Jafferis Promises the World a Magic Carpet Ride

A visual of the wave-induced propulsion, as described in Jafferis' abstract.

Last month, the Applied Physics Letters presented the research of Noah T. Jafferis, a Princeton graduate student, which demonstrates the propulsion method a magic carpet would need to move forward. It resembles the undulations a manta ray uses to move forward in water.

The scientific abstract explains that the researchers used “integrated piezoelectric actuators and sensors.” Piezoelectricity is the electric charge created by pressure or mechanical stress. The actuators, particular areas on the carpet, deform when an electric signal is applied, providing the mechanical stress that sets off a waveform throughout the carpet. The sensors tell the researchers what waveform was produced. With that information, they can modify the input voltage for a more desired output–a very particular waveform that would suck air under the undulating carpet and shunt that air out the back, propelling the carpet forward.

In the experiment, they used a small plastic sheet (10 cm x 4 cm) instead of an actual carpet (though this does not yet mean future models cannot have a plush covering). They also did not have the sheet launch itself off the ground; it was suspended about 1 millimeter above the ground and hooked to heavy batteries. Theoretically, if it were off its tether and its electric charge provided by something lighter, the sheet could travel at 10 centimeters/second–as long as it’s close to the ground, against a surface that air can be trapped against.

So right now, Jafferis doesn’t see his prototype as the Aladdin vision of a magic carpet, as a new transportation for humans. In its current form, the carpet would have to be 15 meters. While Jafferis intends to tweak and upgrade his fantastical invention for lift-off and load-bearing, he sees current, more practical applications.

As a mode of transportation lacking multiple moving parts, the flying carpet won’t get gummed up over time by environmental dirt and dust. Thus, Jafferis sees the magic carpet being useful on Mars, where poor little exploration machines are expected to die off eventually because of their wheels and gears getting too filthy to function.

Which, you must admit, evokes a strange image concerning this man’s (who phonetically has “Jafar” in his name) vision of magic carpets.

“I can show you a world…dusty, grimy, lonely. Tell me, princess, now when did you last have to gasp for air?”

Sure, I’ll Foldit and Help Cure AIDS. No Biggie.

A group of avid Foldit players has accomplished what many biochemists and biocrystallographers have not: deciphered the crystal structure of an enzyme that allows viruses like AIDS reproduce.

The enzyme is a retroviral protease, which, according to the Genome Biology article “Retroviral proteases” are “key enzymes in viral propagation.”

Specifically, the retroviral protease that the gamers deciphered allowed the Mason-Pfizer monkey virus (M-PMV) to grow into the monkey variation of AIDS. According to NPR, being able to envision the three-dimensional structure of the enzyme would allow pharmacologists to create drugs that specifically targeting vulnerable section.

The game Foldit challenges its players to “solve puzzles for science.” In a way, the fact that players of the game managed to decipher the protein’s structure is a little unsurprising—the game is entirely about unfolding chains of amino acids and folding them into specific proteins. Players can shake and wiggle and tweak any given lump of amino acids to essentially design a protein for a given goal.

Seth Cooper, one of Foldit’s founders, told Yahoo’s Plugged In that the gamers succeeded because “people have spatial reasoning skills, something computers are not yet good at…games provide a framework for bringing together the strengths of computers and humans.”

According to the article, recently published in Nature, the researchers who presented the Foldit players with the challenge supplied the gamers with the bits and pieces of the protein that had been derived from previous, failed methods to divine the protein’s structure. The Foldit players thus compiled various parts from different templates to create new models. The research team then challenged the Foldit players to improve their models so that the Foldit program recognized that energy was optimized. The solution was found in ten days; the images were optimized within three weeks.

The gamers are credited in the bylines of the article, alongside Ph.D. biochemists, who acknowledge in their article that “the ingenuity of game players is a formidable force that, if properly directed, can be used to solve a wide range of scientific problems.”

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This is a reproduction from a contribution I did for www.ToTheCenter.com (which, of course, you should check out), but I wanted to add a few notes.

I really encourage y’all take a look at the Nature article (yes, I know the version I have is not actually hosted on the Nature website) simply because, from the viewpoint of someone who browses a lot of stodgy, academic science articles–and has many a gamer friend–this is going down in history.

First off: the bylines. You have Firas Khatib, from the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Washington in Seattle; you have Szymon Krzywda, from the Department of Crystallography at the A. Mickiewicz University in Poland; and you have Foldit Contenders Group and Foldit Void Crushers Group. With a team name that involves “Void” and “Crusher” together, can I please get a “hooah!”?

The third full paragraph on the last page is also gold, because the scientists who wrote the article refer to the game players by their screen names. So you get this magnificent set of sentences: “Foldit player spvincent used partial threading…another teammate, grabhorn, was able to improve…”

Then, again, the concluding paragraph. Sure, “this is the first instance…in which online gamers solved a longstanding scientific problem,” but this event sure does show “the power of online games to channel human intuition and three-dimensional pattern-matching skills to solve scientific problems.”

NIFTY.

SpongeBob Squarepants–the Mushroom?

Left: SpongeBob Squarepants. Right: Spongiforma squarepantsii.

Yup, our very own SpongeBob exists in reality as Spongiforma squarepantsii, a brain-looking sponge-acting mushroom in the rainforests of Borneo. He was discovered by Professor Dennis Desjardin and colleagues Kabir Peay and Thomas Bruns. When they submitted their findings to the research journal Mycologia, the mushroom’s scientific name was initially rejected as being “too frivolous.” Dr. Desjardin insisted upon the name, saying that, “We need a little frivolity in this stodgy old science we love.”

Like a sponge, the S. squarepantsii can be wrung empty of water and will poof back up to a pleasant size. When exposed to 3% potassium hydroxide solution, the normally orange sponge shroom turns purple. Its cousin in Thailand bears very little resemblance and also is much less popular on the Internet.

Such is the life of the strange mushroom named after a strange but popular cartoon character.