Heroes and Legends Before Superman

Man of Steel 

 

Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a... well, you know the rest. Everyone does, because everyone knows Superman.

The man of steel is the first and most iconic superhero of all time. But before Superman came a long line of heroes in fiction who used their superhuman strength for a larger cause.

Source: news.discovery

Read More

Transparent Solar-Cell Screen Charges Phone

Today’s mobile devices are constantly in use—so constantly that battery life is a huge problem. I recently hosted an afternoon barbecue at a community pool; over in one corner, folks jockeyed for a turn to charge their mobile devices at the one available outlet. Meanwhile, the sun shone down brightly on mobile phones scattered across the picnic tables, as the batteries on those idle devices quietly drained.

The SunPartner Group, a 30-employee startup in Aix-en-Provence, France, thinks that’s a real waste. Folks sitting in restaurants, in outdoor cafes, or at their desks typically pull out their phones and put them face up in front of them; put solar cells on the phones and there’d be a lot less scrambling to find a wall outlet. And they’ve built a low-cost transparent panel that does just that. They’re now testing it with a number of manufacturers and expect to see it built into mobile devices early next year.

Sunpartner isn’t the first to think mobile phones should use solar power to charge themselves. A few years ago, several cell phone manufacturers tried putting solar cells on the back of phones—like the Samsung Crest and the Sharp Solar Hybrid. Turns out, though, that people weren’t inclined to put phones face down on the table—they missed alerts, and were worried about scratching the screen. And solar cells on the back of cell phones never caught on widely.

Putting solar cells on the front of a mobile phone is harder, because today phone fronts are virtually all display. Startup Ubiquitous Energy, a spin off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is developing a technology that makes the solar cells themselves transparent by using materials that only absorb infrared and ultraviolet light and let visible light pass through. Researchers at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) are taking a similar approach, while researchers at the University of Cambridge are weaving solar cells into organic light emitting diode (OLED) displays, where they can capture light leaked from the edges of the OLED elements as well as from outside the phone.

These technologies still appear to have a ways to go. SunPartner is taking a lower tech approach it believes will get to the mass market much sooner. The company is using stripes of standard thin-film solar cells alternating with transparent film. It then adds a layer of tiny lenses that spread the image coming from the screen to make the opaque stripes disappear as well as to concentrate the rays coming in from the sun. (See illustration, below.)

SunPartner’s Matthieu De Broca, visiting Silicon Valley as part of the French Tech Tour, says that the company’s current prototypes are 82 percent transparent; future versions should hit 90 percent transparency. The company has 30 patents on its technology so far. Putting the panel and related electronics needed to convert the voltage from the display costs adds about US $2.30 to the cost of each phone, De Broca said.

The technology doesn’t replace the wall charger; mobile device users can still count on plugging their phone in at night. It does, De Broca said, extend the battery life about 20 percent in normal use. And it can infinitely keep up with the phone’s modest power drain when it is idling in normal daylight. The SunPartner Group, founded by optician Joel Gilbert and businessman Ludovic Deblois, is currently working with three mobile device manufacturers to develop prototypes and expects the first models integrating the technology to be on the market in early 2014. Nokia is reportedly one of those companies.

Get More from IEEE Spectrum

This article originally appeared on IEEE Spectrum, all rights reserved.

View the original article here

Read More

Valentina Tereshkova: First Woman in Space

On the afternoon of Sunday, June 16, 1963, Valeriy Bykovsky was in Earth orbit. He’d been up a little under a day, safely inside his Vostok 5 capsule, when he gained a companion: Valentina Tereshkova in Vostok 6. The two cosmonauts’ joint mission was similar to the joint Vostok 3/4 mission that had flown the previous August, but this mission had a twist. Tereshkova was the first woman in space. On Sunday, she’ll be celebrating the 50 year anniversary of this historic feat.

