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Domain: uah.edu
Stories and comments across the archive that link to uah.edu.
Stories · 8
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Upper Ozone Depletion Declining
Silas writes "This SF Chronicle article (and many others) reports that destruction of the upper part of Earth's ozone layer has slowed because of the international effort more than a decade ago to ban ozone-damaging aerosols. More about the study and techniques used is here. We're still a long way away from recovery, but it's a nice example of humans taking an active role in reversing some of the damage we've done." -
Moving Sensor Data Onto The Internet With SensorML
Roland Piquepaille writes "According to this Sensors article, a new XML encoding scheme may make it possible for you to remotely discover, access, and use real-time data obtained directly from Web-resident sensors, instruments, and imaging devices. By describing sensors using SensorML, anyone can put sensors or sensor data online for others to find and use. And because it's XML-based, it means all this data will easily be searchable. "For example, searching for particular kinds of sensors and data in a particular geographic region, with data collected within a particular time window, will be easy. This has significance for science, environmental monitoring, transportation management, public safety, disaster management, utilities operations, industrial controls, facilities management, and many other activities." In this column, you'll find a summary of the Sensors' story which contains more technical details about the technology. And if you're really interested, please visit the SensorML homepage." -
Beaming into Space
HobbySpacer writes "At this week's 1st Int. Symposium on Beamed Energy Propulsion in Huntsville a wide range of laser and microwave propulsion schemes are being presented. The big news so far is the announcement by Gregory Benford of plans for a test of microwave propulsion with the Cosmos Sail, due to fly early next year. The possibilities of using lasers to deflect incoming asteroids & comets are also under discussion." -
The Huntsville Concrete Rocket
eric writes: "Students at the University of Alabama in Huntsville have designed and launched the world's first concrete rocket. Video of the launch can be found on their site" Look to the bottom of the page. What's next? Concrete cell phones? I could use a cell phone that could float. -
Imaging Dark Matter With Gravity
Phase Shifter writes: "I was looking at Lucent's website when I found a link to this article about how a dim galaxy cluster was discovered by its gravity instead of its light. They say the same technique could be used to determine the distribution of dark matter in the universe." -
Cement Canoe With A Contrarian Approach
Markgor writes: "There is an article in Wired News today about a group of students at the University of Alabama (Huntsville) who entered into the 2001 ASCE/MBT National Concrete Canoe Competition with a canoe that was built to achieve forward propulsion through matching natural resonance.""Normally, if two objects share an exact natural resonance, the excited vibrations would usually lead the weaker object to fall apart, much like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge did when the equal frequencies of the wind and the structure of the bridge matched. However, since the canoe was designed with a special mix of concrete, it was flexible enough to withstand the vibrations and harnessed it into forward propulsion. They're now talking about its possible use in space, such as interplanetary probes using natural resonance to propel itself."
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The End Of The Road For Magnetic Hard Drives?
Phase Shifter wrote to us about the limits of conventional hard drives, which Scientific American is discussing. The article talks about the history of hard drives, and why sometime soon, due to the limitations of the superparamagnetic effect, we will need to find a new storage type. It's a cool background read on hard drives and what goes into them. -
ACS Adds Nanotech Division
Phase Shifter writes, " The Materials subdivision within the American Chemical Society's Industrial & Engineering Chemistry division has now become the Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology subdivision. This means that ACS members researching into nanotech now have their own forum for information exchange, where previously it was scattered among several different divisions. Hopefully we'll be seeing faster progress in the field as a result. "