Category Archives: Science and Technology

Video- “Astrochemistry: Putting the Astro in Astrobiology”

Alexander Tielens of the University of Leiden talks in this SETI Institute seminar about Astrochemistry: putting the astro in astrobiology.

The first half or so of the talk, which is suitable for a general audience, Tielens gives a overview of exoplanet discoveries, how planets are formed, and the basics of how life could have arisen on earth. In the rest of the talk, he goes into the details of the research into how the  chemical building blocks of early life could have been formed.

From the caption:

Astrobiology, the study of emergence of life and the its distribution in the Universe, addresses the most fundamental questions in science: “How does life begin ?” and “Are we alone ?” Over the last 20 years, we have discovered that planets are bountiful in the galaxy and that one in every five solar-type stars has a planet in the habitable zone. We have learned that extremophiles have spread to essential every niche – even the seemingly most inhospitable ones – on our planet. And we have learned that life started essentially as soon as conditions permitted, within some 200 million of the late heavy bombardment, or perhaps even earlier.

This has resulted in a paradigm shift from “Life on Earth is unique” to the premise “life is widespread”. As a result, searching for biosignatures in space has taken on a life by itself. In this talk, Dr. Tielens will summarize this shift in our thinking and the global processes that may have influenced the first steps towards life.

The focus in this talk will be on astrochemistry – the starting point of astrobiology – the chemical evolution that takes place in space where simple molecules are transformed into complex molecules and complex molecules are broken down to simple ones. This chemical dance of the elements produces a wide variety of organic compounds. I will review the processes that drive this chemical evolution in space, particularly in regions of star and planet formation.

The focus will be on understanding the raw materials that are delivered to newly formed planets and their relationship to the building blocks from which prebiotic material was formed and biological systems evolve.

SciTech: Video of Magic Leap augmented reality demo

The secretive Magic Leap company is occasionally releasing videos that demonstrate its “augmented reality” system that can put animated objects into your field of view. Some hints of how the system works are being released as well: Magic Leap is about to build ‘millions’ of its augmented reality devices – The Verge

Little is known about Magic Leap’s device, but [company President and CEO Rony Abovitz] described it as a small, self-contained computer that people will feel comfortable using in public. It is believed to involve retinal projection, and evolved out of surgical research. (Abovitz’s previous business involved medical devices.) And when it arrives, Magic Leap will likely compete with Microsoft’s HoloLens, which is now taking applications for its development kits.

* This video was released today:

Shot directly through Magic Leap technology on 10/14/15, without the use of special effects or compositing.

This video is from last March:

 

 

Sci-Tech video: JB Straubel of Tesla Motors

This video shows an interesting talk given at the University of Nevada at Reno by JB Straubel, co-founder and chief technical officer of Tesla Motors. He reviewed the history of electric cars, the founding and growth of Tesla, the challenge of creating affordable high energy density batteries, Tesla’s plans for the lower cost Model 3 sedan, the Gigafactory, and more.

 

Video: Deciphering the reversals and excursions of the Earth’s magnetic field

The earth’s magnetic field varies over time and even flips in polarity periodically. Bruce Buffet of UC Berkeley talks in this SETI Institute seminar about efforts to understand how the earth’s interior causes such variability : Geomagnetic Reversals and excursions: The origin of Earth’s magnetic field – SETI Institute

 

From the lecture announcement:

Palaeomagnetic observations offer important insights into the origin of Earth’s interior, but a detailed reconstruction of the underlying dynamics is not feasible. A practical alternative is to construct a stochastic model for the time evolution of the dipole field.

Slow changes in the field are described by a deterministic (drift) term, whereas short-time fluctuations are represented by a random (noise) term. Estimates for the drift and noise terms can be recovered from a time series of variations in the axial dipole moment over the past 2 million years. The results are used to predict a number of statistical properties of the palaeomagnetic field, including the average rates of magnetic reversals and excursions.

Dr. Buffet will explain how a physical interpretation of the stochastic models suggests that reversals and excursions are part of a continuum of time variations in Earth’s magnetic field, arising from convective fluctuations in the core. Relatively modest changes the amplitude of convective fluctuations can produce large changes in reversal rates, including the well-known occurrence of superchrons lasting longer than 10 million years.

Video: Gwynne Shotwell of SpaceX + Dirk Ahlborn of Hyperloop Transportation Tech

Gwynne Shotwell, president of SpaceX, gave a keynote talk at last week’s South Summit entrepreneurial business event in Madrid, Spain. She then participated in a panel discussion titled, Future of connectivity: What can we expect from Space Exploration 6.0.

Her talk starts at about 1hr 31min 15sec into this video. The panel begins at around 1hr 45min

Then Dirk Ahlborn of JumpStartFund and CEO of Hyperloop Transportation Technologies Inc talked about the Hyperloop concept (see many Hyperloop posts here) and how his “crowdstormed” organization will start building a full-scale prototype system in Central California next year. His talk starts at 2hrs 38min 17sec into the video.

He then participated in a panel discussion titled Trains, Planes, and Drone-o-mobiles-Future of Transportation, starting at around 3hr 0min 35sec.