On Friday evening, space shuttle Discovery launched, docking with the International Space Station (ISS) the following evening. The shuttle mission includes a crew swap and a resupply for the station. And for Stephen Colbert fans everywhere, it's the equipment that went up with the shuttle that is most exciting. Here's why.
The ISS is being assembled piece-by-piece, similarly to a prefabricated home. The individual modules are constructed here on Earth, then sent up to the station and assembled on site. The third and final American node module will be added to the station early next year. And so in March, NASA held an online poll to name this module. Voters were able choose between several pre-chosen names, or write in their own. Soon afterwards, Stephen Colbert called upon fans and viewers of his Comedy Central program to vote to put his name in space. Weeks later, with the poll closed and votes tallied, the name Colbert won by a bit of a landslide. Astronaut Sunita Williams made a guest appearance on the Colbert Report to announce the name of the ISS node. And the winner? Tranquility. The studio crowd was not pleased. NASA's reason for not using the winning name from their online poll was that they "don't typically name U.S. space station hardware after living people." Quite a disappointment indeed.
There was good news, though. Among the equipment being sent to the ISS in the current shuttle mission is a zero-gravity treadmill named the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill, or COLBERT. This decision by NASA to show some humor and an ability to compromise has made many Colbert fans, myself included, quite giddy. What is most notable about the situation, however, is that NASA may have made a major move to draw renewed interest from a younger generation; a generation that seems to see space flight as little more than a novelty.
Learn more about the ISS and follow the current space shuttle mission, as well as future missions at http://www.nasa.gov/missions/index.html.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
A Case Study: Setting the Proverbial Bar
For my first blog post, I thought it might be easiest to focus on a subject very near and dear to me: my competition. When I present my research, whether it be at a national conference or to faculty in my department, I am consistently asked whether I am familiar with the work of an MIT professor by the name of Tim Swager who is conducting research on a technology known as fluorescent conjugated polymers. So what follows is a brief run-down on conjugated polymers and a very particular way in which they are important.
Conjugated polymers are, of course, polymers: materials that are composed of interconnected chains of repeating subunits, otherwise known as plastics. These polymers are special because they are composed of subunits with properties that allow the polymer to act more like a conductor or semiconductor than traditional polymers (which are normally insulators). Conjugated polymers may be pumped with electricity or light, depending on the polymer, and the material will fluoresce, or emit light. Because the electronic phenomenon that induces light to be emitted is capable of traveling down the chains of the polymer, the fluorescence is greatly amplified in these materials, which are a special class of conjugated polymers called amplifying fluorescence polymers (AFPs).
Among the many applications of AFPs, the one that is most interesting to me is their use in detection of explosives. Most explosives, such as TNT, are nitro-containing cyclic compounds that are capable of quenching the emission of fluorescent materials when the two are brought close together. Because the fluorescence of the conjugated polymer is inherently amplified, so too is its quenching when it comes into contact with explosives like TNT. Not only has Dr. Swager been able to deploy this premise for detection of explosives in the lab, but he's deployed it commercially. He is currently on the science and technology advisory board of ICx Technologies, a Virginia-based company that develops technology for security and threat protection. Among their products are detection systems that use conjugated polymers to detect airborne explosive vapor.
All in all, it's great to see this type of optical sensing technology jumping out of the laboratory and into commercial use. Despite the dizzying amount of research and mound of patents in this field, technologies like this rarely see the marketplace. I suppose I shouldn't look at this as my competition, but rather as an example of how it should be done.
Conjugated polymers are, of course, polymers: materials that are composed of interconnected chains of repeating subunits, otherwise known as plastics. These polymers are special because they are composed of subunits with properties that allow the polymer to act more like a conductor or semiconductor than traditional polymers (which are normally insulators). Conjugated polymers may be pumped with electricity or light, depending on the polymer, and the material will fluoresce, or emit light. Because the electronic phenomenon that induces light to be emitted is capable of traveling down the chains of the polymer, the fluorescence is greatly amplified in these materials, which are a special class of conjugated polymers called amplifying fluorescence polymers (AFPs).
Among the many applications of AFPs, the one that is most interesting to me is their use in detection of explosives. Most explosives, such as TNT, are nitro-containing cyclic compounds that are capable of quenching the emission of fluorescent materials when the two are brought close together. Because the fluorescence of the conjugated polymer is inherently amplified, so too is its quenching when it comes into contact with explosives like TNT. Not only has Dr. Swager been able to deploy this premise for detection of explosives in the lab, but he's deployed it commercially. He is currently on the science and technology advisory board of ICx Technologies, a Virginia-based company that develops technology for security and threat protection. Among their products are detection systems that use conjugated polymers to detect airborne explosive vapor.
All in all, it's great to see this type of optical sensing technology jumping out of the laboratory and into commercial use. Despite the dizzying amount of research and mound of patents in this field, technologies like this rarely see the marketplace. I suppose I shouldn't look at this as my competition, but rather as an example of how it should be done.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
