August 1, 2006, 9:50 PM CT

Bathroom Chess

If you are not that good at making intelligent moves at chess then how about doing a little practice just on your own! This floating bathroom chess is just the right set for you to try all your tricks when you are cool and composed right under the shower!

Designers Oliver Beckert and Janet Villano has designed this lovely float that elegantly moves along the water with it's upright ''fins' dancing in the warm light. Besides, a little practice, this floating chess set will give a contemporary touch to your bathroom decor too.what say!!........

Posted by: Kevin      Permalink         Source

August 1, 2006, 9:41 PM CT

Grow Your-own Home

In the future, homeowners may grow their houses instead of building them.

That's the vision of MIT architect Mitchell Joachim of the Media Lab's Smart Cities group. He and colleagues -- environmental engineer Lara Greden (S.M. 2001, Ph.D. 2005) and architect Javier Arbona-Homar (S.M. 2004) -- have conceived a home that doesn't just use "green" design but is itself a living ecosystem. They call it the Fab Tree Hab.

The basic framework of the house would be created using a gardening method known as pleaching, in which young trees are woven together into a shape such as an archway, lattice, or screen and then encouraged to maintain that form over the years.

As the framework matured -- which might take a few years in tropical climates and several decades in more temperate locations -- the home grower would weave a dense layer of protective vines onto the exterior walls. Any gaps could be filled in with soil and growing plants to create miniature gardens. On the interior walls, a mixture of clay and straw beneath a final layer of smooth clay would provide insulation and block moisture. On south-facing walls, windows made of soy-based plastics would absorb warmth in the winter; ground-floor windows on the shady side could draw in cool breezes during hot months. Water collected on the roof would flow through the house for use by people and plants; wastewater would be purified in an outdoor pond with bacteria, fish and plants that consume organic waste.........

Posted by: Kevin      Permalink         Source

July 28, 2006, 10:10 PM CT

From Farm Waste To Bio-oil

Samy Sadaka reached into a garbage bag, picked up a mixture of cow manure and corn stalks, let it run through his fingers and invited a visitor to do the same.

It wasn't that bad.

That mix of manure and corn stalks had spent 27 days breaking down in a special drying process. The end result looked like brown yard mulch with lots of thin fibers. There wasn't much smell. And it was dry to the touch.

"That's about 20 percent moisture," said Drew Simonsen, an Iowa State University sophomore from Quimby who's working on the research project led by Sadaka, an associate scientist for Iowa State's Center for Sustainable Environmental Technologies.

Other Iowa State researchers working on the project are Robert Burns, an associate professor of agricultural and biosystems engineering; Mark Hanna, an Extension agricultural engineer; Robert C. Brown, director of the Center for Sustainable Environmental Technologies and Bergles Professor in Thermal Science; and Hee-Kwon Ahn, a postdoctoral researcher for the department of agricultural and biosystems engineering.

The project is being supported by $190,000 in grants from the Iowa Biotechnology Byproducts Consortium.

The researchers are working to take wastes from Iowa farms -- manure and corn stalks -- and turn them into a bio-oil that could be used for boiler fuel and perhaps transportation fuel.........

Posted by: Kevin      Permalink         Source

July 28, 2006, 9:39 PM CT

Cell-shaped Building In Making

An innovative cell-shaped building will house a new biomedical research institute in Chengdu, China, thanks to an unusual crossdisciplinary collaboration between Shuguang Zhang, a world-renowned bioengineer and scientist at MIT, and his former student, architecture major Sloan Kulper.

Kulper (S.B. 2003) designed the cell-shaped building for the Institute for Nanobiomedical Technology and Membrane Biology in Chengdu, China, the regional capital of Sichuan province in southwestern China. The proposed new facility will contain 170,000 square feet of laboratory, research and meeting spaces; it is slated for construction over the next three years. The building is intended to look like a cell from the outside and to include an assortment of forms inspired by molecular biology inside.

Shuguang Zhang, associate director of the Center for Biomedical Engineering, will serve as founding advisor of the new Nanobiomedical Institute, to be sited at Chengdu's Sichuan University, where Zhang received his undergraduate degree in biochemistry.

Zhang met Kulper in 2002, when he took Zhang's course, "Molecular Structure of Biological Materials: Structure, Foundation and Self-assembly."

In the class, Zhang frequently discusses the striking similarities between architecture and biological structures, he said. "Nature has produced abundant magnificent, intricate and fine molecular and cellular structures through billions of years of molecular selection and evolution.........

Posted by: Ashley      Permalink         Source

July 28, 2006, 9:32 PM CT

Nanotechnology And Atherosclerosis

In laboratory tests, one very low dose of a drug was enough to show an effect on notoriously tenacious artery-clogging plaques. What kind of drug is that potent?

It's not so much the drug itself as how it was delivered. Fumagillin - a drug that can inhibit the growth of new blood vessels that feed atherosclerotic plaques - was sent directly to the base of plaques by microscopically small spheres called nanoparticles developed by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

"Previously we reported that we can visualize plaques using our nanoparticle technology, but this is the first time we've demonstrated that the nanoparticles can also deliver a drug to a disease site in a living organism," says Patrick Winter, Ph.D., research assistant professor of medicine. "After a single dose in laboratory rabbits, fumagillin nanoparticles markedly reduced the growth of new blood vessels that feed plaques".

The researchers report their findings in the recent issue of the journal Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology, and the article is now available on line.

An atherosclerosis plaque results when a buildup of cholesterol, inflammatory cells and fibrous tissue forms inside an artery. If a plaque ruptures, it can block blood flow to the heart or brain, causing heart attack or stroke.........

Posted by: Sean      Permalink         Source

July 26, 2006, 5:18 PM CT

How Well Wind Turbines Operate?

