Shawn Hogan Fan Club » Science

Scubacraft

Shawn — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 19:03:45 +0000

So I think I decided what I want for Christmas… A Scubacraft (I saw it in Wired magazine).

It’s basically a boat that you can hit a button, and it will go underwater (up to 100 feet). It would be pretty awesome to go scuba diving and instead of leaving your boat at the surface, just take it under water with you when you get to the dive site. It’s not pressurized, so it’s not a submarine (you would still need scuba gear of course).

It also has an onboard computer that controls your ascent and descent so you don’t go to quickly and give yourself the bends.

I love you, Santa!

Wait What? She Wore A Diaper??

Shawn — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 19:23:29 +0000

So there was that astronaut chick a couple days ago that tried to murder and kidnap someone, and I guess I missed this part the other day, but it makes the whole thing a whole lot funnier.

…the sordid detail that Nowak drove 900 miles from Houston to Orlando wearing a diaper so that she didn’t have to stop for bathroom breaks.

Astronaut Charged With Attempted Murder

Shawn — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 22:34:46 +0000

Sweet… how would you like to be isolated on the International Space Station with a murderer?

NASA astronaut Lisa Nowak was ordered released Tuesday on an additional $10,000 bond on an attempted murder charge in Orlando, where she allegedly tried to subdue a purported romantic rival with pepper spray and kidnap her from an airport parking lot.

Nowak also was ordered to wear a global positioning satellite, or GPS, device.

Nowak, 43, appeared in court Tuesday afternoon to face the attempted first-degree murder charge.

Nowak is accused of accosting Air Force Capt. Colleen Shipman, 30, in the Orlando airport parking lot early Monday, telling police she only wanted to talk with Shipman.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/02/06/astronaut.arrested/

Concrete That Cleans Air

Shawn — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 20:06:30 +0000

Hmmm… concrete that eats pollution. That’s pretty slick if you ask me.

The results so far are astonishing: A street in the town of Segrate, near Milan, with an average traffic of 1,000 cars per hour, has been repaved with the compound, “and we have measured a reduction in nitric oxides of around 60%,” says Italcementi’s spokesperson Alberto Ghisalberti. In a test over an 8,000 square meter (or approximately 2 acres) industrial area paved with active blocks near Bergamo, Italcementi’s hometown, the reduction was measured at 45%.

In large cities such as Milan, with persistent pollution problems caused by car emissions, smoke from heating systems, and industrial activities, both the company and outside experts estimate that covering 15% of all visible urban surfaces (painting the walls, repaving the roads) with products containing TX Active could abate pollution by up to 50%, depending on the specific atmospheric conditions.

http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/nov2006/id20061108_116412.htm

Teleportation Coming Closer To Reality

Shawn — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 01:57:29 +0000

“It is one step further because for the first time it involves teleportation between light and matter, two different objects. One is the carrier of information and the other one is the storage medium,” Polzik explained in an interview on Wednesday.

The experiment involved for the first time a macroscopic atomic object containing thousands of billions of atoms. They also teleported the information a distance of half a meter but believe it can be extended further.

“Teleportation between two single atoms had been done two years ago by two teams but this was done at a distance of a fraction of a millimeter,” Polzik, of the Danish National Research Foundation Center for Quantum Optics, explained.

“Our method allows teleportation to be taken over longer distances because it involves light as the carrier of entanglement,” he added.

Quantum entanglement involves entwining two or more particles without physical contact.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/10/04/teleportation.reut/

First Woman With Bionic Arm

Shawn — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 17:32:31 +0000

I can’t wait until you can just cut off your own arms and legs and get some of these things by choice.

Mitchell, who lives in Ellicott City, is the fourth person — and first woman — to receive a “bionic” arm, which allows her to control parts of the device by her thoughts alone. The device, designed by physicians and engineers at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, works by detecting the movements of a chest muscle that has been rewired to the stumps of nerves that once went to her now-missing limb.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/13/AR2006091302271.html

(via Washington Post, via Engadget, via Bobby)

Correction And Apology

Shawn — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 18:26:37 +0000

On August 25, 2006, I published some information that turned out to be entirely false. I sincerely apologize to those of you that I inadvertently mislead with this post.

In that entry, I stated that I didn’t get stitches from my surgery. But new information has come to light this morning that now leads me to believe that I did indeed get stitches. This information came from the surgeon that did my surgery. I attended my post-op checkup this morning and I made an inquiry about the lack of stitches and he stated, “You have stitches, but they are under the skin. The last stitch was tied off and cut at the skin, so you can’t see it.” While I have not actually cut myself open to examine myself to see if I indeed have stitches, I don’t have any reason to believe he would have lied to me about it.

