It’s fair to say that climate change is perhaps the greatest challenge facing our planet, and while much attention is directed towards solutions to the problems it presents, perhaps there’s less attention given to the the other side of the equation in the hydrocarbon industry. For example we all think we know something about hydraulic fracking wells, but how much do we really know?
[John Thurmond] is a geologist who has recently completed a long career in the oil industry, and he gave an informative talk on the matter at the summer’s EMF Camp in the UK. It makes for an interesting watch, as he leads the viewer through the process in detail, before discussing what should and shouldn’t cause worry.
We learn that fracking has two parts: first the hydraulic fracking itself, and then the re-injection of the toxic fracking well water released from underground along with the oil or gas. It seems the water released from the rocks a 10,000 ft depth contains all manner of toxic and even radioactive compounds, and the usual means of disposal is to inject it back into the ground at a much lower depth. He makes the point that while the hazards associated with the fracking are low, those of the re-injection are high.
The talk finishes up with perhaps the most interesting point, by looking at the nature of opposition to fracking, or indeed any other controversial development. Such things are inevitably surrounded by a swirling mess of half-truths, and his point is that identifying those easily deflected as not true is key to understanding the whole thing. It’s presented from an expert and factual perspective that’s so often lacking in this arena, and thus we think it’s worth a watch.
OK, I know. We don’t have practical teleportation. But that hasn’t stopped generations of science fiction authors and movie makers from building stories around it. If you ask most ordinary people, they’d tell you the idea originated with the Star Trek transporter, but that’s far from the truth. So when did people start thinking about teleporting?
Ground Rules
Maybe it isn’t fair, but I will draw the line at magic or unexplained teleportation. So “The Tempest”, for example, doesn’t use technology but magic. To get to Barsoom, John Carter wished or slept to teleport to Mars. So, while technology might seem like magic, we’re focusing on stories where some kind of machine can send something — usually people — to somewhere else.
Of course, there’s a fine line between pure magic and pure technology where they overlap. For example, in the opera “Der Ring des Nibelungen”, a magic helmet gives people powers, including that of teleportation. While you could argue that Tarnhelm — the name of the magic helmet — was a technological artifact, it is still explained by magic, not science.
Some systems need a transmitter and a receiver. Sometimes, you only need the transmitter. Sometimes, you can only teleport within a limited range, but other make-believe systems can transport an entire starship across the galaxy.
Early Teleporters
The Man without a Body is a story from 1877 in which a scientist is able to transmit a cat via a telegraph wire. Encouraged, he attempts the same feat with himself, but the battery dies in the middle, leaving him with a disembodied head. The ending is decidedly devoid of science, but the story is possibly the earliest one with a machine sending matter across a distance.
The London Underground is an iconic piece of Victorian era engineering. What started in 1863 quickly became a core piece of infrastructure that would define the modern character of the British capital. It’s grown and changed immensely in the many years that have passed. Sadly, increasing patronage and more trains have created problems that the original designers never envisaged.
Deep in those London tunnels lies an engineering challenge. The Tube is literally cooking itself. Every day, millions of commuters descend into a network of tunnels that have been absorbing heat since the reign of Queen Victoria. Those clay-lined tubes have been soaking up excess thermal energy like a giant underground radiator, and now they’re giving it back with interest. The tunnels are simply too hot, and cooling them down is inordinately difficult.
The Perfect Storm of Thermal Chaos
The Tube’s heat problem isn’t just about one thing gone wrong – it’s about everything gone wrong at once. When Victorian engineers designed these tunnels, cooling wasn’t a major consideration. The tight, compact tunnels were built deep, nestled in the clay beneath London. In the early days, temperatures in the Underground were considered comfortably low.
“The Underground’s the only spot for comfort when the days are hot; it is cooler below.” – London Underground poster, 1926
Originally, the clay surrounding the tunnels sat at around 14°C, acting as a heat sink for the network. However, over the years, with more trains coming and going and more heat pouring in, the temperature has risen. It now typically sits anywhere from 19° to 26 °C. That’s just the earth around the tunnels, though. Air temperatures are worse—hitting as high as 47°C during a 2006 heatwave. The problem has been a continual bugbear of the beloved Tube, with concerns that future heatwaves could see temperatures rise ever higher. Continue reading “The London Underground Is Too Hot, But It’s Not An Easy Fix”→
Ever wonder how those scratch and sniff stickers manage to pack a punch of aroma into what looks like ordinary paper? The technology behind it is deceptively clever, and has been used everywhere from children’s books to compact discs.
Most Scratch and Sniff stickers are simple nose-based novelties, though they’ve seen other uses as diagnostic tools, too. As Baltimore Gas and Electric discovered in 1987, though, these stickers can also cause a whole lot of hullabaloo. Let’s explore how this nifty technology works, and how it can go—somewhat amusingly—wrong.
The Science
3M developed the scratch and sniff technology in the 1960s. It quickly gained iconic status in the decades that followed. via eBay
At its heart, scratch and sniff technology involves the microencapsulation of tiny smellable particles, which are then impregnated into stickers or other paper products. Microscopic amounts of aromatic materiale are trapped inside gelatin or plastic capsules, and then stuck to paper. When you scratch the surface, these capsules rupture, releasing their aromatic cargo into the air. It’s an elegant feat of materials engineering, originally developed by Gale W. Matson. Working at 3M in the 1960s, he’d been intending to create a new kind of carbonless copy paper.
