Category Science

Creators of Living Ink Technologies have created an eco-friendly “timelapse” ink that magically appears after exposure to sunlight.

The plant pens contain cyanobacteria, algae and chlorophyll in tiny amounts that are invisible to the naked eye at first. But when exposed to sunlight, the organisms reproduce at astonishing rates, bolstering their numbers to the point where they finally appear dense and green, thanks to the chlorophyll that harvests light energy and reflects light.

There are two types of ink: pink or “fast ink” which grows in 1-2 days, and blue or “slow ink” that takes 3-4 days to appear. This allows you to create a two-stage secret reveal over the course of a week which could find use in greeting cards or even a proposal!

The creation is housed inside a compact ‘greenhouse’ (which doubles as a picture frame) filled with a nutrient-dense material called agar that promotes the ink’s growth. When removed from the frame the algae and bacteria will eventually die, but the resulting image stains the paper so that it won’t fade away.

Besides being fun, Living Ink is also nontoxic. “Carbon black is the most common pigment used in black inks. It’s most commonly made from the incomplete combustion of heavy petroleum products such as tar,” says the company, who sidestepped this by making its product out of the ultimate organic material – living organisms.

Picture Credit : Google

Research has identified the tiny chameleon Rhampholeon spinosus as having the ultimate high-speed tongue. When it flicks its tongue at a fly, it reaches peak acceleration 264 times the force of gravity. In comparison, NASA’s shuttle delivered astronauts into orbit with a peak acceleration of only 3g. The F-16 jet fighter only reaches 7 g in pulling out of a dive. The acceleration of a chameleon’s tongue is the equivalent of getting from 0 to 60 mph in a hundredth of a second. But in the course of sticking out its tongue to 2.5 times its own body length, at a peak acceleration of 486 m/sec2, it generates the highest yet measured acceleration and power output per kilogram of muscle mass of any reptile, bird or mammal: 14,040 watts per kilo, making it second only to the most powerful vertebrate tongue of all, that of the salamander.

Picture Credit : Google

A tiny mollusc in Borneo is the new record holder for the world’s smallest known snail. It is so small that the researchers couldn’t see it in the wild without a microscope! Its shiny, translucent, white shell has an average height of 0.027 inches. The former champion – the Chinese snail Angustopila dominikae – is the world’s second-smallest snail, with an average shell height of 0.033 inches. Dutch and Malaysian researchers have named the snail Acmella nana; its species name (nana) is a reference to the Latin nanus, or “dwarf”.

But the researchers knew exactly where to hunt for unknown mollusks: Snails tend to live on Borneo’s limestone hills, likely because their shells are made of calcium carbonate, the main component of limestone, said study co-researcher Menno Schilthuizen, a professor of evolution at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

“When we go to a limestone hill, we just bring some strong plastic bags, and we collect a lot of soil and litter and dirt from underneath the limestone cliffs,” Schilthuizen told Live Science.

They sieve the contents, and dump the larger objects (including the snail shells) into a bucket of water. “We stir it around a lot so that the sand and clay sinks to the bottom, but the shells- which contain a bubble of air – float,” Schilthuizen said.

Then, they scoop out the floating shells and sort them under a microscope.

“You can sometimes get thousands or tens of thousands of shells from a few liters of soil, including these very tiny ones,” he said.

It’s unclear what Acmella nana eats, because the researchers have never seen it alive in the wild. But the researchers have observed a related snail species from Borneo, Acmella polita, foraging on thin films of bacteria and fungi that grow on wet limestone surfaces in caves.

Picture Credit : Google

Researchers at the University of Michigan have created a lattice-like solar cell that can stretch like an accordion, allowing it to tilt along the sun’s trajectory and capture more energy. The unique solar cell is inspired by the ancient art of paper cutting, known as kirigami.

The new design helps fix a problem with most solar power systems – the sun moves and the panels don’t. the kirigami cells are made of flexible, thin-film gallium arsenide strips that have been cut in a simple, two-dimensional pattern. When the cells are stretched using a motorized mechanism, the sheets twist open into three dimensions, offering raised surfaces to track the sun over a radius of about 120 degrees. The patterned film can collect 30 per cent more solar energy than conventional cells would.

The idea has the potential to make rooftop solar much more efficient, but in the near future, researchers say it would be more feasible for smaller aerospace applications.

Picture Credit : Google

Mars may one day have rings similar to Saturn’s famous halo, new research suggests.

The two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, are named after the children of the god Ares, the Greek counterpart to Mars, the Roman god of war. The larger, inner moon, Phobos is the only remaining inwardly migrating moon known to exist today.

Phobos, is just 22 kms wide and orbits the Red Planet rapidly, rising and setting twice each Martian day. The tiny moon is slowly drawing closer to Mars by 6.5 feet every century which may result in a dramatic crash into the Martian surface within 30-50 million years, previous research has shown.

Researchers now suggest that instead of going out in a single, enormous impact, the moon will be pulled apart by Martian gravity. After simulating the stresses caused by the tidal pull of Mars, found that the moon would break up over the course of 20-40 million years, forming a ring of debris around the planet. The rubble would continue to move inward towards the planet, and over the span of 1 million to 100 million years, the particles would rain down on the equatorial region of Mars. Initially, the ring could be as dense as Saturn’s, but it would become thinner as the particles fall down onto the planet over time.

What would the Martian ring look like? “From one angle, the ring will reflect extra light towards a viewer, and it will look like a bright curve in the sky,” says Tushar Mittal, one of the authors of the research paper. “From another angle, the viewer might be in the ring’s shadow, and the ring would be a dark curve in the sky.”

Picture Credit : Google

Out of 425,000 e-buses worldwide at the end of last year, 421,000 were in China, a Bloomberg report found. The e-fleet is projected to rise to over 600,000 buses by 2025. Electric buses have become the norm in many Chinese cities. Shenzhlen, a city of 13 million people, has a fleet of over 16,000 electric buses, and it’s making a huge difference. China’s electric buses save more diesel than all the world’s electric cars combined.

To achieve this wide-scale implementation, China used a top-down approach (as is usually the case with the Asian country). National objectives were implemented, both for manufacturers and municipalities, and the policy was used to nurture a productive competition between major cities. Meanwhile, in the US, the opposite is happening — the current administration discourages the national implementation of low-emission transport, and local markets are trying to fill in the void. Even in Europe, which is doing a bit better than the US with 2,250 electric buses, policy has not been decisive enough to fuel a revolution in electric transportation. The rest of Asia, despite some progress, also lags behind.

Buses are excellently suited for transitioning to electric engines: they follow a relatively short and stable route and can be easily recharged between rides. They also transport many more people than a regular car, which means that the positive impact is maximized.

Picture Credit : Google