N Y B B L E M O N T H L Y N E W S L E T T E R
A Free Ezine about Anything Tech and Everything Else
2011.07.18 Issue No. 227
Some of you would know that one of my other hobbies (aside from Nybble) is photography. I would take pictures whenever I can and at the end of each month, publish the better ones on Fotopic, a photo-sharing website. I would go resize them for faster uploading, then annotate/caption each of them online. Been doing this for the past few years. In fact, I've actually purchased more storage space from Fotopic to house my expanding collection.
I haven't been uploading pictures for a long time now, as I've been busy. I logged in to aching.fotopic.net to see how my galleries are doing. The URL is unresolveable. I tried the main
Fotopic website. Apparently, Fotopic's parent company has ceased trading. All photos are safe in the servers, but inaccessible until such time when the another team comes in restores the service. Bummer. All those time and effort wasted. I've since started uploading some of my photos to
PicasaWeb. Google give you 1GB of quota, but if you keep your pictures less than 800 pixels wide, they don't count against the quota. Even better, if you join
Google+, that picture size limit is bumped up to 2048 pixels. Google+, here I come.
Have an answer, comment, suggestion, or violent reaction? Send them my way by clicking on Reply or join
nybbletalk@yahoogroups.com to discuss a topic. If you think Nybble is good enough, do tell the Facebook users about it. Thanks.
_________TABLE OF CONTENTS_________
* US Soldier Regrows Legs
* Windows into Solar Panels
* Handwritten Circuits with Silver Pens
* Inkjet-Printed Solar Cells
* Algorithm Solves Any-Sized Rubik's Cube
* Likeable Links
* Questionable Question
* Quotable Quote
* Trivial Trivia
* Laughable Laugh
_________US SOLDIER REGROWS LEGS_________
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2005595/US-soldier-Isaias-Hernandez-grows-leg-pig-bladder-hormone-injection.html
A U.S.soldier who had most of his leg muscle blown off in Afghanistan has become the first to see it grow back in a pioneering experimental operation.
Marine Isaias Hernandez lost 70 per cent of his right thigh muscles when an enemy mortar exploded as he tried to carry out repairs to a truck in Afghanistan. With such severe muscle damage Hernandez would ordinarily have had his leg amputated. But a re-think in the way soldiers are treated led to the wounded Marine being injected with a growth promoting substance extracted from pig bladders.
In preparation for the operation, corporal Hernandez was made to build up the remaining 30 per cent of muscle left on the damaged thigh. Surgeons then sliced into the thigh, placing a thin slice of a substance called extracellular matrix. Since the experimental growth hormone was used, Hernandez has regained most of the strength in his right thigh.
The recovery is particularly exciting for scientists as it involves the regeneration of skeletal muscle which ordinarily does not grow back. The surgery is the result of a $70 million investment by the U.S. military into regenerative medicine research.
_________WINDOWS INTO SOLAR PANELS________
http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/06/post-5.php?ref=fpblg
A start-up in Northern California is working on creating "solar windows" that could act as solar panels at the same time as blocking sunlight from entering office buildings to reduce their energy needs.
The company
Pythagoras Solar is based in San Mateo, California, and it won an award from the "GE ecomagination Challenge," award of $100,000 last week for its idea. The company makes a "window laced with solar cells," that could generate power for office buildings and shield offices from sunlight, thus reducing air conditioning costs.
The technology is a class of equipment that seeks to replace parts of buildings with solar panels to generate energy. Other possibilities include window awnings and roofing tiles. Some of Pythagoras' windows are already installed on Chicago's
Willis Tower (formerly known as the Sears Tower.) CEO Fink wouldn't reveal his system's cost per watt, but he says that "for the typical customer" the system will pay for itself in three to five years.
_________HANDWRITTEN CIRCUITS WITH SILVER PENS________
http://www.gizmag.com/silver-pen-for-handwriting-electrical-circuits/19059/
People have been using pens to jot down their thoughts for thousands of years but now engineers at the University of Illinois have developed a silver-inked rollerball pen that allows users to jot down electrical circuits and interconnects on paper, wood and other surfaces. Looking just like a regular ballpoint pen, the pen's ink consists of a solution of real silver that dries to leave electrically conductive silver pathways. These pathways maintain their conductivity through multiple bends and folds of the paper, enabling users to personally fabricate low-cost, flexible and disposable electronic devices.
While metallic inks have been used to manufacture electronic devices using inkjet printing technology, the silver pen offers users the freedom and flexibility to construct electronic devices on the fly.
The researchers have used the pen to create a flexible LED display on paper, conductive text and three-dimensional radio-frequency antennas. They now plan to expand the palette of inks to enable pen-on-paper writing of other electronic and ionically conductive materials.
While the pen is likely to prove attractive to electrical engineers and hobbyists, the researchers have also highlighted the potential of the device for creating art. Using the pen to sketch a copy of the painting "Sae-Han-Do" by Jung Hee Kim, which portrays a house, trees and Chinese text, the researchers used the ink as wiring for an LED mounted on the roof of the house that was powered by a five-volt battery connected to the edge of the painting.
