Spread Thin

As you may already know, a colleague and I recently started a start-up technology R&D company. My colleague and I are the operational managers (he is the President, I am the Vice president), and we own the company in equal shares with a third non-operational partner at Lincoln University who is acting as a scientific advisor. The company is called Emergent Sensor Technologies, and you can learn more about us here. We are currently in the process of requesting Small Business Innovation Research funding through a number of agencies. Our small arsenal of concepts are currently being developed for potential commercialization. The patents are pending on these, so until we have sufficient intellectual property protection for our concepts, I am going to avoid divulging any details on the projects. As these concepts mature, though, I plan to provide updates on their progress here on this blog, as well as the research section of our website, which is currently pretty much void of any useful information.

As you may also already know, I am currently a post-doctorate researcher at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, MO. Here at LU I work on and oversee various projects, write grant proposals (seemingly endlessly), mentor students interested in research, and manage several laboratories on campus. My lab work is split between overseeing projects being conducted by others as well as pursuing my own research interests. I really enjoy my work at LU, as I have a lot of latitude with respect to my research activities and am free to work on and request funding for my own little pet projects.

As you probably don't already know, I am in the process of taking on a third (and hopefully final) job as a senior research scientist at Mizzou, my beloved alma mater. As I finished my doctorate research at MU, I was conducting a pilot study in order to gather some preliminary data for a research project that was to continue after I graduated. The preliminary data was used in a small piece of a relatively large-scale research proposal, which was subsequently funded. So I have been called back to MU to oversee that portion of the project so that the deliverables that were proposed can be met in the short time frame of 1 year; the current duration of the project.

Yes, that's right. I will now be splitting my time between Emergent Sensor Technologies, Lincoln University, and the University of Missouri. Three different positions at three different institutions doing all sorts of different science-y things.

Can I handle it? Hell yes! I love science.

Cool Toys

Let me know when this becomes commercially available.

I want one.

Bikes Are So Freakin' Cool!

I love bicycles. I enjoy riding them. I enjoy working on them. In particular, I like rehabbing and restoring old bicycles. There's something about bringing a machine back to life that may have otherwise ended up in the landfill that fills me with pride. Plus there's a certain level of cool that vintage bicycles, especially 60s and 70s road bikes and roadsters, possess that is rarely seen in modern bikes. Something about the clean lines and simplicity of the thing I guess.

The machine that we now recognize as the bicycle has been around for a little over a century. And the physics of how the bike works and how it stays upright are fairly well understood. First of all, the bicycle has a particular geometry with respect to the position of steering that helps to keep it upright. Enhancing this effect are the rotation of the relatively large wheels of the bicycle. This rotational motion provides an inertial force or gyroscopic effect, much like the tail rotor of a helicopter, and allows the bicycle to stay upright even when it is not actually going anywhere. These phenomena are well studied and are fairly easy to understand.

But not so fast. A research group has eliminated the gyroscopic effects of the bicycle's wheels by adding a counter-rotating wheel and altered the traditional geometry of the bicycle by playing around with its form and shape. And what they get is a bicycle-like vehicle that is able to stay upright on its own, as long as it moves greater than a particular speed. Pretty mind-blowing stuff. You can see a video of it in action here, and also read more about the study and the conclusions. The research group believes that the ability of their machine to stay upright can be attributed to the fact that, like a traditional bicycle, the machine has a tendency to steer into its fall, keeping it from completely falling over when it begins to tip. But this is just a hypothesis. So the study has added a bit of mystery and intrigue to what was considered the ordinary, plain-old bicycle.

So I Was Wrong. Want to Fight About It?

OK, I'm going to try to fire off a quick post on Mother's Day before calling my mom and enjoying the rest of the afternoon with my lovely wife. I ran across an interesting post on Wired Science about an experiment involving gyroscopes in space. The experiment, named Gravity Probe B, used small gyroscopic devices placed in Earth orbit to study the effects of our planet on the space around it. The idea, it turns out, is to experimentally prove Einstein's basic principle of space-time. The existence of space-time, a sort of fabric woven from both space and time into which all of the cosmos exist and travel, would validate many subsequent Einsteinian theories. The basic idea here is that a massive object such as the Earth would warp and bend space-time due gravitational effects, and these effects would also bring about a swirling motion of space-time as the Earth spins within this strange fabric. To very briefly sum up the results of the experiment: if the gravitational effects of the Earth on the space-time around it was non-existent and space was static, the gyroscopes would create a directional electromagnetic pointer that would remain pointing in the same direction. If, on the other hand, space-time is indeed affected by the mass and gravity of the Earth, then the pointer would shift due to the movement of space-time as the Earth spins. And this latter effect is what was observed.

This is considered the very first experiment to determine whether Einstein was correct in his prediction of the existence of space-time, as he concluded that it was impossible to study with the technology available during his time. It is certainly important that the results were in his favor.

I should also mention here that I was a bit of a space-time skeptic. Einstein, a great mathematician, did a fine job of using mathematical proofs to illustrate the existence and effects of space-time. But just because you can model a phenomenon with math doesn't make it reality. And the results of this study have essentially reversed my skepticism. Consider me a believer. And this is the way of science. Our knowledge is constantly evolving based on the information available to us at the time. So I'm sort of a case study in how advancements in science should ideally bring about changes in society and the way we look at the world around us. Too bad that's not really how it works in practice.