I know this is kind of last minute, but i wanted to let everyone know that if you want to (and i hope you do), you can watch the phoenix spacecraft land on Mars LIVE over at NASA TV.

Touchdown of the phoenix mars lander is expected to happen just before 8:00PM Eastern time (little more then two hours from writing this), but the live broadcast will actually start at 6:30PM (see the full schedule here). You will be getting all the images at the exact same time as everyone over at NASA, so you can follow it live as it goes through what they are calling 7 minutes of hell in it’s entry into the Marsian atmosphere.

Due to time difference and school early tomorrow i’m afraid i won’t be able to stay up and follow the events, but i can highly recommend heading over to Phil Plaits Bad Astronomy Blog, i’m sure he’ll be covering the entire event with style.

Not that i was specifically looking for more football news (and this really isn’t that related), but here goes.

Scientists at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, have developed the worlds most sophisticated robot, at least most sophisticated when it comes to walking like a human. If you’re anything like me, you’re not overly impressed with the awkward way those “dancing robots” from Japan are moving around (and waving fans), i mean it’s cool and all, but far away from being the robotic overlords we’ve all been waiting for. But leave it to Holland to bring us one step closer. Check out this video of Flame, their new robot.

Making a robot walk like a human is no easy task, as it is really a series of controlled falls, but i think you’ll agree that this robot is getting pretty close. I also like their flair! Pointless flashing LED’s in front and a skull in the shape of a blue flame. Kudos Holland.

Now i promised that this was somehow related to football as well, and indeed it is. The creators of the robot intend on competing in the 2008 RoboCup, an annual competition that pits robot teams against each other in a game of football. To read more about the robot itself and the research being done on it, check out the press-release.

This isn’t exactly breaking science news, but it is still a pretty cool demonstration of electrostatic force.

I saw this news over at Popular Mechanics, and according to them the inventors of this lovely device are a non-profit group called SRI. They will be unveiling this new design of a wall-climbing robot shortly, but until then you’ll have to watch the video from the original story.

What’s happening here is basically the same as when you rub a balloon against your hair and it sticks to the wall. There is a buildup of electric charge on the balloon as a result of rubbing it on your hair, and because of this it is able to stick to most wall surfaces. The vehicle does the same thing, creating an electric charge on a large surface of the car (probably on the belt it uses to move), causing a strong enough attraction to the wall to overcome gravity.

If i had to guess, I’d say that the car was built much like a Van der Graaf generator, which is basically a machine made for creating a huge amount of electrostatic charge (you might recognize it if you see one, it’s basically a pole with a big metal sphere on top, it’ll emit sparks if you get too close). Van der Graaf generators are fairly simple contraptions, consisting of a conveyor belt that literally transfers electrons from small needles at the bottom, to the sphere on top (check out HowStuffWorks.com’s guide to Van Der Graaf generators if you want to know more). My guess is that the belt that is moving the machine, works in much the same way, collecting electrons onto the belt and using them to “stick” to the wall. I’m sure there is more to it, and there’s a pretty good chance that i’m just talking out of my ass, but hey, it’s fun to guess. If you think you know how it works, leave comments! I’d love to hear your ideas.

Now i’m not one to love all things labeled “nano”, but being a HUGE soccer (football!) fan, i can’t resist this piece of news.

The national institute of standards and technology (NIST) is now giving the public a chance to watch the second annual nano-soccer cup, where competitors from various research institutes will compete with tiny robots to complete various tasks. The nano-bots will be controlled via remote-control and react to changes in magnetic field, or through electric signals sent through the microchip arena (which is about the size of a single rice). The robots will compete in events such as the two millimeter dash, the slalom (dodging between obstacles to make it to the goal), ball handling skills, which involves moving balls into a goal. Much hope is tied to nanobots being a big thing in the medical field in the future, performing microsurgery and such, plus of course, they will play an intricate part in the BORG plan to assimilate all races (as long as 7of9 is there, i welcome my borg overlords).

