discuss Science & Technology news & discussion

[CraigD]

Post and discuss interesting articles & videos about science and technology.

You don't need to be an expert - just interested in the wonders of modern science, technology, and the history of these fields.

Please keep it rational, and post articles from reputable sources.
Try not to editorialise headlines and keep the copy to just a paragraph with a link to the original source. When quoting excerpts from articles, I think the best method is to italicise the copy, and include a link to the source.

Have some fun with your comments and discussions... just keep the sources legitimate.

Other threads:
The Break Room has a number of other popular threads, so there is no need to post material here that is better suited to these other threads:

- Covid19-Coronavirus updates and news
- Conspiracy Thread Free For All
- The *religious* discussion thread

Please enjoy!

 

[Cal2]

Love this ... so much potential for safe and affordable housing.

With outfits like banks and insurance companies, and some governments and home buyers starting to factor in more the increased fire, flood and wind risks from climate change, I'm thinking housing that's more affordable yet can withstand such catastrophes better will be even more attractive going into the future in many areas. 3D printed houses built of certain materials and configurations could end up being a best viable option.

 

[Cal2]

COBOD AND CEMEX USE NEW CONCRETE THAT “GAINS SHAPE INSTANTANEOUSLY” TO 3D PRINT HOUSE IN ANGOLA​

"Mexican building material supplier CEMEX has developed a means of turning regular concrete into a more versatile aggregate, and deployed it to 3D print a low-cost home on the African continent.

Formulated alongside 3D printer manufacturer COBOD, this D.fab admixture-boosted blend is said to “gain shape instantaneously,” lending it significant construction lead time and cost-minimizing potential. Already, the companies have put their concrete to the test, working with contractor Power2Build to build Angola’s first 3D printed home, and they say it could now have much broader applications.

“To address the world´s affordable housing needs requires not only a technology that can build faster, but also materials that are as cost-effective as ordinary concrete,” said Ricardo Almeida, CEO of Power2Build. “With this solution, the strength and quality of concrete combined with the speed and automation of 3D printing, we can help solve the affordable housing crisis in Angola and elsewhere.”

https://3dprintingindustry.com/news...taneously-to-3d-print-house-in-angola-201633/

My 1st guess is they're using a new type of fast setting accelerant mixed into the concrete at the nozzle, to get the "gains shape instantly" effect without plugging up their equipment.

More on this. Bolding is mine:

"World's Largest Real Concrete 3D Printed Building” Goes up in Oman

"COBOD’s additive construction technology has been deployed worldwide, from Germany to Kenya, the U.S. to Belgium. The latest location for the Danish firm’s construction 3D printer is Oman, where COBOD technology was used to make “the world’s largest 3D printed real concrete building.”

The key phrase there is “real concrete”, as 3D printed buildings, including those previously made with COBOD machines, typically rely on dry mix mortar formulas, not concrete. In part this is because concrete generally dries too slowly to self-support during the printing process. However, as unveiled with the first 3D printed house in Angola, a new concrete concoction called D.fab makes it possible to 3D print with real concrete and at the same, lower price.

D.fab was developed by COBOD and CEMEX (NYSE: CX), a Mexican multinational building materials company with $13 billion in revenue and over 41,000 employees. Because ready-to-mix dry mix mortars are five to 10 times the price of standard, ready-mix concrete, the partners sought to develop a solution that could be less expensive and created from local sand, gravel, cement.

Only one percent of the total mixture consists “magic mix” from COBOD and CEMEX. This system of admixtures consists of specialty chemicals incorporated at the batching plant that makes the concrete more fluid and pumpable. Another admixture that speeds up the curing process is added in the dosing unit at the printhead, along the concrete to gain shape. According to COBOD, this drops the cost of materials by 90 percent."

https://3dprint.com/287725/worlds-largest-real-concrete-3d-printed-building-goes-up-in-oman/

 

[Cal2]

More on this. Bolding is mine:

"World's Largest Real Concrete 3D Printed Building” Goes up in Oman

"COBOD’s additive construction technology has been deployed worldwide, from Germany to Kenya, the U.S. to Belgium. The latest location for the Danish firm’s construction 3D printer is Oman, where COBOD technology was used to make “the world’s largest 3D printed real concrete building.”

