FIRE BLASTER: Fighting fire usually takes water or special chemicals, but DARPA can use sound. In their demo they placed speakers on either side of a liquid fuel flame. When they played a sound it thinned the air around the flame, making it easier to extinguish. The sound also disturbed the pool of fuel, vaporising it more quickly, making it wider, thinner and cooler and so easier to extinguish. The system's being tested for fighting fires in confined spaces such as ships. One problem may be delivering the speakers to the right spots. Wired has more. Check out the video.
GO FOR BROKE: Engineers from Harvard University plan to visit New Mexico soon. Once there, they intend to send a balloon 24 Km into the air to spray tens or hundreds of kilograms of sun-reflecting chemical particles into the atmosphere. They've observed that when volcanoes release sulphates high into the atmosphere sunlight is reflected away from Earth, and they want to see if their experiment can help cool the planet. They say they can't accurately simulate the complexity of the stratosphere in a lab so a real-world test is what's needed. Let's
hope New Mexico have something to say about this experiment. The Guardian details.
EYE ON THE BALL: Pity the poor camera operator at a game of tennis. Tracking the ball as it moves from one end of the court to the other can't be easy. The University of Tokyo's idea is to use mirrors to handle the tracking, instead of panning with the camera. Their 1ms Auto Pan-Tilt system uses a Saccade Mirror and a high-speed camera. The Saccade Mirror rotates two-axis small galvanometer mirrors. Their demo movie of a ping pong game was recorded at 500 fps and the ball is always at the centre of the image. Now someone needs to figure out a way to put a camera in the ball too. University of Tokyo has more. Video here.
STAR POWER: Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the USA recently test fired a 500 trillion watt laser. Yes, that's trillion. It's also 1,000 times more power than the United States uses at any instant in time. The laser was created by combining the beams of 192 individual high powered lasers onto a 2 millimetre target. The powerful laser is used for studying materials at extreme conditions. Don't look directly at the laser. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory explains.
PHONE FUTURES: British researchers have figured out how to use our smartphone's location tracking to predict where we'll be in the future, and with a worrying level of accuracy. By looking at where we are and where we've been, and then factoring in the patterns of people in our social group their predictions were less than 20 metres off for a test group. The accuracy was much higher when the social group data was included. The researchers say that habits and patterns of friends are highly correlated. Luckily the test group were all fairly predictable, but it could have implications for the rest of us too. How will our knowledge of the predictions skew our behaviour? Technology Review elaborates.
