Floating Cities

Posted on March 12, 2012 by | 2 comments

A floating city designed based on a lily pad. This design was created by Belgian architect, Vincent Callebaut. Click to enlarge.(http://vincent.callebaut.org/)

Despite being a science student, architecture is kind of a big interest of mine. I’ve seen a few different concept photos of floating cities, or in other words, cities that are not built on land but rather on the ocean or sea. I never really gave it much credibility in terms of real life applications and just thought of them as really cool architectural pieces.

The Globe and Mail posted this article a few weeks ago pertaining to the potential uses for a floating city, or seastead. By building a floating city, people who are unable to obtain work visas to do business in other countries may be able to stay in a floating city and conduct business outside the targeted country’s jurisdiction.

Mock picture of exaggerated rising sea levels in city. (image from: http://www.marineinsight.com)

Of course, the concept of a floating city goes beyond the business venture as it was originally suggested as a solution for the rising sea levels due to global warming that will diminish our current usable land for housing. Sea levels are believed to be rising because of the warmer temperatures that cause water to expand in addition to melting glaciers. A floating city is a novel and innovative idea, but how realistic is this?

The financial cost of a floating city would be enormous. When considering a ship or other large-scale structures, the cost of maintaining these in the ocean for long periods of time is already a lot. The estimated price for maintaining a city is projected to be upwards of hundreds of millions of dollars. In terms of stability of the structure, smaller structures are more responsive to wave motion and considering that the sea is not always in an ideally calm state, this will pose a problem. For structure, steel is the most commonly used material for offshore construction (i.e boats) but steel must be maintained regularly as it is at risk for corrosion and wear which are not preventable.

Ship, Barge, Island -- Proposed models to follow for floating cities. (image from: http://seasteading.org)

Several models of floating cities have been suggested. The “lily pad” design shown above is considered an island design and compared to other designs has disadvantages. Since it is essentially, an island, it is predicted that it would have the least mobility but if large enough might be the most stable design against wave motion.

Although a floating city sounds like a nice idea and  cool place to visit in your lifetime, personally I don’t think it is a realistic idea. The things I have mentioned above are only touching on a few of the more science/engineering aspects that need to be considered. There are also legal, political, and social implications that should be looked at. Despite it being an out there idea, if given the chance, would you want to live in a floating city?

References

2 Comments

Posted in Uncategorized

6-month-old babies know meaning of nouns

Posted on March 12, 2012 by | 2 comments

It is believed that infants start learning words at an age between 9 and 15 months. However, a recent study shows that this theory about the developmental stages of language learning for babies is actually quite flawed. This new study finds that infants already recognize several common nouns for foods and body parts, at least in a budding sense, as early as 6-month-old.

10-month-old participates in a word-recognition experiment. Credit: E. Bergelson

Graduate student Elika Bergelson and psychologist Daniel Swingley of the Unversity of Pennsylvania say that while babies usually utter their first word at the around 1 year of age, but babies can catch words as early as 6 months of age. They found that these infants eyes lingered longer at images of certain foods or body parts after the mother has mentioned these certain words.

 

Experimental Setup. Credit: E. Bergelson and D. Swingley

In their present research, Bergelson and Swingley examined 33 infants ranging from 6 to 9 month-old, as well as 50 children ranging in age from 10 to 20 months. This kids participated in a word-recognition experiment whereby they sat down on their mother’s lap in front of a computer connected to an eye-tracking device. The mothers wore visor and headphones while repeating the prerecorded sentences they heard to their child. These sentences were formatted such as “Can you find the nose?” or “Look at the banana!”. It was detected that when flashed with a picture with two different things on the screen, kids as young as 6 months looked at picture of banana, for example, longer than at the nose when the mother mentions the word “banana.” And vice versa.

Bergelson and Swingley said that mothers in the study did not realize that their 6-month-olds were already able to recognize food and body-part words. Although babies show signs of recognizing words like “mommy”, “daddy” and other frequently heard words at those ages, we should not be mistaken into believing that these babies understand what these words mean.

From Getty Images, WebMD slideshow

In my opinion, studies like these are important and it is a good idea to educate parents about this information relating to their kids. That way they will have an idea on how to bring up, nurture and respond to their infants at certain ages.

Video below briefly shows how the eye-tracking in infants work.

YouTube Preview Image

 

For full article of the study: here

For review post by Bruce Bower: here

 

2 Comments

Posted in Issues in Science, Science Communication

Tagged , , , ,

Decisons Under Stress: Reward or Risk?

Posted on March 12, 2012 by | 4 comments

Cracking under pressure by topgold

Facing the many crossroads life presents to us, we are often forced to make decisions with limited time. While having prolonged experience with the word stress, many of us are not aware of the outcomes of making a decision under stress–this is called cracking under pressure. (Lame joke, did you laugh?)

