The Making of an Indigenous Scanning Tunneling Microscope

November 14, 2013 by kris de decker Filed Under: DIY, Random, Science

Pankaj Sekhsaria investigates the culture of innovation in nanotechnology laboratories in India. He found the very first Indian Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM), which was built in 1988, only seven years after the first one, for which the inventors were awarded a 1986 Nobel Prize. Sekhsaria shows how the making of this first Indian STM can be seen as a succesful application of what he calles “technological jugaad”.

Jugaad is an Indian word that does not have an easy equivalent in English, although “tinkering” and “bricolage” come close: it means reconfiguring materialities to overcome obstacles and find solutions; it can also mean working the system to one’s advantage and thus sometimes has negative connotations related to gambling and corruption.

table top scanning tunneling microscope

A table-top STM placed on the inflated tube of a car tyre that acts as a vibration isolating device. Picture by Pankaj Sekhsaria.

Sekhsaria traces the history of this technology and describes how “discarded refrigerators, stepper motors from junked computers, tubes from car tyres, bungee cords, Viton rubber tubing, weights from the grocers’ shop, aluminum vessels generally used in the kicthen and bobbins from sewing machines were only some of the components that went into the making of the first prototype and the other probe microscopes that followed”.

It is important to emphasize that there is nothing second-rate about this STM and the research it allowed. The research group has published its findings with STM in top-tier, international journals, and the doctoral graduates involved found postdoc positions in the most prestigious laboratories in both Europe and the United States. Pankaj Sekhsaria highlighted that while these Indian nanoscientists followed their own very “Indian” style of working around scarce resources, still they were able to produce superb, internationally recognized research.

Quoted from: “Good fortune, Mirrors, and Kisses”, Wiebe E. Bijker, in Technology and Culture, Volume 54, Number 3, July 2013. Pankaj Sekhsaria’s research paper is online and well worth a read: “The making of an indigenous scanning tunneling microscope“, in Current Science, Volume 104, Number 9, 10 May 2013.

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Bog Butter: Storing Food in Soil

November 13, 2013 by kris de decker Filed Under: Food storage, Random, Refrigeration

Bog Butter Storing Food in Soil

“Bog butter is butter that has been buried in a peat bog. Over 430 instances of bog butter have been recorded. Of these, 274 have been found in Scotland and Ireland since 1817. The earliest discoveries are thought to come from the Middle Iron Age (400-350 BC), though this does not exclude the possibility of much more ancient roots. More recently one firsthand account tells of butter being buried for preservation in Co. Donegal 1850-60. In 1892, Rev. James O’Laverty, an advocate of the argument that the butter was buried for gastronomic reasons, dug some butter into a ‘bog bank’ and left it for eight months. His experiment was carried out in much the same spirit as ours – for analytical purposes and not for a cultural or preserving motive.”

“Peat bogs are, by their nature, cold, wet places; almost no oxygen circulates in the millennia-old build-up of plant material, which creates highly acidic conditions (our site had a pH of 3.5). Sphagnum moss bogs have remarkable preservation properties, the mechanisms of which are poorly understood. Early food preservation methods have been researched extensively by Daniel C. Fisher, in relation to the preservation of meat. In an attempt to recreate techniques used by paleoamericans in North America, Fisher sunk various meats into a frozen pond and a peat bog.

“A key finding from his research is that after one year, bacterial counts on the submerged meats were comparable to control samples which had been left in a freezer for the same amount of time. In fact, suitable foods can probably be aged in many types of soil: salt-rich that will provide dehydration, very cold/freezing that will freeze foods or slow degradation, or, as in our case, anaerobic and acidic conditions to prevent microbial action and oxidation. To our canny ancestors, this preserving characteristic provided an ideal place to bury foods.”

Read more: Bog Butter: a gastronomic perspective. Via The Year of Mud. More low-tech food preservation.

Update: Root Simple links to an interesting video about this primitive food storage technique. Thanks to Ruben Anderson.

Heat Your Desk, Not Your Office

November 13, 2013 by kris de decker Filed Under: Heating appliances

heated desk“Bloooms introduces a desk with a heated top, which is bound to enhance the comfort level of people who spend much time working behind a desk.

