Behold the Inexorable Power of ... Bubbles!
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View Caption + #1: This week we can't the old school Billy Preston song
Will It Go Round in Circles out of our heads.
Tasty Tech Eye Candy Of The Week (June 21)
Will It Go Round in Circles out of our heads. From hydroponic wheel gardens to advanced helicopter rotors to closed loop micro algae farms, everything seems to be spinning. Above: A new exhibition devoted to light just opened up at the Technische Sammlungen Museum in Dresden, Germany. "Hi Lights! News From the Light" is devoted to the phenomenon of light and its importance for science. Here, an interactive display highlights the technology and beauty of fiber optics.
Arno Burgi/dpa/Corbis
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The Garden Wheel from DesignLibero is a rotary hydroponic garden inspired by one developed by NASA to grow food for astronauts on long missions. This microgarden lets users grow herbs and microgreens in a small space.
DesignLibero
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This week, bioengineers from Columbia University demonstrated a way to use humidity to power devices. It relies on spores that expand and contract depending on how much water vapor is in the air. That expansion and contraction is captured and used like an artificial muscle to power a range of devices. See the video here .
Columbia University
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Airbus showed off its advanced H160 helicopter this week at the 51st International Paris Air Show. The lightweight full-composite airframe makes the medium-lift model aircraft lighter, quieter and more efficient than other similar copters.
Kalpana Kartik/Demotix/Corbis
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Google showed off the capabilities of its advanced image detection software, which is built around several stacks of synthetic neurons -- think: artificial brain. To train the brain, researchers fed images into the first stack, which then communicated with the next stack and so on and so forth between 10 and 30 stacks. The images here represent the end results and they are pretty trippy.
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At a press conference in Tokyo this week, Masayoshi Son, chairman & CEO of Japanese internet and telecommunications giant SoftBank Corp., presented Pepper the robot, which Son claims can feel and understand people's emotions and also express them as well.
Aflo/Splash News/Corbis
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A pilot miro-algae plant in Germany is up and running. Researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute are experimenting with growing concentrations of micro-algae in a closed-loop system. The algae is versatile and can be grown to make everything from biofuel to food.
Fraunhofer IGB
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This tiny accordion doesn't play music, but it does conduct electricity. Researchers at North Carolina State University developed a method for creating a transparent, flexible, and stretchable energy generator that could eventually be used to power wearable electronics.
Abhijeet Bagal, Carolina State University
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At the Milan Expo 2015, the Palazzo Italia building demonstrated that buildings can be both beautiful and environmentally friendly. This net-zero building is extremely energy efficient and its surface uses sunlight to deactive and neutralize pollutants in the air.
Kalpana Kartik/Demotix/Corbis
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The inflatable prefabricated structure, Casa Bubble, puts a little glamour into camping. The UV-reflecting dome is made from recyclable materials and rests lightly on a wooden base. Fresh air is pumped inside, giving "glampers" a 360-degree view of nature from inside a dry, bug-free environment.
CasaBubble/BubbleTree
When I was a kid in suburban Detroit, the locally brewed ginger ale called Vernorshad a reputation as the hardest soft drink on the shelves. Vernors was infamous for its strong flavor and hypercarbonated formula, which often caused coughing and sneezing fits for rookie imbibers. Chugging a can of Vernors was sort of like the cinnamon challengeof 1980s Michigan.
Such was the viciousness of Vernors back then — they’ve since mellowed the formula — and it’s a good demonstration of how bubbles and liquids can make a formidable tag team. A new studyout of Virginia Tech this week suggests we’ve only begun to tap the power of … bubbles!
Using high-speed underwater cameras, biomedical engineering researcher Sunghwan Jung discovered that the popping of bubbles in liquid is a small, quick and rather violent phenomenon. Cavitation in a liquid can occur when pressure is quickly lowered — as with a spinning boat propeller or when opening a soda can. When the bubbles subsequently pop, they generate pressure waves that can impact nearby objects.
Jung’s experiments involved monitoring the effect of bursting bubbles on nearby objects roughly the same size as the bubbles themselves. He discovered that particles in the water were actually drawn in toward the popping bubble. “When the bubble collapses, it brings in all the material nearby; it’s like a black hole,” Jung said.
The bubble burst occurs in less than three milliseconds, and also generates a cloud of microbubbles that thrust out toward the approaching particle. The spray of bubbles doesn’t appear to interrupt the particles movement toward the collapsing main bubble.
The upside to all this is that the process could have several practical applications. For instance, Jung suggests that cavitation could be used as a method for cleaning produce without chemicals, pulling microbes and dirt off the surface of fruits and vegetables.
Jung’s study was published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
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