It’s happened. We’re in the early 21st century, and it’s now possible for a space suit to look hopelessly outdated. I mean, would you pilot a 1950s vehicle off the planet in something that looks like it recently came off a baked potato? I think Devo once made a music video in more sophisticated space apparel than this.
But it’s fun looking at the progression of space suit fashion in this NASA slideshow (link is at lower left of page). You even get some glimpses of the future, both conceptual drawings and shots of astronauts testing out the new designs on a dusty Washington lake bed. There’s also the famous 1984 shot of the first untethered spacewalk – a prospect that still makes me shiver.
The slideshow doesn’t offer any pics of women in space (even though 40 American women have achieved escape velocity). If you hanker for a break from all the manliness, check out NASA’s tribute to Sally Ride, who last week celebrated her 25th anniversary as the first American woman in space.
On the fashion side, keep your eyes peeled for the next major development. On July 4, Mattel rolls out “Space Camp Barbie.” Who says we’re losing our edge in science and technology?
As a native Michigander, I’m a sucker for news about the Great Lakes. (That’s HOMES, remember? Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior.) Engineers at the U of M Marine Hydronamics Laboratory have now designed a boat without a ballast tank in order to prevent the introduction of non-native species.
A ballast tank is a compartment that sits at the bottom of any large boat. When the boat doesn’t have any cargo, its crew can fill the ballast tank with water to help it stay afloat. The mechanical details on how this works can be found here; but basically, the extra water lowers the boat’s center of gravity and makes it more stable on the water.
Trouble is, these ballast water pools typically harbor lots of aquatic species. Researchers have identified 185 non-native species in the Great Lakes, and guess that most of them got there via cargo ship. The most famous are Zebra mussels, which are native to the Caspian Sea and were first introduced to the Great Lakes in 1988. Since then, they’ve disrupted ecosystems all over the U.S., out-competing local species for food and wreaking havoc in harbors, boats, and power plants.
Those U of M engineers are clever, though. They’ve figured out how to keep a ballast-free boat from sinking. As a press release explains:
Instead of hauling potentially contaminated water across the ocean, then dumping it in a Great Lakes port, a ballast-free ship would create a constant flow of local seawater through a network of large pipes, called trunks, that runs from the bow to the stern, below the waterline.
This design concept has been around since 2001, but only now have its creators built a prototype. When testing their 16-foot, $25,000 wooden scale model (shown above), the engineers found that not only does it work, but propelling it requires 7.3 percent less power than regular ships. That efficiency translates to a savings of $540,000 per ship (which is only slightly less impressive when you consider that a typical vessel costs a whopping $70 million to construct).
A decade ago, thanks to the Federal Endangered Species Act, gray wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park. Conservationists have since used radio collars and overhead surveillance technologies to keep track of the animals’ whereabouts. But at the end of this month, federal support will dissolve—meaning scientists will no longer be able to use the expensive equipment.
But a new, cheaper technology might save the day. “Howlbox,” developed by scientists at the University of Montana in Missoula, is a $1,300 speaker-recorder system that broadcasts digitized wolf howls and then records any real howls that respond to the fakes. The system is pretty sophisticated: a precise frequency analysis of the recordings shows not only how many wolves responded, but which specific ones did.
The Howlbox was tested in one spot in Montana in January. The University of Montana’s pilot project, involving four remote sites in Idaho, is slated for June.
The biggest problem with the box might not be the response from wolves, but from humans. As this NYT article points out:
To the uninitiated, a Howlbox-enhanced forest could sound as if wolves were everywhere—a scary proposition. Montana wildlife officials are braced for a public relations campaign if the project moves forward.
Politicians, journalists, even scientists love to talk about the “promise of biofuels.” But a thorough news feature in last week’s Nature reveals just how empty that promise may be.
Shown above is a Midwestern plant in which corn starch is turned into ethanol. Global ethanol production hit 13.2 billion gallons in 2007, more than double the production four years before. In the U.S., almost a quarter of all corn production now goes toward making ethanol. But, as Jeff Tollefson points out in the Nature piece, the agricultural techniques used for ethanol’s production “often damage the environment on a scale that far outweighs any good achieved through the biofuels’ use.”
Enter “second-generation” biofuels made from trees and grasses, which are cheaper and most sustainable raw materials than corn. A big push in the industry right now, according to Tollefson, is turning cellulose (from the cell walls of plants) into fuel. But there’s a big catch to that approach, too:
The fly in this ointment is that the world cannot yet boast a single commercial-scale cellulosic-ethanol facility. Breaking cellulose down into sugars is not easy work, and can use up a lot of energy; what’s more, not all the sugars produced are easily fermented.
Even if bioengineers successfully tinkered with those chemical processes, and even if they created a crop that could be an ample source of the cellulose, they’d still need to figure out how it could could all be done on a large scale. With all of the roadblocks, Tollefson argues that biofuels “will never take over the whole liquid-fuel market, let alone amount to a large proportion of total energy use.”
The best option, he concludes, would be to increase our fuel efficiency:
In the same law that expanded the ethanol mandate, Congress also increased the fuel-efficiency requirements for vehicles by 40%…And as Ingram points out, âIf we increase gas mileage by 1 mile per gallon, that is about equal to all the ethanol we are making right now from corn.â?
In a region prone to earthquakes, a little warning could make a big difference. Though current early warning systemsâsuch as those in Japan, Mexico and Taiwanâcan only give a few to tens of seconds warning before the ground starts to shake, this is enough time to allow some short-term mitigation. Trains and elevators can be slowed or stopped, utilities and factories can put into safe modes, and people indoors and out can move to safer areas. Damage will still occur, but it could be lessened.
Japan is particularly earthquake prone (above, Tokyo devastated after a 1923 earthquake), so itâs no surprise that the country would develop an earthquake early warning system. After years of development, it went online in October. However, the success of the system has been called into question. On January 26, a magnitude 4.8 earthquake shook the Noto Peninsula in the Ishikawa Prefecture about 200 miles northwest of Tokyo. No warning had been issued for the quake, and the Japanese media claimed that system had failed. But did it?
The Japanese system is designed to issue a warning only if the predicted intensity of the earthquake will reach lower 5 or above. (Intensityâsee here for an explanation of the Japanese scaleâis a measure of the strength of seismic motion at the surface, whereas magnitude is a measure of the energy released at the source of an earthquake.) An earthquake with an intensity of 4 will shake books off the shelf; in a lower 5, the bookshelf will fall over. For the January 26 earthquake, the system predicted an intensity of 4, but in one town, Wajimamonzen, the intensity reached lower 5. Government officials from the Ishikawa Prefecture, though, received no reports of injuries or damage from the earthquake. And a representative of the Japan Meteorological Agency told the journal Nature that this kind of variation was within expected limits.
It can be argued that, technically, the system did fail and there should have been a warning. With a system still in its first year of operation, it is no surprise that it still needs perfecting. However, if there was no serious damage from the earthquake, and the system is meant to mitigate damage, doesnât this also call into question where they have placed the cutoff? If warnings are given too often for quakes that donât do much damage, is there a danger people would grow complacent and begin to ignore them? And then what would happen when Japanâs equivalent of the âbig oneâ? (see Tokyo Tremors in Earthquake!) occurs?
It’s happened. We’re in the early 21st century, and it’s now possible for a space suit to look hopelessly outdated. I mean, would you pilot a 1950s vehicle off the planet in something that looks like it recently came off a baked potato? I think Devo once made a music video in more sophisticated space apparel than this.
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