Inflatable tower could climb to the edge of space

A GIANT inflatable tower could carry people to the edge of space without the need for a rocket, and could be completed much sooner than a cable-based space elevator, its proponents claim.

Inflatable pneumatic modules already used in some spacecraft could be assembled into a 15-kilometre-high tower, say Brendan Quine, Raj Seth and George Zhu at York University in Toronto, Canada, writing in Acta Astronautica (DOI: 10.1016/j.actaastro.2009.02.018). If built from a suitable mountain top it could reach an altitude of around 20 kilometres, where it could be used for atmospheric research, tourism, telecoms or launching spacecraft.

The team envisages assembling the structure from a series of modules constructed from Kevlar-polyethylene composite tubes made rigid by inflating them with a lightweight gas such as helium. To test the idea, they built a 7-metre scale model made up of six modules (see image). Each module was built out of three laminated polyethylene tubes 8 centimetres in diameter, mounted around circular spacers and inflated with air.

To stay upright and withstand winds, full-scale structures would require gyroscopes and active stabilisation systems in each module. The team modelled a 15-kilometre tower made up of 100 modules, each one 150 metres tall and 230 metres in diameter, built from inflatable tubes 2 metres across. Quine estimates it would weigh about 800,000 tonnes when pressurised – around twice the weight of the world’s largest supertanker.

“Twenty kilometres up is about as dark as outer space. You can see about 600 kilometres in any direction,” Quine says. Tourists could get a view almost like that from space, but without the difficulties of coping with zero gravity. He calculates the tower could be extended up to low Earth orbit at 200 kilometres.

The tower does a similar job to the much-vaunted space elevator. But while the elevator envisages using ribbons woven from superstrong nanotubes – a material that is as yet non-existent – the tower would use materials that are already available. And should something go wrong with the tower, failure of a few modules would not cause the whole structure to collapse.

he team envisages assembling the structure from a series of modules constructed from Kevlar-polyethylene

via Inflatable tower could climb to the edge of space – space – 08 June 2009 – New Scientist.

It’s raining tadpoles in Japan town, residents say

Tadpoles dropping out of the sky have been reported in Japan.

Meteorologists in Japan say the rainy season has just started in Tokyo, but residents in a small coastal town have reported a different phenomenon — tadpoles dropping out of the sky.

An office clerk in Nanao said he first noticed the anomaly when he heard a dull thud in a parking lot last week, news reports said. Looking around, he saw about 100 dead amphibians splattered on car windshields and the ground.

More reports followed from bewildered residents in Nanao.

“People speculate that a waterspout picked them up and dropped them from the air,” an official at a local weather observatory told AFP. “But from a meteorological point of view, I have to say it is most unlikely.”

“We have checked the weather conditions of last week, thinking gusts of wind might have hit the area but confirmed no damage,” he said. “To be honest, I don’t think it was anything caused by a weather condition.”

Similar events — in what is sometimes called the “Fafrotskies” phenomenon, short for “fall from the sky” — have been reported around the world, with whirlwinds passing over water bodies and picking up frogs, jellyfish or other unfortunate animals before dumping them back to earth.

via It’s raining tadpoles in Japan town, residents say – Yahoo! News UK.

Sierra Leone police station turns into snakepit

Hundreds of hissing serpents have infested a Sierra Leone police station.

Law enforcers in Sierra Leone are used to slithering low life but the invasion of a police station by hundreds of hissing serpents has left even some of the toughest officers afraid to go to work.

An estimated 400 snakes, mostly cobras and vipers, have infested the station in the town of Gerihun in Sierra Leone’s southern Bo district.

Residents also complain that they are too afraid of the snakes to go there to report crimes.

“(The snakes) have been in the… police station since January and despite fumigating exercises carried out by officials of the Ministry of Health, many of the reptiles have not been dislodged,” Town Chief Momoh Fornah told AFP in a telephone interview.

The authorities are now looking to bring in army sharp-shooters to dispatch the unwelcome guests, he added.

Police officers at the station said the presence of the snakes had left many of them too afraid to work from their desks.

“We constantly hear hisses and weird sounds from the roof and we are always restless,” said one police officer, who asked not to be identified.

via Sierra Leone police station turns into snakepit – Yahoo! News UK.

Hummingbirds ‘faster than jets’

Male hummingbirds, swooping in an effort to impress females, achieve speeds “faster than fighter jets”, according to a study.

A US researcher has captured the birds’ dives with super-fast cameras. He lured them into their impressive displays using stuffed models of female birds.

The feathered acrobats reached speeds of almost 400 body lengths per second.

