Posts Tagged ‘death’
FYI: Can Wireless Electricity Kill People?
Tesla’s experiment proved that the Earth itself could be used to conduct electricity, no wires necessary. He also experimented with electromagnetic induction, a phenomenon discovered 70 years before Tesla’s experiments by the English scientist Michael Faraday. In electromagnetic induction, an oscillating magnetic field around an electromagnet produces a current in a nearby conductor—in effect, the current jumps the gap. While it is airborne, electric energy exists as a magnetic field. Magnetic induction is used today in the contact plates on electric toothbrushes, transmitting a charge from the plastic-wrapped charging station to the battery inside the brush.
In 2006, Marin Soljacic, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sent wireless electricity across a room to light a 60-watt bulb. Soljacic used electromagnetic induction, but with a twist. By tuning the sending and receiving coils in his electromagnetic field to resonate at the same frequency and engage only at that frequency (the way glass will shatter when struck by sound waves of just the right pitch), the current is focused and bypasses everything else, humans included. Resonant coupling, as Soljacic’s process is known, is far more efficient than Tesla’s attempts, and safer too.
Soljacic has , and he can now send 3,000 watts across a room—or a garage, since 3,000 watts can charge an electric car.
Have a science question you've always wondered about? Send an email to fyi@popsci.com
Five Hundred More Dead Birds in Louisiana Further Puzzle Investigators
That speculation began with fingers pointing at the weather over Beebe at the time of the blackbird decimation, as thunderstorms were just departing the area when the birds began dropping from the sky before midnight of New Year’s Eve (ominous!). , gathering some opinions from ornithological experts, reported that perhaps foul weather was the culprit.
This has happened before – flocks of birds can be caught off guard in bad weather, literally plucked from their roosts and thrust into the air by violent weather systems, leaving them disoriented, cold, and sometimes without life.
Later yesterday, other sources were reporting that loud the Arkansas incident. Necropsies performed yesterday showed the Arkansas birds suffered internal injuries that formed blood clots that went to their brains. It’s conceivable that loud noise (NYE fireworks?) could have startled a flock, causing them to rapidly change course and plunge headlong into buildings or tall trees, sustaining blunt traumas that led to their collective death.
Of course, none of this accounts for the 500 freshly dead birds in Louisiana. Those, of course, could be completely unrelated to the Arkansas birds (don’t be fooled by randomness, people). But we like a good conspiracy theory better. Besides, what about all those dead drum? Something smells fishy indeed, but who could possibly benefit from knocking off a bunch of birds in the American south? NASA? BP? Aliens? Our money is on Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, who was never really afforded an opportunity to even the score with his avian nemeses.
Feel free to leave your own thoughts on these odd happenings below.
[]
Prototype Coffin Screws Into the Ground to Save Space
Donald Scruggs has a ground-breaking new idea
Holding a body vertically, it is screwed down into the ground securely, to optimize graveyards' use of space. It can be screwed in manually or with a machine, and designed to take into account the density of the earth where it's used.
Scruggs has installed the prototype above in his own California backyard, and is working on refining the idea. He even envisions a transparent model for those wishing a glamorous burial.
[]
New Corpse-Detection System Finds Where the Bodies Are Buried
Before they go tearing up the ground in search of a body, authorities often want to be sure about what lies beneath. Typically, tests of soil around a suspected grave site involve extracting samples and shipping them to a lab for testing, which is expensive and time-consuming.
The new system, designed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, consists of a slender probe that can simply be stuck in the ground to pull in air samples. It can even detect bodies buried beneath concrete, as long as you drill a 1/8-inch hole for the probe.
The system involves a small aluminum pipette that can detect trace amounts of a chemical called ninhydrin-reactive nitrogen, which collects in air pockets around a grave site. It's the only known example of testing the chemical in its vapor phase, NIST says. As an added bonus, the system works at ambient temperatures instead of freezing cold, which could make it easy to transport.
Chemists Thomas J. Bruno and Tara M. Lovestead tested it on dead rats, burying some in 3 inches of soil and laying others on top of the soil. For comparison, they also tested boxes with no dead rats in them. The NRN compound was still detectable after nearly five months, the researchers say. A paper on their findings was published in the journal Forensic Science International.
As of now, testing of the air samples still must be done in a lab, but Bruno is working on a portable device that can test for NRN in the field.
One would hope the demand for such technology would be limited, but NIST says it could help law enforcement officials find out where bodies are clandestinely buried.
[]