Curio Cabinet / Nerdy Curio

It's Flashback Friday, and almost the 4th of July! Enjoy these curios in honor of the holiday. 
If you are a fan of fireworks (like the ones many of our American readers will soon see on July 4th), then you are a fan of pyrotechnical chemical reactions. The first firework was set off over a thousand years ago by a Chinese monk who stuffed a piece of bamboo with gunpowder and threw it into a fire. Modern fireworks are remarkably similar: a shell, an explosive, and a fuse. The only advances have to do with the extravagant colors and shapes you see today. Individual fireworks are either a tube or sphere containing explosives with a time-delayed fuse. Inside the explosives are small colored balls nicknamed “stars.” They are what you see blazing through the sky after the initial burst. As the "stars" absorb heat energy from the exploding gunpowder, their electrons move from a stable to an excited state. This causes them to release excess energy in the form of light as they move to a lower-energy state. The materials in the “star” determine what color light is emitted. Blue is a mixture of copper chloride compounds, red is a combination of strontium and lithium salts, and yellow is simply sodium nitrate. Mixtures of these primary colors create secondary colors like purple and green, just like in grade school art class. BOOM goes the chemistry!

 
[Image description: Fireworks exploding against a black background.] Credit & copyright: DeltaWorks, Pixabay

Keep your head in the game! One June 23, researchers from Michigan State University published a paper in the journal Nature describing a new, flexible sensor that can detect concussions in athletes. Concussions are common in high-impact sports like football and hockey, with short-to-long-term symptoms ranging from memory loss to seizures. When just a single concussion can cause lasting damage and the best treatment is an early one, it’s important to be able to accurately detect when one occurs. While there are already helmets that use accelerometers to detect concussions, they have been found to be only moderately accurate, sometimes giving false readings because the device tracks the movement of the helmet instead of the wearer’s head directly. However, the newly developed sensor is attached directly to the body of the wearer, eliminating that source of error.
 
The sensor, which is placed on the nape of the neck as a patch, is composed of a thin piece of piezoelectric film that generates an electric charge when under tension or compression. Electrodes connect the film to a computer which keeps track of the charges produced, and the information can be analyzed for the type of sudden movements that result in concussions. Researchers attached the device to a dummy that was also equipped with a separate set of accelerometers and gyroscopes. When the dummy was dropped from two feet up in the air to simulate sports-related impacts, the results showed that the new device was 90 percent accurate at detecting potentially concussion-causing movements. The next step for the researchers will be to make the device wireless, so that it could be easily worn by athletes. No doubt this device could make a big impact in the sports world.

[Image description: A football player wearing a maroon jersey tackles a player wearing a white jersey.] Credit & copyright: KeithJJ, Pixabay
 

Move over wind and solar, there’s a new green energy in town and it’s powered by…carbon dioxide? Yep, the same greenhouse gas that’s driving climate change may soon have a widespread hand in mitigating it, thanks to Italian startup Energy Dome. The fledgling company, which began in 2020, recently announced the opening of its first carbon dioxide (CO2) battery in Sardinia, Italy. Also known as a grid-level energy storage plant, the facility both produces and stores energy without having to maintain low temperatures, as many other kinds of long-term batteries do. As Energy Dome’s name suggests, the secret to its CO2 battery is a large dome filled with carbon dioxide gas. To charge the battery, electric compressors condense the gas into liquid. This process produces excess heat, which is captured and stored. Then, when energy needs to be “withdrawn” from the battery, the heat is used to evaporate the liquid CO2, which once again fills the dome in gaseous form as energy from the process is harvested by turbines and delivered to the power grid. Although Energy Dome’s current battery only stores about four megawatt hours (MWh) of energy, it has served as proof-of-concept for the company’s larger planned facilities. In fact, Energy Dome has already sold facilities in Germany, Africa, and at least one Middle Eastern country, some of which are slated to open by 2023. These plants should be capable of storing 200 MWh of energy. The secret to Energy Dome’s ultra-speedy rollout? The fact that its CO2 batteries require no specially-made equipment. Of course, the abundance of CO2 probably doesn’t hurt, either.
 

[Image description: A combined photograph of wind turbines on the left and solar panels on the right.] Credit & copyright: seagul, Pixabay
 

It's Flashback Friday, and the anniversary of the Watergate scandal. As such, enjoy these curios all about government; it’s procedures and some of the shenanigans it gets up to.  
It sounds like the plot of a sci-fi blockbuster, but NASA is testing out a very real asteroid-defense system. On November 23, the agency launched DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) from Vandenberg Space Force Base. The experimental, 1,200-pound spacecraft, which launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, is meant to crash into the asteroid Dimorphos in September. Although the 525-foot-long asteroid poses no threat to earth, If DART can knock Dimorphos off course, it would prove that averting future, earth-bound asteroids might be possible.
 