A recent review article reports that under acute stress, our brain outweighs the positive over the negative–due to stress-induced changes in dopamine levels in the reward-processing brain regions–ignoring the consequences of an impulsive decision. This means that given limited time, we tend to go for decisions that result in immediate pleasure, rather than stopping and considering the possible downsides of that decision. While both males and females focus on the reward and less on the negative outcomes, it has also been found that males tend to take more risks than females under stress.

Researchers studied the response of individuals playing a computer game where they had to inflate balloons on screen. Although bigger balloons earned more points, each additional pump of air also meant an increase in the risk of popping the balloon. The males who have been previously stressed by putting their hands in an ice bath, tend to go for the extra pump in this game. The women previously stressed in the same way, however, responded in an opposite manner and went the safer route.

Dr. Mather, a psychology professor at the University of Southern California and the lead author of this review, says,

“What we found is that under stress, males are more likely to make risky choices and their decision strategies change so that they make their choices faster…whereas females under stress become more conservative and actually make their choices slower in this risky decision-making context.”

Decision under time constraint by Jeffrey Coolidge from Getty Images

So apparently, men tend to do better under stressful situations where you risk a lot but earn a lot, while women tend to do better when caution is warranted. This is again demonstrated through the financial market where several studies found that women investors actually outperform men. Aligning with this notion is also why we see less women prone to addiction than men–women tend to slow down and avoid the jeopardy that will lead to addiction.

Do you think this study was accurate? Personally, I tend to make more impulsive decisions under time constraint, such as buying something on sale and regretting it afterwards.

As students, I think it’s safe to say that we’re constantly under some degree of stress. So for all of you stressed-out souls, here is something funny I found while doing research for this topic. Want stress relief that will work 24/7? Now you can be permanently stress-free with Panic Away! (I hope you realize I’m kidding.)

—
Read the full article from Time Healthland, here.
Read the review article by Dr. Mather as tagged above in PDF, here.
Read the article comparing women and men investors, here.

 

4 Comments

Posted in Biological Sciences, Science in the News

Tagged , , , , , , ,

Ocean acidification and its consequences

Posted on March 11, 2012 by | 2 comments

Will our grandchildren be able to see these corals? Picture by Sam and Ian on Flickr

Many of us know that carbon dioxide, CO2, is a greenhouse gas. As a greenhouse gas, it acts like a blanket over the Earth and prevents some of the heat from leaving our planet out into space. Thankfully, we have big oceans on Earth which serve as a sink of carbon dioxide. However, the amount of carbon dioxide we have been adding into the atmosphere via burning of fossil fuels since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution is too much for the oceans to handle. The result is acidification: a decrease in the pH of the oceans.

Some may argue that acidification of the oceans is natural, and that the Earth has already seen many cases of ocean acidification in the past. This, in fact, is true. The problem is, however, the relatively unusual rate of acidification that is occuring today. According to a new research review by paleooceanographers at University of Columbia, the rate of ocean acidification today may be faster than any time in the past 300 million years.

For those that may be wondering, ocean acidification works like a chain of reactions that starts with the increase in the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. These carbon dioxide molecules in the atmosphere are dissolved into the surface oceans where they eventually mixe with deep ocean waters. The carbon molecules that are dissolved into the oceans form carbonic acid which lower the pH of the oceans.

So, what are the consequences of ocean acidification? The increased acidity of oceans not only kills coral reefs, but also affects the calcium or magnesium carbonate shells of microorganisms. Since microorganisms are at the base of the food chain in marine ecosystems, the loss of microorganisms may lead to the extinction of numerous marine species.

The future of marine life depends on us. Picture by jeffk42 on Flickr

This new review compared ocean acidification today with what happened during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum which occurred 55 million years ago. Back then, an input of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from an unknown source over thousands of years resulted in some extinctions of marine life and produced great changes to the environment. What is interesting is that the extinctions of organisms and the change of environment allowed the proliferation of new species on land, including our very own ancestors, primates. However, we need to note the difference between this event and what is occurring now: ocean acidification 55 million years ago occurred at a rate approximately ten times slower than the rate today.

It is very likely that ocean acidification rates today is much greater than anything we have seen in the past 300 million years. Since we are aware of the consequences of ocean acidification, it may be of our interest, as the species responsible for this unnatural event, to reduce our CO2 emissions into the atmosphere.

The following video briefly explains ocean acidification and its consequences.

YouTube Preview Image

 

2 Comments

Posted in Biological Sciences, Issues in Science, Science Communication, Science in the News

Tagged , , , , ,