Something that scientists have been trying to replicate for years is a living thing's ability to heal itself and thus sustain repeated damage. Now, thanks to bioengineers at the University of California there is a jello like substance that reforms after being pulled apart. The substance is called Hydrogel and thanks to its high water content it is able to mimic flexibility and other textural qualities of biological matter.
Hydrogels are semi-solid, gummy-bear-like squishy materials made of chains of hydrophilic polymer molecules. Hydrophilic polymers contain polar functional groups which makes them water soluble.
The hydrophilic quality makes them a good analog for natural tissues so they often have medical applications.
The team at the University of California realized that the key to making the hydrogels self heal was giving the polymer chains a way to latch back on to each other if ripped apart or damaged. The solution is what they call "dangling side chains". They are finger like structures of hydrophilic polymer that reach off the main structure of polymers and act as something to grab on to. Another posotive trait of the self healing gel is that when pH of the solution it is in is lower, the bond becomes stronger between polymers. This will be ideal for suturing in the stomach, or creating containers for holding acidic materials.
The video below shows and explains how two pieces of the gel, when split apart, can put themselves back together with a little help. Enjoy.
The last time I made a blog post I talked about how the laser should be the weapon of the future. It is not wasting a projectile or using dangerous chemicals (gunpoweder) to propell it, but is just energy. I still stand by what I said, however, it is not yet completely within our grasp to be able to not fire a projectile at the enemy. That is why I want to tweek what I said last week by adding that the laser is the weapon of the distant future. A weapon that I am seeing as being part of the near future is the Electromagnetic Railgun.
http://www.popsci.com/files/imagecache/article_image_large/articles/tech0604magnet_730x550.jpg
The railgun is futuristic because it does not use chemicals as its propellant, but instead uses electricity. The reason it is just futuristic enough to be in the near future (in my opinion) is that it still fires a projectile. According to Popular Science, the U.S Navy recently put a prototype of a 32 megajoule railgun through some tests and it completed the tests surprisingly well. The Navy's futuristic weapon is capable of firing a large metal projectile at speeds of 5,600 mph and someday its makers think that when attatched to battleships it will be able to fire the projectile 50 to 100 nautical miles. Where does this energy come from? Well its in the name, 32 MEGAJOULES IS A LOT OF ENERGY. To put it in perspective, 1 megajoule is equivalent to a 1,000 pound car thrust at 100 mph. Multiply that by 32 and you have got a stupid amount of energy!!!
Above are two videos displaying the power of the prototype railgun. Clearly, this weapon has a lot of potential if it is firing chunks of metal that big, that fast, without dangerous chemicals. My question is will this weapon pass all of its tests and eventually be implemented on to the battleships and maybe even planes of the U.S Navy and Airforce? Or should the Defense branaches of the U.S Army stick with the dangerous chemically powered weapons that have brought our so far?
If you ask me, I say that weapons these days are inefficient. If we are talking about missiles, each costs more than a mini-van and it only works one time. The problem I have with that is, the missile is weighing down the jets that carry it thousands of miles (sometimes) just to be fired once. Although missile technology has gotten far more deadly, they still won’t always hit their target and do their job.
Missiles are not the only inefficient killing device that our world has come to use. Guns, and more specifically bullets, are even more inefficient that missiles because one missile can kill many bad guys who are spread out over a larger area. A bullet is lucky to hit one man, and the further away from the target that the bullet is fired, the less chance it has to kill. A missile can be fired from a distance that is great enough to keep the person firing it safe, while effectively killing or injuring the enemy.
I like the saying from the movie Iron Man which was something like, “I prefer the weapon that you only have to fire once.” However, even this saying I have a bit of an issue with because it isn’t clear who should be killed in that one firing. I would improve that saying by adding that you only have to fire it once to kill all the bad guys, or targets you want.
Cool clip from Iron Man^^
I want to focus more on guns and how I would improve them because my knowledge of missiles is less than my knowledge of guns. Guns have huge kickback, they jam easily, must be cleaned, they are only useful if being wielded by an accurate shooter, they can backfire, and they have a limited amount of ammunition. The limited ammunition is my biggest issue with weapons these days. If a soldier runs out of bullets he has lost his best chance at killing, and his best form of protection. So what could we do to make bullets obsolete, and make guns more deadly?
LASER GUNS! Why not go in the science fiction direction? Laser technology is already at a place where lasers can be fired from planes that have controlled amounts of power from lethal to nonlethal. Another advantage is that they can be precisely targeted, and since the lasers are beams of high energy light they travel at the speed of light. Lasers are also silent, unlike the way they are portrayed in movies. So, when fired they would not give away a soldiers position.
Here is an image of an airborne laser. This airborne laser is capable of locating in flight missiles and shooting high energy lasers at the missile which cause it to explode. I believe, that like all other technology it will get smaller and smaller until it is capable of being held by one man and fired to kill or stun or even injure another man.
