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Someday, These Gifts Will Come
This year has been so rough on so many that rather than consider this holiday season, it might be more fun to take a peek at the future to see what we might find under the tree or near the menorah. For example, how about wrapping that expensive present in a case that protects it from drops and smashes? While you can find certain cases like that today, the U.S Department of Defense is funding research into one specifically designed to channel shock waves away from components, with the idea of making munitions safer to handle. Don't look for this before 2014.
More exciting could be the ever-full liquor flask. Take a bioreactor-on-a-chip, set it up to constantly run a fermentation and distillation process, and voila! There's no telling when this item will be ready for giving, but all of the necessary components are being developed. Do you prefer power to booze? How about a battery that lasts for at least a couple of decades? Several teams are working on batteries powered by radioactive decay. It's possible with betavoltaics, which generates current by capturing electrons from a radioactive material with a semiconducting device. It's a great idea, with just one catch: disposing of the battery once it does run out.
Or maybe you'd like to bring your gaming experience to life. There have been many versions of virtual reality, but how about one that doesn't require goggles? Burton, a Japan-based company, is working on a system that uses a laser projector to generate streams of precisely-focused pulses that create point-flashes of light. These light flashes can be used to build virtual 3D objects. We could see a demo as early as 2011.
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Even While Stuck, Mars Rover Makes Discovery
Despite being stuck for months in the Martian sand, unable to move, NASA rover Spirit continues to make important discoveries. Its latest one promises to give scientists a better understanding of the history of water on the red planet. It turns out spinning one's wheels can be productive after all.
The rover has been doing just that – literally spinning its wheels – since April in an effort to escape a patch of loose soil at the edge of a crater. As the wheels spun, they broke through an inch-thick reddish-brown crust to expose some sandy material with “a higher concentration of sulfite than seen anywhere else on Mars,” according to geologist Ray Arvidson. Sulfates are usually formed in steam vents or hydrothermal pools; their existence in a higher concentration on Mars could indicate that the area once supported life.
Arvidson explained that the deposits are evidence of water-charged volcanism. The red planet's modern water cycle, scientists now believe, is very different. The soil layering turned up by Spirit leads them to think that water from the poles shifts to the equator during warmer times, melts and trickles into the soil at the equator, reaching the sulfates; the water-soluble iron sulfates dissolve, and the remaining white calcium sulfates form a crust. That's some good thinking for months of work and measurements – but it's time to move on, and NASA may get a mobile Spirit for the holidays. Its right front wheel, jammed since 2006, just “almost magically turned on a few days ago after we ran some voltage through it,” Arvidson noted.
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