The key phrase there is “real concrete”, as 3D printed buildings, including those previously made with COBOD machines, typically rely on dry mix mortar formulas, not concrete. In part this is because concrete generally dries too slowly to self-support during the printing process. However, as unveiled with the first 3D printed house in Angola, a new concrete concoction called D.fab makes it possible to 3D print with real concrete and at the same, lower price.

D.fab was developed by COBOD and CEMEX (NYSE: CX), a Mexican multinational building materials company with $13 billion in revenue and over 41,000 employees. Because ready-to-mix dry mix mortars are five to 10 times the price of standard, ready-mix concrete, the partners sought to develop a solution that could be less expensive and created from local sand, gravel, cement.

Only one percent of the total mixture consists “magic mix” from COBOD and CEMEX. This system of admixtures consists of specialty chemicals incorporated at the batching plant that makes the concrete more fluid and pumpable. Another admixture that speeds up the curing process is added in the dosing unit at the printhead, along the concrete to gain shape. According to COBOD, this drops the cost of materials by 90 percent."

https://3dprint.com/287725/worlds-largest-real-concrete-3d-printed-building-goes-up-in-oman/

Adding to this: Just speculation, but once they start construction 3d printing using something like a honey comb design, for better heating and cooling while using less materials and gaining extra structural strength; and can do it cost effectively with materials besides concrete, like waste wood, hemp, ...... - the especially long term benefits there could be.....

 

[Cal2]

Gravity Could Solve Clean Energy’s One Major Drawback​

IN A SWISS valley, an unusual multi-armed crane lifts two 35-ton concrete blocks high into the air. The blocks delicately inch their way up the blue steel frame of the crane, where they hang suspended from either side of a 66-meter-wide horizontal arm. There are three arms in total, each one housing the cables, winches, and grabbing hooks needed to hoist another pair of blocks into the sky, giving the apparatus the appearance of a giant metallic insect lifting and stacking bricks with steel webs. Although the tower is 75 meters tall, it is easily dwarfed by the forested flanks of southern Switzerland’s Lepontine Alps, which rise from the valley floor in all directions.

Thirty meters. Thirty-five. Forty. The concrete blocks are slowly hoisted upwards by motors powered with electricity from the Swiss power grid. For a few seconds they hang in the warm September air, then the steel cables holding the blocks start to unspool and they begin their slow descent to join the few dozen similar blocks stacked at the foot of the tower. This is the moment that this elaborate dance of steel and concrete has been designed for. As each block descends, the motors that lift the blocks start spinning in reverse, generating electricity that courses through the thick cables running down the side of the crane and onto the power grid. In the 30 seconds during which the blocks are descending, each one generates about one megawatt of electricity: enough to power roughly 1,000 homes.

This tower is a prototype from Switzerland-based Energy Vault, one of a number of startups finding new ways to use gravity to generate electricity. A fully-sized version of the tower might contain 7,000 bricks and provide enough electricity to power several thousand homes for eight hours. Storing energy in this way could help solve the biggest problem facing the transition to renewable electricity: finding a zero-carbon way to keep the lights on when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. “The greatest hurdle we have is getting low-cost storage,” says Robert Piconi, CEO and cofounder of Energy Vault.

https://www.wired.com/story/energy-vault-gravity-storage/

 

[J Sokol]

Fossil fuel firms among biggest spenders on Google ads that look like search results​

Fossil fuel companies and firms that work closely with them are among the biggest spenders on ads designed to look like Google search results, in what campaigners say is an example of “endemic greenwashing”.

The Guardian analysed ads served on Google search results for 78 climate-related terms, in collaboration with InfluenceMap, a thinktank that tracks the lobbying efforts of polluting industries.

The results show that over one in five ads seen in the study – more than 1,600 in total – were placed by companies with significant interests in fossil fuels.

https://www.theguardian.com/technol...s-on-google-ads-that-look-like-search-results

 

[Cannuck]

Found this today... we've been discussing many of these breakthroughs

SPINLAUNCH

Also, the video following discusses Hempcrete

 

[Cal2]

.

 

[koolishman]

Huge fossilised ‘sea dragon’ found in Rutland reservoir​

During landscaping work at the reserve's reservoir in February 2021, he'd spotted something unusual poking out of the mud.
It wasn't a dinosaur. But it was the fossilised remains of a ten-metre long sea predator called an ichthyosaur.
And it was the largest of its type ever discovered in the UK.