“Although there isn’t a currently known asteroid that’s on an impact course with the Earth, we do know that there is a large population of near-Earth asteroids out there,” Lindley Johnson, Planetary Defense Officer at NASA, said in a statement. “The key to planetary defense is finding them well before they are an impact threat.” In order for DART’s mission to be considered a success, the craft will have to use its onboard camera and navigation software to locate and slam into Dimorphos at over 14 thousand miles per hour. The crash would then need to cut at least 73 seconds off of Dimorphos’s usual 11-hour, 55-minute orbit around the larger asteroid Didymos, though mission organizers are hoping for an overall reduction of 10 minutes. Knocking an earth-bound asteroid off-course by even a small amount could save the planet, provided it was done far enough in advance. Of course, it’s not quite as dramatic as blowing up an asteroid Armageddon-style, but you can still blast Aerosmith while watching NASA’s DART livesteam.

[Image description: An illustration of an asteroid approaching Earth. Credit & copyright: 9866112, Pixabay
 

If you think AI can really think, you’ve got another think coming. A Google engineer recently made headlines when he claimed that an AI system in development had become sentient, but that’s considered highly unlikely by the majority of experts in the field. The system in question was the tech giant’s Language Model for Dialog Applications, or LaMDA, for short. Its main function is to identify patterns in language and predict what words should come next. When interacting with the system, the AI can seem very convincingly human, but not always. Mistakes are obvious and its conversational output can become downright bizarre. That’s because LaMDA, along with other AI systems like it, can’t actually think. They’re really just collecting massive amounts of data and predicting what the output should be based on probability. The results are often impressive, like the pictures created by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 and Google’s Imagen. Both are capable of creating images out of descriptive sentences, but they struggle with anything that requires the slightest bit of interpretation. For example, ask either of them for a picture of an astronaut riding a horse, and they will give you just that. But in April, AI expert Gary Marcus tested the two systems by asking them for a picture of a horse riding an astronaut, and they just spit out the same kind of images as before. It wasn’t until one of the scientists working on Imagen came up with prompts specifying that the horse must be on the astronaut’s back or shoulder that it produced the desired results. In other words, it’s just reacting to input without reasoning or interpretation. For now, that’s about as good as AI gets, so it will likely be a long time before androids dream of electric sheep.
 

[Image description: A digital illustration of a woman’s face beneath a screen of computer code.] Credit & copyright: geralt, Pixabay
 

Supercomputers have entered a bold new realm. Recently, the Frontier supercomputer, developed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and installed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), achieved an HPL score of 1.102 exaFLOPS per second—or 1.102 quintillion calculations per second. This makes it the first supercomputer to break the exascale barrier, a threshold of a quintillion calculations per second. TOP500, which ranks the world's supercomputers, published the results in their 59th edition, placing the Frontier system at No. 1, far ahead of the previous record-holder, Fugaku. Developed by the RIKEN Center for Computational Science in Japan, Fugaku previously held the record with just 0.4 exaFLOPS.
 
The Frontier system is an undoubtedly impressive machine. It includes 8,730,112 cores, consumes 29 megawatts of power, and requires a 6,000 gallon water cooling system to manage the heat produced during operation. The record-breaking supercomputer has had to overcome some incredible odds. It was in the middle of being built when the ongoing, worldwide computer chip shortages first started, and was only able to get its necessary parts thanks to the Defense Act. Despite all they’ve accomplished, the ORNL can’t rest on its laurels if it wants to keep its No. 1 rank, as both AMD and Intel are developing their own exascale supercomputers that may exceed 2 exaflops. However, there is room for the ORNL to expand on the power plant that feeds the Frontier, hopefully allowing it to keep up with the competition with up to 70 megawatts to get closer to its theoretical limits. The supercomputing race is on!

[Image description: A digital illustration of computer code against a background of computer banks.] Credit & copyright: Elchinator, Pixabay
 

Preparing for the future is hardly a breeze. Scientists at Florida International University (FIU) are developing a new hurricane simulator that will mimic Category six winds. The National Hurricane Center (NHC), which is based out of FIU, uses the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale to rate hurricane winds based on sustained maximum wind speed. Category five means winds of 157 miles per hour and up. Currently, there is no Category six, but that may have to change due to increases in extreme weather caused by climate change. To prepare, the NHC is building the National Full-Scale Testing Infrastructure for Community Hardening in Extreme Wind, Surge and Wave Events (NICHE). When completed, it will be one of the most advanced storm-simulators on the planet. For now, the FIU has the Wall of Wind—an airplane hangar filled with 12 giant fans. The Wall can produce winds of up to 160 miles per hour, and is often used to knock down model buildings to simulate hurricane damage. A field behind its hanger allows researchers to track where debris fly. Still, The Wall’s winds fall far short of the 215-miles-per-hour winds of Hurricane Patricia in 2015 and the 184-miles-per-hour winds of Hurricane Dorian in 2019.
 
