A company called GreenSun Energy is developing solar panels that absorb particular parts of the light spectrum available even when the sun is not shining directly at them:

They say the key is the bright colors in hues to capture different parts of the sun's light spectrum.

GreenSun, the company behind the technology, says unlike conventional solar panels, these can produce electricity without direct sunlight.

It says the colored panels don't need to face the sun and can absorb dispersed light.

This means they can also harness energy on a cloudy day, although with less efficiency than on sunny days.

The company says production costs are kept to a minimum because they require less silicon.

There's a video at the link and it will play automatically when you click on it.

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Sarah Zielinski writes in The Smithsonian that Jupiter, as the largest planet in our solar system, occasionally pulls comets into its orbit. Sometimes, as with comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in 1994 (pictured), Jupiter's gravity will even pull a comet into a direct impact. Zielinsky writes:

Astronomers from Japan and Northern Ireland, presenting their findings today at the European Planetary Science Congress, used observations of Comet Kushida-Muramatsu—from when it was discovered in 1993 and when it returned in 2001—to calculate the comet’s path over the previous century. They determined that the comet became a temporary moon when it entered Jupiter’s neighborhood in 1949. It made two full, if irregular, orbits around the planet, and then continued its travels into the inner solar system in 1962.

The researchers also predict that Comet 111P/Helin-Roman-Crockett, which circled Jupiter between 1967 and 1985, will again become a temporary moon and complete six loops around the planet between 2068 and 2086.

“The results of our study suggests that impacts on Jupiter and temporary satellite capture events may happen more frequently than we previously expected,” David Asher of Northern Ireland’s Armagh Observatory told the AFP.

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Photo: NASA

Image: Jones Soda

Gourmet soda maker Jones Soda has released five new flavors inspired by the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. They are Potion of Healing, Sneak Attack, Bigby’s Crushing Thirst Destroyer, Eldritch Blast, and Dwarven Draught. I hear that drinking any will add +2 to your constitution for 1d4 rounds.

Link via Geek Dad

The blog Funster Mental Floss has pictures of ten amazing playgrounds from around the world. Pictured above is the St. Kilda Adventure Playground in Port Philip, Australia. It covers four hectares of land and includes a beached pirate shipwreck and a submarine. It was built after World War II to help disadvantaged children in the area develop mentally and physically.

Link via Geek Dad

Image via flickr user Looking Glass used under creative commons license.

UPDATE 9/16/09: In the comments, Miss Cellania says that Funster copied the work of Mental Floss writer David K. Israel, so I have altered the link. Thanks for pointing this out, Miss C.

Photo: Jorge Orta, Studio Orta

Jorge Orta is a Paris-based Argentine artist noted for his work with PAE light cannons, which he uses to project images onto mountains or large buildings. The image above was projected onto the Evry Cathedral in France in 1996 and is called "Cardinal Cross." Other images at the link include projections onto Machu Picchu, inside the Aso volcano in Japan, and the Cathedral at Chartres.

http://www.studio-orta.com/artwork_fiche.php?fk=&fs=9&fm=0&fd=0&of=0 via Gizmodo

Jesse Bering writes in Scientific American that blushing may have evolved in the human race as a means of ameliorating conflict. By reducing the possibility of deception, it encouraged socially constructive behavior among early humans:

Given the possibility of being deceived, it would have been rather foolish of our ancestors to take at face value a person’s verbal or behavioral expressions of remorse. Instead, over tens of thousands of years, uncontrollable blushing would have evolved as a fairly reliable predictor of the actor’s future behavior. In other words, if the behavior or situation at issue made the person feel so uncomfortable that his or her facial veins dilated—a physiological response that for many people is attended by a somewhat unpleasant tingling sensation—the blusher would probably avoid repeating that behavior in the future. Thus, blushing seems to be an appeasement display. Interestingly, this evolutionary hypothesis is aligned with a recent argument advanced by neuroscientist Mark Changizi in his book The Vision Revolution (BenBella, 2009). Among other things, Changizi claims that our species unusually strong color vision evolved so that we could detect subtle hue changes in other peoples’ skin, thereby deducing their emotions.

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Image by flickr user SanFranAnnie used under creative commons license.

According to a BBC News article by Victoria Gill, researchers at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia have discovered that chimpanzees will yawn after watching animated chimpanzees yawn. They hope to use this information to learn how human children process what they see on a screen, as well as how they empathize with the feelings of other people:

Although Dr Campbell doesn't think the chimps were "fooled" by the animations into thinking they were looking at real chimps, he explained that there was evidence that chimpanzees "process animated faces the same way they process photographs of faces".

He said: "It's not a real chimpanzee, but it kind of looks like a chimpanzee, and they're responding to that."....

In his future work, Dr Campbell would like to pin down exactly how these measurable behaviours are related to the more difficult to measure phenomenon of empathy.

"We'd like to know more about behaviours related to empathy, like consolation - when an individual does something nice to the victim of aggression," he told BBC News.

"So we want to see if our good contagious yawners are also good consolers."

Link via Discover Magazine

Image: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

(YouTube Link)

This video shows a selection from Johann Sebastian Bach's Musical Offering (1747) played forwards, then backwards, then both forwards and backwards at the same time. It was created by mathematical illustrator Jos Leys and science/philosophy blogger Xantox. This Bach piece has long intrigued mathematicians:

In each of these canons a musical line is played twice (or four times in Canon 10). The second version is always transformed with respect to the first by shifting in time, but it may also be shifted in pitch, turned upside-down, stretched, or played backwards. Each of these transformations occurs in the mathematics of elementary functions; they are examples of how new functions can be made out of old and of how a function can be tailored to fit a new situation.

