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X-rays reveal bloody religious ritual
THOMAS R.FLETCHER/ALAMY
Technology TURN POLLUTION INTO POWER
X-RAYS produced by particle accelerators have confirmed the authorship of paintings and probed the structure of fossils. Now they are illuminating the religious rites of ancient Africans. Pascale Richardin’s team at the Centre for Research and Restoration of the Museums of France in Paris exposed the coating on sculptures used between the 12th and 19th centuries in the rituals of the Dogon and Bamama people of Mali to X-rays produced at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble. The coating produced the telltale fluorescence of protein molecules laden with haem, an iron-containing group found in blood (Analytical Chemistry, DOI: 10.1021/ac070993k). “Blood is often reported in religious contexts, linked to animal sacrifices,” says Richardin.
0
out of 10. Nintendo’s score in a Greenpeace survey of gadget makers’ recycling policies and use of harmful chemicals
–Iron brew–
Do our brains work like Google?
SOURCE: GREENPEACE
Old religion lit up by new science
water, producing solid iron hydroxide plus hydrogen ions and electrons. The hydrogen ions diffuse through a membrane to an electrode on the other side of the cell, causing current to flow through a wire connecting the two sides (Environmental Science and Technology, DOI: 10.1021/es0712221). The resulting power output is 300 milliwatts per square metre of catalyst, which should be enough to power the pumps and sensors that would help with the clean up if fuel cells are placed in polluted rivers. Meanwhile the ruddy, solid iron hydroxide could be used as a pigment for paint. Sulphuric acid must still be cleaned up using other methods, however, and the platinum catalyst in the cell is expensive. Logan is looking at cheaper options, such as cobalt.
Filing patents in the US boosts economic growth in the nation the patents come from
20% increase in the annual number of US patents granted to a nation
= 3.8% increase in its annual economic growth
GOOGLE’s patented and powerful search algorithm, PageRank, may mimic the way the human brain retrieves information. Our memory for words can be modelled as a network in which each point represents a different word, with each linked to words that relate to it. Psychologist Tom Griffiths and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley,
wondered whether the ease with which the brain retrieves words is similar to the way that websites are ranked by PageRank: by the number of sites that link to them. It seems it might. In tests against other word-retrieval algorithms, PageRank most clearly matched the human model (Psychological Science, vol 18, p 1069). The results suggest human memory studies could be improved by examining the tricks that search engines employ, and vice versa, says Griffiths.
GIZMO
WEALTH FROM INNOVATION
Going out is no excuse for not doing the housework, says South Korean company Yujin Robot. It is launching a vacuum cleaning robot that you steer around your home using the keypad and video screen of a 3G cellphone. In “sentinel mode”, the robot doubles as a burglar alarm: sensors detect when something moves in your house – and it sends a text to warn you of the intrusion. A speaker on the robot then lets you shout at the burglar through the phone. SOURCE: WORLD BANK
Waste water leaking from disused iron mines could be cleaned up using fuel cells, producing electricity and useful iron compounds into the bargain. Such a set-up could make cleaning up old mines more economical and efficient. Pennsylvania has a long history of iron mining. “There’s a lot of problems here with acid mine leakage,” says Bruce Logan of Pennsylvania State University. Such leaks carry sulphuric acid and dissolved metals into rivers, where it kills aquatic life and can turn rivers bright red or yellow. To tackle the problem, Logan’s group adapted fuel cells originally designed to produce electricity from household sewage (New Scientist, 13 March 2004, p 21) so that they used iron as a fuel instead. A catalyst on one side of the cell encourages dissolved iron to react with
Technological trickle-down is benefiting London’s firefighters. Robots that defuse roadside bombs in Iraq have been equipped with thermal imaging cameras, allowing potentially lethal gas cylinders at blaze sites to be inspected remotely before firefighters move in. After a fire acetylene cylinders can take 24 hours to cool to safe temperatures.
