California wants better batteries, which is why t he electric company Southern California Edison is planning a set of, let’s say, unconventional energy storage solutions, including huge 450-gallon ice packs. Why? It all has to do with a little-known problem with California’s wind-reliant electric grid. Read more…
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California’s Grid May Soon Store Energy in Giant Ice Packs
High-powered microscopes are useful for spotting cancer and other diseases in cells, but they’re expensive and complicated. Your local physicians probably won’t have a microscope on hand, and you’ll probably need at least some skill to use one. However, UCLA scientists have developed a lens-free microscope that could put this tissue scanning power in the hands of many more people. The device creates a holograph-like image of your sample using a CCD or CMOS sensor (like that from your camera) to detect shadow patterns cast by a light source, and reconstructs them in software to present what you’d actually see. The result is a microscope that’s just as effective as its conventional optical brethren, but should also be much cheaper and simpler. The tech won’t be truly ready for a while. As senior author Aydogan Ozcan tells the LA Times , there’s a lot of spit-and-polish necessary before the software is truly easy to use. Should everything go according to plan, though, it could do a lot to make cancer detection more accessible. At a minimum, it would let medical staff in small or remote offices get a snapshot of your cells, rather than having to send you to specialists. And ideally, the lensless telescope will help both in education and “citizen-science” activities — you might not diagnose yourself, but you could contribute data to a large research project without leaving home. [Image credit: Aydogan Ozcan] Filed under: Cameras , Science Comments Via: LA Times Source: UCLA , Science
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Lens-free microscope lets almost anyone spot cancer
If you’re the type of person who likes to do things the needlessly complicated way, then come on over. Here’s how to make AA batteries entirely by hand, courtesy of YouTube’s NurdRage . Read more…
Receiving luxury Christmas presents is great. Giving them, however, has one major downside: Luxury Christmas gifts are expensive as shit. Perhaps that’s why the business of peddling counterfeit items like fake iPhone 6 smartphones and knockoff Louis Vuittons is flourishing on darknet markets like Evolution . Read more…
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Forget Drugs, Darknet Markets Are Selling Counterfeit Christmas Gifts
Since Venus is closer to Earth than Mars — both in size and distance — it would be a much more convenient candidate for manned exploration . There’s just a slight hitch: the average temperature is 850 degrees F, and the atmosphere is 90 times denser than ours. In other words, you’d die in the opposite way that Quaid nearly did in Total Recall . Probes have been sent to the planet’s surface, but the Russian Venera 13 survived the longest at just 127 minutes in 1982. As it does, NASA has figured a way around all that. In IEEE Spectrum , it outlined a study called HAVOC to build a floating “city” of astronaut-manned zeppelins that would hover 30 miles above the planet. At such an altitude, the pressure would be the same as Earth’s at sea level and the temperature would be a still scorching, but manageable 165 degrees F. What’s more, radiation levels would be much less than those on Mars — about the same as Canada gets. The travel length would also be much shorter, solar power would be plentiful, the atmosphere is extremely buoyant for blimps and there would be an option to abort the mission early and return home. After a risky arrival, where the goal is most definitely to not land, astronauts would be able stay for 30 days in 400-foot blimps powered by 10, 000 square feet of solar panels. Venus remains one of the least studied planets in our solar system, so scientists could learn about the planet’s runaway greenhouse effect and study its highly acidic atmosphere. The airships could also bring robotic landers to study the soil and other factors on the surface. So far, there’s no plan to turn the study into an actual manned mission, particularly since NASA is focused strictly on Mars . But the space agency’s Dale Arney said “given that Venus’ upper atmosphere is a fairly hospitable destination, we think it’s… probably no worse than the second planet you might go to behind Mars.” Filed under: Science Comments Via: CNET Source: IEEE Spectrum
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NASA wants to build airship cities in the Venus sky
When your data is in the cloud, you’re relying on someone else to back up your stuff. If your account gets hacked or the service glitches, your data could go up in a puff of smoke. Revert.io automatically backs up your Evernote, Tumblr, and other data online. Read more…
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Revert.io Backs Up Your Evernote, Tumblr, and Other Cloud Data
Friday was a big day at the drone testing facility in Boulder City, Nevada. It was the day that the first drone authorized to fly without FAA approval would take to the air. The bright orange unmanned aircraft, Magpie, did just that—and then it crashed to the ground in an embarrassing cloud of dust two seconds later. Read more…
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First Drone Launches at FAA Test Site in Nevada, Crashes Immediately
Depending on the context, volcanic eruptions are either terrifying or transfixing—sometimes both, but rarely neither. The opportunity to safely view the otherworldly spectacle of lava rarely fails to ignite a child-like, giddy wonder. The damage currently being done by a lava flows in the Cape Verde Islands , on the other hand, is heart-breaking. We study these things because they are both lovely and terrible. We want to see a lava flow spill across a snowfield out of curiosity, and we want to better understand the hazards surrounding snow-capped volcanoes out of caution. Benjamin Edwards of Dickinson College and Alexander Belousov and Marina Belousova of Russia’s Institute of Volcanology and Seismology got the opportunity to witness one of these events last year in Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. For nine months, Tolbachik spewed basaltic lava flows that ultimately covered 40 square kilometers, reaching as far as 17 kilometers from their source. The lava flows came in two flavors , known to geologists by Hawaiian names. (While frozen Kamchatka doesn’t exactly evoke coconuts and grass skirts, these lavas are similar to those of the Hawaiian volcanoes.) First there’s ‘a’a (pronounced as a staccato “AH-ah”), which ends up a chunky, blocky crumble of basalt. The other is pahoehoe (roughly “puh-HOY-hoy”, which is how volcanologists answer the phone), which flows more like thick batter and can solidify into a surface resembling a pile of ropes. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Watching lava fight with snow in Kamchatka
With Yosemite, you can create your own voice commands on your Mac using Automator. Blogger Jacob Salmela points out that if you like to live on the edge, you can make a voice activated self-destruct sequence. Read more…
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Give Your Mac a Voice-Activated Self Destruct Sequence
At this point in time, you’ve already hung your tinsel and decorated your tree with blinking lights. Maybe there’s even a glowing Santa statue on your lawn. But did you ever step back and think about where all of these holiday decorations come from? A factory in China is the easy answer. An entire town of factories specializing in Christmas cheer is the correct answer . Read more…
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A Single Chinese Town Makes Most of the World’s Christmas Decorations