Whales, lizards inspire hi-tech bio-mimicry

OSLO: Whale hearts hold clues to making pacemakers and lizard skins are showing how to cut friction in electrical appliances as companies mimic nature to develop high-tech goods, a UN-backed report said on Wednesday. Among other advances that could save hundreds of millions of dollars, the wings of desert beetles could improve water collection and the drought-resistant African "resurrection plant" indicates ways to store vaccines without refrigeration. "Biomimicry is a field whose time has come," said Achim Steiner, head of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) in a statement issued to coincide with a May 19-30 UN conference on protecting the diversity of animals and plants in Bonn, Germany. The project, called "Nature's 100 Best", points to environmentally friendly advances mimicking natural solutions evolved over almost 4 billion years. "Life solves its problems with well-adapted designs, life-friendly chemistry and smart material and energy use," said Janine Benyus and Gunter Pauli, creators of the Nature's100 Best project. "What better models could there be?" Nature has been a blueprint for human inventions throughout history -- such as flight inspired by birds -- but the project identifies 100 less obvious modern spin offs. Humpback whales pump six bathtubs of blood around their bodies and regulate the beats with electrical signals passing through thick non-conductive blubber shielding the heart from cold. A cheap operation for humans that bridged damaged heart muscles by mimicking the tiny "wiring" could cut demand for battery-powered pacemakers in humans, based on research at the Whale Heart Satellite Tracking Program in Colombia, it said. Fitting a new pacemaker costs up to $50,000 per patient and the world market is projected at $3.7 billion by 2010. The sandfish lizard, which lives in North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula could also give clues to cheaper ways to cut friction in mechanical and electrical devices than costly silicon carbide or crystalline diamond. Studies by German scientists showed that the skin is covered with microscopic spikes. "A grain of Sahara sand rides atop 20,000 of these spikes, spreading the load and providing negligible levels of friction," UNEP said. Consortium of three German companies was working with scientists to try to imitate the keratin-based skin. And it said that bumps on the wing cases of the Namib desert beetle enabled it to gather water droplets from frequent fogs in a region where only about 1 cm (0.5 inch) of rain falls a year. A team from the University of Oxford and British defence research group QinetiQ were producing a beetle-like film to capture water vapour from cooling towers. The invention could help save water and energy in a world facing stresses on water supplies because of climate change. And the African resurrection plant has sugars called trehaloses that allow it to dry to a crisp during droughts and then flourish again. Indian company Panacea Biotech is making trials to see if similar the sugars could be used to store vaccines without refrigeration.

Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Earth/

Kids' cell phone use under scrutiny in Japan

TOKYO, Japan (AP) -- Japanese youngsters are getting so addicted to Internet-linking cell phones that the government is starting a program warning parents and schools to limit their use among children.

About a third of Japanese sixth graders have cell phones, while 60 percent of ninth graders have them.

The government is worried about how elementary and junior high school students are getting sucked into cyberspace crimes, spending long hours exchanging mobile e-mail and suffering other negative effects of cell phone overuse, Masaharu Kuba, a government official overseeing the initiative, said Tuesday.
"Japanese parents are giving cell phones to their children without giving it enough thought," he said.
"In Japan, cell phones have become an expensive toy."
The recommendations have been submitted from an education reform panel to Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda's administration, and were approved this week.
The panel is also asking Japanese makers to develop cell phones with only the talking function, and GPS, or global positioning system, a satellite-navigation feature that can help ensure a child's safety.
About a third of Japanese sixth graders have cell phones, while 60 percent of ninth graders have them, according to the education ministry.
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Most mobile phones in Japan are sophisticated gadgets offering high-speed Internet access called 3G, for "third-generation."
But the panel said better filtering programming is needed for Internet access to protect children.
Some youngsters are spending hours at night on e-mail with their friends. One fad is "the 30 minute rule," in which a child who doesn't respond to e-mail within half an hour gets targeted and picked on by other schoolmates.
Other youngsters have become victims of Internet crimes. In one case, children sent in their own snapshots to a Web site and then ended up getting threatened for money, Kuba said.
Cell phones tend to be more personal tools than personal computers. Parents find that what their children are doing with them are increasingly difficult to monitor, Kuba said.
Some Japanese children commute long distances by trains and buses to schools and cram-schools and parents rely on cell phones to keep in touch with their children.
Parents typically pay about $39 a month for cell phone fees per child.
Japan boasts a relatively low crime rate compared to other industrialized nations, but some people are concerned that the Internet could be exploited for serious crimes

