Can You Dig the RoboClam?

Anchor technology hasn't changed too much since Blackbeard's heyday. They're really not much more than gigantic hunks of steel with hooks. Now, scientists are working on building a smart, robotic anchor inspired by a clam that buries itself into the seabed.

Burrowing is something that the clams figured out the best way to do long ago. The Atlantic razor clam in particular is one of the planet's best burrowers.

Image: Arne Hückelheim via Wikimedia

"It has a digging efficiency that is more than ten times any existing technology," said Kerstin Nordstrom, a researcher at the University of Maryland.

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The Misappropriated Marie Curie

This photograph of Marie Curie can be found on postage stamps all over the world. But there's one problem, this isn't a picture of Marie Curie.

Image courtosey of Frontczak

It's actually a photo of Susan Marie Frontczak, taken by Paul Schroder in 2001. Frontczak is a professional storyteller, writer and actor who for 13 years has made a living portraying Marie Curie on stage.

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Podcast: Volcanic Eruptions Stymie Global Warming

This week's physics central podcast is about hot and cold. Volcanoes—which spew material that reaches thousands of degrees Fahrenheit—can actually cool the planet. Volcanoes eject aerosols that reflect sunlight, and climate scientists have observed the cooling effects of major volcanic events in 1991 and 1982. Those effects can sometimes take years to reverse. New research in the journal Nature Geophysics has shown that the combination of minor volcanic events between 1998 and 2010 had a measurable cooling effect on the Earth.

This is a big deal because it partly explains the so-called global warming slow-down: a decrease in the acceleration of rising global temperatures. For the most part, climate models have not been able to replicate the slow-down. But most of those models do not include recent volcanic activity as a cooling factor.

In 2011, Susan Solomon and colleagues at MIT wrote a paper showing that the volcanic contribution from 1998 to 2010 was likely large enough to have a significant cooling effect on the earth. The new work by Ben Santer and colleagues at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory provides the quantitative evidence to back up Solomon's conjecture.

Using satellite data going back to 1998, Santer and his team measured the extent to which volcanic aerosols blocked sunlight and moonlight coming through the atmosphere. They estimate that volcanic activity may be responsible for 15 to 20% of the global warming slow-down.

The results counter the notion that climate models do not predict the slow-down because they are "oversensitive" to greenhouse gasses. Santer emphasized that this logic is flawed for multiple reasons, but the new results offer more clear evidence against it.

This new information will help scientists make better predictions about future climate conditions (it is already being incorporated into climate models), but it don't be mislead by the title of this post: these cooling effects do not reverse the effects of climate change. If volcanic activity and other cooling effects are reduced in the future, temperatures will once again start to soar.
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Physicists Mistaken for Hackers at APS March Meeting

A precious resource has been returned to thousands of physicists attending this year’s APS March Meeting. Yesterday marked the start of one of the largest physics conferences in the world, but the security settings on arXiv did not know this. The arXiv is an online repository for preprints of scientific papers covering studies in mathematics, physics, astronomy, computer science, quantitative biology, statistics and quantitative finance.

When over 9,000 scientists using the meeting’s complementary WiFi tried accessing their trusty scientific paper repository, the arXiv’s security turned on and denied them access. Luckily, developer of arXiv, Paul Ginsparg, was notified of the problem and earlier this morning scientists at Cornell University lifted the block.

One of the ways that websites identify hacking attacks is when a large number of requests from a single Internet Protocol (IP) address attempt to access the site over a short period of time. Such was the case on Monday, March 3 at the Colorado Convention Center where this year's APS March meeting is taking place.

Page that appears in place of arxiv.org. 

Instead of recognizing its devoted users, the arXiv identified the many requests as an attack attempting to shut down the site or illegally download information. As a result, when users tried to access the site with the meeting’s complimentary WiFi, they came face to face with a daunting “Access Denied” page.

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Could Sugar Power Cell Phones Of The Future?

Originally published: Feb 28 2014 - 4:30pm, Inside Science News Service
By: Emily Lewis, ISNS Contributor

Researchers are charged up about biobatteries, devices able to harness common biological processes to generate electricity. Most biobatteries are unable to generate large amounts of power, but researchers recently developed a prototype version that has the potential to be lighter and more powerful than the batteries typically found in today's portable electronic devices, including smartphones.

