Friday Science Roundup, August 19, 2011

Another week in the world’s weary transit round our round old sun, and another week of science news goodness to sift through, choose from, and proffer to you, my good and gentle readers, as a hapless and penniless moonstruck beau offers his lady a bouquet of carefully chosen wildflowers from a shy and trembling hand.

How’s that for a little impromptu poetry? I amaze myself sometimes.

First up, a story that I absolutely love because it contains many of my favorite elements[1] : a 13 year old boy has designed a new kind of solar panel based on the Fibonacci sequence that might just make solar panels far more efficient in the future.

Efficiency, of course, is the magic word when it comes to solar power. The Sun gives us so much free (to us) energy that we could solve all our energy problems ten times ’round if we could but capture enough of it for our needs.

But current solar panels captures woefully little of it. But that might change thanks to New York seventh grade student Aidan Dwyer, and his brilliant new design based on the Fibonacci sequence[2] and, of all things, the mighty oak tree.

He was walking in the woods, and noted (as many before) that the branches of the oak trees followed a Fibonacci pattern. He then decided to get out his protractor and measure just how an oak tree is put together, then went home and made a computer model of it, then built a PVC “tree” based on that model.

The result : solar collectors on his “tree” took in far more energy than the usual flat rooftop panel arrangement, and all without any parts having to move to catch the sun.

Makes sense, right? Trees don’t lean over to catch the sun! Nature has already designed extremely efficient solar collectors. They’re called trees, and they are all around us. This kid just figured out how they do it.

Like all genius, it is elegantly simple and obvious once someone explains it to you.

He figures the Fibonacci angle keeps the various parts of the tree (and his “tree”) from casting shadows on one another, thus maximizing solar intake.

Amazing stuff, Aidan. That’s true genius!

Next up : the secret language of pronouns.

Not that pronouns are secret. Feel free to continue using them.

Like these smart people!

No, the secret is how the way a person uses pronouns, and which ones they use and how often, reveals about the psychology of said person. According to the research of psychologist James Pennebaker of the Univerity of Texas in Austin, an amazing wealth of information can be derived about a person’s mental state simply from which pronouns they use most often, whether in writing or in everyday speech.

Myself, I am dubious about the predictive power of his results. Sure, you can find all kinds of patterns in known data sets. When you are analyzing the past, as with looking into someone’s writing, it’s easy to fool yourself into thinking you can correlate Observation A with Known Event A. That doesn’t mean there’s an actual meaningful connection.

Still, if he wants to pretend he can predict the actiosn of him or her, I won’t object.

Lastly, we have this extremely awesome little video of the closest thing we have to Voltron existing in the world today.

Heck, better than Voltron. No five stereotypical anime character human pilots needed!

Seriously, though, my mouth hung open in amazement during most of that video. The Eye-bots alone are pretty snazzy. But watching all the colorful shiny robots work together to solve a problem is truly fascinating.

Not sure if the clunkily-named “Swarmanoid” (why not just “Swarmoid”?) will make it as a real world problem solver, despite the usual boilerplate stuff at the end there about it being used in space exploration or hazardous environment work.

I get the distinct feeling that a lot of steps were glossed over in the presentation in order to make the ‘bots seem more independent than they are.

But still, this sort of thing, making individual units that can cooperate, coordinate, and operate in parallel, as well as integrating video into the process, strikes me as a very interesting line of exploration that could well lead to something potent and practical in the not too distant future.

Well, that’s it for science for this week. Tune in next week, when I will reveal the name of the secret master mole who controls earthquakes. Ciao!

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. For those playing at home, said elements are : pure innovation via inspiration, new directions from younger people, child prodigies, successful modeling after nature, and alternate energy. How many did you get?
  2. The sequence in which each number is the sum of the two numbers before it

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