The Ultimate Seed Vault Backup? How About The Moon

August 4, 2024 by Donald Papp 44 Comments

A safe haven to preserve samples of biodiversity from climate change, habitat loss, natural disaster, and other threats is recognized as a worthwhile endeavor. Everyone knows good backup practice involves a copy of critical elements at a remote location, leading some to ask: why not the moon?

Not even the Svalbard global seed vault is out of the reach of climate change’s effects.

A biological sample repository already exists in the form of the Svalbard global seed vault, located in a mountain on a remote island in the Arctic circle. Even so, not even Svalbard is out of the reach of our changing Earth. In 2017, soaring temperatures in the Arctic melted permafrost in a way no one imagined would be possible, and water infiltrated the facility. Fortunately the flooding was handled by personnel and no damage was done to the vault’s contents, but it was a wake-up call.

An off-site backup that requires no staffing could provide some much-needed redundancy. Deep craters near the moon’s polar regions offer stable and ultra-cold locations that are never exposed to sunlight, and could offer staffing-free repositories if done right. The lunar biorepository proposal has the details, and is thought-provoking, at least.

The moon’s lack of an atmosphere is inconvenient for life, but otherwise pretty attractive for some applications. A backup seed vault is one, and putting a giant telescope in a lunar crater is another.

The Atomic Gardener Of Eastbourne

August 1, 2024 by Jenny List 7 Comments

Pity the video team at a large hacker camp, because they have a huge pile of interesting talks in the can but only the limited resources of volunteers to put them online. Thus we often see talks appearing from past camps, and such it is with one from Electromagnetic Field 2022. It’s from [Sarah Angliss], and as its subject it takes the extraordinary work of [Muriel Howorth], a mid-20th-century British proponent of irradiated seeds as a means to solve world hunger.

Today we are used to genetic modification in the context of plants, and while it remains a controversial subject, the science behind it is well known. In the period following the Second World War there was a different approach to improving crops by modifying their genetics: irradiating seeds in a scattergun approach to genetic modification, in the hope that among thousands of duds there might be a mutant with special properties.

To this came Muriel Howorth, at first charged with telling the story of atomic research for the general public. She took irradiated seeds from Oak Ridge in the USA, and turned them into a citizen science program, with an atomic gardening society who would test these seeds and hopefully, find the supercrops within. It’s a wonderfully eccentric tale that might otherwise be the plot of a Wallace and Gromit movie, and but for a few interested historians of popular science it might otherwise have slipped into obscurity. We’re sorry we didn’t catch this one live back when we attended the event.

Continue reading “The Atomic Gardener Of Eastbourne” →

Spin Your Own Passive Cooling Fibres

July 31, 2024 by Jenny List 4 Comments

When the temperature climbs, it’s an eternal problem: how to stay cool. An exciting field of materials science lies in radiative cooling materials, things which reflect so much incoming heat that they can cool down from their own radiation rather than heating up in the sun. It’s something [NightHawkInLight] has been working on over a series, and he’s dropped a very long video we’ve placed below. It’s ostensibly about spinning radiative cooling fibers, but in fact provides a huge quantity of background as well as a bonus explanation of cotton candy machines.

These materials achieve their reflectivity by creating a surface full of microscopic bubbles. It’s the same process that makes snow so white and reflective, and in this case it’s achieved by dissolving a polymer in a mixture of two solvents. The lower boiling point solvent evaporates first leaving the polymer full of microscopic bubbles of the higher boiling point solvent, and once these evaporate they leave behind the tiny voids. In the video he’s using PLA, and we see him experimenting with different solvents and lubricants to achieve the desired result. The cotton candy machine comes in trying to create fibers by melting solid samples, something which doesn’t work as well as it could so instead he draws them by hand with a small rake.

When he tests his mat of fibers in bright sunlight the effect is almost magical if we didn’t already know the mechanism, they cool down by a few degrees compared to ambient temperature and the surrounding control materials. This is a fascinating material, and we hope we’ll see more experimenters working with it. You won’t be surprised to hear we’ve featured his work before.

Continue reading “Spin Your Own Passive Cooling Fibres” →

Read Utility Meters Via SDR To Fill Out Smart Home Stats

July 30, 2024 by Donald Papp 21 Comments

[Jeff Sandberg] has put a fair bit of effort into adding solar and battery storage with associated smarts to his home, but his energy usage statistics were incomplete. His solution was to read data from the utility meter using RTL-SDR to fill in the blanks. The results are good so far, and there’s no reason similar readings for gas and water can’t also be done.