ANALYSIS: First Woman in Space Wants to Go to Mars

Towards the end of 1961, Sergei Korolev, the Soviet space program’s Chief Designer and mastermind behind the nation’s earliest space triumphs, was looking for a new first in space. Having already launched Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov into orbit, he needed something new to maintain the Soviets’ lead over America in space. One idea he had was to launch a woman. A female cosmonaut would send the message that the Soviet Union valued its citizens equally and give little girls throughout the nation the belief that they, too, could go into space some day.

The Central Committee of the Communist Party Korolev’s idea, and on February 16, 1962, five experienced parachutists became the first all female cosmonaut training group.

PHOTOS: Ten People Who Overcame Their Limits to Achieve Greatness

Among them was Valentina Tereshkova, a textile factory worker and avid skydiver. But more importantly, she was an outspoken supporter of the communist party who had worked throughout her life – she began helping her widowed mother support their family at the age of 10 – within the Communist system to achieve great things. She was, like Yuri Gagarin before her, the picture of success in the Soviet Union.

Tereshkova spent three days in space aboard Vostok 6, strapped to her ejection seat inside the seven-and-a-half foot wide pressurized cabin. She was wearing an SK-2 space suit similar to the SK-1 suit Gagarin wore on his mission. It was, for a spacesuit, a comfortable design, designed to be pressurized only in an emergency situation where the cabin pressure was lost.

The joint mission between Vostoks 5 and 6 was similar to that between Vostoks 3 and 4. Neither spacecraft could change its orbit or properly maneuver in space, but they were launched such that they came within 3 miles of one another in orbit. Tereshkova swears that she could actually see Bykovsky in Vostok 5 during their brief close pass; as the mission wore on the spacecraft drifted further apart in their orbits. The bulk of their remaining time in space saw Tereshkova and Bykovsky run a series of biomedical experiments while learning to live and work in microgravity.

PHOTOS: 7 Extreme Female Explorers

Tereshkova’s mission ended after 48 she’d completed orbits in a little under 70 hours. She used manual controls to hold Vostok steady while firing the rocket engine to slow her capsule and begin the fall back through the atmosphere. After re-entry, Tereshkova tapped into her parachutist past and ejected from the falling spacecraft to land by her own parachute on June 19.

While Tereshkova has been lauded since her flight as a trailblazer for women in space – and indeed, she’s been an advocate of both women’s rights and space exploration in her post-cosmonaut career – it’s worth remembering that her flight was based in politics.  Then again, so was the decision to launch men into orbit.

Image: Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova practices eating in flight simulations for launch into space. Credit: Corbis

View the original article here

Read More

World Population May Reach 11 Billion By 2100

The world's population could reach 11 billion by the year 2100, according to a new statistical analysis.

That represents 800 million more people than was forecast in 2011. Most of that increase comes because birth rates in Africa haven't dropped as fast as projected.

"The fertility decline in Africa has slowed down or stalled to a larger extent than we previously predicted, and as a result the African population will go up," said study co-author Adrian Raftery, a statistician at the University of Washington, in a statement.

Ever increasing

The United Nations reported that the population hit 7 billion in October 2011. That's an amazing increase from the mere 5 million people who lived on the planet in 8000 B.C. or the 1 billion who were alive in 1805.

The huge surge in population is expected to cause mega-city populations to swell, which could worsen environmental problems and overcrowding.

Right now, Africa's population stands at 1.1 billion, but that is expected to increase four-fold, to 4.2 billion, by 2100.

Rest unchanged

The rest of the world is unlikely to see big changes from the past estimate. Europe may see a slight dip in population, because it continues to have a below-replacement birth rate, meaning more people are dying than being born.

The new analysis used a more sophisticated method for estimating life expectancy, updated fertility forecasting methods and new population data.

The model predicts that the population will likely reach between 9 billion and 13 billion by 2100. By contrast, the U.N.'s population estimates assume the average birth rate may vary by up to 0.5 children per woman, which results in a large range for the world's population at the end of the century, between 7 billion and 17 billion.

