Chemical weapon detection at a touch

Chemical weapons are easy enough to detect with the right equipment but such equipment is often not at arm's reach when the use of such weapons is first suspected. Samples of contaminated surfaces need to be taken and run through detection devices and this takes valuable minutes. It would be better if soldiers could automatically detect the presence of dangerous compounds right when they are encountered and now a new system that integrates detection systems into a glove looks like it can grant this ability.     

The new technology is a flexible glove with a tiny electro-chemical lab stitched into it that is designed to transmit its findings in real time to a nearby phone. The glove can, quite literally, sound the alarm by triggering an application installed on the phone to vibrate or beep. You can read more in The Economist article that I wrote on this here. Alternatively, if you would like to hear me describe the research on The Economist's science podcast, you can do so here.

Tornado transport

Carrying more than just dust.

Image courtesy of NASA.

Read any geology textbook and it will tell you that winds only routinely transport sediment grains that are smaller than 2 millimeters in diameter. Thus, sand, silt and clay are all regularly moved around by wind but gravel, cobbles and boulders only get picked up by occasional fierce storms.

These rules have left geologists working in the Chilean desert perplexed by the discovery over the years of hundreds of mounds containing tens of thousands large crystal shards of the mineral gypsum. Many of the crystals are over 20 centimeters in length and clearly did not grow in the dry environment where they are being found. How the crystals got where they are has been a long standing mystery but now a new study is revealing the story of how they got there... tiny tornadoes that routinely pass through the area. You can read more in The Economist article that I wrote on this here. Alternatively, if you would like to hear me describe the research on The Economist's science podcast, you can do here.

The A.I. will see you now

Psychologists are not about to be replaced by robots but they are about to gain a lot of assistance from computer systems that are designed to monitor your voice and facial expressions when visiting medical clinics. Read on in my article in The Economist's "The World in 2017" here.

A record of ancient sunspot activity

Spotted!

Image Courtesy of The European Space Organisation.

Every 11.2 years there is slight change in the degree of solar radiation that reaches Earth. This is caused by spots forming on the sun and known as the sunspot cycle. We know that the cycle shapes plant growth today but have little evidence of what solar cycles once were. Botanists are perfectly capable of looking at recently felled trees to infer solar cycle information but applying these methods to fossil plants has been really hard. To make matters worse, trees with the relevant structures preserved in them are almost never fossilised in a good enough state to be used in this manner. Thus it is all the more remarkable that a team of researchers are revealing the discovery of spectacularly well preserved fossil trees which show evidence of sun spot cycles that took place 290 million years ago. You can read more in The Economist article that I wrote on this here.

Deep sea pollution

We thought that the trenches at the base of the ocean were effectively untouched environment due to their incredible depth and isolation. Well, that notion has now proved to be totally incorrect as a team of researchers has now revealed the presence of some rather nasty pollutants in them. You can read more in The Economist article that I wrote on this here. Alternatively, you can listen to my podcast on the subject here.