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New RFID Tag Could Mean the End of Bar Codes

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Lines at the grocery store might become as obsolete as milkmen, if a new tag that seeks to replace bar codes becomes commonplace.

sciencenewsResearchers from Sunchon National University in Suncheon, South Korea, and Rice University in Houston have built a radio frequency identification tag that can be printed directly onto cereal boxes and potato chip bags. The tag uses ink laced with carbon nanotubes to print electronics on paper or plastic that could instantly transmit information about a cart full of groceries.

“You could run your cart by a detector and it tells you instantly what’s in the cart,” says James M. Tour of Rice University, whose research group invented the ink. “No more lines, you just walk out with your stuff.”

RFID tags are already used widely in passports, library books and gadgets that let cars fly through tollbooths without cash. But those tags are made from silicon, which is more expensive than paper and has to be stuck onto the product as a second step.

“It’s potentially much cheaper, printing it as part of the package,” Tour says.

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What’s It Like to Fly the Space Shuttle? We Find Out

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As a person who really enjoys flying airplanes, I never thought I would ever say this, but flying a simulator can be as much fun as flying the real thing. Of course it helps when the simulator is a replica of the space shuttle cockpit at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

On a recent assignment for AOPA Pilot magazine, I arrived early for an interview with Ken Ham, commander on the shuttle flight scheduled to lift off on May 14. While I waited, an engineer fired up the simulator where we were going to conduct the interview and let me make some practice approaches.

Known as the Shuttle Engineering Simulator, or SES, it’s not the full motion simulator used for full flight profile training, but rather a fixed-base simulator used by astronauts and engineers for both training and testing changes that will be made on the shuttle. The SES is very similar to the e-cab used by Boeing and other aircraft makers to test systems before putting them on the real thing.

Whether it was a change to a guidance computer, or an upgrade to the software controlling the nine glass panel displays, many of the improvements made to the shuttle over the years were tested right here. Shuttle commanders and pilots (commander is in left seat, pilot in the right) also use the SES for training, especially early on in their preparation.

The wood on the floor in front of left seat has been worn smooth by thousands of heels sliding back and forth controlling the rudder pedals over the years. With the news that the shuttle will likely continue flying into 2011, instead of being retired later this year as previously scheduled, the SES may yet see a few more heels.

Sadly, even with the extension, this was as close as I would probably get to my astronaut dreams. Still I was eager to try flying the heaviest and most expensive glider ever built.

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Lab-Quality Booze Detector Fits in a Suitcase

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Ever found yourself staring down a punch bowl at a frat party and wondering just how spiked it might be?

What you needed was the AlcoQuick 4000, a briefcase-sized infrared spectrometer that can accurately determine the alcohol content of a wide variety of beverages in just 60 seconds, according to a new study in the open source journal Chemistry Central.

alcoquickFor every day use, you can use an alcoholmeter, first developed by Gay-Lussac in the 1820s. It’s essentially a tube that you can insert into a liquid-containing beaker that uses the difference in density between water and alcohol to determine how much alcohol is in the beverage.

But some people, notably scientists and tax collectors, need more precise readings of alcohol content. They use complex techniques that require the liquid in question to be distilled. That limits the diffusion of the techniques and can prove downright impractical in some settings.

The German researchers who conducted the study say that the AlcoQuick could be especially useful in analyzing “unrecorded alcohol,” which you might know as “moonshine.” They estimate that one-quarter of the world’s alcohol consumption comes in this form, largely in developing countries without strong regulatory regimes.

“In this context, expensive laboratory measurements such as distillation and pycnometry are not practical, but portable, battery-powered infrared sensors offer a feasible alternative in areas of lower socioeconomic status,” they conclude.

So, watch out Bangladesh, your days of moonshining could be coming to a technology-induced end soon.

Citation: “Rapid and mobile determination of alcoholic strength in wine, beer and spirits using a flow-through infrared sensor” by Dirk W Lachenmeier, Rolf Godelmann, Markus Steiner, Bob Ansay, Jurgen Weigel, and Gunther Krieg. doi:10.1186/1752-153X-4-5

Image: hoggarazzi/Flickr

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Tumblr, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.

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Ron Howard Was Wrong: Apollo 13 Would Have Burned, Not Frozen

The Apollo 13 module, had it not been for NASA’s heroic efforts to get it back on course, would have missed Earth and tumbled into the depths of cold, lonely space.

At least that’s been the story repeated in popular, academic, and cinematic accounts of the ill-fated mission, like Ron Howard’s Apollo 13.

Now, space writer Andrew Chaikin and a team of modelers at Analytical Graphics have stumbled upon a surprise: The official story isn’t true. Instead of drifting into a nearly eternal orbit around Earth, the ship would have swung out past the moon, been pushed by its gravitational field, and been sent hurtling back toward Earth on a collision path, as described in the video above.

In any case, the crew would not have survived. They’d have frozen first, then burned up on re-entry.

Luckily, James Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise were able to use the lunar module as a lifeboat and make it safely home with the help of Ed Harris, er, Eugene F. Kranz, the flight director for the mission.

And while we’re debunking Apollo 13 myths, the astronauts never actually said, “Houston, we have a problem.” They said, “Houston, we’ve had a problem.”

And if you ever correct someone on the presence of that helping verb at a party, you join an elite club of pedants who love space and grammar too much. Contact us immediately with a YouTube video of the incident and we’ll send you a pin, because it’s our club.

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Via CollectSPACE

Image: The damage caused by the oxygen explosion that nearly cost the Apollo 13 astronauts their lives/NASA.

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Tumblr, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.

