Watch George Lucas photobomb documentary about nuclear waste!

Look!  A wild George Lucas sighting!

"Nuclear Waste: Fission Products & Transuranics from Thorium & Uranium" is sincerely fascinating in its own right.  A short documentary about the valuable materials often left in used-up fuel rods from nuclear reactors and how they might be extracted.  Very interesting if you're at all into nuclear engineering and chemistry in general.

But let's face it: most people are going to want to see the creator of Star Wars stumbling into view on a Chicago street as research scientist Bruce Hoglund explains pyroprocessing (using molten salt and electrochemistry to pull out the desired substances).

You can choose to watch it all, OR you can fast-forward (I recommend moving it to 13:00 to get the full effect):

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Crazy new data storage: DNA and quartz crystals (for 300 million years)

Because I don't want to go to bed with two consecutive posts pertaining to Star Wars staring me in the face (no matter how good, or how nutty)...

A strand of DNA containing the digital data of all of Shakespeare's sonnets, a half-minute sound clip of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, a photo and a science paper was announced a few days ago in an article from the journal Nature. So you could pretty much take everything information-wise accumulated during the course of your entire life - photos, videos, music, writings, financial information, medical files, an entire Blu-ray collection of movies and TV shows, computer games and porno - and put it inside a test tube. The DNA used in the research took two weeks to extract data from, but the read times are supposed to get shorter as the tech develops.

And earlier this month a group of researchers in Japan announced they've turned quartz crystal into a storage medium that will last 300 million years. Currently it has the capacity of a standard CD, but it's thought that it can be expanded with more layers of crystal. It probably won't have the size-to-data ration of the DNA gimmick but in time it'll still hold a lot of your videos, finances, movies, porno TV shows and other stuff.

If the technology ever produces practical quantum computing and nano-scale laser diodes, there could be some wildly cool applications with this. Never mind that iPhone silliness: gimme a real Mother Box!

(Can't recall if I've ever used a Fourth World/New Gods reference on this blog before, but I have now :-)

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New technology: 2TB optical storage, cardboard bicycles!

Two researchers at Case Western Reserve University have developed an optical storage system that can hold 1 to 2 terabytes of data on a disc the same size as a standard Blu-ray or DVD! That's equal to 50 Blu-ray discs. Whereas Blu-ray and DVD discs have always had up to two layers holding the data and the laser refocusing to transition from one to another (the reason why your DVD often pauses for a split second before resuming play) the researchers piled dozens of much teenier layers on top of each other. Same basic technology, but a significant refinement of the materials being used. Potential investors are already looking into bringing the technology to market.

Meanwhile over in Israel, Izhar Gafni - an accomplished engineer and cycling enthusiast - has invented a bicycle made almost entirely out of cardboard. The cycle is very cheap to produce, can be manufactured in large quantities and is already about to hit the retail racks. Gafni expects, in fact designed his bike, to be especially useful in major congested urban areas such as are often found in India and southeast Asia, as well as remote villages in Africa.

And no, the bike will not come apart when it starts raining :-) To find out more, hit the link above!

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World's lightest solid material

Crazy buff for wild engineering that I be, this lil' news item just blows my mind...

A team of researchers from the University of California at Irvine, HRL Laboratories and the California Institute of Technology have come up with a metal lattice material that is the lightest solid yet discovered. As you can see in the photo above, a sample of it can be perched atop a dandelion without damaging it at all. This stuff has less density than the air surrounding it! It's also much stronger than aerogel: the previous "lightest solid" title holder.

It's stories like this, friends and neighbors, that still give me a reliable sense of optimism about the future. Who knows what the uses and demand for this stuff will end up being.

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