MR fluids?

A grey blob oozes down the side of a laboratory beaker. It's heading for the table, but before it gets there a low hum fills the air. Someone just switched on an electromagnet. The goop stiffens, quivers, then carries on oozing only after the hum subsides.

Is it alive?

No, just magnetized.

"We call them magnetorheological fluids--or 'MR fluids' for short," says Alice Gast, a professor of chemical engineering at MIT. "They're liquids that harden or change shape when they feel a magnetic field."

The article then goes on to talk about applications in use today with MR fluids and how this research could one day be used by robots which they admit won't happen tomorrow.

This week, ISS Science Officer Don Pettit conducted the first experiments with MR fluids inside the glovebox. His two-hour "run" marked beginning of the InSPACE investigation, which will likely continue off and on throughout the month.

Meanwhile, some companies are already forging ahead with new magnetorheological devices. Lord Corporation of North Carolina, for example, is designing an MR washing machine. Magnetic dampers inside the machine will decrease noise and vibration--and save energy. They're also studying MR technology for seat belts and airbags in cars. Because MR fluids can generate large forces quickly and flexibly, they could be used by automakers to adjust the arresting force of a seatbelt to the size and weight of a passenger.

Saving lives and silencing washing machines--and that's just the beginning. Not bad for a bunch of grey oily goop.

You can find the full article here.

Instant Glider: Just add Light

Wow you know I'm always amazed at some solutions people come up with. I only wish I could work with people this smart. Well it seems that some real smart people at the University of Kentucky are working with NASA and a few others to make a glider that may someday fly over Mars. Only one problem how to you get a glider big enough to fly over the surface into a small enough package for the journey. Well read on and learn how they solved the problem by harnessing the sun as a reacting agent.

A glider soaring over the surface of Mars could take a much closer look than an orbiting satellite, while also covering much more territory than Sojourner-like rovers.

But Mars's atmosphere is very thin--less than 1% as dense as the Earth's--so a glider would need very long, thin wings to stay aloft. With traditional rigid wings, even a master of origami could only fold them so small. To pack the glider into as small a package as possible for launch, some researchers are exploring the idea of "blow up" wings that inflate when needed. It's an elegant solution to the problem of bulk, but it presents a different problem of its own. Flexing of the inflatable wings during flight makes the glider unstable, and this flexing is particularly bad for the long, thin wings needed for Mars. To get rigid wings out of an inflatable package, the students are using a little chemical wizardry to stiffen the wings after inflation. All they need is a little help from the Sun.

Want to learn more. You can find the whole article here.

Internet Sales Taxes in California

Well I might live in the "Golden State", but we sure are lacking a lot of gold right now. If you have listened to the news at all you know with the large debut in California our State is looking for money everywhere. The latest thing is to tax internet sales. If you have a "brick & mortar" store in California you'll have to pay taxes on internet sales. Ok if that is not bad enough now they are talking about if you sell anything over the internet to someone in California and you offer a service like home tech support you'd have to pay taxes as well. I'm thinking Dell and Gateway are having a hard enough time right now without having to give 8.5% of their profits over to the state just to help California get out of debut. Here's a report from around 2001 just look at these numbers:

Key Findings

Contrary to some inaccurate media reports, states are currently collecting sales taxes on the Internet, but only on purchases made from vendors that have "nexus" or substantial physical presence in the state.

Using data from the federal General Accounting Office (GAO) and a solid California econometric model called Cal-STAMP, we estimate that taxing Internet sales will immediately and permanently destroy thousands to tens of thousands of California jobs. Specifically, if California applied sales taxes to most Internet purchases this year, the state would gain $184 million in additional state sales tax revenue, but lose 45,207 jobs in 2001.

If Internet sales are taxed more broadly, more than 100,000 California jobs could be permanently destroyed by 2002. And even under the highest Internet sales projections, taxing the Internet will generate less than one-half percent (0.47 percent) of the state’s total tax revenue.

Seems simple to me, and as all you know how easy would it be for me to up and move my internet business from California. I just hope someone in the government thinks about this before we drive one of our biggest economic drives out of the state.