In the 40 years that humans have been traveling into space, the
suits they wear have changed very little. The bulky, gas-pressurized
outfits give astronauts a bubble of protection, but their significant
mass and the pressure itself severely limit mobility.
Dava Newman, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems at MIT, wants to change that.
Newman
is working on a sleek, advanced suit designed to allow superior
mobility when humans eventually reach Mars or return to the moon. Her
spandex and nylon BioSuit is not your grandfather's spacesuit--think
more Spiderman, less John Glenn.
Traditional bulky spacesuits
"do not afford the mobility and locomotion capability that astronauts
need for partial gravity exploration missions. We really must design
for greater mobility and enhanced human and robotic capability," Newman
says.
Newman, her colleague Jeff Hoffman, her students and a
local design firm, Trotti and Associates, have been working on the
project for about seven years. Their prototypes are not yet ready for
space travel, but demonstrate what they're trying to achieve--a
lightweight, skintight suit that will allow astronauts to become truly
mobile lunar and Mars explorers.
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/biosuit-0716.html
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Anyone can get the Web on their cellphone these days. But now it
seems Google is interested in so much more than that. It has reportedly
approached the Federal Communications Commission recently about
obtaining wireless spectrum, the base upon which mobile-phone networks
are built, in the U.S. agency's next auction.
Never mind the
potential buyout of Bell Canada Inc. or Apple Inc.'s much-hyped
introduction of the iPhone yesterday, there's a much larger,
game-changing force in telecommunications lurking just around the
corner.
Search engine giant Google Inc. has been putting together
a massive cable network to provide customers around the world with
telecommunications services ranging from broadband Internet to home and
mobile phones.
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The
researchers used a scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) for their
cutting tool, which works by manoeuvring a sharp metal tip close to an
object, applying a small voltage, and measuring the trickle of
electrons that flow between the two.
The team first used their STM to locate a methylaminocarbyne (CNHCH3) molecule that was fixed to a platinum surface.
Then
they turned up the voltage, increasing the flow of electrons. That was
enough to break one bond – between the molecule's nitrogen and
hydrogen atom – but not to disturb any of the other bonds,
leaving a molecule of methylisocyanide (CNCH3).
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12161-molecular-surgery-snips-off-a-single-atom.html
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