Your Very Own Air Guitar

Do you like music? Do you like lasers? Do you like making music by using lasers? Would you like doing all that without holding a heavy and awkward box of wood and strings? How silly of us to even ask: of course you would. BAM! Introducing the Air Guitar.

The Air Guitar distills decades of design and style into a single handheld device, enabling anyone to create music with the press of a button and a flick of the wrist. Don’t feel like actually playing music? BAM! Presets. Ten of them, in fact. So, what are you waiting for? Honestly. There’s no genuine reason you should be waiting. We both know you want to be a famous rock star, and putting it off any longer just got substantially more embarrassing

Secrets of the first practical artificial leaf

Man I hope some of this stuff starts actually being used in the real world. It would be great if I could just put up a couple solar panels and start getting hydrogen which could be used at night or in a hydrogen car. This solves the battery problem with electric solar. I wonder how efficient it is, though. Photosynthesis is extremely efficient, so if that’s what they are claiming, they’d better come through with the numbers.

Daniel G. Nocera points out that the artificial leaf responds to the vision of a famous Italian chemist who, in 1912, predicted that scientists one day would uncover the “guarded secret of plants.” The most important of those, Nocera says, is the process that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen. The artificial leaf has a sunlight collector sandwiched between two films that generate oxygen and hydrogen gas. When dropped into a jar of water in the sunlight, it bubbles away, releasing hydrogen that can be used in fuel cells to make electricity.

These self-contained units are attractive for making fuel for electricity in remote places and the developing world, but designs demonstrated thus far rely on metals like platinum and manufacturing processes that make them cost-prohibitive.

To make these devices more widely available, Nocera replaced the platinum catalyst that produces hydrogen gas with a less-expensive nickel-molybdenum-zinc compound. On the other side of the leaf, a cobalt film generates oxygen gas.

Glare, Dust, and Fog Free Glass

This will be nice on my next phone. Especially Apple with it’s shiny glass screens needs to do something about the constant smudging.

One of the most instantly recognizable features of glass is the way it reflects light. But a new way of creating surface textures on glass, developed by researchers at MIT, virtually eliminates reflections, producing glass that is almost unrecognizable because of its absence of glare — and whose surface causes water droplets to bounce right off, like tiny rubber balls.

The new “multifunctional” glass, based on surface nanotextures that produce an array of conical features, is self-cleaning and resists fogging and glare, the researchers say. Ultimately, they hope it can be made using an inexpensive manufacturing process that could be applied to optical devices, the screens of smartphones and televisions, solar panels, car windshields and even windows in buildings.

Amish farm kids remarkably immune to allergies: Study

The researchers surveyed 157 Amish families, about 3,000 Swiss farming families, and close to 11,000 Swiss families who did not live on a farm — all with children between the ages of six and 12. They found that just five per cent of Amish kids had been diagnosed with asthma, compared to 6.8 per cent of Swiss farm kids and 11.2 per cent of the other Swiss children.

Similarly, among 138 Amish kids given a skin-prick test to determine whether they were predisposed to having allergies, only 10 kids — or seven per cent — had a positive response. In comparison, 25 per cent of the farm-raised Swiss kids and 44 per cent of the other Swiss children had a positive test, the researchers report in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

The study did not determine why the kids who grew up on farms were less likely to develop asthma and allergies, but other research has pointed to exposure to microbes and contact with cows, in particular, to partially explain the farm effect (see Reuters Health story of May 2, 2012). Drinking raw cow’s milk also seems to be involved, Holbreich said.

Biochemist creates CO2-eating light that runs on algae

This is one of very very few ideas that I’ve seen that actually could work to prevent global warming. We’d need a hell of a lot of these lights, but everyone needs light, right?

Our atmosphere is filling up with CO2 and we seem to be the major cause of that. The generally accepted solution seems to be cutting back on emissions as quickly as possible, but implementing such cuts is problematic because everyone has to agree to do more, which essentially ends up costing a lot of time and money.

There is an alternative to such measures, though. Instead of relying entirely on cutting emissions, why don’t we start taking CO2 out of the atmosphere?

That’s exactly what biochemist Pierre Calleja is trying to do, and his solution almost sounds too good to be true. Calleja has developed a lighting system that requires no electricity for power. Instead it draws CO2 from the atmosphere and uses it to produce light as well as oxygen as a byproduct. The key ingredient to this eco-friendly light? Algae.