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Laser Guidance Adds Power to Wind Turbines

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The wind industry may soon be dependent on a different kind of environmental awareness that has more to do with lasers than ecology.

A new laser system that can be mounted on wind turbines allows them to prepare for the wind rushing toward their blades.

The lasers act like sonar for the wind, bouncing off microscopically small particulates and back to a fiber optic detector. That data is fed to an on-board processor that generates a three-dimensional view of the wind speed and direction. Subtle adjustments in the turbine blade’s angle to the window allows it to capture more energy and protect itself in case of strong gusts.

The startup company that developed the Vindicator system, Catch the Wind, recently deployed a wind unit on a Nebraska Public Power District turbine. It increased the production of the unit (.pdf) by more than 10 percent, according to the company’s white paper. If those numbers held across the nations’ 35 gigawatts of installed wind capacity, the LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) sensors could add more than 3.5 gigawatts of wind capacity without adding a single additional turbine.

“This is what they call disruptive technology,” said William Fetzer, vice president of business development for Catch the Wind. “There are roughly 80,000 to 90,000 wind turbines out in the world, and they don’t have this technology.”

Wind farms are only as good as their data. There have been revolutions in assessing wind resources over long time-scales, but the short-term gustiness of the wind has remained a problem.

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Chemical Fingerprints Could Finger Weapons Makers

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SAN FRANCISCO — Finding out whodunit in chemical warfare cases may be aided by scientists focused on the howdunit.

sciencenewsResearchers have developed a technique to ascertain the chemical fingerprint of compounds such as mustard gas, rat poison and nerve agents such as VX. Figuring out the details of how these compounds were created in the first place could provide vital clues to law enforcement agencies aiming to catch chemical warfare criminals and help guide first responders as they gather evidence.

Chemical forensics typically focuses on identifying the compound in question, but chemist Audrey Martin and her colleagues at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California wanted to take these analyses a step further. “If we already know this was a chemical attack using mustard gas, now we want to know who made it,” said Martin, who presented the research March 22 in a poster session at a meeting of the American Chemical Society held in San Francisco. “We’re looking at the next step — where did this come from?”

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As Temperature Rises, Earth Breathes Faster — and Maybe Harder

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As planetary temperatures rise, Earth’s soils release steadily larger amounts of carbon dioxide, according to massive data crunching from hundreds of soil respiration studies published since 1989.

The critical question is whether soils release more CO2 because faster-growing plants pump more in, or if soils release CO2 that would have stayed in the ground at lower temperatures.

If the latter, the fresh influx of CO2 could produce a self-reinforcing cycle, producing higher temperatures that cause even more CO2 to be released.

“That’s the $50,000 question: Is there a feedback effect?” said Ben Bond-Lamberty, a University of Maryland, College Park biogeochemist and co-author of the review, in the March 24 Nature. “The data we have implies a feedback. It doesn’t prove it, but it’s consistent with the possibility.”

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Female Chimpanzees Drive the Culture

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Chimpanzee culture is driven by its females, suggests a new analysis of six long-term chimp studies.

The number of cultural traits in each colony is linked to the number of females. How many males there are makes no difference.

“Our results suggest that females are the carriers of chimpanzee culture,” wrote study co-authors Johan Lind and Patrik Lindenfors, both evolutionary biologists at Stockholm University’s Center for the Study of Cultural Evolution.

Lind and Lindenfors’ paper, published March 24 in Public Library of Science ONE, was prompted by two sets of observations. First, as becomes more evident with each passing month, chimpanzees possess complex learned behaviors that vary between colony and region. They have culture.

Second, the culture resides in the females. They use tools more frequently than males, and spend more time teaching tricks to their young. And while male chimpanzees tend to stay in the same colony, females will sometimes transfer. Culture would travel with them.

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DNA Reveals New Hominid Ancestor

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A new member of the human evolutionary family has been proposed for the first time based on an ancient genetic sequence, not fossil bones. Even more surprising, this novel and still mysterious hominid, if confirmed, would have lived near Stone Age Neandertals and Homo sapiens.

sciencenews“It was a shock to find DNA from a new type of ancestor that has not been on our radar screens,” says geneticist Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. These enigmatic hominids left Africa in a previously unsuspected migration around 1 million years ago, a team led by Pääbo and Max Planck graduate student Johannes Krause reports in a paper published online March 24 in Nature.

The researchers base their claim on DNA from a finger bone belonging to a hominid that lived in the Altai Mountains of central Asia between about 48,000 and 30,000 years ago.

Anthropologists have generally assumed that hominids left Africa in a few discrete waves, starting with Homo erectus about 1.9 million years ago. Neandertal ancestors left between 500,000 and 300,000 years ago, followed by humans around 50,000 years ago.

But the new genetic sequence supports a scenario in which many African hominid lineages trekked to Asia and Europe in the wake of H. erectus, Pääbo suggests.

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Chemical From Plastic Water Bottles Found Throughout Oceans

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A survey of 200 sites in 20 countries around the world has found that bisphenol A, a synthetic compound that mimics estrogen and is linked to developmental disorders, is ubiquitous in Earth’s oceans.

Bisphenol A, or BPA, is found mostly in shatter-proof plastics and epoxy resins. Most people have trace amounts in their bodies, likely absorbed from food containers. Its hormone-mimicking properties make it a potent endocrine system disruptor.

In recent years, scientists have moved from studying BPA’s damaging effects in laboratory animals to linking it to heart disease, sterility and altered childhood development in humans. Many questions still remain about dosage effects and the full nature of those links, but in January the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that “recent studies provide reason for some concern about the potential effects of BPA on the brain, behavior, and prostate gland of fetuses, infants and children.”

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