Hurricanes aren’t just more powerful nowadays, but more frequent. According to NOAA, the three busiest hurricane seasons on record in the U.S. have all happened since 2000. In order to better understand the destructive potential of more powerful hurricanes and test construction methods, NICHE will simulate not just the wind, but also the rain and storm surges produced by them. Richard Olson, director of FIU’s Extreme Events Institute, stated earlier this year, “Climate change is fueling more intense and more dangerous storms, and cutting-edge research and testing capabilities are clearly needed to meet the nation’s evolving risks.” Hold on to your hats.
 

[Image description: A distant view of Hurricane Catarina, from 2004.] Credit & copyright: WikiImages, Pixabay
 

It's Flashback Friday! This week we’re throwing things waaay back with these curios all about ancient times and practices.
 
Alright, who ordered the roast duck and cauliflower skewers with a side of Mount Vesuvius eruption? This past month, archaeologists uncovered a frescoed street food stand in the ancient city of Pompeii near Naples, Italy. The well-preserved artifact was known then as a thermopolium or "hot drinks counter" in Latin. There is a fresco painting of a sea nymph in blue hues to the left of the stall; at the forefront are images of chickens and ducks which may indicate what was on the menu in 79 C.E.: remnants of poultry as well as pig, goat, and snails were found in clay pots at the site along with containers for wine. Researchers have uncovered about 165 acres of Pompeii's remains, which were buried under Mount Vesuvius' volcanic debris. The food stalls and their contents will provide further insights into the daily diets of ancient Roman culture. But what we really want to know is what time the food chariots came around to serve lunch!
 

Image credit & copyright: Pompeii Archaeological Park/Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism/Luigi Spina/Handout via REUTERS

Scientists are really shooting for the moon with these plants. Researchers at the University of Florida were recently able to grow plants on Lunar soil collected during the Apollo missions, according to a paper published in Communications Biology. The soil used is Lunar regolith, which is powdery and razor-sharp at the microscopic level. That’s challenging enough when cultivating crops, but the scientists also had a limited quantity of the soil. After several attempts to acquire Lunar regolith from NASA, the agency finally loaned them just 12 grams to be used in their experiments. To make the most of the soil, the scientists created thimble-sized wells filled with 1 gram each. They then planted arabidopsis, also known as thale cress, along with a mix of nutrients and water. Surprisingly, the plants were able to sprout in the alien soil, although they did appear to struggle compared to the control group. The sprouts in the Lunar regolith tended to grow slower and were smaller in size. Most importantly, the scientists were able to deduce how the plants reacted to the stressful environment at the genetic level. Lead author Anna-Lisa Paul told Science News, “By seeing what kind of genes are turned on and turned off in response to a stress, that shows you what tools plants are pulling out of their metabolic toolbox to deal with that stress.” This means that, if humanity ever does create livable colonies on the moon, plants might be able to be genetically engineered to grow better there. Such plants could provide oxygen and food to lunar explorers. Now that would be some out-of-this-world horticulture.

[Image description: Bean sprouts grow inside small cups.] Credit & copyright: KlausAires, Pixabay
 

It's Flashback Friday! In honor of Cher’s birthday, enjoy these curios about things that were going on in the 1960s and 70s, during the height of the pop star’s career.
 
It’s been quite a while since Apollo 11 delivered the first humans to the moon. Nobody was more excited by that accomplishment than Margaret Hamilton. She lead the software team that programmed the computers that ran the control systems that enabled the astronauts to find, land on, and return from the moon. Surprised such a critical technical position was held by a woman in the 1960s? That's because jobs like computer programming were considered “women’s work.” The process of programming was extremely labor intensive. First, series of instructions were hand written onto paper coding pads. These were then translated onto punched cards by “keypunch girls,” who sent them to the male machine operators who fed the code decks through card readers. But Margaret Hamilton was no keypunch girl. She led the team at MIT that programmed the two guidance computers--one on the command module and one on the lander module. The code was so complex and lengthy that, when printed out single spaced, it was taller than Margaret (see photo below). The equivalent of more than 20 phone books of hand written and compiled computer instructions! Margaret's code likely saved the entire Apollo 11 mission. Three minutes away from landing on the Moon, multiple false alarms were rapidly triggered by the rendezvous radar system. This flooded the computer's processor, which was trying to perform its normal landing functions. Thanks to Hamilton's design principles, which assumed the program would break and included graceful recovery procedures, the computer simply rebooted itself. It restarted almost instantaneously, with fresh memory, and completed the landing sequence without incident. Hamilton's approach to creating the Apollo software led to many best practices for programming that are still used today. In fact, she invented the term “software engineering” to describe her methodic and redundant approach to coding. I have a feeling if Margaret were Mark we would already know this story.
 