_________INKJET-PRINTED SOLAR CELLS_________
http://www.gizmag.com/inkjet-printing-cigs-solar-cells/19057/
Traditional solar cell production techniques are usually time consuming and require expensive vacuum systems or toxic chemicals. Depositing chemical compounds such as CIGS on a substrate using vapor phase deposition also wastes most of the expensive material in the process. For the first time, engineers at Oregon State University (OSU) have now developed a process to create "CIGS" solar cells with inkjet printing technology that allows for precise patterning to reduce raw material waste by 90 percent and significantly lower the cost of producing solar cells with promising, yet expensive compounds.
The researchers focused on chalcopyrite, or "CIGS" - so named for the copper, indium, gallium and selenium elements of which it's composed - due to its high solar efficiency. A layer of chalcopyrite one or two microns thick has the ability to capture the energy from photons about as efficiently as a 50-micron-thick layer made of silicon.
The researchers were able to create an ink that could print chalcopyrite onto substrates with an inkjet approach, with a power conversion efficiency of about five percent. While this isn't yet high enough to create a commercially viable solar cell, the researchers say they expect to be able to achieve an efficiency of about 12 percent with continued research. The engineers are also studying other compounds that could be used with the inkjet technology that could cost even less. If they are able to reduce costs enough, the researchers say it also offers the prospect of creating solar cells that could be built directly into roofing materials.
_________ALGORITHM SOLVES ANY-SIZED RUBIK'S CUBE_________
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20636-rubiks-cubes-of-any-size-can-now-be-solved.html
Only the most hardcore puzzle-solvers ever go beyond the standard 3x3x3 Rubik's cube. Now an algorithm has been developed that can solve a Rubik's cube of any size.
Rubik's cube science got a boost last year when a team led by programmer Tomas Rokicki of Palo Alto, California, showed that even the most scrambled standard Rubik's cube can be solved in 20 moves or less. That feat was a big deal: the figure has been dubbed "God's number", the assumption being that the Almighty couldn't solve it faster. But that result didn't shed light on the monster cubes.
So Erik Demaine, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, set out to find a general algorithm for solving a cube with any side-length – of n squares. The new approach differs from that of Rokicki's. The latter used a "brute force" method to check all 43 quintillion possible solutions, but doing the same for larger cubes would be impossible. Instead, Demaine's team started by looking at a method Rubik's cube enthusiasts commonly use to quickly solve the puzzle. Essentially, you try to move a single square, or "cubie", into the desired position while leaving the rest of the cube as unchanged as possible. Because it's not possible to move a single cubie without disturbing others, this method is time-consuming, requiring a number of moves that is proportional to n2. Demaine and his colleagues found a short-cut. Each cubie has a particular path that will place it in the correct position. His algorithm looks for cubies that all need to go in the same direction, then moves them at the same time.
Grouping cubies with similar paths reduces the number of moves required by a factor of around log n. This means that the maximum number of moves that will ever be required for a cube of side n is proportional to n2/log n.
Clark says it's possible that some of the techniques behind the algorithm could be applied to speeding up other problems that involve searching or sorting through sets of data with a similar mathematical structure to the cube.
_________LIKEABLE LINKS_________
The World's Biggest Pac-Man
http://worldsbiggestpacman.com/
Subtitle Search
http://subscene.com/
Jim's Fortune Cookie Image Generator
http://jim.ignitiondomain.com/fc/
Scientific Illustration
http://scientificillustration.tumblr.com/
What Do You Love?
http://www.wdyl.com/
_________QUESTIONABLE QUESTION_________
Whenever I sit on a chair that someone else just sat on it's always warm, never cool. Does this mean I have the coldest butt in the world?
_________QUOTABLE QUOTE_________
The problem with doing nothing is not knowing when you're finished.
~ Benjamin Franklin
_________TRIVIAL TRIVIA_________
How did Attila die?
Attila the Hun died of a nosebleed on his wedding night in A.D. 453.
Source: Arcamax Trivia
_________LAUGHABLE LAUGH_________
I couldn't find my luggage at the airport baggage area. So I went to the lost luggage office and told the woman there that my bags never showed up.
She smiled and told me not to worry as they were trained professionals and I was in good hands. "Now," she asked me, "Has your plane arrived yet?"
That's all for this week. Nybble is and will always be a work in progress. Please do send me your comments and suggestions on how to improve Nybble. Just hit the reply button to you know, reply.
A very enlightening read from a very enlightened guy. Sagan starts off the book by going through how humans eventually discovered that we are not the centre of the universe. And what better way to develop this humility by studying the universe. He then proceeds to give us an introduction of the planets and the major moons, and whether these have a good chance of harbouring life or not. If none are found in the nearby planets, maybe we can start things off by colonizing them. If not the planets, then maybe the asteroids. Sagan also gives an introduction of the US space missions, especially Voyager. 
He shares some interesting anecdotes, how it was beset by technical problems mid-mission, and how human ingenuity always manages to save the day, etc.