The findings are reported in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Christopher Clark from the University of California Berkeley filmed the courtship dives of male Anna’s hummingbirds on cameras able to capture 500 frames per second.

When measured relative to the length of their bodies, the birds’ top speed, he said, was “greater than [that] of a fighter jet with its afterburners on, or the space shuttle during atmospheric re-entry”.

Jet fighters, however, are able to out-accelerate the little birds.

In the latter stages of their dives, when they spread their wings to pull up, the hummingbirds’ “instantaneous acceleration” was, said Mr Clark, “greater than any organism previously recorded undergoing aerial manoeuvres”.

And that was all without the help of a powerful jet engine.

via BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Hummingbirds ‘faster than jets’.

This is a relative measurement. What is the actual air speed velocity of a diving humming bird? (Unladened)

‘Slumdog’ child star gets new home

The makers of the hit movie “Slumdog Millionaire” have bought a new home for one of the two child stars discovered in Mumbai’s slums.

Both children lost their homes last month when authorities demolished parts of their slum.

The purchase of a 250-square-foot (23-square-meter) one-bedroom apartment for the family of Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, 10, was completed Monday, said Nirja Mattoo, who helps oversee the Jai Ho trust set up by the filmmakers to help Azharuddin and his 9-year-old co-star Rubina Ali.

“They can move in,” Mattoo told The Associated Press on Wednesday. “I’m just waiting for their consent.”

Ownership of the tiny apartment, which cost about 2.5 million rupees ($50,000), will be transferred from the trust to Azharuddin when he turns 18, provided he completes school, Mattoo said.

“He has to complete an education. We are very clear about that,” she said. She declined to say what would happen to the property if he does not finish school.

via ‘Slumdog’ child star gets new home – Yahoo! News.

Seems like there should be a solution to the slums that would help more than these two kids.

Japanese Probe to Slam into Moon Today

The Japanese lunar orbiter Kaguya has completed its main mission. But there’s one final scientific endeavor: It will slam into the moon’s surface at about 2:30 p.m. ET (18:30 UT) today.

The impact is expected to occur on the near-side of the moon, in the dark area close to the limb, at lunar coordinates 80°E and 64°S, said European astronomers, who have mapped out the expected impact site using images from the the European Space Agency’s SMART-1 lunar orbiter, which was also purposely crashed into the moon in 2006.

SMART-1 images show that the Kaguya satellite’s impact site is in an ancient cratered highland.

Among other work, Kaguya beamed back a spectacular movie earlier this year of Earth eclipsing the sun as seen from the moon. It also provided fresh data on the composition of the moon’s mysterious far side.

Amateur skywatchers with telescopes and some experience might see the event from Earth. “The timing favors telescopic observers in east Asia, Australia and New Zealand, who may be able to see a brief flash of light or a plume of debris rising from the Moon’s southeastern limb,” according to Spaceweather.com.

Scientists hope to learn something about lunar composition by observing the debris that’s kicked up.

They’ll also later compare the pre-impact SMART-1 images to subsequent photographs taken by other spacecraft after the controlled crash landing.

“We hope that future data will show the elongated crater that will form due to the Kaguya impact and bouncing secondary debris,” said Bernard Foing, ESA’s former SMART-1 Project Scientist.

via Japanese Probe to Slam into Moon Today – Yahoo! News.

Air Writing: Next Big Thing in Cell Phones?

Forget fumbling with tiny cell phone keys. A prototype of a new application allows cell phone users to write short notes in the air and send them automatically to an e-mail address.

This represents just one possible step toward allowing people to naturally merge the real world with the information power of the Internet. Travelers and other mobile users could air-write notes to themselves rather than have to text on the run.

“By holding the phone like a pen, you can write short messages or draw simple diagrams in the air,” said Sandip Agrawal, an electrical and computer engineering student at Duke University in North Carolina.

The air-writing app takes advantage of accelerometers already inside cell phones such as Apple’s iPhone. Accelerometers normally keep track of phone movements and orientation, such as having the display screen rotate from portrait to landscape mode.

Speed writers may still want to stick with texting for now, because air-writers currently have to pause briefly between each letter and cannot use cursive. But researchers expect an improved app that will come with better algorithms and accelerometers.

Future versions of this PhonePoint Pen app may even allow users to take a photo with their phone and write a quick note on it.

Such interactivity has also emerged in the work of other research groups, such as MIT’s Sixth Sense project, and may signal the new era of cyborg technologies. Applications that can piggyback on existing cell phone technology may also get an advantage.

via Air Writing: Next Big Thing in Cell Phones? – Yahoo! News.

