Science Ain't So Bad

Misplaced confidence

AN INVALUABLE AIRCRAFT

An airplane disappeared with 239 people on board.

MISTER ScienceAintSoBad hates to hear stuff like that. If you have any sort of connection to any of the passengers, you have my deepest sympathy.

What a horrible thing!

Crazy too.

The chances of dying in a fire are about 1200 to 1. From a car accident or from  poison, about 1 in 120. From an airplane accident? About 11 million to 1.

In other words, you are safer – much, much safer – in the seat of a stupid airplane than you are sitting in your own living room where you could get caught in a fire or accidentally eat rat poison thinking it was some new candy treat from the lunatic next door. The disappearance of that airplane – of any commercial airliner-  is unthinkable.

When Manilla’s flight MH370 disappeared from radar on March 8, 2014, it was a twelve year old Boeing 777.  An airplane like that isn’t cheap but you can pick one up for 40 to 50 million dollars.

Now that it’s (probably) in pieces at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, it’s worth a fortune. The airline industry wants it badly. Because airplane accidents are so amazingly rare, this is a remarkable opportunity to learn from an honest to God airplane accident – an extremely rare chance to improve air safety even more. Boeing needs that thing to figure out if there were any issues with design or manufacture. Insurance companies need a look to settle the many interwoven claims against various parties. The airline needs it so it can prove it wasn’t negligent and to improve its own practices. Malaysia and China need to find it for political purposes because so many citizens want to tar and feather certain leaders over the way the accident was (mis)handled. And even the US which wasn’t directly involved (just one US citizen) would like to have a look at those those black boxes and examine key pieces of the wreckage.

It sounds cold to focus on the “worth” of the wreckage. I don’t mean it that way. I really do feel awful about the accident. However, if you’re trying to figure out why so much national treasure and effort is being invested in the search for this wreckage in “the most dangerous place on the planet”, it may help to understand the importance of the secrets hidden within that wreckage.

SOLVING THE MYSTERY

Will the aircraft be found? Will it ever be possible to deduce exactly what happened?

If you haven’t tuned out by now, you probably know that the search area has been narrowed down. As of this writing, the use of robotic submersibles has just begun. In the opinion of MISTER ScienceAintSoBad, they aren’t exagerating about what a rotten location this is. This area is remote, has indescribably bad weather, and very deep and uncharted water. If the airplane had been lost even a few years ago, it might have been hopeless. This is more like a planetary expedition than sending some soldiers to comb through a wreck somewhere but I think the search will go on until something is found. It’s an “in for a dime, in for a dollar” deal. So much has already been invested, and so much is riding on the results, that I don’t think giving up is on the menu.

– – – – – – – – –

The drawing is mine.

ICE

Ice can build up on airplane wings. When this happens, the airplane loses lift. When an airplane loses lift, it doesn’t fly so good.

What if were possible to make metal immune to icing?  What if this immune-to-icing metal  could also be used in compressors so that air conditioners and heat pumps and refrigerators and freezers didn’t ice up?   Actually? If you add it all up, the money saved, the energy that wouldn’t be wasted, the air fatalities that wouldn’t  happen – this would make the world a better place.

So.

Guess what?

Two women at a college in Cambridge, Massachusetts developed  (ACS Nano) a treatment for metal that repels ice. Ice doesn’t have a chance. Anything – even “incipient condensation droplets” –  slides right off. Dr. Joanna Aizenberg and Dr. Amy Smith Berylson call the product SLIPS. The marketing department may call it something catchier. Whatever. The point is, this is a great idea. Potentially, this has lots of uses. It even  works for the blades of wind turbines which, if they get iced up, also lose “lift” and become inefficient.

The downside?   I sure can’t find one.

ScienceAintSoBadRating = 10

– – – – – – – – – – –

Photo credits with appreciation to Frank Starmer, Associate Dean for Learning Technologies, Professor of Biolstatics and Bioinformatics, Duke University, Duke – National University Of Singapore Graduate School

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
.

THE INSPIRATION

NICE SCIENTISTS INVENT USEFUL THING

Be good if there was a green box with a red light and a buzzer. Bomb goes by? The buzzer buzzes, the red light blinks.

Like that.

Wouldn’t that be nice? It would change so many things and, maybe, tilt the advantage in the terrorism struggle back to the guys who call themselves the good guys.