Scratch and Sniff stickers soon became a popular novelty in the 1970s. The catchy name was perfect—it told you everything you need to know. A children’s book named Little Bunny Follows His Nose was one of the first widespread applications. Released in 1971, it was entirely based around the whole scratch and sniff concept. Children could read along and scratch various illustrations of peaches, roses and pine needles to see what they smelled like. The book was reprinted multiple times, remaining in publication for over three decades.
Other popular media soon followed. Pop rock band The Raspberries put a scratch and sniff sticker on their album cover in 1972. Director John Waters would go on to release his 1981 film Polyester with an accompanying “Odorama” card, which featured multiple smells for viewers to sniff during the movie. The concept still resurfaces occasionally, though the gimmick is now well-worn. In 2010, Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream album smelled like cotton candy thanks to a scratch-and-sniff treatment on the Deluxe Edition, and King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard put a similar touch on 2017’s Flying Microtonal Banana. Continue reading “Scratch And Sniff Stickers And The Gas Panic Of ’87”→
So now we’ve talked about all kinds of byproducts, including man-made (Fordite), nature-made (fulgurites), and one that’s a little of both (calthemites). Each of these is beautiful in its own way, but I’m not sure about the beauty and merit of corium — that which is created in a nuclear reactor core during a meltdown.
A necklace made to look like corium. Image via OSS-OSS
Corium has the consistency of lava and is made up of many things, including nuclear fuel, the products of fission, control rods, any structural parts of the reactor that were affected, and products of those parts’ reaction with the surrounding air, water, and steam.
If the reactor vessel itself is breached, corium can include molten concrete from the floor underneath. That said, if corium is hot enough, it can melt any concrete it comes in contact with.
The SR-71 with its blended wing body design. (Photo by Tech. Sgt. Michael Haggerty, US Air Force, 1988)
Ask someone to picture an airplane and they’re likely to think of what is essentially a tube with wings and a stabilizing tail tacked onto one end of said tube. Yet it is also no secret that the lift produced by such a tube is rather poor, even if they’re straightforward for loading cargo (static and self-loading) into them and for deciding where to put in windows. Over the decades a number of alternative airplane designs have been developed, with some of them also ending up being produced. Here most people are probably quite familiar with the US Air Force’s B-2 Spirit bomber and its characteristic flying wing design, while blended wing body (BWB) maintains a somewhat distinctive fuselage, as with for example the B-1 Lancer.
Outside of military airplanes BWBs are a pretty rare sight. Within the world of passenger airplanes the tube-with-wings pattern that the first ever passenger airplanes adopted has persisted with the newest designs, making it often tricky to distinguish one airplane from another. This could soon change, however, with a strong interest within the industry for passenger-oriented BWBs. The reason for this are the significant boosts in efficiency, quieter performance and more internal (useful) volume, which makes airline operators very happy, but which may also benefit passengers.
With that said, how close are we truly to the first BWB passenger airplane delivery to an airline?
According to the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, our language influences how we think and experience the world. That’s easy to imagine. Certainly our symbolism of mathematics influences how we calculate. Can you imagine doing moderately complex math with Roman numerals or without zero or negative numbers? But recently I was reminded that technological media also influences our perception of reality, and I have a Hackaday post to thank for it.
The post in question was about color TV. When I was a kid, most people had black and white TVs, although there were color sets. Even if you had a color set, many shows and movies were in black and white. Back then, many people still shot black and white film in their cameras, too, for many reasons. To make matters worse, I grew up in a small town, reading books from the local library that were ten or twenty years behind the times.
At some point, I read a statistic that said that most people dream in black and white. You may find this surprising, as I’ll bet you dream in color. It turns out, how people dream may have changed over the years and still and motion photography may be the reason.
The Post
In the post, I posed a question I’ve thought about many times: Did people dream in black and white before the advent of photography? It was kind of an off-hand remark to open the post, but many people reacted to it in the comments. They seemed surprised that I would ask that because, of course, everyone dreams in color.
I asked a few people I knew who also seemed very surprised that I would assume anyone ever dreams in color. But I was sure I had been told that sometime in the past. Time to hit the Internet and find out if that was incorrect or a false memory or something else. Turns out, it was indeed something else.
A scientific paper from 2008 held the answer. It turns out that science started asking questions like this in the early 1900s. Up through the 1940s, people overwhelmingly reported dreaming in black and white, at least most of the time. Color dreams were in the minority, although not unheard of.
Then something changed. Studies that occurred in the 1960s and later, show exactly the opposite. People almost always dream in color and rarely in black and white. Of course, that correlates well with the rise of color photos, movies, and television. What’s more is, while there is no scientific evidence gathering about earlier times, there is a suspicious lack of, for example, a Shakespeare quote about “The gray world of slumber…” or anything else that would hint that the writer was dreaming in black and white.
Interpretation
Judging from the paper, it seems clear that most people agree that color media played a role in this surprising finding. What they can’t agree on is why. It does seem unlikely that your dreams really change based on your media consumption. But it is possible that your recollection changes. This is particularly true since the way researchers acquired data changed over that time period, too. But even if the data doesn’t show that you dreamed in black and white, it did show that you remembered dreaming in black and white.
For that matter, it isn’t clear that anyone understands how you experience dreams visually, anyway. It isn’t like the back of your eyelids are little movie screens. You don’t actually see anything in a dream, you only remember seeing it.
The Question
If something as simple as black-and-white movies and TV can change how we perceive dreams, you have to wonder how much tech is changing our reality experience in other ways. Do we live differently because we have cell phones? Or the Internet? Will virtual reality alter our dream lives? It would be interesting to fast-forward a century and see what historians say about our time and how strangely we perceive reality today.
