Process converts human waste into rocket fuel

At NASA's request, University of Florida researchers have figured out how to turn human waste into rocket fuel.

Adolescent jokes aside, the process finally makes useful something that until now has been collected to burn up on re-entry.

What's more, like so many other things developed for the space program, the process could well turn up on Earth, said Pratap Pullammanappallil, a UF associate professor of agricultural and biological engineering.

"It could be used on campus or around town, or anywhere, to convert waste into fuel," Pullammanappallil said.

In 2006, NASA began making plans to build an inhabited facility on the moon's surface between 2019 and 2024.

As part of NASA's moon-base goal, the agency wanted to reduce the weight of spacecraft leaving Earth.

Historically, waste generated during spaceflight would not be used further.

NASA stores it in containers until it's loaded into space cargo vehicles that burn as they pass back through the Earth's atmosphere.

For future long-term missions, though, it would be impractical to bring all the stored waste back to Earth.

Dumping it on the moon's surface is not an option, so the space agency entered into an agreement with UF to develop test ideas.

Abhishek Dhoble

Pullammanappallil and then-graduate student Abhishek Dhoble accepted the challenge.

"We were trying to find out how much methane can be produced from uneaten food, food packaging and human waste," said Pullammanappallil, a UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences faculty member and Dhoble's adviser.

"The idea was to see whether we could make enough fuel to launch rockets and not carry all the fuel and its weight from Earth for the return journey."

"Methane can be used to fuel the rockets. Enough methane can be produced to come back from the moon."

NASA started by supplying the UF scientists with a packaged form of chemically produced human waste that also included simulated food waste, towels, wash cloths, clothing and packaging materials, Pullammanappallil said.

He and Dhoble, now a doctoral student at the University of Illinois, ran laboratory tests to find out how much methane could be produced from the waste and how quickly.

They found the process could produce 290 liters of methane per crew per day, all produced in a week, Pullammanappallil said.

A typical Anaerobic Digestor process using farmyard waste as a source of fuel.

Their results led to the creation of an anaerobic digester process, which kills pathogens from human waste, and produces biogas, a mixture of methane and carbon dioxide by breaking down organic matter in waste.

In earth-bound applications, that fuel could be used for heating, electricity generation or transportation.

The digestion process also would produce about 200 gallons of non-potable water annually from all the waste.

That is water held within the organic matter, which is released as organic matter decomposes.

Through electrolysis, the water can then be split into hydrogen and oxygen, and the astronauts can breathe oxygen as a back-up system.

The exhaled carbon dioxide and hydrogen can be converted to methane and water in the process, he said.

The Developing Brain: There is no final, optimal state

To reflect the ongoing structural changes in the adolescent and twenty-something brain, many journalists and scientists use words and phrases like “unfinished,” “work in progress,” “under construction” and “half-baked.”

Such language implies that the brain eventually reaches a kind of ideal state when it is “done.” But there is no final, optimal state.

The human brain is not a soufflé that gradually expands over time and finally finishes baking at age 30.

Yes, we can identify and label periods of dramatic development—or windows of heightened plasticity—but that should not eclipse the fact that brain changes throughout life.

Whether we can, at this moment in time, meaningfully link this life stage to neuroscience seems a tenuous proposition at best. By itself, brain biology does not dictate who we are.

The members of any one age group are not reducible to a few distinguishing structural changes in the brain.

Ultimately, the fact that a twenty-something has weaker bridges between various brain regions than someone in their thirties is not hugely important—it’s just one aspect of a far more complex identity.

Malaria: Cell Phone Cameras Capture Microscopic Images

Smart phone apps can help you check your vision, keep tabs on your blood-glucose levels and track your blood pressure. Earlier this year the U.S. Food and Drug Administration even approved an app that allows doctors to view scans on an iPhone or iPad to help them make diagnoses on the go.

But fancy apps aside, the cameras on these devices and others can help health care workers in remote or understaffed areas submit photos of complicated conditions to doctors who can verify or make a diagnosis.

One question that quickly surfaces is whether cell phone cameras are good enough to transmit microscopic information to experts.

A new study found that many simple bar phones with cameras could snap a good enough picture through a standard microscope to allow a remote assessment of a sample. The results were published online Wednesday in PLoS ONE.

“Poor and vulnerable populations are most affected by weak laboratory services because they carry the largest burden of ill health,” noted the researchers behind the study, which was led by Coosje Tuijn, of the Royal Tropical Institute of Biomedical Research in Amsterdam.

And although microscopy is often pivotal in diagnosing common diseases, such as malaria, tuberculosis and other bacterial or parasitic diseases, in poor areas, “microscopy services are often suboptimal,” the researchers noted.

And “as a result, many common diseases are misdiagnosed and improperly treated, ” which can affect patients—and cost the health system time and money.

In Uganda, where there are only eight physicians for every 100,000 people, getting a definitive diagnosis can be difficult. The research team enlisted local health workers to try using their own (or borrowed) cell phones to capture photos and videos of microscopic images to send off for remote diagnosis.

The best images were obtained with cameras that were two megapixels or higher, which are common in smart phones and are in some slimmer Nokia, Samsung and Sony bar phones.

And some of the most successful diagnoses were those of samples that contained malaria parasites, which “were often so clear that specific stages of the malaria parasite could be identified”—thus improving targeted treatment.

TB was a little more challenging (owing to the small size of its bacteria) and required a fluorescent microscopy and a five-megapixel camera.

But phones with video could also grab clips that revealed some other microbes as they moved around, helping to improve the remote diagnosis.

Once the pictures were snapped, health workers could send them directly to a website that could make them accessible to experts for diagnosis and/or students for training.

Direct feedback, via phone call or text, could then be sent to the user’s phone.