Or is that the other guys?

Whatever! You know what I mean, right?

An Israeli team’s announcing an electronic explosives detector. Works for all SORTS of explosives. TNT, too. It’s very portable, very fast,  and can identify explosives that’re some distance away – a nice feature if you don’t wanna keep hiring new people to replace the ones that got exploded.  The lead researcher, Dr. Fernando Patolsky (Tel Aviv university), says there’s a need for this.

Well.. yuh!

Yer gonna find lots of troops in Afghanistan who think so. When you never know WHAT’S gonna blow, you get a little jumpy. This sounds like just the kind of device that could make a real difference . The nano sensor based device is the instrumentation equivalent of human/animal smell. I’ve called  this kind of thing an artificial nose, in the past,  because it “sniffs” the air that contains the molecules of the thing you’re looking for. No nostrils. No bump on the bridge. Probably no embarrassing hairs but nose-like in what it does.

Patolsky says it’s better at picking out explosives than dogs. That makes my eyes water. I happen to know how good dogs are at this particular job so that’s REALLY impressive!

You gotta think there’ll be interest from Homeland Security and the Military.

——————————-

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.

GREENER GALLONS

Energy: Riding The Algal Wave.

Jet engines decorate our skies with their sunlight sparkled contrails. While sharing, generously, their carbon dioxide with our oh so delicate atmosphere.

Airplanes, alone, contribute 2 to 3 percent of all of the CO2 emissions – a lot for just one single human activity. When you think of all forms of transportation including planes, cars, trucks, trains, ships, barges, and whatnot they (airplanes) are responsible for about one fifth of the total.

Do you worry about such things? Do you think global warming’s an over hyped pseudo scientific fraud?

MISTER ScienceAintSoBad doesn’t like to make a big controversial mess out of himself so if you think the whole carbon thing’s all nonsense, I will let you go. You probably have other stuff to do right now anyway. The rest of you can move up into the empty chairs while I explain what the airline industry intends to do about this.

First I should explain that airplanes have a little too much oomph to run on solar energy. And hydrogen fuel cell’s are still more dreamish than realish. The practical answer appears to be some form of fuel made from renewable substances and algae seems to the renewable substance of the moment.

But the fuel requirements for the turbine engines that run jet aircraft are pretty stringent.

You would think!

It get very cold in the stratosphere. And the pressure changes considerably from down here to up there. Diesel, with its high flash point and low volatility isn’t a very good fuel for jets. And early forms of biodiesel tended to get cloudy and clog up at low temperatures. At 30,000 feet, you really WANT a good fuel. Don’t you? Failure is not (a very desirable) option. And, by the way, the flammability of jet fuel is a terrifically important consideration in the event of an airplane accident where spilled fuel can change a survivable crash into a hopeless inferno.

The delays in implementing a new kind of fuel aren’t just foot dragging. This isn’t an easy problem. Because of all this, for the foreseeable future, any solution is likely to be a mix of conventional fuel with biofuel.

What are the real prospects for replacing (or at least reducing) reliance on kerosene? In 2008, Boeing figured we would be able to transition to a 30/70 biofuel/kerosene mixture within 3 to 5 years.

Are we on track?

I asked Adele C Schwartz, a well respected journalist with lots of professional experience in the air transportation industry (oh and my sister) where to find information on this topic and she pointed me to an article by Geoffrey Thomas in Air Transport World which is fairly encouraging about the prospects for the airline industry getting itself over to algae based “biodiesel”. Sapphire Energy seems to think it’s good for a million gallons of biodiesel and biojet by next year.

But Thomas’s article emphasizes that this isn’t likely to happen without government incentives playing a major role.

One would hope!

Where WOULD this country be if we didn’t look to government to take the lead in innovation and risk?

A Spur For Fitness?

Technology: The un-girdle.

After the attempted attack on flight 523, “body scanners” are finally getting some respect. Heathrow Airport will be using them and several hundred of them have been purchased for use in airports in and out of the US.

Good, right? Nobody want’s to get blown up.

Except for the radiation and the nudity. Overexposure on two fronts.

Let’s start with the nudity.

It doesn’t exactly make sense to say that photos like the one at the top of this article are obscene.

Proof? They’ve been run on the front pages of major newspapers and on family television stations in prime time. If you search for “body scanner” this photo shows up in Google with “strict search” on. So where’s the obscenity? Why the discomfort?

