By Sarah Jenn — NewsBTC In a step closer towards the institutionalization of bitcoin trading, a New York firm announced that it is expanding its operations to include trading in blocks of bitcoin. Genesis Trading, a division of SecondMarket, says that it is currently the only licensed broker-dealer that offers this service.
Genesis is now specializing its operations to focus on bitcoin trading with its own team of traders and support staff. According to its Chief Executive Brendan O’Connor, their plan is to generate business from the hedge funds and private investors who have shown an interest in the cryptocurrency. Read more
Our smartphones can do a lot—compute, pin down our location, sense motion and orientation, send and receive wireless signals, take photographs and video. What if you could also learn exactly what chemical components were present in any object? A new invention out of Israel aims to enable just that.
“The tricorder is no longer science fiction,” a recent Tel Aviv University (TAU) article declared. While a number devices in recent years have inspired similar comparisons, maybe this one is a little closer. Read more
ByKatie Peek — Popular Science As you fall feet first across an event horizon—the point where nothing can escape the black hole’s gravitational pull—you don’t feel anything change. But eventually, gravity is so much stronger at your feet than your head that you’re stretched apart, like Play-Doh, until you snap. Or at least, that’s the picture physicists drew after Einstein proposed his theory of general relativity in 1915. In the past few years, new possibilities for your untimely end have emerged.
The thought experiments attempt to resolve a paradox that physicist Stephen Hawking outlined in the 1970s. He showed that in their current forms, the two major pillars of physics—quantum mechanics and general relativity—can’t both be true near a black hole. General relativity governs how very massive objects work, while quantum mechanics governs how very tiny objects work. In most of the universe, physicists can choose which set of rules to apply—general relativity for a galaxy cluster, quantum mechanics for a particle accelerator—but a black hole is both very massive and very small. Read more
There’s been a lot of talk lately about how spider silk is this crazy wonder material that may soon find its way into everything from electronics to ultra-strong fabrics. Now, there’s another reason to be excited about spider silk: doctors might one day use the stuff to grow you a new heart.
Growing new organs and tissues outside the body is the bleeding edge of biomedical research. Just imagine: if doctors could grow replacement hearts or kidneys from a patient’s own stem cells, that patient would no longer have to face the agonizing prospect of waiting to find a suitable donor. The risk of organ rejection would become nil. But there’s a lot of R&D to be done before we get there. One initial challenge has been finding a scaffold material to grow organ tissues on—something that’s non-toxic, will not impede cell growth, and will not, itself, be rejected by the body. That, it turns out, is a pretty tall order. Read more
Researchers at Purdue University have shown how standard inkjet-printers can be employed to produce flexible electronic circuits from liquid-metal nanoparticle inks. This simple printing solution promises faster, cheaper, and easier production of stretchable, bendable electronics for clothing, soft robotics, and wearable devices. Read More
I read all the news about SpaceX’s Falcon 9 latest “failure” to land on an autonomous spaceport drone ship aka barge. I view these as trials to success. Here’s why.
1. Grasshopper Successes: The two videos below show that the early landing trials aka Grasshopper from several heights between 250m and 1,000m.
The lessons here are:
a) Pinpoint landing of a 1st stage rocket is technologically feasible.
b) This 1st stage rocket has to attain zero vertical velocity at a minimum 250m above the barge.
Video of 250m test
Video of 1,000m test
2. Falcon 9 1st stage crash landing — 1st attempt: SpaceX tells us that the failure was due to a hard landing (see video below) but at 0:03 minutes into the video one can see that the 1st stage has substantially tilted before it hit the deck i.e. the 1st stage did not tilt because it hit the deck.
The lessons here:
a) A wobble — a dynamic instability — occurs before landing.
b) The guidance systems are unable to cope with new wobble.
Video of 1st attempt
3. Falcon 9 1st stage crash landing — 2nd attempt: The video of the second attempt (below) confirms that indeed a wobble has been introduced before the stabilization fins are deployed. Further, this deployment exacerbates the wobble, and the guidance systems is unable to handle this exacerbated wobble.
The lessons here:
a) 1st stage vertical velocity needs to be zero by at least 250m above deck.
b) The stabilization fins need to be redesigned to alleviate exacerbation.
c) Like the Space Ship One’s shuttlecock approach, the 1st stage upper fins need to be deployed before the lower fins are.
d) Upgrade the landing guidance system to account for more severe wobbles.
