Category Science

Carbon3D Inc. has developed a new 3D printing technology that uses light and oxygen to print objects at speeds 25 to 100 times faster than current technology. The technique was inspired by the film Terminator 2, in which the T-1000 robot rises from a pool of metallic liquid.

Continuous Liquid Interface Production (CLIP) enables objects to rise from a liquid media continuously, rather than using the layer-by-layer method that has defined the technology for decades. Beams of light are projected through an oxygen-permeable window into a liquid resin. Light and oxygen control the solidification of the resin, creating objects that can have sizes below 20 microns.

CLIP enables a very wide range of materials to be used to make 3D parts with novel properties, including elastomers, silicones, nylon-like materials, ceramics and biodegradable materials. Since it is facilitates 3D objects fabrication in minutes instead of hours or days, it would not be impossible within coming years to enable personalized coronary stents, dental implants or prosthetics to be printed on-demand in a medical setting.

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Bats can make ultra-fast decisions about how to attack their prey or even call off the attack. A bat is capable of adjusting its attack until it is approximately 100 milliseconds away from its prey.

Bats use echolocation for orientation. They emit ultrasonic sounds, which hit potential prey nearby, sending an echo back to the bat. From this echo the bat can define where the prey is and attack it. A new study has examined how hunting bats react when approaching their prey. The study concludes that bats are capable of gathering information from the environment and process it surprisingly fast in order to determine how to carry out the attack or maybe call it off.

“A bat is capable of adjusting its attack until it is approximately 100 milliseconds away from its prey,” explains Signe Brinkløv, postdoc at the Department of Biology, University of Southern Denmark.

“It is surprising that they are so fast. Until now we thought that bats are deploying a kind of autopilot in the last phase of an attack limiting them to an unchangeable behavioral pattern.”

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China has finished building the world’s biggest radio telescope, which it will use to explore space and hunt for extraterrestrial life. The Five hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) is the size of 30 soccer fields and has been hewn out of a mountain in the south-western province of Guizhou.

The telescope has been designed so that individual panels can be rearranged to focus on and track radio waves from specific objects of interest, which will give the dish much greater range and sensitivity than rival dishes.

O’Brien says FAST will enable more-detailed studies of pulsars: ultra-dense collapsed cores of exploding stars. “We may even find [more] pulsars outside our own galaxy,” he says. “It will also allow us to survey hydrogen in very distant galaxies, detect molecules in space, search for natural radio wave emissions from planets orbiting other stars and help in the search for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.”

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A little asteroid has been tagging along in Earth’s orbit for at least a century – and it’ll probably follow along for at least a few hundred years more.

Scientists at the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope on Haleakala, Hawaii spotted the little asteroid known as 2016 HO3, in April. They estimate that the asteroid is only about 130-330 feet wide, making it a tiny speck in the vastness of space. Even at its closet point, 2016 HO3 is at least about 9 million miles away.

“The asteroid’s loops around Earth drift a little ahead or behind from year to year, but when they drift too far forward or backward, Earth’s gravity is just strong enough to reverse the drift and hold onto the asteroid so that it never wanders farther away than about 100 times the distance of the moon,” says NASA’s Centre for Near-Earth Object Studies. “The same effect also prevents the asteroid from approaching much closer than about 38 times the distance of the moon. In effect, this small asteroid is caught in a little dance with Earth.

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Researchers from Carnegie of Science have been monitoring the seismic activity of more than 50 volcanic explosions in active volcanoes since 2009. Leading up to an eruption, volcanoes threw out plenty of smoke, fire, and sputtering ground movement, as expected. But, in the moments right before an eruption, the volcanoes went suddenly and completely quiet and still.

Most eruptions had quiet periods of less than 30 minutes, and some had lulls lasting only a few minutes. The longest one measured 10 hours, but then it was also followed by the largest eruption that researchers noticed that the longest lull was also linked to the biggest explosion, they compared all explosion sizes to the length of the quiet periods and found a clear correlation – the shorter the lull, the smaller the explosion; the longer the lull, the bigger the explosion.

Researchers can use these long, ominous silences to predict how big of an explosion will occur, right before it happens.

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The giant fluorescent pink slug (Triboniophorus aff. graeffei) that only lives on an extinct volcano in Australia is under severe threat of global warming. The slug grows up to 8 inches long and lives in a small forest at Mount Kaputar’s peak where it has no predators. Millions of years ago, when Australia was part of a larger landmass known as Gondwana, the terrain was characterized by lush rainforests. A volcanic eruption 17 million years ago on Mount Kaputar kept a small, 10 sq.km. area lush and wet even as much of Australia turned to desert. The slugs spend most of their time buried beneath the leaf mould on which they feed, but come out in the hundreds by night or after a rain shower to snack on tree moss.

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