 

[koolishman]

In a First, Man Receives a Heart From a Genetically Altered Pig​

A 57-year-old man with life-threatening heart disease has received a heart from a genetically modified pig, a groundbreaking procedure that offers hope to hundreds of thousands of patients with failing organs.

It is the first successful transplant of a pig’s heart into a human being. The eight-hour operation took place in Baltimore on Friday, and the patient, David Bennett Sr. of Maryland, was doing well on Monday, according to surgeons at the University of Maryland Medical Center.

“It creates the pulse, it creates the pressure, it is his heart,” said Dr. Bartley Griffith, the director of the cardiac transplant program at the medical center, who performed the operation.

 

[CraigD]

An undersea eruption has caused a tsunami that has just hit our neighbour Tonga.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1482218193619865600

https://twitter.com/x/status/1482249845943717888

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-01...rning-after-undersea-volcano-erupts/100759102

The eruption, located about 65 kilometres north of Nuku'alofa, caused a tsunami measuring 1.2 metres, Australia's Bureau of Meteorology said. Lasting eight minutes, the eruption could be heard as "loud thunder sounds" in Fiji, more than 800km away, officials in the capital Suva said.

Stay safe everyone in the South Pacific.

 

[Cal2]

This Smartphone 3D Printer Could Make Meds Tailored Just for You

"A collaborative team of researchers from University College London, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (USC), and FabRx, an expert in pharma-tech, tackled the issue of fabricating personalized medication not just by 3D printing it, but by 3D printing it using the light from a smartphone screen."

https://3dprint.com/287752/research...nter-for-fabricating-personalized-medication/

 

[Sutruk]

An undersea eruption has caused a tsunami that has just hit our neighbour Tonga.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1482218193619865600

https://twitter.com/x/status/1482249845943717888

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-01...rning-after-undersea-volcano-erupts/100759102

The eruption, located about 65 kilometres north of Nuku'alofa, caused a tsunami measuring 1.2 metres, Australia's Bureau of Meteorology said. Lasting eight minutes, the eruption could be heard as "loud thunder sounds" in Fiji, more than 800km away, officials in the capital Suva said.

Stay safe everyone in the South Pacific.

Hey @CraigD ! Welcome back Happy to see that you are good and back again

 

[CraigD]

Hey @CraigD ! Welcome back Happy to see that you are good and back again

Hello my friend

Great to be back, with lots of interesting science and technology posts from you guys to read through when I get the chance!

It's also great to see @koolishman posting again

 

[J Sokol]

‘We started eating them’: what do you do with an invasive army of crayfish clones?​

Small, bluish-grey and speckled, it would be easy to overlook the marbled crayfish. Except for the fact it is likely to be coming to a pond or river near you soon – if it is not already there. The all-female freshwater crustacean has become a focus of fascination for scientists in recent years, due to its unique ability among decapods – the family that includes shrimps, crabs and lobsters – to clone itself and quickly adapt to new environments, as well as the fact that it has spread exponentially.

https://www.theguardian.com/environ...-with-an-invasive-army-of-crayfish-clones-aoe

 

[CraigD]

‘We started eating them’: what do you do with an invasive army of crayfish clones?​

Small, bluish-grey and speckled, it would be easy to overlook the marbled crayfish. Except for the fact it is likely to be coming to a pond or river near you soon – if it is not already there. The all-female freshwater crustacean has become a focus of fascination for scientists in recent years, due to its unique ability among decapods – the family that includes shrimps, crabs and lobsters – to clone itself and quickly adapt to new environments, as well as the fact that it has spread exponentially.

https://www.theguardian.com/environ...-with-an-invasive-army-of-crayfish-clones-aoe

The common freshwater crayfish variety in Australia is called a Yabbie (Cherax destructor) and they can happily survive in murky (even polluted) waters that won't support other aquatic life.

They are amazingly resilient creatures and quite easy to catch: tie a small piece of meat to the end of a length of string, and dunk it into the murky depths until you feel a yabby latch onto it - he wont let go, and you can pull him out. They can even survive long periods out of water.

 

[Cannuck]

Elon Musk discusses SpaceX in 2022 and beyond... (cue @ 11:30)

 

[Cal2]

Elon Musk discusses SpaceX in 2022 and beyond... (cue @ 11:30)

Space travel needs to happen more like this:

 

[koolishman]

Chemical pollution has passed safe limit for humanity, say scientists​

The cocktail of chemical pollution that pervades the planet now threatens the stability of global ecosystems upon which humanity depends, scientists have said.

