The oldest known dinosaur, lighting up a space station and the black marble

Alt-week takes a look at the best science and alternative tech stories from the last seven days.

While some refer to it as a lonely planet, we prefer to think of it as unique. Where else can you find such diverse biology that dates back millions of years, that also has a space station hovering delicately above it. A planet where several millennia of human evolution gave birth to the comedy animated gif? Precisely. One of a kind. This is alt-week.

wwThere are many challenges presented to humans when living in a space station. Not just the obvious basics such as sufficient resources of food and water, even the simple light bulb poses a problem. First of all, what happens if they run out? Beyond that there are other, more subtle, issues to deal with. Light and quality of sleep are well-known to be linked, as anyone who has ever pulled a night shift will attest. Now, what if you're working in an environment where there's a new dawn every 90 minutes screwing with your circadian rhythms? (Not to mention all the other issues like noise, and unnaturally floating in bed.) As supplies of the current fluorescent bulbs start to decline, NASA is taking the opportunity to refresh the lighting onboard the ISS with a new Boeing-developed solution, that will also help the astronauts get some quality rest. The new bulbs will house a "rainbow" of over 100 bulbs that can deliver three types of light. For general use, there's standard white light. However, when residents need to be a little more focused, a special blue-hue that has been found to stimulate alertness is generated. Likewise, when it's time to get some shut-eye, a warm red tone that promotes sleep can be dialled in. The first bulbs won't get to the station until 2015, but it's also expected the same technology might find its way into more earthly locations too.

Palaeontologists are exercising some caution, but a recently published study reports evidence of a discovery that could be the oldest known dinosaur -- predating the previous eldest by up to 15 million years. The species -- called Nyasasaurus parringtoni -- is believed to have been six to ten feet in length, weighing between 45 and 130 pounds. The reason for the dose of caution is due to the skeleton being incomplete, with just one upper arm bone, and six vertebrae being recovered. Despite this, the finding very strongly suggests something of the dinosaur classification, that also fills in a "missing blank" between them and their earliest relatives. If proven, this could push the origin of dinosaurs back to a time when there was a wide variety of reptile families evolving, long before the dinosaur would become the dominant force on the planet. Whether this might inspire some Jurassic Park prequels, we don't know.

Fast-forward a few ages, and we encounter the humble GIF image -- something of an internet staple. We've all been amused, bemused and irritated by them at some point in our time on the big 'ole W W W. But, love 'em or hate 'em, they persist. Of course, it's the animated variety that we're largely discussing here, and their broad influence hasn't gone unnoticed -- particularly by Legs Media, who produced the video below that gives a succinct, yet entertaining, summary of the image format's illustrious 25-year history. There are a few classics in there, and a few we're more than happy to have forgotten (we're looking at you Baby Cha-Cha). If you're hungry for more, however, head over to the Moving the Still blog which has been calling out for your submissions as part of its GIF festival.

Last up this week is one that, to be fair, needs no words. We'll give you some about it anyway, but the money is all in the graphic. NASA has compiled two month's worth of images of the Earth at night, and compiled them into an awe-inspiring animation. The pictures come from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) satellite, and have been referred to as "The Black Marble" in reference to the famous "Blue Marble" daylight pictures. But enough talk, head down below for the goods.

Seen any other far-out articles that you'd like considered for Alt-week? Working on a project or research that's too cool to keep to yourself?

REFERED FROM--ENGADGETS

How many NASA engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?

Casting Light on Astronaut Insomnia: ISS to Get Sleep-Promoting Lightbulbs

NASA plans an $11-million upgrade to help space station crews sleep better in orbit

By Katie Worth

 

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An early prototype of new LED fixtures (Solid State Lighting Module) that could help to prevent astronaut insomnia aboard the International Space Station.Image: Kennedy Space Center

How about if they're changing 85 lightbulbs? What if the bulbs they're replacing are on the International Space Station (ISS)? What if it's rather urgent, because the old bulbs are rapidly burning out? And what if the replacements are a brand-new technology, meant not only to illuminate, but also to help astronauts sleep more?

Those questions are no joke to NASA, which is investing $11.4 million to change out aging fluorescent lights in the ISS's U.S. Orbital Segment. When NASA began considering the replacements, doctors realized they had an opportunity to address an entirely different problem: astronaut insomnia.

Indeed, sleep deprivation is a serious problem in space—severe enough that sleep meds are the second-most common drug taken by astronauts after painkillers, according to NASA medical officer and flight surgeon, Smith Johnston. Although their schedule allows for 8.5 hours of shut-eye a day, astronauts average barely six hours—30 to 60 minutes less than they get on Earth—and that's with the help of pills, relaxation techniques, sleep hygiene education and every other tool Johnston has thought up. Most people can sustain such sleep deprivation for several days, but over the course of months, "it adds up," Johnston says.

There's no single reason why astronauts often go months without a good night's sleep. Johnston says it's a combination of the unearthly sensation of floating in bed, constant noise, variable temperature, poor air circulation, nagging backaches and headaches, frequent shifts between Houston and Moscow time zones, and a new dawn every 90 minutes that confuses surface-accustomed circadian rhythms.

That's a grave concern for NASA: Sleep deprivation makes us fuzzy—an annoyance on Earth, but plain dangerous (and if a mission is botched, plain expensive) in space.

NASA hopes to fix at least part of the problem—the disruption of normal circadian rhythms—with new lamps.

