This week’s Top 5 engineering technology articles include some new breakthroughs on some old technology and an old event that deserves a new look.
- Super Slippery Coatings Are Good For Way More Than Ketchup Bottles
- Kepler Tally Grows: 104 More Exoplanets Confirmed
- This Intelligent Tape Measure May Be The World’s Smartest
- Scientists Make Single-Atom Memory From Copper And Chlorine
- July 20, 1969: One Giant Leap For Mankind
Super Slippery Coatings Are Good For Way More Than Ketchup Bottles
Wired.com
Having a major improvement on something that’s been around as long as a ketchup bottle is always interesting to see. The simplicity of a tipping a bottle and having the “mostly” liquid contents flow out is kind of a hard dynamic to change in terms of improvement.
However, a couple of startups have been working with a liquid impregnated surface to smooth out the inside of the bottle. This serves to remove friction in terms of the ketchup flow which means that the entire contents of the bottle can flow out easily with no remnants left in the bottle.
Clearly this is a great technology for a company like Heinz. But other applications can be just as impactful in the world around you. Imagine the same slippery surface coating on the hull of a boat where barnacles can cluster and cause drag. Imagine this coating on an IV line so that the fluid can’t stick and have a build-up of bacteria.
There are quite a few industries and applications that this technology would be beneficial for and the startups are basically just moving from sticky to non-sticky on every surface they touch.
Kepler Tally Grows: 104 More Exoplanets Confirmed
ScienceNews
With the amount of information that we’re collecting about our solar system, it becomes more and more likely that we’ll find a similar inhabitable planet like our Earth. Whether or not there exists another me working a blog post is probably a much scarier proposition.
JPL-CALTECH/NASA
In operation since about 2009, the Kepler telescope was originally designed to scan the same section of sky and report findings back. During a four-year span, it discovered over 2,000 distinct exoplanets. After a failure in a few components, a new paradigm emerged where it would scan sections for a period of time and then move on. In this capacity it has found over 100 new planets with the tally rising all the time. The planets range from small range orbits of 24 days to a dozen or so planets that are similar in size to Earth.
This Intelligent Tape Measure May Be The World’s Smartest
Engadget
For anyone that’s ever struggled to measure the wall of a room by themselves or determine the size of a round object, this is an excellent gadget. Called, the “Bagel” it uses three different methods for measurement. You can extend an incredibly strong string to follow a semi-traditional method. You can also simply run the wheel one handed over a surface. And finally, you can use the laser pointer to measure horizontally or vertically.
Originally started on Kickstarter, it reached the stated goal of $30,000 and went to more than $850,000 before the campaign even ended. With an accompanying app for the phone that will actually record dictation of what you just measured for storage, this tape measure will certainly make you want to measure twice and cut once.
Scientists Make Single-Atom Memory From Copper And Chlorine
ScienceMag.org
I’ve covered a number of computing breakthroughs in this forum, but nanotechnology is clearly one of the coolest. And now researchers have used a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to store data at the atomic level.
Rearranging chlorine atoms on a copper surface using the STM to arrange the grids have given the researchers a 500 times increase over today’s hard disk technology. Though it isn’t quite ready for commercial production due to the nature of working with the STM, it shows the possibility of storage of a terabyte per square centimeter for the future.
July 20, 1969: One Giant Leap For Mankind
NASA
Buzz Aldrin climbs down the Eagle’s ladder to the surface. Credits: NASA
47 years ago this week, one of the most amazing results of an engineering technology breakthrough occurred. Neil Armstrong changed the course of history with a single step. Of course, there was the rocket lift-off into space, the journey to the moon’s orbit, the lunar lander onto the surface, and then the space walk outside the vehicle.
President Kennedy had given the world the notion that the United States would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade and with just a few months to spare, they accomplished the goal. And, with that goal reached, NASA began reaching for bigger and better things including the Kepler discoveries mentioned above.
So, with a bit of a throwback this week, it still shows how you should never be content with one engineering technology breakthrough, there’s always room for improvement even at the nanotechnology level.
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