Sci-tech
Undersea
Power Source
US
scientists have developed a method to learn about seafloor
conditions within laboratories, a development that will be
key to the study of under-ocean methane hydrates, one of the
richest sources of natural gas. Scientists at the Brookhaven
National Laboratory have managed to mimic the high-pressure,
low-temperature seafloor conditions in a tabletop vessel.
"The amount of natural gas tied up in methane hydrates
beneath the seafloor is several orders higher than all other
known sources of natural gas. It is enough to meet our energy
needs for several decades," said Devinder Mahajan, a
chemist at the laboratory. Methane hydrates -- which are ice-like
cages made of water molecules surrounding individual methane
molecules -- are stable only at the very low temperatures
and high pressures present at the ocean floor. "If you
try to bring it up, these things fizzle and decompose, releasing
the trapped methane," Mahajan explained. By studying
different samples of methane hydrates and learning what combinations
of pressure and temperature kept the methane locked up, scientists
are now hoping to identify ways to extract natural gas from
them with minimum loss.
The new research vessel, Mahajan said, may help in developing
the required strategies. The new apparatus allows scientists
to study even fine sediments and helps visualise and record
the entire hydrate-forming event through a window along the
vessel. "You fill the vessel with water and sediment,
put in methane gas and cool it down under high pressure. After
a few hours the hydrates form. You can actually see it. They
look like ice, but they are not. They are stable at four degrees
Celsius," he said. The comparisons of different sediment
samples might help pinpoint the most abundant sources of locked-up
methane.
Robot
Arms Lose to Teenage Girl
The
world's strongest man needn't worry about relinquishing his
title to a robotic competitor anytime soon, a recent contest
indicates. At a conference held by the International Society
for Optical Engineers in San Diego, three robotic arms tested
their might against a human opponent in arm wrestling matches,
which the flesh-and-blood contestant won handily. Yoseph Bar-Cohen
of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., first
proposed the idea of a robot-versus-person arm wrestling showdown
in 1999 as a means to encourage research into artificial muscles
or electroactive polymers (EAP). Three different designs rose
to the challenge and took on 17-year-old high-school student
Panna Felsen. A robotic arm manufactured by Environmental
Robots Inc. (ERI) in New Mexico put up the best effort, surviving
26 seconds, whereas arms from Virginia Tech and the Swiss
Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research capitulated
in under four seconds each.
Formula
for Every Relationship
Every
time you criticise your partner, follow it up with five compliments
for a smooth and happy relationship, says a German scientist.
Dr. Hans Werner from the sociology department at the Ruhr
University, Bochum, suggests, that couples must shower enough
compliments on their partners once they express their anger
and couples should ideally compliment their partners five
times for every single bashing. "Then people feel good
in their relationship. Goodwill increases your potential to
be happy," said Werner. He came to this conclusion after
he conducted a research in co-operation with his colleague
Elke Rohmann on more than a thousand individuals and couples.
He has also penned a book called What makes love strong
based on this study.
Elephants
Found Capable of Vocal Mimicry
Animals
that live in complex social groups may employ vocal imitation
to strengthen and maintain social bonds. Humans, bats, birds
and marine mammals are well known to use this ability to advertise
reproductive willingness or acknowledge acquaintances after
a long absence, for instance. Now results indicate that elephants
are also capable of this vocal feat. Mlaika is a 10-year-old
female African elephant living in semicaptivity with other
orphaned pachyderms in Tsavo, Kenya. The stockade that she
sleeps in is located three kilometres from a busy highway.
Peter L. Tyack of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and
his colleagues analysed Mlaika's calls and were surprised
to discover that they were unlike any of the normal calls
made by African elephants. Rather, they sounded like moving
trucks. Mlaika did not directly copy the sounds she heard,
however. The team reports that her trucklike calls shared
characteristics both with the sounds she was exposed to and
other truck sounds recorded at other times, which suggests
"that Mlaika used the general features of truck sounds
as a model." The researchers also studied the vocalisations
of Calimero, a 23-year-old male African elephant living for
the past 18 years in a zoo in Switzerland. Calimero's companions
are two female Asian elephants. In the wild, Asian and African
elephants use different calling systems, with Asian elephants
relying mainly on chirping sounds. The researchers analysed
Calimero's calls and found that they were significantly different
from any standard calls used by African elephants. Instead,
they sound like the chirps of female Asian elephants. "To
our knowledge," the authors write, "this discovery
in elephants is the first example of vocal imitation in a
nonprimate terrestrial mammal."
Bad
e-mail Habits
A
British-based security firm and a market research company
has claimed that some users of the e-mail tend to use it in
a careless and irresponsible manner and this in turn, helps
to sustain the spam industry. According to the security firm
Mirapoint and the market research company Radicati Group,
one in 10 e-mail users have bought products advertised in
junk mail, thus making it a fairly attractive business given
its inexpensive costs. "This preliminary data is surprising
and somewhat shocking to us. It explains why e-mail security
threats including spam, viruses and phishing scams continue
to proliferate," said Marcel Nienhuis, a market analyst
at the Radicati Group. Clearswift, another research firm,
has seen a 180 percent rise in sex-related spam over the course
of the last month. Spammers will deliberately misspell a word
or use digits instead of letters in an attempt to by-pass
anti-spam software, said Graham Cluley, senior technology
consultant for security firm Sophos. But anti-spam filters
can only be part of the solution to the menace of junk e-mail.
"People must resist their basic instincts to buy from
spam mails. Spammers are criminals, plain and simple. If no-one
responded to junk e-mail and didn't buy products sold in this
way, then spam would be as extinct as the dinosaurs,"
quotes BBC.
Source:
BBC Online, Webindia123, Scientific America and US Geological
Survey
Compiled
by: Imran H. Khan
Copyright
(R) thedailystar.net 2005
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