Daily Science Dose

I find it ironic that just a few weeks after watching the finale of the great space soap opera known as Battlestar Galactica, a tale of technology running amok and former-slave-labor-robots evolving on their own to exact revenge on humankind, that we get news that scientists have developed robots or software programs that can think for themselves in terms of science experimentation and theorizing.

But does that robot look like this?

Yeah, didn’t think so.

But back to the news…

Aberystwyth University in Wales has a robotics department that has built ADAM. The head of the ADAM team, Ross King, says that ADAM carries out experiments and uses reason to theorize and plan for additional experiments.

It is the world’s first example of a machine that has made an independent scientific discovery — in this case, new facts about the genetic make-up of baker’s yeast.

“On its own it can think of hypotheses and then do the experiments, and we’ve checked that it’s got the results correct,” King said in an interview. –Reuters

And yes, EVE is being built next.

Around the same time, another team working on artificial intelligence has announced that they have developed a program that can independently reason its way through Newtonian physics.

…Hod Lipson and Michael Schmidt of Cornell University in New York, who have developed a computer program capable of working out the fundamental physical laws behind a swinging double pendulum.

Just by crunching the numbers — and without any prior instruction in physics — the Cornell machine was able to decipher Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and other properties. — Reuters again

My only fear with these AI “sci-lons” is what will happen when they figure out the only way to solve the climate crisis, the food crisis, the extinction crisis, the water crisis, etc would be to kill all humans?

robots, robotics, software, programs, computers, reason, artificial intelligence, AI, science, experiments

In the late 1950’s, two scientists working at UCLA came up with a process in which fresh water can be made from seawater. It’s a little thing called reverse osmosis. One of those UCLA guys, while working at Ben-Gurion in Israel, had an idea to use the same kind of process to create energy.

It’s quite simple. The way that osmosis works with fresh versus seawater, water will naturally move from a less-concentrated solution (fresh water) to a more-concentrated solution, i.e. the salty water, and once something moves, it creates kinetic energy, and energy is energy, people. You just have to figure out a way to optimize and harness it.

And that is what this Sidney Loeb fellow wanted to do. He patented it anyway in 1973, and named the process Pressure Retarded Osmosis (gee, I wonder if you could get away with naming it that today). But with osmosis, you need a membrane that is permeable to something like water and not to something else, say salt. The water moves from fresh to salty, creating a flow, if enough pressure is present. The amount of pressure is key, and if you doubt me, think of a shower with really low water pressure. Yeah, exactly.

With enough pressure, you can move turbines, and turbines run generators, and yep, you got power. A group in Norway is working on new and improved membranes that can actually produce the pressure (about 12 atmospheres) needed to create power, which was the sticky point since 1973. The Norwegians are looking at plans to build a prototype power plant in a fjord near Oslo, a great location in terms of ample supplies of both fresh and seawater.

The Dutch group working on similar plans for their own prototype and they have come up with the term Blue Energy. The Dutch plans also include a series of batteries, powered by the salt water. Blue Energy uses the movement of the ions present in salt water, the + Na and the - Cl. It makes me think of how a solar panel works, using ions to create an electron flow which creates electricity.

So far, it seems that a fifth of the power that the little pressure retarded osmosis systems produce are needed to pump the water, so obviously, things are going to have to become a lot more efficient before we start replacing all the coal plants with osmosis plants. So designing the shape of the membrane “tubes” will become important, to maximize surface area, but also be as compact as possible. And then there is maintenance and cleaning of said membranes…and a limited number of suitable locations…constructing in hard-to-reach places that will require new roads…

Besides that, it’s brilliant. Clean, non-obtrusive, safe for the environment and wildlife…The Europeans are obviously getting creative.

reverse osmosis, osmosis, UCLA, desalinization, fresh water, seawater, salt water, pressure retarded osmosis, PRO, membrane, electron flow, ions, electricity, power, kinetic energy, energy, green energy, Blue Energy, Oslo, Norway, Netherlands

He’s been a professor at Stanford, he runs the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, oh, and he was part of team of scientists that won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997. Not a bad choice for Energy secretary, eh?

