Category Science & Technology

Forgetting everything you hear in classes or meetings? Your overstuffed notebook might be the culprit. According to psychologists at Mount St. Vincent University in New York, our brains go: “Hey, he’s writing this down, so no need to warehouse this stuff. Better to make room for other stuff.” Researchers call this phenomenon ‘intentional forgetting’.

Subjects played the memory game Concentration in which players memorize images on cards and try to identify them after the cards have been covered up. Half the subjects studied the cards before they were covered; the other half were allowed to take notes. The note-takers did significantly worse than the group that knew they had to concentrate on the images and position of the cards.

Researchers concluded that “participants adopted an intentional-forgetting strategy when using notes to store certain types of information.” Taking notes didn’t improve memory; it made recall worse because the brain was forgetting as fast as its owner was writing.

So the next time your teacher asks why you’re not taking notes, explain that you want to make sure you remember!

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Stanford engineers recently demonstrated a pair of gecko-inspired hand pads strong enough to pull the weight of an adult man and to allow him to climb a wall.

The gecko’s climbing ability is due to specialized pads located on its toes, comprised of various satae (bristle-or hair-like structures) on the tip of which lie tiny structures called spatulae, each less than a micron wide. These allow attraction forces called Van der Waals interactions to arise between the adhesive satae and the surface. A single spatulae shows very weak molecular forces, however when coupled together in thousands of thousands on the satae, the attraction becomes very strong.

Researchers created an artificial adhesive that could copy the high surface area of the satae on a gecko’s feet, made from a silicone material called polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) that is layered as a microscopic wedge. The pads have “controllable adhesion”, so they could easily be switched on or off simply by transferring weight on the adhesive.

The pads could prove useful in manipulating huge solar panels or other massive objects without any suction power or chemical glues, and in space where astronauts could cling to surfaces of the International Space Station.

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The true purpose of eyelashes? Controlling airflow around the eye. Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology measured lash length and eye width in 22 preserved mammals ranging in size from hedgehogs to giraffes. In all species, lash length was about one-third eye width, suggesting they had evolved to be a particular size relative to the eye. The researchers made artificial eyes, attaching synthetic lashes to small water-filled aluminium caps and monitoring the “eyes” water loss and particle deposition by 50%, as they trap a protective layer of air on top of the eye. Lashes that are too long no longer trap air and instead funnel airflow onto the eye, likely increasing evaporation and particle deposition.

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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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