Online Cortex Thoughts on Science and Technology

I stumbled across a working Rubik’s Cube made from Legos.  The design is by Maarten Steurbaut, and it is an impressive compact design (his second version).  Below is a MLCAD/POV Ray image of the inner workings of his cube.

His first design was much more complex (below), and I find the images to be quite impressive.  Its interesting to me that I am more impressed by the complex design, while a design that relies on simplicity takes a lot more ingenuity and effort.

Surprisingly, Maarten was not the first to make a working Lego Rubik’s cube.  Martin Howard had also constructed a Rubik’s cube with a more compact design.

 J.P. Brown took a different approach and created CubeSolver, which is a Lego Mindstorms machine that solves Rubik’s Cubes.   His written documentation about the design challenges that he faced is full of excellent ideas.

Kevin Knuth
Albany NY 

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Posted under Fun, Inventions, Lego, NXT, Robotics

My good friend Joe Coughlan informed me that all 10 new technologies for the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have been approved early! 

The James Webb Space Telescope will have a large mirror that is 6.5 meters in diameter.  Its sunshield will be the size of a tennis court, and it will be positioned in an orbit 1 million miles from Earth.  The JWST will study the early universe in the infrared.

All 10 new technologies have been approved early, which will help speed this mission along.  One of the technologies will enable the telescope’s mirrors to be adjusted by a computer algorithm that monitors the image wavefront and computes the optimal mirror positions.  Another new technology will be the implementation of microshutters that will allow researchers to block out unwanted light in an extremely well-controlled fashion.  These shutters are little doorways that are the width of several human hairs.

Kevin Knuth
Albany NY

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Posted under Astronomy, Exploration, Inventions, Research, Space

Nature Materials annouced that Takao Someya’s research group at the University of Tokyo in Japan developed a plastic sheet that can deliver power by electromagnetic induction.  This sheet utilizes an ingenious combination of solid state physics, organic chemistry, and nanoscience.

 The plastic sheet, nearly a millimeter thick, can deliver up to 40 Watts of power to receivers that have a special receiving coil.  The power transfer is 81.4% efficient compared to the 93% efficiency of a wired power system.  The sheet has as its base a layer of transistors that vary the conductivity of the organic molecule pentacene.  The upper layers have microscopic copper coils that sense when a receiver is nearby.  These copper coils can switch on nearby micromechanical-machine (MEM) switches that then deliver power to the device via induction.

 The picture above shows the sheet below a goldfish bowl in which is a live goldfish and an LED, which is being powered by the sheet.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” — Isaac Asimov

Sekitani T., et al. Nature Materials, advance online publication; doi:10.1038/nmat1903 (2007).  

Kevin Knuth
Albany NY

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Posted under Energy, Entrepreneurship, Inventions, Nanoscience, Physics, Research