T-sci-eng - SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING

Crazy Looking Bamboo Tower Creates 25 Gallons of Drinking Water Per Day From Thin air

This crazy looking tower creates 25 gallons of drinking water per day from thin air. It’s basically an atmospheric water collector which gathers dew from the air.

“…The 9 m tall bamboo framework has a special fabric hanging inside capable to collect potable water from the air by condensation…”

It’s called the WarkaWater:

“…The name ‘WarkaWater’ comes from the Warka Tree, a giant wild fig tree native to Ethiopia, traditionally used for public gatherings and school education. The Warka Tree is an archetype of the Biennale theme ‘Common Ground’…”

The simple and practical, yet elegant design powers out ahead of any of the commercial atmospheric water generators on the market which cost thousands more to build than this.

This is a wonderful water generation idea, that’s inexpensive, and actually beautiful to look at.

Water is life, and being designed after a tree. This is a real Tree of Life.

Optical Properties: Negative Refraction and Metamaterials

Negative refraction isn’t something that occurs naturally in nature, it’s something scientists have created using specifically designed materials. So how do they do it?

The index of refraction, n, can be equated to the square root of the material’s relative permittivity times its relative permeability. For most materials, both these values are positive, resulting in the sort of refraction that we’re all familiar with. But, as show in the diagram below, if both the values were negative then the resulting material would have negative refraction

Metamaterials are defined as artificial materials engineered to have properties that have not yet been found in nature, and since negative refraction does not occur naturally, only metamaterials can have negative refraction. 

So far, however, metamaterials have only been created that refract microwave and radio frequencies - scientists believe it is unlikely that a material will be created with negative refraction in the visible part of the spectrum.

Sources: 1 2 3 4

Image sources: 1 2 3

(Note: Images 1 and 2 are not actual photographs of negative refraction, but rather depictions of what the effect would look like, given that negative refraction has never been achieved in the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum.)

Fibonacci trefoil

© Rafael Araujo

Due to the Mandela Effect, we remember things that didn’t happen or exist. Get the answer and why in our NEW VID: https://youtu.be/hvu4D1jngCY

Major types of Engines

Straight In-line

This is the type of engine that you find in your quotidian car. Nothing fancy, just all pistons arranged parallel along the vertical direction.

V in-line

Now, this is the sort of the engine that you find on sports cars like the Ferrari. When you hear sports enthusiasts go ‘ Whoa, that’s a V-12! ‘ - it just means that the engine has a V-type arrangement with 12 cylinders.

V +  Inline = V-inline

Commonly referred to as the VR engine.

The name VR6 comes from a combination of V engine (German: V-Motor), and the German word “Reihenmotor” (meaning “inline engine” or “straight engine”)

Volkswagen’s VR6 engines, and the later VR5 variants, are a family of internal combustion engines, characterized by a narrow-angle (10.5° or 15°) V engine configuration.

                    a: straight engine, b: V engine, c: VR engine

W engine

A W engine is a type of reciprocating engine ( again created by Volkswagen) arranged with its cylinders in a configuration in which the cylinder banks resemble the letter W, in the same way those of a V engine resemble the letter V.

Bugatti Veyron’s W16 engine

A W16 engine is used on the Bugatti Veyron. That’s 16 cylinders!

Flat Engine

Flat engines offer several advantages for motorcycles, namely: a low centre of gravity, smoothness, suitability for shaft drive, and (if air-cooled) excellent cooling of the cylinders. You can find them on aircrafts as well

Radial Engine (aka the dancing starfish)

They were used mostly in small aircraft for the propeller

The big advantage of radials was their large frontal area, which meant they could be air cooled, meaning less maintenance, failures, and of course a lower cost of initial purchase and maintenance.

Wankel Engine

This engine has only 3 moving parts and can make a lot of power.However, they are pretty inefficient, the last car to use this was a Mazda RX-8.

Axial Engine

The axial engine is a very interesting design. But they are not widely used because they are just hard to make and running these things at high RPM’s  is a challenge.

Duke engines are equipped with this type.

Jet engine

Commonly jet engines refer to the engines that are found on, well Jets!

Suck,squeeze,bang and blow

Air is sucked in through the front and  squeezed. A controlled explosion follows and the exhaust is blown out through the back

But, Jet engines also include the engines that are found on rockets, hybrids and water-jets. And their mode of operation is different than the one mentioned above.

Pretty cool eh?

Have a great day!

PC: Howstuffworks, Duke, MichaelFrey, Azure.km

** There is also the Stirling Engine. It’s amazing and a topic for an another post. But if you are interested do check out more about it here.

EDIT :  Had forgotten about the VR and the W-engines. My bad! Thanks for pointing it out.:D.

EDIT2: The suck squeeze bang and blow illustration was incorrect. Ergo, changed that.

It’s easy:  Form a triangle, then a hexagon, then a bicycle wheel

This is the general mechanism on how a spider spins its web (talk about engineering, right?). When an insect gets caught in its web, the vibrations caused by the insect is felt by the spider which then rushes to engulf its prey.

Now here is the trippy part ; This is the effect of drugs on the pattern of the web.

Hope you are having a great week. Have a good one!

* Spider spinning a web (video) (if you find a better full video let us know)

** Spiders on drugs -  NASA article ; Video

Inside - Vadim Sadovski

Hi I made this app called PhysicsPedia. It contains all the theory and formulas of high school and college physics. Please have a look. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pp.nikit.phyprac2

Editor’s Note:

Thank you for your submission android-nikit  and we did check the app out and it is really interesting and useful. If you are in high school, we recommend you give this one a try!

Hackaday Useful Tools Links

So I am an avid reader of Hackaday for a long time now and they have been putting out a lot of great introductions to tools and processes to get makers up to speed on the resources that are available.  This is just a splattering of links that I have found lately that you guys might be interested in.

DC Motors

Lessons in Small Scale Manufacturing

Grinding Gears: Figuring out gear ratios

Tools of the trade: Injection Molding

Are todays engineers worse?

How to nail a technical presentation

Tools of the trade: Vacuum Forming

The Art and Science of Bending Sheetmetal

A how-to of designing, fab, and assembly with structural framing systems (t slot)

Machine learning foundations

A machine shop in a box

How to: Cold resin casting

Join the GUI generation: Qtcreator

Do you guys have any other great resources that you’d like to share and/or are you enjoying this type of content?

Behold the awesomeness that is the heart of a blue whale. This colossal organ weighs 440 pounds and was retrieved from the carcass of a whale that had washed up on the shore of Newfoundland in 2014. Despite decomposition the heart was still in such great condition that it was a perfect candidate for preservation via plastination, which is precisely what was done by mammalogy technicians at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.

Head over to Wired to learn how museum scientists went about preserving this titanic ticker.

[via Wired]