The concept is based on research showing that our bodily clocks are wound by light exposure. About a decade ago scientists discovered a new type of light-sensitive cell in our eyes—an extraordinary find, considering they'd been peering at rods and cones for centuries and never noticed that the nearby retinal ganglion cells were, in a way, peering back. But the cells have no role in vision. Instead, they inform our brain's pacemaker, the suprachiasmatic nucleus, what time it is, which in turn cues thousands of schedule-sensitive bodily processes.

Sleep scientists have found that when these receptors are exposed to a particular wavelength of blue light—incidentally, sky blue—we feel more alert, because the brain suppresses melatonin, a key hormone in regulating sleep. In contrast, red-spectrum light allows the melatonin to flow.

The new lamps aim to exploit this chronobiology. The fixtures, which must fit in the exact footprint of their predecessors, comprise a rainbow of more than 100 LED bulbs cloaked by a diffuser, so they appear to be a single panel of white light, says Debbie Sharp, a senior manager at project contractor Boeing.

REFERENCE-SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

SCIENTIFIC INVENTION

Waxing Innovative: Researchers Pump Up Artificial Muscles Using Paraffin

Artificial muscles have mostly been flaccid as a replacement for motors. Could carbon nanotube yarns soaked in paraffin wax change this? 

When Scientific American heard from chemist Ray Baughman a year ago, he and his international team of nanotechnologists had taken artificial-muscle technology to the next level. Their innovation relied on spinning lengths of carbon nanotubes into buff yarns whose twisting and untwisting mimicked natural muscles found in an elephant's trunk or a squid's tentacles.

Now the researchers are reporting a new artificial muscle–building technique that makes their carbon nanotube yarns several times faster and more powerful. These qualities could help deliver on the technology's promise of developing compact, lightweight actuators for robots, exoskeletons and other mechanical devices, although several challenges remain.

The latest breakthrough comes from infusing the carbon nanotube yarns with paraffin wax that expands when heated, enabling the artificial muscles to lift more than 100,000 times their own weight and generate 85 times more mechanical power during contraction than mammalian skeletal muscles of comparable size, according to the researchers, whose latest work is published in the November 16 issue of Science.

The previous-generation artificial muscles were electrochemical and functioned like a supercapacitor. When a charge was injected into the carbon nanotube yarn, ions from a liquid electrolyte diffused into the yarn, causing it to expand in volume and contract in length, says Baughman, director of the University of Texas at Dallas's Alan G. MacDiarmid NanoTech Institute. Unfortunately, using an electrolyte limited the temperature range in which the muscle could function. At colder temperatures the electrolyte would solidify, slowing down the muscle; if too hot, the electrolyte would degrade. It also needed a container, which added weight to the artificial-muscle system.

The wax eliminates the need for an electrolyte, making the artificial muscle lighter, stronger and more responsive. When heat or a light pulse is applied to a wax-impregnated yarn about 200 microns in diameter (roughly twice that of a human hair), the wax melts and expands. In about 25 milliseconds this expansion creates pressure causing the yarn's individual nanotube threads to twist and the yarn's length to contract. Any weightlifter will tell you that the success of any muscle—artificial or natural—depends in part on the degree of this contraction. Depending on the force exerted, the Baughman team's muscle strands could contract by up to 10 percent.

Muscles are also judged by the weight they can lift relative to their size. "Our muscles can lift about 200 times the weight of a similar-size natural muscle," Baughman says, adding that the wax-infused artificial muscles can also generate 30 times the maximum power of their electrolyte-powered predecessors.

The researchers' latest artificial muscles move the technology closer to commercialized products such as environmental sensors, aerospace materials and even textiles that take can take advantage of nanoscale actuators, University of Cincinnati mechanical engineering professor Mark Schulz, wrote in a related SciencePerspectives article. This new artificial muscle outperforms existing ones, allowing possible applications such as linear and rotary motors; it also might replace biological muscle tissue if biocompatibility can be established, he adds.

However, Schulz points out—and Baughman is quick to acknowledge—that even this new crop of artificial muscles faces many challenges before they can be a practical alternative to mini–electric motors in many of the products we buy. Despite their improvements, the latest artificial muscles are for the most part inefficient and limited in the combinations of force, motion and speed they can generate, according to Schulz.

Indeed, these new artificial muscles operate at about 1 percent efficiency, a number Baughman and his colleagues want to increase at least 10-fold. An option for improving efficiency is to use a chemical fuel rather than electricity to power the muscles. "One way to compensate for a lack of efficiency is to use fuel like methanol instead of a battery," he says. "You could store more than 20 percent more energy in a fuel like methanol than you can in a battery."

Another challenge is that the artificial muscles must be heated and cooled to contract and release, respectively. Short lengths of yarn can cool on their own in a matter of seconds, but longer pieces would need to be actively cooled using water or air, otherwise the muscle would not relax. "Or you'd need [to use a] material that doesn't require thermal actuation," Baughman says. "If you keep making the [carbon nanotube] yarn longer and longer, your cooling rate increases."

This issue of scale poses perhaps the greatest challenge. A one-millimeter length of artificial muscle can lift about 50 grams, according to Baughman. That means lifting several tons would require a greater length of carbon nanotube yarn than is practical. "We'd like our artificial muscles to be used in exoskeletons that help workers or soldiers lift objects weighing tons," he says. But the researchers are still working out ways to pack enough yarn to perform such tasks into the length of an exoskeletal limb.

Carbon nanotube artificial muscles are more likely to first appear in products requiring only short lengths. Baughman envisions artificial muscles used in a catheter for minimally invasive surgery, "where you want to have lots of functionality on the end of the catheter to do surgical manipulations." Another application with flex appeal—"smart" fabrics that can automatically react to their environments, becoming more or less porous when they detect heat or harmful chemicals in the air.

REFER HERE