Discover - July/August 2011

Science
News
;OOD NEWS

≥ After four years of haggling, the 193 member states of the World Health Organization reached a deal to share pandemic flu samples and vaccines. Major drug companies also agreed to cooperate.

≥ People who experience discomfort watching 3-D movies can now find relief in glasses that restore the film to 2-D, invented by entrepreneur Hank Green after he learned that his wife suffered from headaches brought on by the extra dimension.

≥ A new online multi-player game from the Navy will crowd-source ideas for handling piracy scenarios. Help them out at http://mmowgli.nps.edu.

BAD NEWS

≥ United Nations peacekeepers were probably the source of the cholera epidemic that has ravaged Haiti in the wake of last year’s earthquake, an independent panel commissioned by the U. N. concludes.

A massive metal compactor puts tough new rocket materials to the test. CAN CRUSHER cameras, meanwhile, snapped photos of the test metal’s exterior, which was speckled with 70,000 black dots whose movements were tracked by imaging software to reveal the buckling in finer detail. Ultimately, the shell withstood 750,000 pounds—250 times its own weight—before it began to collapse. Camera Hydraulic Actuator Test Metal NASA’s subscale crusher compresses metal cans 8 feet in diameter.

On March 23 scientists at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center spent the day destroying perfectly good metal in the name of rocket science. The engineers watched as a giant machine crushed a 20-foot-tall hollow metal can with nearly a million pounds of force over the course of about five hours. The point? To simulate the extreme forces that can bend and compress the surface of a rocket as it plows through the atmosphere into space.

The “can crusher” is one of
NASA’s premier instruments for
developing new rockets capable of
carrying payloads more affordably
to the International Space Station
and beyond. (Today, launching cargo
into space costs about $10,000 per
pound.) “Our rocket engineering
guidelines date back to the Apollo
program in the 1960s,” says Mark
Hilburger of the NASA Langley
Research Center in Virginia. “We can
do a lot better.”
The squashed container was no
soup can. It was made of 3,000
pounds of aluminum and lithium, the
same alloy that has clad space-
shuttle rockets since the 1980s. The
crushing began with force applied
by eight hydraulic actuators, each
capable of exerting a quarter-million
pounds of force to the can. About
800 sensors on the metal registered
the deformations. High-resolution

Later this summer Hilburger and team will feed the crusher a can made of carbon-fiber material that is 25 percent lighter than the metal alloy. Of course, a few practice runs will be necessary in the meantime. “I just crushed my Diet Coke can,” Hilburger says. “You can’t help but want to crush things all the time.” ANDREW GRANT

≥ The graphs of real-time studio-audience feedback often displayed during televised debates distort public perception of the outcome, a British study reports.

≥ A study of pollutants such as PCBs and DDT in blubber sampled from dolphins off the U. S. East Coast and the Gulf of Mexico showed the highest con- centrations ever recorded in mammals. Dolphins near urban areas racked up the heaviest loads of toxins.

OFF THE CHARTS Caliente! Hottest Pepper Tips Heat Scale ;;;; ;;;;;; ;;; ;;;;;; ;;;;;;; in Australia announced a hot new product: sauce made from the spici- est chili in the world. ;e Trinidad Scorpion Butch T registers ;,;;;,;;; Scoville heat units, nearly ;;; times as hot as the hottest jalapeño. The pepper is so brutal that owners Mar- cel and Alex de Wit wear protective suits to guard against fumes while cooking their brew, called Scorpion Strike. Butch T is genetically primed to produce extraordinary levels of the heat-inducing chemical capsa- icin, but only under perfect condi- tions. Horticultural expert Mark Peacock’s technique calls for a fer- tilizer blend of worm excrement to boost protective bacteria around the plant’s roots and crushed insects to stimulate natural defense mecha- nisms. On sampling the fruits of his labor, Peacock says, “It’s the worst pain I’ve ever felt.” ;;; ;;;;;