Credit & copyright: Draper Laboratory; restored by Adam Cuerden, Wikimedia Commons, image cropped for size, Public Domain.
 

Ever think of using pond scum for your math homework? Scientists at the University of Cambridge have developed a generator that was able to power a computer for six months using the power of photosynthesizing algae. They published a paper about their invention, which is about the size of a AA battery, in Energy & Environmental Science. The generator consists of an aluminum casing and clear plastic that contains Synechocystis sp., also known as blue-green algae. Placed on a windowsill at the home of one of the researchers, the algae inside the device was able to photosynthesize, which in turn generated a small electric current in the form of bio-photovoltaic energy. That electric current was harvested, and provided 0.3 microwatts of power to an ARM Cortex-M0+ chip, a microprocessor that is often used in the “Internet of Things,” according to the paper. To simulate an actual device’s workload, the microprocessor was made to calculate sums of consecutive integers in 45 minute cycles. The researchers hope that this technology can be scaled up so that it can be used in low-energy applications, replacing conventional batteries and photovoltaic generators that require the use of environmentally hazardous materials. While the bio-photovoltaic energy produced by the device is very small compared to what can be produced by photovoltaic units of comparable size, one advantage it has is that it can produce energy even in the dark, as the algae continues to process surplus food. Clearly the sun isn’t setting on the future of clean energy.

[Image description: A beaker of algae sits inside a larger glass container.] Credit & copyright: ckstockphoto, Pixabay
 

It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy these creepy curios in honor of Friday the 13th!
 
On this spooky day, we're focusing our Daily Curio on the world's scariest (or, at least, deadliest) feline, the black-footed cat. Yes, I'm talking about the bundle of fur shown above. Don't be fooled by his nocturnal doe eyes—he's a relentless killing machine. Taxonomically known as Felis nigripes, this little guy comes from South Africa and weighs just 2.4 to 4.2 pounds. That's 200 times smaller than a lion. But don't let the black-footed cat's size fool you. The hunting success rate for lions hovers around 20 percent. The black-footed cat, meanwhile, succeeds in nabbing its prey at an incredible rate of 60 percent. That's a hard-earned stat, too. In fact, the black-footed cat has an accelerated metabolism. Which means the furball is always hungry—and always hunting. On average, it kills 10-14 rodents and birds nightly. Pound for pound, that means the black-footed cat snags more prey in one night that a leopard does in six months. Leopards, with slower metabolisms, generally hunt for 8-10 days then pick at their prey over the course of 3-4 days. Black-footed cats catch their food much faster using a myriad of techniques, including bounding through grass, staking out holes, flanking. So, if there's a takeaway from this Curio, it's to avoid hand-feeding South Africa's "cute stray kittens"!
 

Image credit & copyright: Zbyszko, Wikimedia Commons, image cropped for size, this image is hereby distributed under the same license linked here.

Water, water, everywhere…and plenty to drink. Engineers at MIT have just developed a portable device that can desalinate saltwater, or turn it into freshwater, without the use of filters. Desalination is usually an energy intensive process because it requires a high-pressure pump to move water through a filter. However, MIT’s new, filterless device can render water safe to drink by using nothing more than a $50 solar panel to power it. It works by using a technique called ion concentration polarization (ICP), which applies an electrical field to membranes that surround the water. The membranes then repel charged particles like salt and pathogens, sending them into a separate stream of water to dispose of them. While ICP can remove both dissolved and suspended solids, a single pass isn’t enough to get rid of all the contaminants. To overcome this, the suitcase-sized desalination plant uses a two-stage process: water is passed through six ICP modules, then again through three more. Even after all that, the water that comes out can still contain unacceptable levels of salt, so the device passes the water through an electrodialysis module to get rid of the salt ions that are still present. In all, using only 20 watt-hours per liter of water, the device can produce 0.3 liters per hour of water that more than meets World Health Organization quality standards. The creators of the device envision it being used by everyone from small island communities to soldiers on long-term missions with access to seawater. And the next step? Building it bigger. One of the creators, Junghyo Yoon, stated in a press release by MIT, “Right now, we are pushing our research to scale up that production rate.” Now there’s a refreshing idea.
 

[Image description: A man pours bottled water into his mouth on the beach.] Credit & copyright: Olichel, Pixabay