Plastics are of particularly high concern, they said, along with 350,000 synthetic chemicals including pesticides, industrial compounds and antibiotics. Plastic pollution is now found from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans, and some toxic chemicals, such as PCBs, are long-lasting and widespread.

The study concludes that chemical pollution has crossed a “planetary boundary”, the point at which human-made changes to the Earth push it outside the stable environment of the last 10,000 years.

 

[koolishman]

Shifting meetings, conventions online curbs climate change ​

Study from Cornell Uni

The COVID-19 global pandemic – unexpectedly – has shown humanity a new way to reduce climate change: Scrap in-person meetings and conventions.


Moving a professional conference completely online reduces its carbon footprint by 94%, and shifting it to a hybrid model, with no more than half of conventioneers online, curtails the footprint to 67%, according to a new Cornell-led study in the Dec. 16 issue of Nature Communications.


It’s a significant impact: The annual carbon footprint for the global event and convention industry is on par with the yearly greenhouse gas emissions of the entire U.S., according to the new paper.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-27251-2

 

[koolishman]

Que? Dogs' brains can tell Spanish from Hungarian, study finds​

Dogs can distinguish between languages, researchers in Hungary found, after playing excerpts from the story "The Little Prince" in Spanish and Hungarian to a group of 18 canines and examining how their brains reacted.

The study was led by Laura V. Cuaya at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, who moved to the city from Mexico a few years ago, bringing her dog Kun-kun with her.

"I wondered whether Kun-kun noticed that people in Budapest spoke a different language, Hungarian," she said.

"(In the research) we found for the first time that a non-human brain can distinguish (between) languages."

In their lives with humans, dogs pick up on the auditory patterns of the language they are exposed to, said Raul Hernandez-Perez, co-author of the study.

 

[koolishman]

In a First, Scientists Film a Puffin Scratching Itself With a Stick​

From 2019

What’s a puffin to do with an itchy back and a short little beak? Grab a stick, a new study suggests.

 

[koolishman]

Something bizarre is raining down on Uranus​

Scientists believe that Neptune and Uranus could both be home to a constant stream of “diamond rain”. The two planets are considered “ice giants”. They’re mostly made of water, methane, and ammonia, which accounts for the icy-like titles we’ve given them.

While they might not be as talked about as some of the other giants in our solar system, ice giants are still remarkable. Unfortunately, both Uranus and Neptune are too difficult to study up close. It will probably be years before we can send a spacecraft out to study the planets specifically. Because of that, scientists have used the telescopic observations that we’ve captured to decode more about these planets, including the existence of diamond rain

 

[koolishman]

How Pearls Obtain Their Remarkable Symmetry​

A concept called ‘pink noise’ brings order to seemingly disorderly patterns seen in classical music, seismic activity, economic markets and even pearls.


Researchers have now found that mollusks use a complex layering process that follows mathematical rules seen throughout the world, reports Rachel Crowell for Science News. Layers of the aragonite and conchiolin are called nacre, and after each layer forms, mollusks will adjust each sheet to maintain its symmetry. If one layer of the pearl’s nacre is thinner, the next layer will be thicker to balance out irregularities, over time creating a smooth, uniform pearl that isn’t lopsided. The process is then repeated until thousands of layers of nacre from the gem.

 

[koolishman]

‘Intriguing’ Carbon Isotopes on Mars Could Be From Cosmic Dust, UV Radiation or Ancient Life​

NASA scientists compared the data to chemical signatures of biological processes on Earth and found some similarities to billion-year-old microbes

Chemical signatures like these are considered strong—but heavily debated—evidence for prehistoric, microbial life here on Earth, but the two planets are ultimately too different to make any definitive claims based on direct comparisons alone. Alternatively, scientists suggest the strange isotopes could have been caused by space dust or the degradation of carbon dioxide from ultraviolet light, reports Andrew Griffin for the Independent. Researchers published details of the carbon signature this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

 

[koolishman]

Chinese researchers claim electroculture works as theorized​

Electroculture has been suggested as a possible means for increasing crop yields. The idea is to apply an electric current to growing plants; doing so, for some unknown reason, may increase yields. Multiple studies have tested the idea, but thus far, all of them have been tainted by claims of methodological flaws. Now, similar claims are being made about the research by the team in China. For as-yet unknown reasons, the team chose not to use a double-blind approach in the study. This has led critics to note that their results could have come from some other factor.