In the body, sugar is converted into energy in a process called metabolism, which decomposes sugar into carbon dioxide and water while releasing electrons. Biobatteries produce energy though the same conversion process by capturing the electrons that are generated in the decomposition of sugar with the same tools that the body uses. Because biobatteries use materials that are biologically based, they are renewable and non-toxic, making them an attractive alternative to traditional batteries that need metals and chemicals to operate.

Image credit: mattwalker69 via flickr | http://bit.ly/1dK8srs

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Off to Denver!

Next week, the Physics Central team will be in Denver, Colorado helping out with this year's APS March Meeting. We hope to see some exciting news coming out of this year's meeting (look out for Roboclam). Our images and video gallery is now up. Check out some of the cool visuals that physicists have been developing over the last year!

                          

Soap film colors are caused by thin film interference and allow the observer to know approximate thickness of the liquid membrane. Forces in the film cause some portions to become thinner and appear black. Credit: Collin Pearsall and Vivek Sharma University of IL.

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Top 5 Science Experiments with Pop-Tarts

Kellogg’s tasty pastry, the Pop-Tart, celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. Since Pop-Tarts first came onto the breakfast scene in 1964, they have spurred some crazy ideas. From Pop-Tart Ice Cream Sandwiches to flying, rainbow Pop-Tart cats, some of the ideas are tastier than others.

In celebration of Pop-Tarts’ 50 years of sweet service, here are five science experiments that Pop-Tarts have inspired over the years that you can test yourself.

Strawberry frosted Pop-Tarts. Credit: Evan-Amos.

5. Last year, a student at Kaneohe elementary tested the fastest way to cook a Pop-Tart without electricity. The student followed the six steps of the scientific method to determine whether apple wood, charcoal or a solar oven was most efficient. To the student’s surprise, the apple wood cooked the Pop-Tarts the quickest.
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Podcast: Virtually Invisible Cochlear Implants

 On this week's Physics Central Podcast I've got an amazing story of how physics could improve quality of life for thousands of people. Researchers at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary are working on a new cochlear implant device which would eliminate the need for external hardware, and help the wearer better determine the direction of sounds. The new design is based around a new, low-power signal-processing chip developed by researchers at the MIT Microsystems Technology Laboratory. The chip is low power and wirelessly chargeable, removing the need for an external battery pack. It also combines with other technology to remove the need for an external microphone, and instead uses the wearer's natural ear. Listen to this week's podcast to learn more.
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Syria's Censorship Practices Exposed

When a country is in the midst of civil war, how does that country’s government use the Internet to its advantage? A group of scientists recently released the monitoring and filtering practices of the Syrian government during the early stages of the Syrian Civil War in 2011, and their results are not what you might expect. The story begins with a US based company, an international net activist group and a fluke of a find.

Credit: Lalosmartz

Last year, the non-profit organization Reporters Without Boarders identified a California-based company as one of the “corporate enemies of the Internet”. The company, called Blue Coat Systems, is a privately held company that specializes in Network Security.

Part of what set Reporters Without Boarders off was a report in 2011 by a net activists group who call themselves Telecomix. The group stumbled upon evidence indicating that the Syrian government was using Blue Coat technology to help monitor and filter online searches from Syrian users.

In October 2011, Telecomix leaked tens of gigabytes of data they had acquired from Blue Coat proxies – web servers that facilitate users’ access to online content. The report came out at a time when the Syrian Civil War was gaining speed with growing protests and rising armed insurgencies like the Free Syrian Army.

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Record-Breaking Meteoroid Impact on the Moon

Last September, two telescopes captured a spectacular flash of light on the moon's surface lasting more than 8 seconds — the longest and brightest flash ever confirmed on the lunar surface.

Scientists have now attributed the record-breaking flash to a meteoroid impact and the resulting vaporization of plasma in a paper published online yesterday in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Despite the huge flash, the cause was relatively small — a rock about one meter across.

Nonetheless, researcher Jose Madiedo (University of Seville) and his team estimate that the rock slammed into the surface at speeds exceeding 50 kilometers per second, leaving a crater roughly 45 meters wide.

A picture of the lunar impact from September 11, 2013.  The flash caused by a meteoroid impact lasted for over 8 seconds — the longest flash ever confirmed.
Image Credit: Jose Madiedo et. al/MIDAS Observatory/MNRAS

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