There are 4 main forces that affect a flying object. Lift, which is created by the wings, happens when more pressure in the air is bellow an object than above it. When the wings of a plane create more pressure bellow the plane than above it the pressure forces the plane up. Lift is generated from the wings of a plane and allows the plane to fly. Some might say that the turbine, or jet engine is what allows a plane to fly but this is incorrect. The turbine is what drives the plane forward. I think about it like this, if a plane had no wings, but it did have a turbine it would just be a really fast car. Hangliding is another way to show that the wings allow the plane to fly. Hang-gliding is the act of launching oneself from a steep incline and soaring through the air by using a hang-glider which is a pair of V shaped wings under which a pilot is strapped. Hangliders have no engines but they are able to fly.
Wings are shaped like an airfoil which forces air to pass under the wing more slowely than the air that passes over the wing. The air under the wing moves slower and has more pressure. Therefore it creates an upword thrust to lift up the plane.
Thrust is the force that drives the plane forward. The thrust is generated by turbines or prepellers of a plane. Thrust is necessary to allow a plane to continue to fly. Without thrust a plane would fall to the ground. Take a hang-glider for example, since it has no thrust it cannot make 5 hour flights like airplanes with turbines can. So, it is clear that lift and thrust are the two forces that help a plane fly forward.
The two forces that do the opposite of lift and thrust are weight and drag. The weight pulls the plane down and can counteract the lift of the wings if it is too much. The gross weight is the plane's weight plus everything on board. In order for a plane to fly the lift must be greater than or equal to the gross weight. If the weight is more than the lift the plane will not be able to fly.
Drag is the force that opposes thrust. Drag happens simply because the plane exists and is moving. Drag happens because the air is resisting the sudden push that it gets from the plane. Planes constantly are pushing air out of the way and are transfering energy into that air. As a result, energy is lost and we call that drag. Thrust must be greater than or equal to drag in order for the plane to fly.
So my concern comes in in the lift and weight area. If not only wing span was longer but also the width of the wings was bigger in commercial airplanes, it would allow more seating (directly in the wings) which would increase the weight, but it would also increase the lift. I think one day commercial airplanes should have wings like a B-2 stealth bomber.
My knowlege of math is nowhere close to being able to calculate if wings like that would create lift greater than or equal to the weight. However, when i can calculate whether this is true or not, I will write about it.
The capabilities of fighter jets these days are awesome. Breaking the sound barrier seems easily achieved for many fighter jets. However, these days the military seems to be making more stealth planes/bombers and those cannot break the sound barrier because the sonic boom would defeat their purpose. Sound travels at about 760 mph. When a plane goes that fast it causes both visual and audible effects. There is one effect that I want to focus on; that skirt of water vapor that forms around the tail end of the jet in the picture. Why does this happen? When a jet goes that fast it is pushing the air around it away and creating more pressure in certain areas around the plane.
In this picture of a bullet traveling at high speeds, you can see the bends that the bullet is causing. As the bullet travels quickly it pushes the air in front of it out of the way. Pushing the air causes more air to be around the sides of the bullet. The same happens to a jet. Since jets are so large, when they create pressure waves they are condensing a lot more air in a given place than a bullet can. So, if the air in which the plane is flying is very moist, the moisture is condensed under the pressure of the air. The plane forms enough pressure that the water condenses into a temporary cloud around the area where the pressure is high enough to condense the water. I say temporary, because the cloud is only forming because of the intense air pressure caused by the jet traveling at very high speeds. The cloud forms, dissipates and reforms which makes it look like its moving as the plane moves. As soon as the plane’s speed drops below the sound barrier it does not create enough pressure in the air to condense water so the cloud would no longer be visible.
This image depicts the pressure wave well, calling it a shock wave which is similar to a pressure wave. As you can see in the picture a cone shape forms as the plane flies. At low altitudes, the air is filled with water vapor from evaporation, humans breathing, sweating, plants giving off water and so on. In previous blog posts I explained how cars could run on water in the future. If there is water in the air, could we use that for energy? Someday, could planes run on the moisture of the air?!
This summer, I think I am going to build a welding torch. Not just any old oxy-acetylene, ARC, or MIG welding torch though. I am going to build a welding torch that’s fuel is water. Think about my last post, when I said that hydrogen and oxygen, the two elements that make up water are so flammable that they are sometimes used in rocket ships. In rocket ships the hydrogen and oxygen are used in liquid form which requires a lot of chemicals to keep them in that state, it is very dangerous because one spark and its Apollo 13 all over again, and you need high pressure tanks to hold them. To be safer and smarter, I plan to make the hydrogen and oxygen from water, so the two elements are delivered to the nozzle of the welding torch as a gas. This is no easy task, splitting water molecules, because hydrogen and oxygen are covalently bonded.
