Hasta La Gadget!

Color shifting has been a pipe dream for about as long as alchemists have claimed their studies to be legitimate, but now a brilliant team from the New University of Lisbon can finally say a breakthrough has been found. Essentially, these inventors have conjured up a transistor that changes the color of practically any surface (paper, glass, plastics, ceramics and metals, just to name a few). For what it’s worth, this same team already has quite a bit of display cred, as it has developed technology currently used within Samsung panels. With the help of a few good men and woman at the University of Texas at Austin, the team was able to register for a patent right here in the US, and with any luck, they’ll be giving OLEDs and e-paper a run for their money before we can snap our fingers twice and run around the block. Check a video (narrated in Portuguese) after the break.

[Thanks, Nelson]

Continue reading Inventors develop transistor to change color of any surface, your face notwithstanding

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Inventors develop transistor to change color of any surface, your face notwithstanding originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 27 Apr 2009 04:13:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Static cling makes lunar dust stick to the instruments astronauts use to conduct experiments on the moon, according to a new survey of 40-year-old Apollo mission data. Brian O’Brien, a now-independent researcher in Floreat, Western Australia, and a former professor of space science at Rice University in Houston, determined that the angle of the sun in the lunar sky modulates the “clinginess” of lunar dust, Scientific American reports.

Since the moon has little atmosphere, solar radiation hits the lunar surface and gives it a clingy electrostatic charge, the report said. If O’Brien’s theory proves correct, this will be a larger problem for future manned missions than it was back in the Apollo days, when astronauts undertook them in the “morning” (roughly equivalent to a month here on earth, according to the article). The solution? You guessed it: a shed. “A sun-proof shed may provide dust-free working environments on the moon,” O’Brien said.

Hubble has picked up a galaxy collision here or there over the past 19 years, but none stranger than the one pictured here. Called Arp 194, the trio of galaxies give the impression that one of them has sprung a leak, as ScienceDaily reports.

“The bright blue streamer is really a stretched spiral arm full of
newborn blue stars,” the report said. “This typically happens when two galaxies interact
and gravitationally tug at [each other].” In fact, all of the galaxies pictured were likely distorted already from a prior collision, according to the article.

In addition, it turns out that what appears to be the third galaxy in the trio is actually further away and in the distance–something that Hubble’s resolution alone can help astronomers sort out. Arp 194 is located in the constellation of Cepheus and is about 600 million light-years away from Earth, the report said. To date, Hubble has taken over 570,000 photos of 29,000 celestial objects. (Credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA))

NASA originally projected that the Mars Exploration Rovers would last 90 days once on the surface of the red planet. Today, both rovers are still doing science five years after their arrival. Spirit is now driving on a plateau called Home Plate in the
Inner Basin valley, according to the Washington Post, while Opportunity has left
Victoria Crater on the other side of the planet, and is motoring toward
a much larger crater called
Endeavour.

Spirit, the less-healthy of the two, has a bunch of minor to moderate issues. They include a broken wheel, some flaky sensors and software, and enough dust on its solar panels to limit its power to 30 percent of normal, the report said. Each night, the two rovers sleep to conserve energy since there is little sunlight–but from April 9th to 11th, Spirit wouldn’t wake up. It’s working again, though scientists working on the program may never find out what happened.

That’s not necessarily a problem. When Spirit’s wheel broke three years ago, the other five wheels dragged the broken one across the surface, which gouged a trench along the way–revealing a silica that proved to be evidence of ancient hot springs, according to the article. “When life hands you lemons, you make lemonade,” said John Callas, project manager for the Mars rovers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in the report.

When Alaska’s Mount Redoubt volcano erupted last month, scientists figured out a way to “see” and track lightning inside the plumes of ash coming out, LiveScience reports.

Here’s what happened: A team of researchers scrambled to set up a system, called a Lightning
Mapping Array, that could see through the dust and gas of an eruption and reveal the lightning storm happening within the tumultuous clouds, the report said. Meteorologists use these arrays to issue storm warnings, but they’re rarely used for volcanic eruptions–and this is the first time researchers were able to set it up beforehand in time to catch the initial lightning.

“The lightning activity was as strong or stronger than we have seen in
large Midwestern thunderstorms,” said physicist Paul Krehbiel of New Mexico Tech in the article. “The radio frequency
noise was so strong and continuous that people living in the area would
not have been able to watch broadcast VHF television stations.”