Hasta La Gadget!

Leave it to a gaggle of brilliant wood science researchers at Oregon State University to figure out that we’ve been doing this whole “tire” thing wrong for generations now. While studying some uses of microcrystalline cellulose, which can be made easily from practically any type of plant fiber, these Earth-loving gurus discovered that said material could actually improve the efficiency of vehicle tires when used in place of silica. Granted, only about 12 percent of the silica — which is used as a reinforcing filler in the manufacture of rubber tires — was swapped out, but the resulting tires gripped just as well in wet weather while decreasing the rolling resistance during those dry summer months. Furthermore, tires constructed with these fibers could be made with less energy, though long-term durability studies are still needed to prove that this whole plan is viable for more than a few thousand miles.

[Via Gizmag]

Filed under: Transportation, Science

OSU foresters swap tree fibers for rubber in fuel efficient tires originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 26 Jul 2009 12:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Man, tremendous particle accelerators just can’t catch a break these days. Right as engineers finished repairing the helium leak that benched the Large Hadron Collider from doing much last year (aside from a successful early test), the team discovered two more vacuum leaks in another part of the machine.

In order for the leaks to be repaired, first engineers have to warm up the area, which is normally maintained at “ultracold temperatures,” according to Wired. The new delay will likely push the LHC’s projected restart sometime into November, after already being delayed twice recently.

Currently, the LHC is running about two and a half years behind schedule, according to the report.

The Apollo missions marked a turning point in human history. They changed the political climate of the day, made many tech advances possible, and inspired future scientists and astronomers the world over. But it turns out they’re also having a far more practical effect: acting as a guiding light for future lunar missions.

NASA’s next-generation Orion spaceship–scheduled for first launch in 2015–may look a lot like the Apollo craft in use 40 years ago. But as Space.com reports, the similarities are often just skin deep–and also draw from the Shuttle program as well. “The computing power of modern electronics just dwarfs what [Apollo engineers] had available,” Jim Geffre, a NASA engineer working on Orion, said in the article. “That allows us to do a lot more and build more automation into the spacecraft. More performance that uses less power and less space allows us to build in redundancy that Apollo didn’t have.”

The Orion is also about four feet larger in diameter–16.5 feet, to the Apollo craft’s 12.8 feet–which will enable four astronauts to travel to the moon instead of three, let all four descend to the surface (instead of just two), and allow for missions that run several weeks long. (Image credit: NASA)

Are you ready for this? Can you stomach the truth? If things continue spiraling madly out of control as they are right now, there’s at least a modicum of a chance that your children or grandchildren will greet a lifelike robot when sashaying in for the first day of kindergarten. Horrifying, we know. A new research effort published in this month’s Science outlines new ways in which humanoids could actually be used to instruct our little ones. At the core of the project is imitation; humans, especially young ones, learn a multitude of mannerisms and such by simply watching others. Thus, it stands to reason that robots are “well-suited to imitate us, learn from us, socialize with us and eventually teach us.” Already, these social bots are being used on an experimental basis to teach various skills to preschool children, “including the names of colors, new vocabulary words and simple songs.” Just think — in 2071, those harmless lessons will morph into studies of subterfuge, insurrection and rapacity.

[Via Digg]

Filed under: Robots, Science

The plot thickens: robot teachers to brainwash your children’s children originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 19 Jul 2009 16:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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NASA released Thursday newly restored video of the Apollo 11 mission from July 20th, 1969, including video showing the moonwalk more clearly than what has been seen before. It’s part of the 40th anniversary commemoration of astronauts landing on the moon for the first time.

The initial release shows 15 key moments from the mission. The video material came from a variety of sources and was assembled by a team of Apollo-era NASA engineers.

“The restoration is ongoing and may produce even better video,” said Richard Nafzger, an engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center that oversaw TV processing during Apollo 11, in a statement. “The restoration project is scheduled to be completed in September and will provide the public, future historians, and the National Archives with the highest quality video of this historic event.”

The new videos are definitely clearer. Unfortunately, an opportunity to make them sharper still was lost, it turns out. NASA concluded after an exhaustive three year search that the original tapes–not the degraded broadcast versions–were most likely erased and reused accidentally sometime in the early 1980s for satellite missions, as NPR reports. But we’ll take whatever we can get, of course.

With that, we’d like to turn it over to you, our readers. What are your memories of the Apollo 11 mission? Let us know in the Comments section below.