Scientists find they can control how people react to group pressure

Researchers found they were able to control whether volunteers conformed to social pressure by using powerful electromagnetic pulses that changed the activity of a small part of the brain.

Volunteers whose posterior medial frontal cortex, an area in the middle of the brain that is associated with reward processing, were exposed to the magnetic pulses suffered reduced levels of conformity.

The researchers believe this part of the brain dates back a long way in the evolution of animals and is responsible or automatically "correcting" our performance when we fall out of line with a group.

They say that by suspending this mechanism, it allows people to think and behave differently. They now believe it may be possible to develop drugs or behaviour changing techniques that could increase or decrease people's conformity.

Dr Vasily Klucharev, a neuroscientist who led the research at the Radboud University Nijmegen, in Holland, said: "People can try to reduce conformity in certain situations, especially when they know about negative consequences of group pressure such as criminal behaviour, propaganda or aggressive marketing.

"Right now we can search for behavioural techniques that modulate activity of the posterior medial frontal cortex without any physical intervention. Hopefully, with help of these techniques someone would be able to partly immune themselves to 'group pressure'.

"Drug manipulation of dopamine could also affect conformity."

Such drugs would be controversial, however, as they could be used by companies hoping to make their employees more reliable or to help control rebellious individuals.

In the study, the researchers asked 49 female volunteers to take part in a study where they were asked to rate the attractiveness of 220 photographs of female faces, but they were allowed to change their ratings after seeing what others in the study had scored.

When Transcranial Electromagnetic Stimulation (TMS) was used to inhibit the activity of the neurons in the posterior medial frontal cortex, the participants did not change their ratings of the photographs so they were more in line with the rest of the group.

Dr Klucharev believes this part of the brain is responsible for generating an "error" signal when individuals deviate from the group opinion, triggering a cascade that leads them to conform with the group view.

He said: "What if that mechanism could be suspended for a time? The group who were exposed to the TMS changed their views to a much lesser extent – they were immune to 'group pressure'.

"Individuals differ in the strength of the error signal – which is why some people are more conformist than others. It also tells us that conformity is a rather automatic process that is based on an old evolutionary mechanism."

NASA Orbiter Processing Facilities: High-Tech Shuttle Garages

Image: Shuttle Columbia arrived at Kennedy's Shuttle Landing Facility via the shuttle carrier aircraft in March 1979 after completing its ferry flight from Dryden Flight Research Center in California. Columbia then was towed into an OPF for processing for STS-1, NASA's first shuttle fight. Photo credit: NASA
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If home is where the heart is, then the heart and soul of NASA's space shuttle fleet reside in three custom-built, 29,000-square-foot buildings at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

They're formally called orbiter processing facilities (OPF), but routinely go by the names OPFs, bays, or hangars, and inside highly experienced technicians perform two-thirds of the work to prepare a shuttle for space.

The bays may be the highest-tech garages on the planet, where workers ready a spaceship for flight without scuffing it and huge cranes move tons of cargo into place. But it's also a place where staples are prohibited from the paperwork technicians work off of so the little pieces of metal don't accidentally become embedded in the shuttle's critical systems.

Fresh off Kennedy's Shuttle Landing Facility and back from a mission, shuttles are towed to their individual processing bays. In recent years, OPF-1 and OPF-2, which are connected by a 233-foot-long low bay, have been the residence of Atlantis and Endeavour, respectively. Across the street is OPF-3, the home base of Discovery. Once inside, technicians jack-and-level the shuttle to maintenance height where platforms and a main access bridge surround the spacecraft like a glove.

"Each high bay has a footprint of the orbiter, and when it rolls in, it has to fit to that footprint," said Wayne Bingham, a United Space Alliance, or USA, flow manager.

"We try to keep the platforms within a maximum distance of 6 to 8 inches, but a minimum of 4 inches."

NASA - Orbiter Processing Facilities: High-Tech Shuttle Garages



Image: In September 1983, technicians in Orbiter Processing Facility-2 inspect Spacelab-1 in the payload bay of shuttle Columbia. Photo credit: NASA
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Image: In OPF-2, technicians check out space shuttle Endeavour's payload bay before its final mission, STS-134. Photo credit: NASA/Frankie Martin
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Image: Shuttle Discovery's tail fin clears the hangar door of Orbiter Processing Facility-2 at the end of its 39th and final spaceflight mission, STS-133 in March 2011. Inside the OPF, Discovery will be prepared for future public display. Photo credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett
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Image: Workers watch as shuttle Atlantis slowly backs out of OPF-1 during its rollover to the Vehicle Assembly Building for its final mission, STS-135. Photo credit: NASA/Jack Pfaller
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Language and Your Brain - Infographics

For centuries, researchers have studied the brain to find exactly where mechanisms for producing and interpreting language reside. Theories abound on how humans acquire new languages and how our developing brains learn to process languages. We take a look at the mysteries of language and the brain in the infographic below.

Click on the picture to see the whole Infographics on VOXY Blog

Hammerhead sharks - Evolutionary process

For over a century, scientists have speculated why hammerheads evolved such an odd shape and whether having eyes so far apart would enhance their vision.

In 1942 a leading authority on sharks, Gordon Walls, suggested the position of the shark's eyes prevented it from having binocular vision but others have argued exactly the opposite, saying the animals must have enhanced eyesight.

Now, hammerhead sharks have had their first eye examination, and it has laid the debate to rest. Sharks with wider heads have better binocular vision – all the better to track fast-moving prey like squid with far more accuracy than sharks with close-set eyes.

The research also shows that hammerheads – among other sharks – have a 360-degree view of the world in the vertical plane, allowing them to simultaneously see prey above and below them.