Robotic curtain protects from nosey looks of pedestrians passing by.

DARPA: Bionic Arm

The U.S. military is building an ambitious bionic arm that is controlled by thought and provides sensory feedback. Here's the latest prototype, showing the movements of the hand.

Blind Rubik's Cube

We've seen a lot of neat stuff come from the Speed Cubing crowd. However, solving a Rubik's Cube while blindfolded is a new level of cool from a somewhat geeky hobby.

Athlete

JPL engineers built a futuristic robot that may one day go to the moon.

Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Machine - How It Works

What is the LHC?

The LHC is physically located in a circular 27km (16.5m) long tunnel under the Swiss/French border outside Geneva, but as an international project the LHC crosses continents and many international borders. It's exactly what its name suggests - a large collider of hadrons. Strictly, LHC refers to the collider; a machine that deserves to be labelled ‘large’, it not only weighs more than 38,000 tonnes, but runs for 27km (16.5m) in a circular tunnel 100 metres beneath the Swiss/French border at Geneva. However, the collider is only one of three essential parts of the LHC project. The other two are:

- the detectors, which sit in 4 huge chambers at points around the LHC tunnel.
- the GRID, which is a global network of computers and software essential to processing the data recorded by LHC’s detectors.

The LHC’s 27km loop in a sense encircles the globe, because the LHC project is supported by an enormous international community of scientists and engineers. Working in multinational teams, at CERN and around the world, they are building and testing LHC equipment and software, participating in experiments and analysing data. The UK has a major role in leading the project and has scientists and engineers working on all the main experiments.

What will the LHC do?

The LHC will allow scientists to probe deeper into the heart of matter and further back in time than has been possible using previous colliders. Researchers think that the Universe originated in the Big Bang (an unimaginably violent explosion) and since then the Universe has been cooling down and becoming less energetic. Very early in the cooling process the matter and forces that make up our world ‘condensed’ out of this ball of energy. The LHC will produce tiny patches of very high energy by colliding together atomic particles that are travelling at very high speed. The more energy produced in the collisions the further back we can look towards the very high energies that existed early in the evolution of the Universe. Collisions in the LHC will have up to 7x the energy of those produced in previous machines; recreating energies and conditions that existed billionths of a second after the start of the Big Bang. The results from the LHC are not completely predictable as the experiments are testing ideas that are at the frontiers of our knowledge and understanding. Researchers expect to confirm predictions made on the basis of what we know from previous experiments and theories. However, part of the excitement of the LHC project is that it may uncover new facts about matter and the origins of the Universe. One of the most interesting theories the LHC will test was put forward by the UK physicist Professor Peter Higgs and others. The different types of fundamental particle that make up matter have very different masses, while the particles that make up light (photons) have no mass at all. Peter’s theory is one explanation of why this is so and the LHC will allow us to test the theory.

How does the LHC work?

The LHC accelerates two beams of atomic particles in opposite directions around the 27km collider. When the particle beams reach their maximum speed the LHC allows them to ‘collide’ at 4 points on their circular journey. Thousands of new particles are produced when particles collide and detectors, placed around the collision points, allow scientists to identify these new particles by tracking their behaviour. The detectors are able to follow the millions of collisions and new particles produced every second and identify the distinctive behaviour of interesting new particles from among the many thousands that are of little interest. As the energy produced in the collisions increases researchers are able to peer deeper into the fundamental structure of the Universe and further back in its history. In these extreme conditions unknown atomic particles may appear.

Who benefits?

There are two types of benefit that the LHC project produces for the UK. The less easily measured benefits are:

- new understanding of the physical world,
- training of world class scientists and engineers,
- maintenance of a vibrant, world class UK research base and,
- a leading role in a major international project.

More easily appreciated are the knowledge, expertise and technology that is spun off from the LHC and can be directly applied to development of new medical, industrial and consumer technologies (more...)
The science of the LHC is far removed from everyday life, but the fact that the science is so extreme constantly pushes the boundaries of existing technical and engineering solutions. Simply building the LHC has generated new technology.
The LHC is not primarily about building a better world. Rather, it allows us to test theories and ideas about how the Universe works, its origins and evolution. The questions asked, and answers found, are so fundamental that the information from LHC experiments will only be applied many years in the future, if at all. However, this is an experiment and one of the surprises from the experiment may be new science that can be applied almost immediately.

Some interesting links:

- LHC uk
- Cern homepage
- Lhc Machine Outreach

The Draganflyer personal helicopter

An agile, video-equipped helicopter.

Rinspeed sQuba Concept

Rinspeed’s Zero-Emission World Debut at the Geneva Motor Show - a Green “Fish” with Q-Factor

Thirty years after the movie thriller ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’ hit the silver screen “sQuba” is the first car that can actually ‘fly’ under water. It also had to be a sports car that was converted into a diving dream in the facilities of Swiss engineering specialist Esoro. In a first step the combustion engine was removed and replaced by several electric motors. Three motors are located in the rear. One provides propulsion on land, the other two drive the screws for underwater motoring. They are supported by two powerful Seabob jet drives in the front, which ‘breathe’ through special rotating louvers from HS Genion (for opening and closing the water intake). The rotating outlet jets were designed to be extremely light yet twist resistant by using high-tech nano materials, so-called Carbon Nano Tubes.

For more information visit: Rinspeed.ch

Blind Rubik's Cube

We've seen a lot of neat stuff come from the Speed Cubing crowd. However, solving a Rubik's Cube while blindfolded is a new level of cool from a somewhat geeky hobby.

Tsar bomba: most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated

Tsar Bomba (Russian: Царь-бомба), literally "king Bomb", is the Western name for the RDS-220 hydrogen bomb (codenamed "Иван" (Ivan) by its developers) — the largest, most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated. Developed by the Soviet Union, the bomb was originally designed to have a yield of about 100 megatons of TNT; however that was reduced by half in order to limit the amount of nuclear fallout that would result. Two bombs were built, a mock bomb and the real bomb, with the real bomb being tested on October 30, 1961, in the Novaya Zemlya archipelago. Despite testing, the weapon never entered service; it was simply a demonstration of the capabilities of the Soviet Union's military technology at that time. The mock bomb was stored in the Russian Nuclear Weapons Museum in Sarov.

For more information: Wikipedia - Tsar Bomba

Wired Science: World's Most Powerful Lasers

Wired Science heads to the National Ignition Facility, where an enormous 192-beam laser bay may become capable of fusing hydrogen atoms into helium - creating an endless, clean source of energy.


For more information, check out the Wired Science blog

Melting steel with solar power

Solar power is sometimes used as a synonym for solar energy or more specifically to refer to electricity generated from solar radiation. Since ancient times solar energy has been harnessed for human use through a range of technologies. Solar radiation along with secondary solar resources such as wind and wave power, hydroelectricity and biomass account for most of the available flow of renewable energy on Earth. In this video you can see a demostration.

For more information: Wikipedia - Solar Energy

American Crash Testing: theory of crumple zones

The American Railway test the theory of crumple zones using some old commuter stock suitably modified.