And the best part is that he understands the carbon conundrum. Kudos, Mr. Obama, for choosing Mr. Chu as your man to lead this nation’s energy policy.

So much better than that Dick Cheney, plain and tall…and in the pocket of the oil and coal companies. Not that Cheney was Secretary of the Department of Energy, but he might as well have been with his closed door energy wheelings and dealings. Not to mention the team of henchmen Bush employed to allow those oil and coal companies to ignore the consequences of carbon emissions.

I see a brighter and more informed energy future for America and in turn, the World.

Steven Chu is a big advocate for energy conservation. In a Q&A with Science News, he details that buildings account for nearly 40% of all energy consumed, and that with new more efficient technology and building methods, we can get that percentage down to half of that. He also feels that number can drop further, achieving the same results on 25% of what had previously been needed to run the same buildings.

Chu also advocates governmental tax credits to spur advances in energy technologies. In addition to tax credits, Chu feels that the US should be building a “greener” workforce in energy industries, by supporting universities and laboratories in developing the next generation of scientists that will continue to advance the field. Give more grants to professors, who in turn can employ more graduate students, who will in turn become the scientists that develop new and better technology to work to solve our inevitable energy crisis.

Steven Chu, Obama, Secretary of Energy, Department of Energy

Growing up in Michigan, there was a large round depression in the neighboring farmland that we kids called the “crater.” Making a journey to the crater was an event to us kids, because we really believed that a meteorite had crashed in our backyard. Or at least that is what I believed…and still want to.

And the same technology that is used to check for speeders by your friendly state trooper is being used to scan the Earth’s surface for meteorite craters. ‘Bout time.

LIDAR, or light detection and ranging, has been used in the past by the NOAA to measure shoreline elevations as in the image at right. It’s a good way of determining sea level rise or erosion issues. Simply strapping the LIDAR devices to a plane and flying over something you want to get an accurate (within 15 cm or 6 in) elevation reading and viola, you got yourself a pretty kick*ss topographic map. The LIDAR is able to filter through vegetation, so even if you are looking at what looks like a huge flat forested area, the LIDAR will be able to show you all the curves and depressions in the actual planetary surface.

From the AAAS’s news on its website:

Hunting for meteorites isn’t easy. Most craters have eroded away, and those that do survive are often concealed by forests or lakes. As a result, researchers have only been able to locate five craters from the past 12,000 years. Presumably hundreds more pockmark Earth’s surface, but where are they?

Looking for a better way to dig up these subtle depressions, a team from the University of Alberta in Edmonton went airborne with a device called LIDAR. The technology works by shooting laser pulses at the ground; as these pulses bounce back, they reveal the precise distance from plane to Earth, creating a topographical map of the planet’s bare surface. LIDAR differs from radar because it can see through vegetation as it charts surface elevations in great detail.

And wouldn’t you know it, the research team found a crater in dense woods that yielded the tell-tale iron fragments of meteorite around the area. The team estimated that the 36 meter wide crater was created by the impact of a meteorite only one meter wide and traveling at 11 to 17 kilometers per second. Okay, that is fast, true; but that is slower by 9km/s than the big meteorites that created the craters that are well-known.

I imagine scientists that research meteorites are thinking this is like Xmas and their birthday rolled into one with this idea working. Studying meteorites is like looking at ancient artifacts from our earliest ancestors if our ancestors were cosmic rocks. Meteorites contain lots of cosmochemical information on that has proven invaluable to scientists studying the origins of our solar system and universe.

I wonder if I could persuade the Alberta team to take a quick jaunt over my Michigan crater. It’s about 20 m wide, so I imagine it was created by a meteorite maybe two thirds of a meter across…going about 13 kilometers a second…but that’s just a guess.

meteorites, crater, impact, LIDAR, Alberta, Michigan, NOAA, iron, cosmochemical, solar system, universe