This Week in Science: Foundations for the Future
This week, I decided to focus on a loose theme for my selections. Instead of focusing on discoveries in the past, I put emphasis on new discoveries in (relatively) less famous fields that I believe could be the beginning of a grand new reality at some point within our lifetimes.
Quantum Engines: a Far Off Hope
Part of the reality of scientific progress is coming to terms with the relatively slow pace of things. Progress is seldom made by ‘eureka’ moments, but by years of trial, error and failure. This is the case with the “quantum engine”, a device that produces energy by using the peculiar physics of the incredibly small. By using a property of quantum mechanics known as superposition, where a particle can exist both as a particle and a wave simultaneously.
Scientists have for the first time, succeeded in making a quantum engine that has outperformed a traditional ‘heat engine’ without, and this is the key, any special circumstances or adjustment in its environment. By using a laser to cause an electron with in a diamond with an intentional defect to leap between energy levels and sometimes be caught in a superposition with two energy levels. The energy released from the changing energy levels and by utilizing superpositions, the engine outputs energy not as mechanical energy, like a traditional engine, but as electromagnetic waves.
This experiment has proven that these quantum engines have potential as efficient and superior methods of energy production in the future, but that future is far off. We still do not understand quantum mechanics fully, and thus do not understand the quantum engine fully. There is no basis for these to be functional anytime soon, perhaps not even within this century, but it is an important step forward.
Cats Recognize Their Names, in a Way
While human/dog interaction has been the subject of mountains of research, human/cat interaction has received much less attention. A study published by Nature has suggested that cats do, in fact, recognize their own name. Scientists had cat owners say 4 words very similar to their cat’s name and the the cat’s name. The animals reacted to their own name much more strongly, indicating they are “able to discriminate their own names from other words.”
Nothing indicates that a cat understands what a ‘name’ is conceptually, however, or even associate it with themselves. When the experiment was repeated on cats from a cat cafe, a place where there is a large number of cats, the animals saw no significant fondness for their own name over the names of other cats. More likely, the cat associates the word positively with food or affection, rather than any sort of self-identity.
While this study is likely not news to many cat owners, it is an important baseline to establish, especially for further studies in the field of human/feline interactions.
Stronger than Steel, Courtesy of Spiders and E. Coli
The silk that spiders hang from, known as “dragline silk”, has been a sort of ‘Philosopher’s Stone’ for engineers for years. Dragline silk is stronger than steel by weight and its additional flexibility and small size would allow it to be a dream material. For years, scientists have tried to replicate the silk, but have never succeeded.
For the first time, scientists have produced engineered silk in a reliable way, all thanks to the infamous E. Coli bacteria. This is not the first time that scientists have tried to use bacteria to produce dragline silk, but the long, repeating strings of DNA that produce the silk are often butchered by the organisms. By separating the sequences into smaller strands and inserting them individually, they were able to produce short lines of silk that they spliced together with a chemical glue.
The results were impressive; the silk was comparable in tensile strength and resistance to natural dragline silk. The study declares that “the developed process reveals a path to more dependable production of high-performance silks for mechanically demanding applications”, a very welcome result after years of failings.
NASA funding was partially responsible for this development, as they hope to find methods to produce durable and versatile materials for their future aspirations to Mars. Obviously, the success of this experiment, and if it is ever reproducible on a mass-production scale could mean a shift in the production of materials and technology across the world.