Well check out those love handles! Check out that saggy butt! No WONDER they’re throwing rocks at the scanners. I would be too.

This is the single greatest counterstrike against obesity since MacDonald’s decided against staying open all night.

I’m serious!

WEEKS before scheduled trips, travelers will be taking time off from work for exhausting river runs and torturous gym workouts. Lettuce and Tomato will be the new Big Mac.

THANK you L3 for saving our figures. And our hearts.

RADIATION

What about the radiation then?

According to Cnet News, there are two technologies in use. One of them uses low intensity radio waves. The other one uses backscatter radiation, an x-ray technology. And, yeah, the health benefits of x-rays are sometimes overstated.

But, according to Wikipedia, the backscatter technology amounts to .005 millirem of radiation. Since average background radiation is about 300 mrem per year, you would have to get exposed about 60,000 times by one of those backscatter doobies to get the equivalent of what you get in a year at the library. A traveler would have to make about 200 trips a day or about one departure every 3 minutes (assuming a 10 hour travel day) to achieve even that.

Imagine the air mile rewards.

So, weighing costs and benefits, for the price of some institutional indignity (and if you plan to do much flying, you might as well get over THAT), you’re gonna lose the flab and get there in one piece. But you will get enough radiation exposure to die .00003 seconds early.

Seems reasonable to MISTER ScienceAintSoBad. ScienceAintSoBadRating = 8 .

(Image above from From the Rapiscan Secure 1000(tm) Body Scanner manufactured by OSI Systems, Inc.)

Photograph

Bill Groves working his engineering magic

A STEP BACK FROM SCIENCE

We hear from people (mostly relatives and friends) who want to try out our LectricLifter (US patent numb 7517221) to raise their electric outlets up conveniently. Only one request, so far, to protect puppies and such from electric shock (though that’s from a store). ‘Course it would help if we had some. And it would help even more if we got them approved and started marketing our inventions. In fact, three months have evaporated while we’ve been trying to figure out the best way to make the first set (called “pre-manufacturing prototypes” in case you wondered).

In our own defense, this delay is partially because we don’t have a budget for extruded plastic parts and custom circuit boards which forces us to spend extra time being ingenious. For example, we couldn’t justify the money for a custom housing. Instead, we went to a fence manufacturer and bought plastic fence posts of about the right size. You can see how it looks below with the “rotatable plug” poking through. Of course another reason for the delay is that we haven’t been on fire to get this thing to market in the middle of a recession. But with the economy (maybe) beginning to pull out of its dive, we’ve been running out of excuses so Bill Groves, one of the engineers on our team, (plug for Bill: [email protected] to get a quote on electronic or electromechanical projects) took over the work and things began to jell.

We spent lots of time “cad-ing up” the method of holding that plug in place. We tried several approaches till we could agree on a good way. Now we’re working our way through other details: wiring techniques, fastening methods for the cord management knobs, and so on. It shouldn’t be long now till we have enough prototypes to do some “sanity checks”, show them to retailers, and get safety approvals.Meanwhile, we have two more products that’re stuck in the patent office and STILL haven’t budged. Maybe the USPTO needs a stimulus.

AVIATION AND SHIP FUEL

As I’ve mentioned previously, the transformation of energy sources is now underway in a serious way worldwide. My sister, Adele C Schwartz, who writes about and has considerable knowledge about aviation and airports, says her industry is already working on the shift to biofuels which, she says, is “huge”. According to Adele, the motivation is that already ” .. some countries in Europe are penalizing airlines for emissions, even though commercial aircraft are just a tiny part of the problem.”. “Air New Zealand,” she says, “has done some successful test flights recently using part jatropha and part kerosene. A lot of different mixes are being tested, and all the reports I’ve seen are positive for all of them.”

And an NOAA study says that ocean going vessels produce as much polution in a year as ALL THE CARS IN THE WORLD do in six months. The shipping companies, like the airlines, seem to understand that change is inevitable. Sooner rather than later.

I’ll continue to expand coverage of developments related to energy.

NOTE: CORRECTION

Erin ( New England Cockapoos, her link), breeder to the stars AND breeder of our own Bella Luna, reminds us that it isn’t just stores that want the pet protecting version. She needs the LectricLifter too and quick. Before June.

Workin’ on it, Erin.