Research by the Dutch research institute TNO (Dutch Organization for Applied Scientific Research) shows that contact heating through the wrists is the most efficient way to warm the body — one can turn down the heater 1 to 4 degrees C°. If the undersides of the wrists are warm, the whole body will be warm. By working at a computer, for example, using the mouse, or writing, the wrists are placed on the work top.

The heating elements are integrated into the table top. This is possible, because Bloooms exclusively works with bamboo, which is eminently suitable to apply heating. It’s a stable material, that conserves its shape and properties when heated. A sensor triggers the heating the moment someone sits down at the desk, and turns it off when no one is sitting at the desk. The heating can be individually adjusted, and is therefore excellently suited to be used in spaces where there are several people at work.”

Bloooms heated desk. The company is working on a new version of their heated desk, which can be controlled by a laptop and will be ready in a few months. Related: Several readers have sent us a link to a prototype of a thermoelectric bracelet. It monitors air and skin temperature, and sends tailored pulses of hot or cold waveforms to the wrist to help maintain thermal comfort. Heat the individual, not the building.

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Can I See Your Meat License?

November 10, 2013 by kris de decker Filed Under: Meat, Random

meat licensePeople who are comfortable with eating meat, should be equally comfortable with killings animals, thinks UK artist John O’Shea.

Since 2008, he has worked towards the development of a new kind of law which would require active citizen engagement with the act of animal slaughter implicit in meat production.

The draft of the Meat Licencing Act states that:

It is against the law to purchase or consume meat, without an appropriate license.

People wishing to purchase or consume meat, are required, by law, to obtain an appropriate licence.

It is through a specific and supervised engagement in the act of killing an animal, that citizens will obtain their meat license.

Launching 1st November 2013, at mEATing in Tilburg Netherlands, Meat License Legal documents are available in limited edition of 100 to any individual who has legally demonstrated their own specific and personal engagement with acts of killing. Dutch chef and photographer, Sascha Landshoff (assisted by Philip Schuette) became the first individual to obtain the Meat Licence.

Don’t miss mEATing – kill your darlings if you are in the Netherlands. It is a provocative event that questions our relationship with meat and animals. mEATing runs until November 30.

Low-tech Bike Shift Lever

October 29, 2013 by kris de decker Filed Under: Bikes

low-tech bike shift lever

“I designed this bicycle shift lever after countless complaints from our partner organizations in all parts of the world. Programs that provide bicycles to people who need them for transportation, hauling goods and carrying their children can no longer find shift levers that hold up to hard use. They can choose from ridiculously complex and expensive shifters that are usually integrated with the brake lever or cheap shifters made of plastic and pot metal. Both types wear out within months of daily use and cannot be repaired.” Read more. Thanks to Andrew Eichmann.

Why the Brain Prefers to Read on Paper

October 25, 2013 by kris de decker Filed Under: Books, Brains, Maps, Random

“Beyond treating individual letters as physical objects, the human brain may also perceive a text in its entirety as a kind of physical landscape. When we read, we construct a mental representation of the text in which meaning is anchored to structure. The exact nature of such representations remains unclear, but they are likely similar to the mental maps we create of terrain—such as mountains and trails—and of man-made physical spaces, such as apartments and offices.

book 4Both anecdotally and in published studies, people report that when trying to locate a particular piece of written information they often remember where in the text it appeared. We might recall that we passed the red farmhouse near the start of the trail before we started climbing uphill through the forest; in a similar way, we remember that we read about Mr. Darcy rebuffing Elizabeth Bennett on the bottom of the left-hand page in one of the earlier chapters.

In most cases, paper books have more obvious topography than onscreen text. An open paperback presents a reader with two clearly defined domains—the left and right pages—and a total of eight corners with which to orient oneself. A reader can focus on a single page of a paper book without losing sight of the whole text: one can see where the book begins and ends and where one page is in relation to those borders. One can even feel the thickness of the pages read in one hand and pages to be read in the other.

Turning the pages of a paper book is like leaving one footprint after another on the trail—there’s a rhythm to it and a visible record of how far one has traveled. All these features not only make text in a paper book easily navigable, they also make it easier to form a coherent mental map of the text.”

Read more: The Reading Brain in the Digital Age. Picture: This is a Wake Up Call. More books.