Source:http://www.cnn.com/

China Sacks Plastic Bags

SHANGHAI—Thin plastic bags are used for everything in China and the Chinese use up to three billion of them a day--an environmentally costly habit picked up by shopkeepers and consumers in the late 1980s for convenience over traditional cloth bags. Fruit mongers weigh produce in them, tailors stuff shirts into them, even street food vendors plunk their piping hot wares directly into see-through plastic bags that do nothing to protect one's hands from being burned or coated in hot grease. They even have a special name for the plastic bags found blowing, hanging and floating everywhere from trees to rivers: bai si wu le, or "white pollution," for the bags' most common color.
Yet, the Chinese government is set to ban the manufacture and force shopkeepers to charge for the distribution of bags thinner than .025 millimeters thick as of June 1—and no one seems prepared. "I don't know what we'll do," Zhang Gui Lin, a tailor at Shanghai's famous fabric market, tells me through a translator. "I guess our shopping complex will figure it out and tell us what to buy to use as bags."
His wife adds: "Maybe it will be like this," tugging a thicker mesh orange plastic bag she is using to carry some shoes. Such thicker bags may prove one replacement for the ubiquitous thinner versions.
The clothes makers are not alone. "I don't know actually," says a vendor of Chinese tamales, known as zong si, who declined to give her name. "I'm sure the government will come up with a solution. Maybe people will just eat it [the zong si directly.]"
The Chinese government is banning production and distribution of the thinnest plastic bags in a bid to curb the white pollution that is taking over the countryside. The bags are also banned from all forms of public transportation and "scenic locations." The move may save as much as 37 million barrels of oil currently used to produce the plastic totes, according to China Trade News. Already, the nation's largest producer of such thin plastic bags, Huaqiang, has shut down its operations.
The effort comes amid growing environmental awareness among the Chinese people and mimics similar efforts in countries like Bangladesh and Ireland as well as the city of San Francisco, though efforts to replicate that ban in other U.S. municipalities have foundered in the face of opposition from plastic manufacturers.
More than one million reusable cloth bags have already been sold on various Chinese merchandising Web sites, according to Taobao.com, and local environmental groups, such as Shanghai Roots & Shoots, are promoting and giving away cloth bags in schools.
"Too many plastic bags is a great waste of natural resources," retired Communist Party cadre Liu Zhidong says through a translator. "When burnt, they produce poisoning smoke, and if buried underneath the ground they need more than 300 years to be degraded."
But it remains to be seen how strong enforcement will be. Specific penalties have not been set but will include fines. Other environmental efforts—such as a similar ban on disposable wooden chopsticks (a waster of trees) and so-called "green GDP," or gross domestic product, an effort to account for environmental costs when calculating overall economic development— fell by the wayside because they proved too difficult to implement and created significant opposition at the local level. It also remains to be seen whether some of the possible replacements—thicker or biodegradable plastic bags—will be any better.
"This is a very good measure to protect the environment. However, whether it can last long is still very doubting," chemistry graduate student Oliver says. "And another problem is [that] the so-called biodegradable plastic bags, it seems, cannot be totally degraded. Whether or not they are really good for environment protection in the long run remains unknown."

Source: http://www.sciam.com/

Why Do Astronauts Suffer From Space Sickness?

ScienceDaily (May 23, 2008) — Rotating astronauts for a lengthy period provided researcher Suzanne Nooij with better insight into how 'space sickness' develops, the nausea and disorientation experienced by many astronauts.
Gravity plays a major role in our spatial orientation. Changes in gravitational forces, such as the transition to weightlessness during a space voyage, influence our spatial orientation and require adaptation by many of the physiological processes in which our balance system plays a part. As long as this adaptation is incomplete, this can be coupled to motion sickness (nausea), visual illusions and disorientation.
This 'space sickness' or Space Adaptation Syndrome (SAS), is experienced by about half of all astronauts during the first few days of their space voyage. Wubbo Ockels, the first Dutchman in space in 1986, also suffered from these symptoms.
Nooij will receive her PhD from TU Delft on this subject on May 20. In his capacity as TU Delft professor, Ockels is PhD supervisor for Suzanne Nooij's research.

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/

What is Mars like?

