Archive for September, 2009

Sietch Nevada

This is amazing. It’s the Sietch Nevada project from an exhibit (Out of Water | innovative technologies in arid climates) at the University of Toronto earlier this year.

View of the urban life among the water bank canals

Sietch Nevada projects waterbanking as the fundamental factor in future urban infrastructure in the American Southwest. Sietch Nevada is an urban prototype that makes the storage, use, and collection of water essential to the form and performance of urban life… A network of storage canals is covered with undulating residential and commercial structures. These canals connect the city with vast aquifers deep underground and provide transportation as well as agricultural irrigation. The caverns brim with dense, urban life: an underground Venice.

Magnetic levitation of large water droplets… and mice!

From PhysOrg.com article,

Scientists have managed to levitate young mice in research carried out for NASA. Levitated mice may help research on bone density loss during long exposures to low gravity, such as in space travel and missions to other planets.

How it works:

The scientists built a variable gravity simulator consisting of a superconducting magnet that could generate a magnetic field strong enough to levitate the water inside every cell in the mouse’s body. Water is weakly diamagnetic, which means that in the presence of a strong magnetic field the electrons in water rearrange orbit slightly, creating tiny currents in opposition to the external magnetic field. If the external magnet is strong enough, the diamagnetic repulsion of the water in the mouse tissue is enough to exactly balance the force of gravity on the body.