This isn't very high tech, but it's amazing nonetheless. Learn how to, step-by-step, make a golfball-sized fireball that you can toss around in your hands. Impress your friends! Don't burn the house down! Seriously -- don't burn the house down.
via Wonderhowto.com
Want to recommend a video? Tweet it to @Discovery_News with the hashtag #GottaSeeVideos.
Don't miss today's Must-Read DNews Nuggets and you can watch Discovery Curiosity video here.
Lasers are everywhere -- in DVD players, fiber optic communications and even displays. They are so useful it would be great if they were flexible and easy to make, but that hasn't been the case, until now.
Researchers at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. have developed a way to print lasers on a variety of surfaces, using a printer not too far removed from the one on an average desktop.
The team, led by D.J. Gardiner of the Center for Molecular Materials for Photonics, used liquid crystals similar to those used in liquid crystal displays. With the right kind of stimulation, the molecules in liquid crystals emit laser light.
BLOG: Hack Yourself A Super Secret LCD Monitor
The molecules are arranged in spiral patterns, which causes them to act as optical cavities. Optical cavities are one way to make laser light, because the cavity confines light in such a way that all the light waves are "in step," or coherent -- a laser beam. Because the liquid crystal molecules can change their arrangement, it's possible to change what wavelengths are reflected.
Ordinarily a lasing material has to be "pumped" with some external source of energy. In this case it's pumped with laser light. To get that final bit of "gain" a fluorescent dye is added to the liquid crystals, and it's that gain which produces the extra energy for the laser.
Gardiner told Discovery News that while it might seem odd to produce laser light with another laser, that can be more efficient than other methods. The ability to control what wavelength of laser light comes out by controlling the size of the spiral and the color of the dye is also a big plus, because there are some wavelengths for which lasers are expensive or harder to build.
BLOG: Liquid Silver Used To Print Electronic Circuits
This technology isn't unusual; such lasers are often laid down between sheets of glass. Gardiner and his team found a way to print the liquid crystal on any surface using an ink jet-type system. The liquid crystals are printed as tiny dots on a wet polymer that covers a substrate. The polymer dries out and in the process aligns the liquid crystal molecules. Since it can work on any surface, the lasers can be flexible rather than rigid as on glass displays. Once laser light is shined on the printed dots, they emit laser light in either one or two directions. If the material they are printed on is opaque the laser light only goes one way, and if it is transparent it is emitted both front and back.
This kind of technology can be used in the display industry, but Grdiner said he sees more immediate applications in sensing and diagnostics. Currently, everal kinds of medical tests involve using a bio-marker that attaches to the molecule one is interested in and hitting it with laser light. Being able to print an array of hundreds of cheap test sites (each with its own combintion of test substances) would speed those processes tremendously.
The research was published in the Journal Soft Matter.
Credit: University of Cambridge
Titanic Finder Locates Turkish Plane: Robert Ballard, the man who located the Titanic, helped the Turkish government find a plane that had been shot down by Syrian forces about two weeks ago, reports the New York Times.
The Turkish administration hoped that the pilots might have survived the downing, but Ballard's equipment detected the bodies of the two men in the cockpit of the plane.
Ballard's deep-sea explorer, Nautilus, was used to find the pilots, Gokhan Ertan and Hasan Huseyin Aksoy. Ballard used the Nautilus in 1985 to pinpoint the wreckage of the Titanic. via New York Times
GET MORE MUST-READ NUGGETS HERE!
The days of climbing atop your roof, wrapping yourself in tin foil and striking a techie yoga pose just to get a better wireless signal may soon be coming to an end.
BLOG: Dropped Your Phone In The Toilet? No Problem!
Anthony Sutera, of military tech firm Chamtech, spoke recently at Google's "Solve for X" event where he introduced the company's spray-on coating that can not only boost phone reception but can turn just about anything into an antenna.
"Can you imagine" a "device being able to transmit from the depths of the oceans to outer space, effortlessly transmitting between themselves?" Sutera explained. "Think about a highway...you have a painted stripe and have broad band connectivity connected to your vehicle as you" drive "down the highway."
The aerosol spray coats an object's surface area with thousands of nanocapacitors and spray-on particles that can turn a wall -- or even a tree -- into a transmitter.
"Within five minutes we had" the tree "connected and transmitting on VHF to an airplane 14 miles overhead -- double the range we could get from a standard antenna on the ground," Sutera said.
Sutera's team sprayed a third generation iPhone antenna with the material and boosted the signal by almost 10 percent.
BLOG: Are You Ready For Mind-Control Warfare?
"What we're talking about is a profound way of thinking -- a whole paradigm change on antenna technology," Sutera said. "What we'd like to think about" are "ways to enable wireless connectivity anywhere."
ViewUGE: $995 for hardware and 1-year subscription, $99/year after
When you picture wind energy solutions, you probably envision sprawling fields of tall white poles topped with three-blade propellers. Urban Green Energy wants to change that. They offer three sizes of vertical, asymmetrical wind turbines that you can not only install at your home (or business), but monitor from anywhere. Their models are rated for 600 W, 1 kW and 4 kW and range in price from $4,000 to $19,000 just for the turbines (although they offer complete solutions with mounting, electronics, etc.).
PHOTOS: Wind Power Without the Blades
UGE's David Droz explained the funny-looking design to Discovery News, "The angle of attack's always changing. What it allows us to do is better capture wind that's coming from all directions. So there's always a lift component to the torque, which is what's driving the generator." A big benefit to this design is that these vertical turbines can operate at much lower speeds (180 RPM at full power) than their traditional fan-type counterparts. That in turn (so to speak) allows for much lower noise, fewer structural vibrations and less of a hazard to feathered flyers by.
BLOG: Wind Turbine Explodes into Flames
At CES, Urban Green Energy -- which was the only wind company we saw at the show -- launched their ViewUGE monitoring application. UGE gave Discovery News the first outsider look at the app in action. It's a great way for customers to better visualize (and share) how much power they're producing and how many trees they're saving. But more than just that sense of accomplishment, UGE cites studies that have found that energy consumption sharply decreases when users are more conscious and continually aware of their energy consumption habits. Translation: Whatever information turbine customers catch wind of...is a good thing.
Credit: Urban Green Energy
This article is part of our ongoing coverage of this year's Consumer Electronics Show. Find more CES articles here.