If at a minimum, SpaceX achieves zero velocity at 250m before deployment of landing gear it will be successful. The other recommendations are good to have.
I expect SpaceX to be successful by their 3rd try.
When I was in elementary school, about 50 years ago, teachers used to stand in front of a class of 40 or 50 children and write on a blackboard with chalk. To make sure the material was absorbed, the teacher asked occasional questions and assigned lots of homework. If students discussed their homework or helped each other in tests, it was called cheating, and they were punished.
Today, the blackboard has become a whiteboard; chalk has become a magic marker; the slates that students used have been replaced by notebooks; and classes have sometimes gotten smaller. Little else has changed. True, some schools are providing their students with laptops, and teachers are increasingly using technology and encouraging collaboration. But the methods are essentially the same—with the teacher dictating learning. Read more
When scientists looked at Mars through early telescopes, they saw a fuzzy, rust-colored globe scored by mysterious dark gashes some believed were alien canals. Later, armed with sharper images, we scoffed at such naiveté. Mars is obviously dry as a bone and uninhabited. Now, with a great deal more information from rovers and satellites, we believe Mars was once wet. As for life? The jury’s still out.
It shows how much we still have to learn (and are learning) about our solar system. Not too long ago, we only suspected one ocean of liquid water beyond Earth (on Europa). Now, thanks to robotic explorers, like NASA’s Dawn and Cassini missions, we’re finding evidence of oceans throughout the solar system. Read more
I have simple thinking in mind – like visualizing a rotating wheel suspended from its hub without friction so it can be pulled up and down easily.
You can trust that angular momentum remains constant (nature has a knack for that). But the wheel is also a clock. So if you lower it, it must go slower down there and become faster again when retrieved. It thus makes for a beautiful mental plaything (a “hot” one as the young people would say). Angular momentum can be called “L’hombre” (a macho word which is not quite right in Spanish). Can you feel L’hombre in your hand while moving up and down your toy in your mind?
The word “L’hombre” allows one to remember “L = ω mr^2 ” for angular momentum L in one’s mind forever. Omega (or ω) is the rotation rate, m the mass of the wheel’s rim (with a virtually weightless hub for simplicity), and r is the radius. So the wheel is now transparent to us like glass, right? What happens if ω is halved for simplicity as on a neutron star?
Either m must be doubled, or else r must be increased by square-root 2, or both m and r must have changed somehow in a compatible manner. How about m halved and r doubled?
The latter option is the correct one. How can one be sure? Because of quantum mechanics, of all things. Light coming from below has half the frequency and energy when ω is halved. But photon energy and particle masses are locally inter-convertible. So all masses downstairs are halved since photon energy is halved. Hence L’ = ½ ω ½ m (2r)2 = L. High-noon L’hombre has won.
This is what the wheel told us. But: People know from special relativity that the transversal size of departing objects (at the bottom in our case) does not change. Fortunately, optical distortions are allowed. Hence the horizontal doubling of r that is implicit in L’hombre is real albeit masked from above. This implies that the constant speed of light c appears to be halved optically when watched from above even though it is not reduced. This halving was predicted by Einstein in 1907. So the present Noetherian picture – since Emmy Noether discovered the power of angular-momentum conservation in 1916 – is correct.
Unfortunarely, the L’hombre result retrieved by our letting the wheel go down and then up again in our minds lies so deep in the foundations of nature that its consequences cut very deep, too. It, for example, follows from this macho phantasy that certain experiments that still got planned before L’hombre was applied to our wheel need to be postponed: until the consequences of L’hombre on them have been investigated thoroughly. Otherwise those consequences could cause a big – nasty – surprise because L’hombre is so strong after his having sprung from a female phantasy.
I need not mention which experiment I have in mind that is presently being prepared under a communication curtain regarding its safety. L’hombre is ready to pull the false garment away.
“Speaking with former MakerBot CEO, Jenny Lawton, at CES this year, she told me that 3D printing will become mainstream and really begin to explode as far as adoption rates go, when a full cycle of education has been exposed to the technology.” Read more
I read all the news about SpaceX’s Falcon 9 latest “failure” to land on an autonomous spaceport drone ship aka barge. I view these as trials to success. Here’s why.