It should be said though, that it would appear that they have slapped the nano-label on these things as a way to cash in on the nano-hype, as the actualy bots are several micrometer long (one micrometer is 1.000 nano-meters). They claim that because the robots actually weigh nano-GRAMS they can rightfully call it a nanobot competition, but to me it just seems that people are eager to call anything nano as it’s a pop-thing these days. You can see a nano-bot with a micrometer scale next to it in our image above (courtesy of NIST)

Be that as it may! It’s still darn impressive and i can highly recommend checking out their website. There they actually have pictures of the soccer ball to be used, the actual field and even sweet pictures last years nanobots that competed for nano-soccer glory.

Who doesn’t love lasers? You can be annoying at the movies with it, attach them to the heads of sharks and obtain fusion with it. Sadly it seems that the scientists over at Rochester University are only interested in the last prospect, but it’s still pretty neat.

According to a press-release from the University of Rochester, they now have a laser capable of focusing a petawatt of power, onto a target only a millimeter wide. Now the prefix Peta isn’t something we get to use often, as it’s a HUGE number, we’re not even close to measuring harddrives in that range yet, we’re barely up to terabytes there,, but Peta(bytes) comes right after that. So that’s 1.000.000.000.000.000 Watts of power output. In comparison, a normal red laser pointer typically has the power output on the order of milli-watts (0.001 Watts).

Now for me, just being able to throw those numbers around would be reason enough to build the laser, but it’s actually got practical use. It’s purpose is to try out a new concept known as fast-igntion fusion, that offers much more energy efficient way of obtaining fusion. Fusion has long been a holy-grail of sorts in the energy sector, as it would create no enviromently unfriendly gases, and much less radioactive waste compared to nuclear reactors (that work on using the concept of Fission (splitting atoms)). Although fusion has been done before, it has never been done in a way where you actually get more energy out then you put in (correct me if i’m wrong), and the fast-ignition scheme of achieving fusion is one suggestion to make it more economically viable.

Here’s a short article on fusion, explaining both the shortcomings of traditional fusion, and how the fast-ignition scheme might improve it.

Well i guess that “working on” is a bit of an understatement, as they already have a working hand-held device capable of identifying various bacteria and fungi already in use at the international space station. They are however still working on getting it even better. You see, the current version can detect some bacteria, and a recent upgrade to it allows it to detect some fungus as well (which is good, as it can damage equipment). They are working on getting even more capabilities on it (detecting more types of bacteria), and hoping that the end-product will actually perform much like a medical tri-corder from Star Trek, capable of detecting what ails a crewman who has fallen ill and such. If you look at the picture to the left here, you can even see that it kind-of looks like a tri-corder (post-original series anyway).

Now don’t get me wrong, i don’t have anything against health/medicine or anything (in fact i rather enjoy my own), but if you’re trying to copy star trek you could’ve picked something cooler then a medical tri-corder. Be that as it may, more Star Trek inspired technology can never be bad, although I’m sure we’d all prefer the holo-suite for some depraved fun.

If you’re interested in reading the whole story, head over to NASA’s website.

Scientists from the University of Konstanz and the National Institute of Standards (NIST) have succeeded in producing a very powerful laser that also produces short pulses at very high speeds (press release here). While this may sound like something that doesn’t really concern us a whole lot (aren’t lasers for DVD players?) it turns out that this could actually have a big impact on finding earth-like planets in orbit of other stars.

To start with let me wow you with some numbers, the laser can produce 40 billion pulses per second and each one of those lasts only 40 femtoseconds, with the average power being 650milliWatts. Those may all be very impressive numbers (and trust me, they are), but let me tell you why this is something to be excited about aside from being the equivalent of porn for engineers. Well it turns out that lasers with these properties, can be used as so-called frequency comb’s, which is more or-less a measuring stick of sorts for light. You can think of this one as having a lot more notches on it and can therefore differentiate between much finer frequencies than it’s predecessors. For a great article on frequency combs, check out an article on NIST’s website, although long, it is not riddled with math and tries to explain it in a way so everyone can follow.

