Category: Mean machines
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The fundamental patterns of traffic flow
Take up the study of earthquakes, volcanoes or stock markets and the goal, whether voiced or not, is to find a way to predict future “events” in your field. In that sense, these guys have something in common with scientists who study traffic jams. The difference is that traffic experts might one day reach their…
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Centimetre scale models could compute Casimir forces
The Casimir force is notoriously difficult to measure. So tricky is it, that the first accurate measurements weren’t made until 1997 and even today only a handful of labs around the world of capable of taking its measure. Of course there are various ways of modelling what goes on theoretically but even the most powerful…
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Were gravitational waves first detected in 1987?
In 1987, Joe Weber, a physicist at the University of Maryland, claimed to have detected gravitational waves at exactly the same moment that other astronomers witnessed the famous supernova of that year, SN1987A. His equipment consisted of several massive aluminium bars that were designed to vibrate in a unique way when a large enough gravitational…
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Liquid film motors finally explained
Last year, a group of Iranian physicists made the extraordinary discovery that motors can be made of nothing more than a thin film of water sitting in a cell bathed in two perpendicular electric fields. The unexpected result of this set up is that the water begins to rotate. Divide the water into smaller cells…
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The coming of age of hadrontherapy
There’s a problem with conventional radiotherapy for tumours: the body absorbs the radiation as it passes through. So zap a deep seated tumour with X-rays and the dose decreases exponentially with the depth of target. This means that both diseased and healthy tissue end up getting targeted. In 1946, Robert Wilson, a physicist at FermiLab…
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Ptarithmetic: reinventing logic for the computer age
In the last few years, a small group of logicians have attempted the ambitious task of re-inventing the discipline of formal logic. In the past, logic has been thought of as the formal theory of “truth”. Truth plays an important role in our society and as suchm a formal theory is entirely laudable and worthy.…
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What should robots do for us?
Robots have great potential for assisting the old and disabled (not to mention the rest of us) . But if you’re developing one of these devices, where do you start? What kind of assistance you should concentrate on providing? Young Sang Choi and buddies from the Healthcare Robotics Lab at Georgia Institute of Technology have…
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How to build a desktop Foucalt’s Pendulum
Foucalt’s pendulum–a 28 kilogram bob suspended on a 67 metre wire– famously hangs in the Pantheon in Paris where Leon Foucalt himself demonstrated it in 1851. The pendulum oscillates in a vertical plane which slowly rotates. The rotation is explained by the Earth’s motion which spins beneath the pendulum. The length of the wire is…
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Space Station simulator given emotions
Astronauts training to work on the International Space Station have to have mastered a mind-boggling amount of kit before they leave Earth. One of these devices is the Canadarm 2, a robotic arm used to manipulate experiments outside the station. On Earth, astronauts train on a Canadarm 2 simulator connected to a virtual assistant that…
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Massive miscalculation makes LHC safety assurances invalid
It just gets worse for CERN and its attempts to reassure us that the Large Hadron Collider won’t make mincemeat of the planet. It’s beginning to look as if a massive miscalculation in the safety reckonings means that CERN scientists cannot offer any assurances about the work they’re doing. In a truly frightening study, Toby…