Plane delivers super help
Via:Tallahassee
The Tallahassee Regional Airport runway was the site of a demonstration Thursday of the latest in aviation fire fighting tools: a 747 supertanker.
The converted 747 cargo plane dropped 205,000 gallons of water, while flying 180 mph at an altitude of 500 feet.
The plane flies higher and faster than conventional fire fighting planes -- and delivers the water volume of seven conventional planes.
The supertanker is made by an Oregon firm, which is in negotiations with the U.S. Forest Service to sell or lease the supertankers.
Awesome Color Scanning LEGO music machine
Via:[Jroller]
Last year Kristien bought me a package of Lego Mindstorms on ebay. The thing that gets me excited about Mindstorms is that it allows me, software guy, to write code that isn't restricted to the pc. The first thing I built is a (ta-daaam) Lego Music Machine. The idea is simple: the machine functions more or less like a scanner, except that in stead of creating an image from the scanned information, sound is generated. Here's a demo:
http://www.youtube.com/v/hYwdyu48bbI
To build the software, I used lejos, a JVM that replaces the Mindstorms firmware, thereby allowing one to write java programs for the RCX (this is the Lego brick that hosts the Mindstorms computer). Programming a Lego robot isn't always a smooth affair. Uploading a program to the robot takes some time, and especially debugging can be very tedious (the RCX's screen limits one's debug messages to 7 digits). Those things aside, I really enjoyed using lejos, and I'm very grateful to the makers of it. If you're interested in the code, you can find it here. There are some 'lego songs' in the the_fast_tapes section of this site.
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Freezing water at room temperature
This is pretty weird. It turns out that water can freeze at room temperature in response to atomic-scale friction.Joost Frenken and others at Leiden University used an instrument called a friction force microscope to create nano-friction by dragging a tungsten wire over a graphite surface. They wanted to test the theory that water vapour in the air might condense and become ice. And it did.They were even able to draw frozen patterns on the graphite surface. They think that "icy nanoscale water bridges" form as water vapour condenses in the nanoscopic gaps between the two surfaces.So far, so strange. But the researchers say the discovery could also have practical uses. This is because the tiny frozen bridges turn water from a lubricant into a kind of glue. So the effect could be important in the future for building nanoscale devices or structures. Curiously, there are other ways to turn water to ice at room temperature, such as using electric fields.