As robot landers from the US and Europe get set to explore Mars, BBC News Online peers into the heavens to find out more about the conditions they can expect to find on the Red Planet.
Freezing temperatures, immense dust storms and tornadoes much larger than any on Earth await Europe's Beagle 2 lander and Nasa's two Mars Rovers when they finally touch down some time late this year or early in 2004.
Although the planet does not teem with life like Earth, the grand scale of Mars' geology is truly impressive.
It contains the largest mountains in the Solar System and has canyon systems that, if they were on Earth, would stretch from New York to Los Angeles.
With these immense natural wonders on display, it is lucky that the Martian day has an extra 37 minutes to enable data-hungry robots to take everything in.
We already know a great deal about the Martian landscape. Images of its desolate and rocky surface having been beamed back to Earth decades ago.
The first fly-past of the planet by space craft took place in the 1960s and by the end of the 1990s the entire surface had been photographed.
Dead or alive?
The Martian atmosphere is thinner than Earth's and is mostly made up of carbon dioxide, and only a miniscule 0.13 % of it is oxygen.
MARS FACT FILE

Named after the Roman god of war
Martian year: 687 Earth days
Max distance from Earth, 378 million km
Temperature low: -100C
Temperature high: 0C
Mars has two moons
The gravity is only a fraction of that on Earth, but despite these differences Mars is more like our planet than anywhere else in the Solar System.
This is one reason, no doubt, that a manned mission to Mars looks like a possibility within the next 20 years or so.
Part of the explanation for this lies in the knowledge we still need to acquire. Despite all the information scientists already have about Mars, their appetites have been whetted and they want more.
Did Mars once have massive oceans like those on Earth? Can any life forms, living or dead, be found to prove life on Earth is not alone. And would it ever be possible for humans to settle permanently on another planet?

Source: http://www.news.bbc.co.uk

New approach for making cheaper bullet-proof vehicles:

Washington, May 21: Making bullet-proof military vehicles may become about 50 percent cheaper in the future, with a new process of making titanium parts at low costs being developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Experts associated with the project have revealed that they are working on a process that may reduce the amount of energy required and the cost to make titanium parts from powders by up to 50 percent. They say that once ready, the process would make it feasible to use titanium alloys for brake rotors, artificial joint replacements, and armour for military vehicles. We recently exhibited the new low-cost titanium alloy door made by ORNL for the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, which is a next-generation combat vehicle," said Bill Peter, a researcher in ORNL's Materials Science and Technology Division. "By using a titanium alloy for the door, BAE Systems was able to reduce the weight of its vehicle yet at the same time decrease the threat of armour-piercing rounds," he added. He further said that the lightweight titanium alloy would also improve the operation of the door as well as the vehicle's mobility, and thereby make it more useful for the military. Peter describes the new approach as the non-melt processing, which includes roll compaction for directly fabricating sheets from powder, press and sinter techniques to produce net shape components and extrusion. He says that his team's approach offers many advantages over traditional melt processing. "Instead of using conventional melt processing to produce products from titanium powder, with the new method the powders remain in their solid form during the entire procedure," Peter said. "This saves a tremendous amount of energy required for processing, greatly reduces the amount of scrap and allows for new alloys and engineered composites," he added. He also expressed hope that lightweight corrosion-resistant titanium alloys would find applications in many different products in the future.

Source: http://www.zeenews.com

IISc tech to increase range of missiles

A team from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) here has developed a innovative technology for increasing the range of Agni type of missiles without additional cost. The team headed by Prof K P J Reddy from the department of Aerospace Engineering, IISc, achieved the feat by reducing the drag of the missile encountered during its flight, an IISc release said here on Monday. The drag is the main phenomenon which dictates the range of the missile for a given amount of fuel as the thrust generated by the rocket engine must compensate for the drag encountered by the missile in its path. Existing techniques for reducing the drag force involve addition of an aerospike at the nose the missile or blowing a supersonic gas jet from the missile nose tip. Implementation of these techniques involves major modification to the missile structure and hence cannot be applied to existing missiles which are in stockpile. The new technology developed by Prof Reddy`s group involves a radically different technique in the sense that no additional device or power was required for hypersonic flight. The technique is to coat the nose portion of the missile with a thin layer of material such as chromium. This metal evaporates due to heating of the missile nose during its hypersonic flight and the evaporated metal particles in atomic form react exothermically with oxygen atoms surrounding the body to release additional heat into the air in front of the missile.

Source: http://www.zeenews.com/