Category: Engineering

Accuracy vs Precision

By Anupum Pant

There’s a subtle difference between both the things, accuracy and precision. Which in reality is not so subtle for scientists and engineers to produce best results.

Accuracy is how close you can get to the perfect result. It improves as you get trained better, or you make more measurements, or your tool remains the same, but it is calibrated properly.

Precision is different. It is a measure of how often you can get the perfect result using the same method. It improves as you invest in better, high-precision tools.

Ted Ed explains it with an interesting story…

Virus Helps Boiling Water Faster

By Anupum Pant

If you’ve been following awesci for some time now, you must remember the leidenfrost effect. The effect is clearly demonstrated by dropping some water on a really hot pan. The layer of water in contact with the hot pan vaporises and gets trapped there as an air cushion. The drop of water then is free to move around on the air cushion and it dances on the pan.

When you boil water in a vessel, something similar happens. Although a similar air cushion tries to form at the hot inner surface of the vessel (where the water is in contact), these bubbles become bigger, more buoyant and move to the surface. However, for whatever little time they remain in there, and meanwhile new ones keep forming, they create an insulating gap of air. So, the heating of water is much less efficient. How great it would have been if these bubbles never formed.

Well, scientists have accomplished that. And they propose doing it by creating extremely tiny hair like features on the inner surface of the vessel which prevent those insulating bubbles from forming and in turn decrease the time in which the water boils. In fact, by this method of surface modification, they have managed to boil water about three times faster.

The most amazing thing about these tiny hair like features they create on the surface is that they are made using a special kind of virus called the tobacco mosaic virus. Using the hooks on this virus, it is made to stick to the surface and is then coated with a thin film of nickel. And there you have your new modified surface which makes boiling water much more efficient.

Here is how it works…

Didymium Glasses

By Anupum Pant

Praseodymium is a chemical element with symbol Pr and atomic number 59. Most have never heard of it. But it is something that’s essential for glass blowers to work their magic. It seems odd to link praseodymium to the art of glass making. However, a strong link exists and here is how it works.

Praseodymium and neodymium (the element used to make really strong magnets) come together in glass to give it a kind of amazing property. These elements when incorporated into glass, gives it a typical green-blue colour, which is used by a glass-blower to see through the yellow sodium flame.

Well, the yellow flame of sodium comes from the sodium that is present in soda glass. And when it is being worked with a hot torch, it vaporizes sodium and makes a bright yellow flame which conceals the details on the soft glass. These have to be seen to be worked properly.

These glasses just block out the yellow light from the sodium and gives the glass-blower a sort of super human ability to see through the flame. What enables these glasses to do block out the yellow is a lot more complex physics. For now, that’s the story of an unheard element, which deserves to be known. An unsung hero element – praseodymium.

$761 Jar of Peanut Butter

If you have been active on the internet, there’s a great chance that you noticed this image of a peanut butter jar which had its price labelled as $761. That’s too expensive for a jar of peanut butter. Especially for a jar of it which has no added precious metal powder, or diamonds or anything else either. It is a standard ordinary form of the most popular american spread – the peanut butter.

If you are interested, you can buy it here on the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s website, as a standard material of reference. It’s up to you to decide because for 761 dollars you would only get around 500 grams of it. Or you probably can’t even buy it because it is meant as a standard material for scientists, governmental regulatory agencies and manufacturers around the world. According to NIST, it is perfectly homogeneous. That is to say that any part of it you take, you’d get the same composition.

This is one of the 1400 such items you can buy on that website. Others are lake Michigan fish tissue, spinach slurry, new york waterway sediment, SPAM (meat homogenate) and more… all of these for around 700 dollars or more.

More about it on [Smithsonian]

New 3D Printing Technology

By Anupum Pant

This new printing technology by Carbon 3D can print 3D objects out of a pool of gooey liquid. It’s pretty fascinating to see things emerging from a liquid. It seems like backwards melting.

But the msot amazing part of this is that the technology makes 3D printing much faster now. The video is in real time and it makes the tiny effiel tower in a matter of minutes. That’s about 25 to 100 times faster than the technology we use today for 3D printing.

Operation Popye

By Anupum Pant

In the year 1966, the Vietnam war was in full swing and back then the US was doing things you’d only think would happen in science fiction, even today. Controlling weather – bringing the power of nature to the battlefield.

The operation Popye involved planes dropping huge amounts of silver iodide crystals into the clouds to seed them. That’d create rain, more than what naturally happens in that area.

Bacteria Powered Machines

By Anupum Pant

Elizabeth Beattie and Denise Wong are two Ph.D students at the University of Pennsylvania are using bacteria as a tool to build very tiny machines – machines powered by bacteria. These students might sound like they are biologists, they are not. In fact, they are roboticist who want to use bacteria to power tiny machines.

The details of how much precision in the moment of machines they’ve been achieve yet has been detailed in this science friday episode below. The amazing part is how blue light can do wonders here. There’s so much to be discovered!

Surface Kills Bacteria on Contact

By Anupum Pant

The toxic effect of metal ions on bacteria, known as the oligodynamic effect is being used almost everywhere – You’ve seen brass doorknobs in many public places, right? That’s one way for objects to kill bacteria. Other one might be this…

In a study conducted by scientists in Spain and Australia, it is claimed that the wings of a cicada are made up of a biomaterial that has the ability to kill bacteria on contact. Instead of a toxic effect, these actually, according to the paper, kill bacteria by the physical morphology of the surface. The surface has millions of tiny pillars that purportedly kill bacteria like it’s been shown in the simulation below.