[Jeff] uses the open source home automation software Home Assistant which integrates nicely with his solar and battery backup system, but due to the way his house is wired, it’s only aware of about half of the energy usage in the house. For example, [Jeff]’s heavy appliances get their power directly from the power company and are not part of the solar and battery systems. This means that Home Assistant’s energy statistics are incomplete.

Fortunately, in the USA most smart meters broadcast their data in a manner that an economical software-defined radio like RTL-SDR can access. That provided [Jeff] with the data he needed to get a much more complete picture of his energy usage.

While getting data from utility meters is conceptually straightforward, actually implementing things in a way that integrated with his system took a bit more work. If you’re finding yourself in the same boat, be sure to look at [Jeff]’s documentation to get some ideas.

Robot Seeks And Sucks Up Cigarette Butts, With Its Feet

July 20, 2024 by Donald Papp 30 Comments

It would be better if humans didn’t toss cigarette butts on the ground in the first place, but change always takes longer than we think it should. In the meantime, researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology have used the problem as an opportunity to explore what seems to be a novel approach: attaching vacuum pickups to a robot’s feet, therefore removing the need for separate effectors.

VERO (Vacuum-cleaner Equipped RObot) is a robotic dog with a vacuum cleaner “backpack” and four hoses, one going down each leg. A vision system detects a cigarette butt, then ensures the robot plants a foot next to it, sucking it up. The research paper has more details, but the video embedded below gives an excellent overview.

While VERO needs to think carefully about route planning, using the legs as effectors is very efficient. Being a legged robot, VERO can navigate all kinds of real-world environments — including stairs — which is important because cigarette butts know no bounds.

Also, using the legs as effectors means there is no need for the robot to stop and wait while a separate device (like an arm with a vacuum pickup) picks up the trash. By simply planting a foot next to a detected cigarette butt, VERO combines locomotion with pickup.

It’s fascinating to see how the Mini Cheetah design has really become mainstream to the point that these robots are available off-the-shelf, and it’s even cooler to see them put to use. After all, robots tackling trash is a good way to leverage machines that can focus on specific jobs, even if they aren’t super fast at it.

Continue reading “Robot Seeks And Sucks Up Cigarette Butts, With Its Feet” →

Lasers Could Help Us Recycle Plastics Into Carbon Dots

July 18, 2024 by Lewin Day 17 Comments

As it turns out, a great deal of plastics are thrown away every year, a waste which feels ever growing. Still, as reported by Sci-Tech Daily, there may be help on the way from our good friend, the laser!

The research paper from the University of Texas outlines the use of lasers for breaking down tough plastics into their baser components. The method isn’t quite as simple as fire a laser off at the plastic, though. First, the material must be laid on a special two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenide material — a type of atomically-thin semiconductor at the very forefront of current research. When the plastics are placed under the right laser light in this scenario, carbon-hydrogen bonds in the plastic are broken and transformed, creating new chemical bonds. Done right, and you can synthesize luminescent carbon dots from the plastic itself!

“By harnessing these unique reactions, we can explore new pathways for transforming environmental pollutants into valuable, reusable chemicals, contributing to the development of a more sustainable and circular economy,” says Yuebing Zheng, a leader on the project. “This discovery has significant implications for addressing environmental challenges and advancing the field of green chemistry.”

Sure it’s a bit trickier than turning old drink bottles into filament, but it could be very useful to researchers and those investigating high-tech materials solutions. Don’t forget to read up on the sheer immensity of the world’s plastic recycling problems, either. If you’ve got the solution, let us know!

Build Your Own Hydroelectric Dam

July 11, 2024 by Al Williams 21 Comments

We have to admit that we often think about building unusual things, but we hadn’t really considered building our own hydroelectric dam before. [Mini Construction] did, apparently, and there’s a timelapse of the build in the video below.

We wished this was more of a how-to video, although if you are handy with brickwork, the mechanical construction seems straightforward. Presumably, you’d need to understand how much force the water had but we don’t know if there was math involved or just seat-of-the-pants design.

Continue reading “Build Your Own Hydroelectric Dam” →