Researchers at the Peking and Tsinghua Universities have adapted carbon nanotubes into a sponge-like material which can be squeezed dry, which sounds like extremely exciting news for the infomercial cleaning product industry. One minor detail:

since carbon nanotubes are hydrophobic, there’s no modification required to make them not absorb water.

For the record, that includes mysteriously blue infomercial demo water, so there goes that. If not ABSORBING 20 TIMES AS MUCH WATER AS ITS LEADING COMPETITOR, what exactly is this new type of sponge good for? Environmental clean-up, evidently. See, instead of just dropping dispersants into the middle of an oil or chemical spill — which forces the spill to simply absorb into the water — these nanosponges could be used to sop up the spill, after which they could theoretically be wrung dry and reused, like so:

It’s an amazing idea, but I get the feeling that carbon nanotube sponges, riskily abbreviated as CNT sponges, aren’t exactly cheap. [Materials View via Treehugger]

How do they do it? With a triple junction compound solar cell that uses three photo absorption layers made from elements like indium and gallium. I’ll leave it to the physical chemistry geniuses among you to explain exactly what that means in the comments.

You might have heard of efficiency ratings that climb into the 40 per cent range. Sharp even lists one in their press release. To clarify, those are different tests. Apparently there’s a distinction made in efficiency ratings between concentrated and unfocused light. The more you know, right?

Don’t expect to be covering your house in these soon, they’re meant for use in satellites. [Akihabara via Engadget]

The idea is that if someone suffers a critical injury and time is of the essence, a small dose of hydrogen sulphide gas could dramatically slow the patient’s heartbeat. Effectively the patient would enter a near-death state.

As scary as that sounds, it is reversible. Time would basically move in slow-motion for the patient, while doctors would be able to work in real-time. Instead of having minutes to save a person’s life, the technique could give doctors hours.

This all sounds great, but if at all possible I would like to avoid ever having to breathe hydrogen sulphide. Good ol’ nitrous oxide would probably be much more enjoyable. [CNN via BoingBoing]

Rather than wasting time, funds and personnel in attempts to canvas entire jungles for an elephant census, researchers are simply setting up microphones. This bioacoustic monitoring technique is similar to what has been used in the past, on a smaller scale, to count birds, but in this case it’s covering hundreds of square kilometres.

Researchers prepared by manually counting elephants and observing the sounds they make in order to create a system to interpret the sounds captured by the jungle microphones. It must’ve been a tedious bit of preparation, but if the alternative is “dung survey transects”, I think those folks were more than happy to do it. [Elephant Listening Project via Wired]

Photo by exfordy

The 2% figure is extrapolated from NPD less direct assessment:

[A]pproximately 12 percent of all U.S. computer owning households own an Apple computer, up from 9 percent in 2008. While Apple ownership is growing, those households are decidedly in favour of mixed system environments. Of those 12 percent, nearly 85 percent also own a Windows-based PC.

At first glance, these stats almost seem wrong, but when you start think about it, they make sense: The survey polled “households”, which on account of grandma’s Compaq or your roommate’s gaming PC, clobbers the exclusivity figure. (I live in what any reasonable person would call a “Mac household”—three people who use Macs almost exclusively—but that little Acer netbook sitting on the table means we’re not.)

Plus, PCs are cheap and they linger, and Macs, being pricier, tend to find their way into richer households, where more than one computer is almost a given. That, combined the fact that most Macs sold are laptops, and therefore a little more likely to be a supplemental computer, makes the 2% figure look a little less crazy, but still, 2%? Fanboys, you’re slacking. [NPD via Macrumors]

The research, which will almost certainly be used by Conroy and his pals to try and reinforce their argument for mandatory internet filtering, also states that two thirds of teenage girls surveyed have viewed porn online as well.

Even though the internet wasn’t anywhere near as prevalent when I was a teenage boy, I can say without a trace of doubt that any teenage boy saying they’d only seen porn online accidentally is lying. Because it’s completely natural for teenagers to be curious about the physical and hormonal changes in their body, and porn offers a fairly easy way to explore and understand those changes, even if it isn’t necessarily the best way.

I can’t speak for women here—never having been one—but I imagine it’s the same across the estrogen fence.

Let’s just hope that somehow the end result of this study is better parenting, rather than the government deciding they’ll try and “fix” the problem themselves…

[News.com.au]

Supposedly Nunnmps is elevated on stilt-like construction in order to preserve the secrecy of the research it will house and it’s hard to believe that anything of evil nature would occur in such a peaceful-looking place. But maybe that’s the brilliance of the design. Frankly, I don’t even want to know what’ll go on in there, I just want to know how to pronounce it. [Dazeen]

Make that 4707 consumers. I have no intention of even considering an eReader until prices drop under $US100. I still enjoy reading actual, paper books and I can buy them for next to nothing at a used bookstore or get them free at the library. Plus having a collection of them throughout my home looks good (and it makes me feel smart). eReaders don’t have the same appeal as MP3 players—so they sure as hell shouldn’t cost me more to buy. But what about you? How low do eReader prices need to be before you would consider buying one? [Forrester]

Designed by scientists at MIT, this mechanised trout shares a lot in common with the British robo-carp we saw earlier this year. For one, its primary use is to carry sensors and monitor industrial projects that present accessibility problems for divers and larger submersibles. It’s also colourful, ornate and exceedingly fishlike, which is fun for us, but probably doesn’t do a whole lot for its effectiveness as an industrial chemical sniffer.

Unlike the carp, though, these fish aren’t comically huge, nor are they very complicated: Each one has just 10 parts, draws just a few watts of power, measures in at between 12 and 20 centimetres long, and moves in a startlingly lifelike way. (Video below.) The fish are just a research project for now, but the university has firm plans to use these same techniques to build robotised salamanders and manta rays. You know, for science! [CNET]

In layman’s terms, the innovation arrives thanks to a liquid semiconducting layer that potentially bends and flexes more reliably than the “vacuum thermal evaporation” technique employed by Samsung.

In the researchers’ case, the liquid, officially known as ethylhexyl carbazole (EHCz), will constantly deliver a fresh supply of semiconductors to the emitting layer. To you and me that means better, more flexible screens that might not degrade as quickly as once thought, if and when they arrive in the (near?) future. Just don’t try and drink one. [PhysOrg via OLED Info - Thanks, Ron]