs’ 3D-printed domicile? Maybe you should cast your green eyes upon the Stone Spray project, an Eco-friendly robot printer that’s exploring the viability of soil as a building material. Although making actual buildings is a bit out of the robot’s reach, its team has managed to print a series of scaled sculptures (such as stools, pillars and load-bearing arc structures) out of sand, soil and a special solidification compound. The machine’s jet-spray nozzle seems to have an easier time constructing objects over per-existing scaffolding, but the team is striving to design structures that don’t require the extra support. “We want to push further the boundaries of digital manufacturing and explore the possibilities of an on-site fabrication machine,” the team writes on the project’s homepage, citing makeshift printed bridges or an on-beach canopy as possible applications of technology. If the Earth itself doesn’t make a green enough building material, consider this: the Stone Spray robot can be powered by solar energy alone. Check it out in all of its sand-sculpting glory in the video below.
Continue reading Stone Spray research project wants to print bridges with sand, solar power
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
Stone Spray research project wants to print bridges with sand, solar power originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 05 Aug 2012 23:25:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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