Genetic Difference Found in Wild vs. Tame Animals – Yahoo! News

A study of nasty and nice lab rats has scientists on the verge of knowing the genes that separate wild animals like lions and wolves from their tame cousins, cats and dogs.

Unlike their wild ancestors, house pets and other domesticated animals share the trait of tameness, meaning they tolerate or even seek out human presence. New research, which is published in the June issue of the journal Genetics and involved the interbreeding of friendly and aggressive rats, reveals gene regions that influence the opposing behaviors.

“I hope our study will ultimately lead to a detailed understanding of the genetics and biology of tameness,” said researcher Frank Albert of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. “Maybe we’ll then be able to domesticate a few of those species where humans have historically not been successful like the wild African Buffalo.”

And we can possibly understand more about the furry creatures in our homes.

“If you think about dogs, they are such amazing animals. When you compare a dog with a wild wolf, a wolf has no interest in communicating [with] or tolerating humans,” Albert told LiveScience. “If you’re lucky a wolf in the wild wouldn’t care about you. But a dog does care and they even seek human presence.”

He added, “Dogs were all wolves at some point. How did they become these animals that need humans to exist?”

via Genetic Difference Found in Wild vs. Tame Animals – Yahoo! News.

Not so windy: Research suggests winds dying down

The wind, a favorite power source of the green energy movement, seems to be dying down across the United States. And the cause, ironically, may be global warming — the very problem wind power seeks to address.

The idea that winds may be slowing is still a speculative one, and scientists disagree whether that is happening. But a first-of-its-kind study suggests that average and peak wind speeds have been noticeably slowing since 1973, especially in the Midwest and the East.

“It’s a very large effect,” said study co-author Eugene Takle, a professor of atmospheric science at Iowa State University. In some places in the Midwest, the trend shows a 10 percent drop or more over a decade. That adds up when the average wind speed in the region is about 10 to 12 miles per hour.

There’s been a jump in the number of low or no wind days in the Midwest, said the study’s lead author, Sara Pryor, an atmospheric scientist at Indiana University.

Wind measurements plotted out on U.S. maps by Pryor show wind speeds falling mostly along and east of the Mississippi River. Some areas that are banking on wind power, such as west Texas and parts of the Northern Plains, do not show winds slowing nearly as much. Yet, states such as Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Kansas, Virginia, Louisiana, Georgia, northern Maine and western Montana show some of the biggest drop in wind speeds.

“The stations bordering the Great Lakes do seem to have experienced the greatest changes,” Pryor said Tuesday. That’s probably because there’s less ice on the lakes and wind speeds faster across ice than it does over water, she said.

Still, the study, which will be published in August in the peer-reviewed Journal of Geophysical Research, is preliminary. There are enough questions that even the authors say it’s too early to know if this is a real trend or not. But it raises a new side effect of global warming that hasn’t been looked into before.

via Not so windy: Research suggests winds dying down – Yahoo! News.

Israeli woman mistakenly junks $1 million mattress

An Israeli woman mistakenly threw out a mattress she said had almost $1 million inside, setting off a frantic search through tons of garbage at a number of landfill sites on Wednesday. The woman told The Associated Press that she bought her elderly mother a new mattress as a surprise present on Monday — and threw out the old one.

The next day, she said, she remembered that she had hidden her life savings inside the old mattress. “I woke up in the morning screaming, when it hit me what happened,” said the Tel Aviv woman, who asked not to be identified.

She went to look for the mattress, but it had already been hauled away by garbage collectors, she said. Searches at three different landfill sites turned up nothing.

She said the money was in U.S. dollars and Israeli shekels. She refused to say how she acquired such a large sum. “It was all my money in the world,” she said. There was no way to verify her claims, and she refused to disclose key details.

Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said he was not familiar with the case and no report had been filed.

The Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot published a picture of the woman searching through garbage at a dump in southern Israel. The picture shows the woman, dressed in a white top and black pants with her back to the camera, picking through a huge pile of trash that fills the frame about 10 feet (3 meters) in all directions.

Yitzhak Borba, the dump manager, told Army Radio that his staff was helping the woman, saying she appeared “totally desperate.” He said the mattress was hard to find among the 2,500 tons of garbage that arrives at the site every day.

He said he increased security at the site to keep would-be treasure hunters away.

The woman said the money had been stashed in a mattress because she had had “traumatic experiences with banks” in the past. She would not elaborate.

via Israeli woman mistakenly junks $1 million mattress – Yahoo! News.