Tesla Would Be Proud

A few years back, Marin Soljačić was driven from bed by the insistent beeping of his mobile phone. But it wasn’t beeping for him to answer it, it was beeping for him to plug it in. Since that night, the assistant professor of physics at MIT, has been thinking about ways to start his phone charging as soon as he enters his home - without the need for plugs or wires.

Jennifer Chu at Technology Review writes that Soljačić considered using radio waves, but found that most of their energy would be lost in transmission. Targeted methods like lasers require a clear line-of-sight and could be dangerous for anything in their way. According to Chu, he eventually settled on a phenomenon called magnetic resonance coupling, in which two objects tuned to the same frequency exchange energy strongly but interact only weakly with other objects.

Read more of this story »

My grandmother could never have made this connection in a million lifetimes. But she would have cursed me for suggesting that the menacing elephants that occasionally come to our dusty village somewhere in remote Africa to pillage on our crops and the geckos that roam the village paths could have a connection with her lying on her death bed and needing the knife of a surgeon for her perennial ulcers.

But two separate scientific studies and discoveries in very different settings in Africa and the US can easily make the connection, if you may.

Connecting the Elephant and the Gecko
The pounding feet of the 15,000 pound African Bush Elephant make protective crevices in the savanna grasslands that help the geckos hide from their predators and the hot, penetrating African sun, according to Robert Pringle, an ecologist and conservation biologist at Stanford University in California, who conducted his research at the Mpala Research Center in Kenya. Significant numbers of geckos have been reported in the aftermath of an elephant’s feeding - the vertebrates often finding breeding space and security in fallen tree limbs and stripped barks. This makes the Elephant a change agent of habitat creation at the patch scale for small species that seem insignificant.

Connecting You and the Gecko
The gecko is a small to average sized lizard belonging to the family Gekkonidae that come in 1,196 different species and which are found in warm climates throughout the world.

Many species have specialized toe pads that enable them to climb smooth vertical surfaces and even cross indoor ceilings with ease. Some species like the house lizard are entirely harmless and feed on irritant house insects, which is good. But that is not all.

Read more of this story »

Science and technology not only contribute greatly to the nation’s bottom line (about half of U.S. gross domestic product over the past century, according to the group), but represent “what may be the most important social issue of our time,” the group’s organizers claim.

“When you think about it, nearly every major challenge the next president will face has a science or technological component,” said Lawrence M. Krauss, an astrophysicist at Case Western Reserve University and a member of the Science Debate 2008 steering committee.

Those challenges include climate change, the future of the Earth’s oceans, fresh water supplies, drought, renewable energy research, the threat of global pandemics, the rise in antibiotic-resistant bacteria, bioethics, energy policy and ensuring scientific integrity in government.

So far, nearly 75 institutions and 12,000-plus individuals have signed on as supporters of a presidential science debate. They include the National Academy of Sciences; Friends of the Earth; Science Magazine; Marcia McNutt, president and CEO of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute; and Will Steger, a polar explorer and developer of the Global Warming 101 initiative.

Science Debate 2008 organizers hope to soon start formally inviting the presidential candidates, and have tentatively scheduled a debate for sometime in mid-April.