“That would be a declaration of war” Günter Verheugen, vice-president of the European Commission, on what it would signify if Europe’s $5 billion satellite positioning system, Galileo, which finally got the funding go-ahead last week, were ever to be jammed and rendered useless by a foreign power (Financial Times, London, 1 December)
www.newscientist.com
8 December 2007 | NewScientist | 27
Technology TURN POLLUTION INTO POWER
X-RAYS produced by particle accelerators have confirmed the authorship of paintings and probed the structure of fossils. Now they are illuminating the religious rites of ancient Africans. Pascale Richardin’s team at the Centre for Research and Restoration of the Museums of France in Paris exposed the coating on sculptures used between the 12th and 19th centuries in the rituals of the Dogon and Bamama people of Mali to X-rays produced at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble. The coating produced the telltale fluorescence of protein molecules laden with haem, an iron-containing group found in blood (Analytical Chemistry, DOI: 10.1021/ac070993k). “Blood is often reported in religious contexts, linked to animal sacrifices,” says Richardin.
0
out of 10. Nintendo’s score in a Greenpeace survey of gadget makers’ recycling policies and use of harmful chemicals
–Iron brew–
Do our brains work like Google?
SOURCE: GREENPEACE
Old religion lit up by new science
water, producing solid iron hydroxide plus hydrogen ions and electrons. The hydrogen ions diffuse through a membrane to an electrode on the other side of the cell, causing current to flow through a wire connecting the two sides (Environmental Science and Technology, DOI: 10.1021/es0712221). The resulting power output is 300 milliwatts per square metre of catalyst, which should be enough to power the pumps and sensors that would help with the clean up if fuel cells are placed in polluted rivers. Meanwhile the ruddy, solid iron hydroxide could be used as a pigment for paint. Sulphuric acid must still be cleaned up using other methods, however, and the platinum catalyst in the cell is expensive. Logan is looking at cheaper options, such as cobalt.
Filing patents in the US boosts economic growth in the nation the patents come from
20% increase in the annual number of US patents granted to a nation
= 3.8% increase in its annual economic growth
GOOGLE’s patented and powerful search algorithm, PageRank, may mimic the way the human brain retrieves information. Our memory for words can be modelled as a network in which each point represents a different word, with each linked to words that relate to it. Psychologist Tom Griffiths and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley,
wondered whether the ease with which the brain retrieves words is similar to the way that websites are ranked by PageRank: by the number of sites that link to them. It seems it might. In tests against other word-retrieval algorithms, PageRank most clearly matched the human model (Psychological Science, vol 18, p 1069). The results suggest human memory studies could be improved by examining the tricks that search engines employ, and vice versa, says Griffiths.
GIZMO
WEALTH FROM INNOVATION
Going out is no excuse for not doing the housework, says South Korean company Yujin Robot. It is launching a vacuum cleaning robot that you steer around your home using the keypad and video screen of a 3G cellphone. In “sentinel mode”, the robot doubles as a burglar alarm: sensors detect when something moves in your house – and it sends a text to warn you of the intrusion. A speaker on the robot then lets you shout at the burglar through the phone. SOURCE: WORLD BANK
Waste water leaking from disused iron mines could be cleaned up using fuel cells, producing electricity and useful iron compounds into the bargain. Such a set-up could make cleaning up old mines more economical and efficient. Pennsylvania has a long history of iron mining. “There’s a lot of problems here with acid mine leakage,” says Bruce Logan of Pennsylvania State University. Such leaks carry sulphuric acid and dissolved metals into rivers, where it kills aquatic life and can turn rivers bright red or yellow. To tackle the problem, Logan’s group adapted fuel cells originally designed to produce electricity from household sewage (New Scientist, 13 March 2004, p 21) so that they used iron as a fuel instead. A catalyst on one side of the cell encourages dissolved iron to react with
Technological trickle-down is benefiting London’s firefighters. Robots that defuse roadside bombs in Iraq have been equipped with thermal imaging cameras, allowing potentially lethal gas cylinders at blaze sites to be inspected remotely before firefighters move in. After a fire acetylene cylinders can take 24 hours to cool to safe temperatures.
“That would be a declaration of war” Günter Verheugen, vice-president of the European Commission, on what it would signify if Europe’s $5 billion satellite positioning system, Galileo, which finally got the funding go-ahead last week, were ever to be jammed and rendered useless by a foreign power (Financial Times, London, 1 December)
www.newscientist.com
8 December 2007 | NewScientist | 27