Link via Boing Boing

Chris Matyszczyk explains that the laws of probability indicate when you should settle for one prospective mate, and when you should keep on looking. There's a point of diminishing returns in a succession of relationships when you should marry before your prospects start to get worse:

So for a long time, mathematicians believed that, given 100 choices (each of which has to be chosen or discarded after the interview) you should discard the first 50 and then choose the next best one. (The assumption also is that if you don't choose the first 99, you have to choose number 100, which, again, seems rather realistic to me. I know so many people who have chosen the last resort out of perceived necessity rather than, say, happiness.)

The "Discard 50 then Choose the Next Best" method apparently gives you a 25 percent chance of choosing the best candidate.

However, then along came John Gilbert and Frederick Mosteller of Harvard University. I do not believe they were married. However, they came upon the idea that the magic number is, in fact, 37. Yes, you should stop after 37 candidates and choose the next best one. This number was apparently derived by taking the number 100 and dividing by e, the base of the natural logarithms (around 2.72). And it apparently increases your chances of the best choice to 37 percent.

Link via The Corner

Image: U.S. Department of Energy

Paula Sunshine of Lawshall, Suffolk, UK, built an extension onto her 16th Century thatched house with hair. Cattle hair has been used as a traditional building material, but Sunshine is using primarily human and dog hair:

"Traditionally people would use cattle hair from long-haired cattle.

"But we don't get many long-haired cattle around here any more so I use human hair."

She added: "People say it is not thick enough but you just put more in.

"I don't human hair is a lot different.

"It is just the fibre that you need the hair for and human hair does the same thing as cattle hair for plaster.

"It is the fibres that holds the plaster together."

Link via The Corner

Photo: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

In a cave in the nation of Georgia, American, Israeli, and Georgian scientists discovered the oldest human-worked fibers ever known. The flax remnants date to about 30,000 years ago:

Flax was growing wild at the time. And it turns out not only to be a source of edible grain, but of fiber. These fibers were twisted — a sure sign that the flax had been spun.

Flax fibers woven together make linen, but in this case, linen doesn't mean crisply pressed summer suits. Bar-Yosef says the fibers they found in the cave were probably braided together, macrame style.

"You can make headgear, you can make baskets, you can make ropes and strings, and so on," he says.

Bar-Yosef didn't find any of those objects in the cave — that's too much to hope for 30,000 years later. But the researchers report in Science magazine that they did find evidence that the fibers were knotted and dyed — black, gray, turquoise and even pink. That's consistent with other artifacts that show an artistic flair among these early people.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112726804&ps=cprs via Scientific American

Photo: Eliso Kvavadze/NPR

In 1935, physicist Erwin Schrödinger proposed a thought experiment which suggested that an unobserved cat under perilious conditions was simultanteously dead and alive. Now scientists at the Max Plank Institute for Quantum Physics in Garching, Germany hope to place a virus into two quantum states as a test of that thought experiment:

The team hope to trap a virus in a vacuum using an electromagnetic field created by a laser. Then, with another laser, the team would slow down the virus's movement until it sits motionless in its lowest possible energy state.

Once the virus is fixed, the team will use a single photon to put the virus into a quantum superposition of two states, where it is either moving or not. Until it is measured, the virus should exist in a superposition of motion and stillness.

The team suggest that tobacco mosaic virus, a rod-shaped plant virus measuring about 50 nanometres wide and almost 1 micrometre long, would be an ideal candidate for the experiment. While there is still debate about whether such viruses can really be classed as alive, the experiment could even be extended to tiny organisms, the scientists say. Microscopic tardigrades, or water-bears, can survive in the vacuum of space for days, and may be suitable for the same sort of Schrödinger treatment.

Link

Image: U.S. Department of Energy

Biochemistry professor Judy Walls of the University of Missouri is working on ways to use sulfate-reducing bacteria to render radioactive metals harmless. This, she hopes, would provide a cheaper alternative to conventional cleanup:

The bacteria Wall is studying are bio-corrosives and can change the solubility of heavy metals. They can take uranium and convert it to uraninite, a nearly insoluble substance that will sink to the bottom of a lake or stream. Wall is looking into the bacteria's water cleansing ability and how long the changed material would remain inert.

Wall's research could also be beneficial to heavy metal pollution from storage tanks and industrial waste. The bacteria are already present in more than 7,000 heavy metal contaminated sites, but they live in a specific range of oxygen and temperature, making them difficult to control.

Link via Popular Science

(Image: Science Daily)

Photo: Resilient Technologies

Pneumatic tires take a lot of abuse in combat, which is why Resilient Technologies is trying to develop an airless tire. Because they can't be punctured, vehicles equipped with such tires can stay mobile after taking damage that would incapacitate others:

The Wisconsin design breakthrough, first developed by Resilient's in-house design and development team, takes a page from nature. "The goal was to reduce the variation in the stiffness of the tire, to make it transmit loads uniformly and become more homogenous," Osswald says. "And the best design, as nature gives it to us, is really the honeycomb."....

The patent-pending Resilient design relies on a precise pattern of six-sided cells that are arranged, like a honeycomb, in a way that best mimics the "ride feel" of pneumatic tires. The honeycomb geometry also does a great job of reducing noise levels and reducing heat generated during usage - two common problems with past applications.

Link via DVICE

Image:Kent Smith, Gizmodo

Gizmodo held a photoshop contest for video game peripherals that will probably never be developed. Above is the...uh, animal husbandry Nintendo Wii controller by Kent Smith, which took 3rd place. There are 42 reader-submitted images at the link.

Link via GearFuse