Now i said before that this could help with finding planets, and if you are a regular reader of ReducedMass.com, this may not surprise you. One of the most successful methods of finding exo-planets (planets orbiting other suns) is to detect a slight wobble in the light of a sun that is caused by the gravitational pull of an orbiting planet (Henrik wrote a great article about it a few weeks ago). Obviously, a bigger planet has a stronger pull, causing more severe wobbles that are easier to detect, but small planets, like ours, would make very small pulls on the sun, and therefore require a very precise measurement of light in order to detect it. Current technology does not allow for this, but they claim that this laser just might do the trick.

One thing that made me pause a bit though is the claim that it will improve the accuracy of detection 100-fold, which certainly seems like a tall order. I’m not really basing that on anything scientific (and the fact that the press-release comes from NIST probably means that my concerns are unfounded), but an improvement by two orders of magnitude is not something seen every-day.

This video is damn cool, and combines the ever popular high-speed camera, with so-called Schlieren pictures.

The basic idea here is quite intuitive and in fact you’ve probably seen these effects many times in your life. What’s happening is that although we can not see shock waves directly, they create different densities in in the air, which then in turn has a different index of refraction (which means that light that hits low density air is bent in a different way from light that hits the high density). The result is that you get a sort of shadow-picture, that then shows how the air is reacting. An example of this that you’ve probably seen, is the shadow of hot air rising from a candle. If you place a light behind the candle, and look at the shadow hitting the table, you’ll see how hot air is moving around the candle, even though it is naked to the visible eye invisible to the naked eye. This is more or less what they are doing in this video, although they obviously have a very refined technique to get great videos like these.

Back in 2001 the Taliban in Afghanistan demolished a couple of Buddha statues that had been standing there for around 1500 years, behind them were some caves that were adorned with paintings from a similar era (around 5-900 AD). Now don’t worry, i have no intentions on touching on politics here (something we steer clear of here at reducedmass), but the point is, although the caves are now gone, pieces of them have been tested at a European lab and have lead to some surprising discoveries.

It turns out, after having examined fragments from the paintings (a cross-section of a painting piece can be seen in the picture to the left), they reached the conclusion that they were made with oil! Why is this exciting you may ask? Well until now, it was believed that oil painting was first developed in the 15th century, and by Europeans. Now this isn’t exactly a scientific breakthrough or anything, but i think it illustrates nicely how science is involved in almost everything.

To figure out what the paintings were composed of, they used so-called synchrotron radiation, which is more-or-less just a machine that accelerates electrons around in a big circle, producing x-rays. These x-rays are very strong and focused, and can be used to decipher the structure of materials using a variety of techniques, and they actually had to use a good many of them on this project to get a full picture of all the layers. Other materials found in the pictures include natural resins, proteins, gums, and in some cases, a varnish-like layer.

If you want to read more about the Buddha statues and the caves that contained these oil paintings, I suggest reading the wikipedia page on it, and eventually branching out from their sources.

Transistors are an electronic component used in all digital computing today, and the amount of transistors on a CPU chip has grown exponentially since it’s advent. Check out this video below made by Gizmodo to celebrate the latest Intel chipset. It shows how the number of transistors has grown through the years (also known as Moores law). Note that the symbol that looks like a “u” is the greek lower-case letter “mu” that stands for micrometers, which is 1000 nanometers (nm), or 0.000001 meters. It refers to the size of the transistors.

So silicon is what’s used to make these badboys of computing, and they are believed to break down and become unusable if you go below 10nm. This roadblock has not been met yet, but it is not far off as intels latest chipset, as you can see in the video, is at 45nm. This is where the researchers from the University of Manchester come in, as they claim to have created a transistor out of a material called graphene that is about one molecule thick, or around a single nanometer. This could lead to a technology that would be able to replace the silicon transistors once they reach their limit, and keep the rising speed of computers going.

It should be said though, that this is not something that’s about to hit the market anytime soon. They have no viable way of creating these transistors, as they have no way of controlling how the graphene forms. To make the transistor they already have, it was basically just left to chance to get the shape they needed, as there is no known way yet to cut the graphene. Obviously this method can not be used in mass-production, but at least they now know of a material that is capable of functioning beyond the size threshold of silicon.