In West Texas, New Mexico, and other places around the world, wind turbines are used to generate electricity. But how can engineers determine their efficiency and health?

Sandia's Wind Energy Technology Department has developed a device, the Accurate Time Linked data Acquisition System (ATLAS II), which answers that question and can provide all of the information necessary to understand how well a machine is performing.

Housed in an environmentally protected aluminum box, ATLAS II is capable of sampling a large number of signals at once to characterize the inflow, the operational state, and the structural response of a wind turbine.

The ATLAS II has several key attributes that make it particularly attractive for wind turbine deployment. It is small, highly reliable, can operate continuously, uses off-the-shelf components, and has lightning protection on all channels.

"The system provides us with sufficient data to help us understand how our turbine blade designs perform in real-world conditions, allowing us to improve on the original design and our design codes," says Jose Zayas, the project lead, who has been working on ATLAS II since its inception in 1999.

Last year the ATLAS II team completed a project with GE Energy and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to monitor the performance of a GE wind turbine in a Great Plains site about 30 miles south of Lamar, Colo., and will soon start monitoring a new work-for-others (WFO) project with Texas Tech University.........

Posted by: Kevin      Permalink         Source

July 26, 2006, 7:07 AM CT

Full-screen Video IPod Coronation in 2007?

Bad news for all devoted iPod geeks, who are desperately waiting to crown the new king of the 'gadget industry', the latest widescreen iPod would now be released next year. According to International Business Time, you will have to wait for another six months or so to bite the fresh apple.

According to Shaw Wu of American Technology Research:

Apple is aiming to increase both the screen size and improve the battery life - two conflicting attributes that are difficult to improve simultaneously and require significant engineering.

Certainly, we are fed up with the teasing mock-ups and need to see the beast now without fault, however, we are helpless and would have to wait and see what's Apple has to offer to melt down the much-hyped Zune. Apparently, Apple is feeling the pressure and wants to overcome technical hurdles before actually introducing the new iPod and that make sense too.........

Posted by: Kevin      Permalink         Source

July 25, 2006, 8:43 PM CT

Solving Mysteries in Helicopter Parts

They begin with very few clues, and then carefully collect evidence that leads to a discovery of what causes failures in Army helicopter parts. It's an investigative probe blending scientific and engineering principles. But NASA engineers are solving this mystery.

Under a NASA Space Act Agreement, the Materials and Processes Laboratory of Marshall Space Flight Center's Engineering Directorate is partnering with the Army Aviation Engineering Directorate, U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Research, Development and Engineering Center at Redstone Arsenal to conduct failure analysis on helicopter parts. The project taps Marshall's capabilities and expertise in metallurgy -- the science of metals.

The lab is analyzing such items as engine parts, main rotor parts and fasteners from Army helicopters that have flown in the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The parts under scrutiny are those that have experienced some type of failure with the metal product forms such as castings, forgings or extrusions.

The helicopter hardware is studied on a microscopic level, because most problems in the metal can't be seen with the naked eye. Parts from Apache, Blackhawk, Chinook and Observation helicopters are analyzed in Marshall's state-of-the-art failure and analysis diagnostic facility. The facility uses high-powered microscopes to uncover the root cause of the problem, whether it's the way the part was machined, heat-treated or formed and fitted. The engineers also use fractography to characterize the fracture surfaces of the failed parts.........

Posted by: Jim      Permalink         Source

July 22, 2006, 11:24 PM CT

Finding Electrical Short Circuits In Airplanes

A preemptive spark lasting for nanoseconds that helps find potentially dangerous short circuits hidden in the miles of wiring behind the panels of aging commercial airliners has been patented by Sandia National Laboratories.

The rapid technique may make it financially feasible for airlines to quickly diagnose and repair the hard-to-locate intermittent faults that have plagued the industry and cost millions of dollars in lost revenue due to aircraft downtime.

The product, called PASD (Pulsed Arrested Spark Discharge) is expected to be marketed by September by licensee Astronics Advanced Electronic Systems of Redmond, Wash., and combined with that company's other patented test methods under the name ArcSafe.

Other possible uses eventually envisioned for PASD are as inexpensive tests for the wiring harnesses of passenger cars and new homes. Military tanks and the hard-to-reach wiring behind the steel bulkheads of submarines are also possible candidates.

The commercial product is about the size of a small suitcase. It can be plugged into aircraft-installed wire harnesses, 40 wires at a time, to check for the very small insulation breaks linked to intermittent faults.

Sandia is a National Nuclear Security Administration laboratory.........

Posted by: Kevin      Permalink

July 22, 2006, 11:17 PM CT

Yeast In Space

Far above the heads of Earthlings, arrays of single-cell creatures are circling Earth in nanostructures.

The sample devices are riding on the International Space Station (courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories and the University of New Mexico, NASA and US Air Force) to test whether nanostructures whose formations were directed by yeast and other single cells can create more secure homes for their occupants - even in the vacuum and radiation of outer space - than those created by more standard chemical procedures.

Sandia is a National Nuclear Security Administration laboratory.

"Cheap, tiny, and very lightweight sensors of chemical or biological agents could be made from long-lived cells that require no upkeep, yet sense and then communicate effectively with each other and their external environment," says former UNM graduate student and Sandia consultant Helen Baca, lead author on the paper. Baca was advised by Sandia Fellow and UNM professor of chemical engineering, molecular genetics & microbiology Jeff Brinker.

Groups of such long-lived cells may also serve as models to investigate how tuberculosis bacteria survive long periods of dormancy within human bodies.

En masse, they also may be used to generate signals to repel harmful bacteria from the surfaces of surgical tools like catheters.........

Posted by: Brooke      Permalink

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