Again, I apologize for disseminating false information.

No Stitches

Shawn — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 20:50:46 +0000

I changed my little bandage thing today and uhm… I have no stitches. I have a 3 inch incision in my abdomen and I have no stitches. Does anyone besides me think that’s a little weird? What if my guts came spilling out or something if I cough too hard?

Vicodin Doesn’t Do Shit

Shawn — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 17:55:27 +0000

I ended up taking 4 Vicodin last night, and it doesn’t do a God damn thing for me except make me feel like I’m about to puke. Certainly didn’t help with the pain.

So I don’t think I’m going to take anymore pain killers. Which I guess is a moot point because as long as I lay perfectly still it doesn’t hurt anyway.

I Was Stabbed

Shawn — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 05:18:03 +0000

I had my incisional hernia repair surgery today, and it was quick and easy…

But now after the surgery, it straight up feels like I was stabbed with an 8″ blade in my gut, and then someone jammed it around in there just for good measure. Thank God I waited until after Costa Rica to do this.

Okay, I’m going back to laying down in the living room now.

Everyone Wants My Blood

Shawn — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 19:31:46 +0000

I’ve had to give lots of blood lately. 2 vials were taken before I went to Costa Rica, a stone wall took some of my blood in Costa Rica, and then someone else wanted 1 vial of blood today.

Too bad we haven’t perfected human cloning yet. Then I could have myself cloned and harvest my clone’s organs later in life if I ever need them…

If anyone in Costa Rica would like to try that, you can find my blood and maybe some tissue samples on the wall/bridge in Manuel Antonio for the Costa Verde hotel (coming off the main road).

Update

I’m also available for sperm samples if the right person asks.

Note: That’s a joke BTW.

Diet Coke And Mentos Experiments

Shawn — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 20:34:11 +0000

They aren’t the first to do it, but these guys took it to a whole new level.

That’s so much Diet Coke that the chemicals in it are probably going to kill the grass and trees behind them.

http://eepybird.com/dcm1.html

Alien Cells

Shawn — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 07:09:01 +0000

Hmmm… alien microbes that fell in India? Odd but (maybe) true…

As bizarre as it may seem, the sample jars brimming with cloudy, reddish rainwater in Godfrey Louisâ€™s laboratory in southern India may hold, well, aliens. In April, Louis, a solid-state physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University, published a paper in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Astrophysics and Space Science in which he hypothesizes that the samplesâ€”water taken from the mysterious blood-colored showers that fell sporadically across Louisâ€™s home state of Kerala in the summer of 2001â€”contain microbes from outer space.

Specifically, Louis has isolated strange, thick-walled, red-tinted cell-like structures about 10 microns in size. Stranger still, dozens of his experiments suggest that the particles may lack DNA yet still reproduce plentifully, even in water superheated to nearly 600ËšF. (The known upper limit for life in water is about 250ËšF.) So how to explain them? Louis speculates that the particles could be extraterrestrial bacteria adapted to the harsh conditions of space and that the microbes hitched a ride on a comet or meteorite that later broke apart in the upper atmosphere and mixed with rain clouds above India. If his theory proves correct, the cells would be the first confirmed evidence of alien life and, as such, could yield tantalizing new clues to the origins of life on Earth.

http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/2c21c0f98d07b010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html

Full Body Teleportation System

Shawn — Sat, 13 May 2006 07:41:20 +0000

Hmmm… John Quincy St. Clair has filed an interesting patent with the US patent office back in 2004. A “Full body teleportation system”. He must have also invented a time machine and traveled back from the future to file the patent.

View patent filing here

(via digg)

Light Can Travel Backwards

Shawn — Fri, 12 May 2006 05:12:39 +0000

Some interesting stuff here… light traveling at speeds other than the speed of light (slower, faster and backwards)…

Boyd, along with Rochester graduate students George M. Gehring and Aaron Schweinsberg, and undergraduates Christopher Barsi of Manhattan College and Natalie Kostinski of the University of Michigan, sent a burst of laser light through an optical fiber that had been laced with the element erbium. As the pulse exited the laser, it was split into two. One pulse went into the erbium fiber and the second traveled along undisturbed as a reference. The peak of the pulse emerged from the other end of the fiber before the peak entered the front of the fiber, and well ahead of the peak of the reference pulse.

But to find out if the pulse was truly traveling backward within the fiber, Boyd and his students had to cut back the fiber every few inches and re-measure the pulse peaks when they exited each pared-back section of the fiber. By arranging that data and playing it back in a time sequence, Boyd was able to depict, for the first time, that the pulse of light was moving backward within the fiber.

http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=2544