That’s a great hint to people who can grow nano pillars in laboratory to run and patent a surface that’d kill bacteria when the come in contact with the surface. There, I just gave away an idea worth millions probably. Because for all I know, cellphone surfaces are one of the most dirtiest surfaces, and a surface like this one could have massive commercial applications…

By Anupum Pant

Downwind Faster Than the Wind

By Anupum Pant

You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, there’s a team that constructed a land vehicle with a huge propeller and it, without any engines running, can travel about 2.8 times faster than the wind! Physicists and aeronautical engineers would have their heads scratching their heads when they hear this. It sounds physically impossible, but it’s true.

Rick Cavallaro and his team brought into reality an engineering marvel, an idea that most physicists would say, is impossible. A wind powered car that beats the wind. They call it Downwind faster than the wind, or DWFTTW.

With the help of Google and Joby Energy, Cavallaro built this four wheeled vehicle with a 17 foot propeller. It was first made of foam and copied the aerodynamics of an F1 race car. The propeller is what makes it go faster than the wind, but it confuses people.

It somewhat works like this – The wind turns the propeller, and they turn the wheels. The wheels then power the propeller and it again sends back power to the wheels and so on. Before you know, the car is doing a speed faster than the thing that powers it! Sounds like unlimited energy, but it’s the wind that does all the work. And it really works

Making a Cyborg Cockroach at Home

By Anupum Pant

The following post might be very repulsive to some people as it comes very close to animal abuse. Different countries have different laws on the kind of rights animals have. To me however, doing this to a cockroach in the name of biological experimentation, doesn’t sound like abuse. I rather find it very interesting. If you are easily affected by experiments that are done on insects, this is the right time for you to retreat. You’ve been warned.

Imagine this. What if you could plant a tiny circuit on a real cockroach and use it to make the cockroach turn left or right on your command? Guess what, you can indeed convert a cockroach into a cyborg that obeys your commands! And it’s not even very difficult. All you have to do is a little bit of soldering to join wires and a teeny bit of surgery on a cockroach – There, you have your own cyborg.

This seems so incredibly interesting to me. I never knew something like this would be possible to accomplish so easily! Here’s how you do it…

The Lightbulb Conspiracy

By Anupum Pant

Rising technology brings with it a series of strange quirks and cartels, in this case. It’s important that we be aware of these things, not to save ourselves from them, but just for the sake of knowing how strange secrets remain secrets for decades. Wonder what all must be happening out there right now.

In 1924 a group of people from around the world met in Geneva to make a decision that would shake the whole world for years, without it even having a tiny idea about what had happened. These were representatives from the world’s top lightbulb making companies, Osram, Phillips, Compagnie des Lampes and General electric who had met to decide on the life of an electric bulb – To shorten the life of a lightbulb to such an extent that their profits would be optimised and their bulbs would still remain the best ones in the market. According to them 1000 hours would have been a perfect lifetime for the filament of their bulbs.

As you know lightbulbs don’t last for ever, their filament gets burned at some point. But fixing a lifetime for it isn’t very easy. Especially shortening the lives of already technologically advanced bulbs, to a certain time-limit was a massive engineering feat.

Their bulbs were doing 2,500 hours at that time. And that wasn’t very profitable for them. So this had to be done. Deciding on something too less would have made their bulbs inferior. And engineering of this shortening had to be done as seriously as the research that had been done to make it bigger, to shun competition in the past.

Now we know why there’s this bulb which has lasted for a century and it still keeps glowing, and at homes our bulbs get fused all the time.

via [IEEE]

Largest Rock Ever Moved

By Anupum Pant

The story of the largest rock ever moved by man goes back to the year 1768 – A time when even ball bearings weren’t around. It’s hard to believe that no one has topped it after that. Not even after immense technological advancement of the twenty first century has man moved a rock larger than that one.

In 1768, in order to build a huge statue for Peter the great, a three million pound stone was required to be moved into St. Petersburg. This would later serve as a platform to put up the equestrian statue on it. But before everything, a rock that huge needed to be found. An award was announced for anyone who could do that. The perfect rock was thus found when a peasant claimed he knew where it was. The problem was it was 8 miles away from where it needed to be. No one had moved anything so huge before. Still, Catherine the great, not knowing if her order would get fulfilled, ordered it to be moved.

Someone had an idea of how to do it. This is what the proposal said. Cut a tree trunk into half hollow both the parts from the inside and place brass balls inside and close it like a sandwich. Now the upper slice of the trunk could slide with minimal effort. Several suck contraptions were made and the stone was moved on these. Ball bearings were being use before anyone even had an idea that ball bearings were something that needed invention.

via [Futility Closet]

100 Billion Frames Per Second

By Anupum Pant

Couple of months back there were researchers unveiling the trillion frames per second camera, which actually didn’t capture real-time image. This time it is different.

Researchers from Washington University say they’ve built a camera that can capture 100 billion frames per second. It is faster than anything ever made and works on a completely different principle – which they call the compressed ultrafast photography (CUP).

This camera is so fast that it can capture a light photon in motion. Here’s a slow motion video of light bouncing off a mirror. The amount of time taken for this event to happen spanned only 300 trillionth of a second.

via [ScienceAlert]