So, how could you break the strong bonds of the hydrogen to the oxygen? Give it a lot of energy. The electron of hydrogen is shared with oxygen and doesn’t have enough energy to escape from the oxygen. So, if enough energy is transferred into the water molecule it will excite the electrons enough to allow the hydrogen to yank itself free from the overwhelming attraction to oxygen. Then you have got 2 elements, perfect for welding. The process of splitting water using electricity (the energy) is called electrolysis.
This shows the power of the flame that is created when hydrogen and oxygen react. The Dr. Pepper can was in front of the flame for a few seconds and a slit was melted in its side easily. The energy from the reaction should be harnessed and like I mentioned in my last post, I think it should be used to power cars. The coolest part about a water powered car or any HHO flame for that matter is that its only emission is be water vapor.
Only emitting water vapor is truly awesome compared to the crap that comes out of car's tale pipes these days. In a water powered car, if you could find a way to loop the exhaust pipe back into the water tank in a safe way, the car would make one tank of water last a long time by recycling its exhaust. There is one huge problem, it takes a substantial amount of energy to break the bonds of hydrogen and oxygen, so much energy that any resulting energy you would get from recombining them would be less then what it took to split them.
In a recent discovery inventor Denny Klein found a way to perform electrolysis in a way that would use less energy. Here’s a video clip on the new discovery.
In that video, listen closely if you missed it just after 1:30…
You can hear the inventor clearly say that a 100 mile trip uses about 4 OUNCES of water! 128 fluid ounces = 1 fluid gallon. According to that conversion factor you would get aproximately 3200 miles out of one gallon of water. This discovery is truly revolutionary and could really change the world if we use it correctly.
Some draw backs could be that we might find ourselves running low on water because if this technology catches on, cars all over the world would be using up fresh water and that would leave us pretty thirsty.
Sitting on my couch thinking of ways that we could make water a priority for Mankind first, cars second, I found a creative solution to the problem. I remembered that NASA uses a technology to convert urine into drinking water.
The link to the news article on Nasa’s Urine to water filter.
I understand if you're skeptical here because it does sound gross that astronauts are drinking their own pee. However, if you think about it, urine is nothing more than water with some nitrogenous waste, salts, and other dead cells and waste that the body is getting rid of by filtering them out in the kidneys. So, since NASA has found a way to filter out the unwanted molecules, all they have to do now is install one into the opening of the gas tank of the water powered car so that all pee or water passing through could be filtered. I am suggesting that cars run on urine, a very environmentally friendly idea. If the water powered car idea catches on quickly enough my future kids could be peeing into the gas tank if they’re running low on water! Then the only problem we would be dealing with would be where to dumb the excess of filtered waste coming from the pee.
Maybe homes could have a designated toilet for urinating where the waste could be flushed with small amounts of toilet water and stored under the garage so that all homes could have a fuel pump in their garage. That waste could even be filtered in the toilet and turned into pure water so that the car wouldn’t have to waste energy on filtering the urine.
With an in home pump, people wouldn’t have to pee in public. But, I think that the car should have a urine-to-water filter just in case you run out of gas in the middle of nowhere and need a few more miles out of your thirsty old car.
Since I was about four years old and first started to play with matches I have been a pyromaniac. Not a crazy one who burns down buildings but more of a scientific pyromaniac who builds foundries and smelters and just enjoys a good backyard bonfire.
When I first started being interested in fire I could never understand why water isn’t flammable. I put flaming matches, candles and pieces of paper into buckets of water and over many trials I found the data to be conclusive: water definitely isn’t flammable. At that time I was only curious because everything else seemed to be pretty flammable but water was the only thing I tried to light that didn’t catch or even blacken in the flame.
Now that I am in high school Chemistry I know that Oxygen has 6 valence electrons and Hydrogen has 1, so two Hydrogen atoms want to bond with an Oxygen atom to reach a stable octet: when there are 8 valence electrons. If not bonded Hydrogenand Oxygen together are flammable…very very very flammable… As in flammable enough to be the fuel for some rocket ships.
The way I think of it is that the statement, “if not bonded Hydrogen and Oxygen together are flammable” gives away the reason why water isn’t flammable. Water is the product of hydrogen and oxygen burning. Try sticking a match into a pile of dry ash and it will go out. Stick a match into water and it will go out. Water is basically ash! It is the product of burning so it cannot burn more and more importantly it has reached a stable octet and has 8 total valence electrons and CANNOT accept anymore.
In fire, molecules or atoms are combining with oxygen to form new compounds. Water cannot combine with oxygen because water is already stable and does not want to bond to anything else.
As shown in the excellent image above, water has charged ends. The hydrogen are positive because they gave away their one electron to bond to oxygen and now have more protons. The oxygen is negative because it gained two electrons from the hydrogen so the oxygen has more electrons than protons and is negative. These charges give water some of the characteristics that make life possible: adhesion and cohesion. I think one day all cars should run on water, but that’s an idea for another post so I’ll leave my reader curious for one more week.
One use of hydrogel shown here is scar reduction.
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