The findings suggest that experts should redouble their efforts to curb population growth in Africa, Raftery said.

"These new findings show that we need to renew policies, such as increasing access to family planning and expanding education for girls, to address rapid population growth in Africa," Raftery said in a statement.

More From LiveScience:

Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

View the original article here

Read More

Stunning Space Photos of the Week (June 9-14)

The Long March-2F rocket carrying China's manned Shenzhou-10 spacecraft blasts off from the launch pad at Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Jiuquan, northwest China's Gansu Province, on June 11, 2013. Crew Nie Haisheng, Zhang Xiaoguang, and Wang Yaping docked with China's prototype space station two days later on June 13.

View the original article here

Read More

Amelia Earhart Plane Search Turns Up New Clue

A sonar anomaly that researchers suspect might possibly be the wreckage of Amelia Earhart's aircraft is a straight, unbroken feature uncannily consistent with the fuselage of a Lockheed Electra, new analysis of the sonar imagery captured off a remote Pacific island has revealed.

Examined by Oceanic Imaging Consultants, Inc. (OIC) of Honolulu, Hawaii, the new data processing showed that the imagery released last month by The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), was incomplete and somewhat misleading because of "ping drops."

Basically, sonar pings that were not continuously recorded by the intake system, due to a number of technical deficiencies, created the illusion of a break in the linear nature of the anomaly.

“The good news is that, when corrected, the imagery of the anomaly -- although less complete -- looks even more interesting than it did in the initial distorted version,” Ric Gillespie, executive director of TIGHAR, said in a statement.

“It's looking more and more like it might be the Electra,” he told Discovery News.

Last month TIGHAR, which has long been investigating Earhart's last, fateful flight, released a grainy image of an "anomaly" resting at a depth of about 600 feet in the waters off Nikumaroro island, an uninhabited tropical atoll in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati which was the target of TIGHAR's underwater search in 2012.

Located distinctly apart from the debris field of the SS Norwich City, a British steamer that went aground on the island's reef in 1929, the anomaly appeared to fit TIGHAR’s theory about where the Electra may have come to rest.

The legendary aviator was piloting this two-engine aircraft when she vanished on July 2, 1937 in a record attempt to fly around the world at the equator.

A number of artifacts recovered by TIGHAR during 10 expeditions have suggested that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, made a forced landing on the island's smooth, flat coral reef.

Gillespie and his team believe the two became castaways and eventually died on the island, which is some 350 miles southeast of Earhart's target destination, Howland Island.

The anomaly is made up of two features -- an object that is high enough to be casting a shadow, and a "tail" of what might be either skid marks or scattered debris.

In the corrected sonar imagery, the object that is casting a shadow is estimated to be at least 34 feet long and arrow-straight.

“Long straight lines are rare in nature and especially in coral. The probability that we have a man-made object has gone up significantly,” Gillespie said.

View the original article here

Read More

6 Traditions Born in the Marketing Department

Robert Kennedy wears the George Washington Medal awarded to him as National Father of the Year, in 1960.

Among the weary and cynical, Father's Day is one of those American traditions sometimes called Hallmark Holidays. The term refers to holidays and celebrations that are primarily commercial in nature. They exist so that people will feel obligated to buy gifts for other people. Think Sweetest Day, Grandparent's Day or Secretaries' Day (now called Administrative Professionals' Day, thank you very much.)

In the United States, Father's Day is believed to have originated as response to Mother's Day, a holiday that itself began earnestly enough as a way to honor those who had lost children to war. But by the 1930s, both Mother's Day and Father's Day had become thoroughly commercialized, promoted by the greeting card industry and groups like the New York Associated Men's Wear Retailers.

In fact, many enduring traditions actually have their origins in the boardrooms and marketing departments of America. Here's a sampling.

View the original article here

Read More