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POPS"Einstein Fridge . ."
Now Malcolm McCulloch, an electrical engineer at Oxford who works on green technologies, is leading a three-year project to develop more robust appliances that can be used in places without electricity. Einstein refrigerator His team has completed a prototype of a type of fridge patented in 1930 by Einstein and his colleague, the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard. It had no moving parts and used only pressurised gases to keep things cold. The design was partly used in the first domestic refrigerators, but the technology was abandoned when more efficient compressors became popular in the 1950s. That meant a switch to using freons. Einstein and Szilard's idea avoids the need for freons. It uses ammonia, butane and water and takes advantage of the fact that liquids boil at lower temperatures when the air pressure around them is lower. 'If you go to the top of Mount Everest, water boils at a much lower temperature than it does when you're at sea level and that's because the pressure i
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POPSOLDS: Preparing for a neuroscience revolution Our challenge is that we don't pay enough attention to such game-changing discoveries as they are happening. And when we don't pay attention, then the societal conversations that need to happen to reach consensus on policy also don't happen - at least in a proactive fashion. We end up reacting instead. In the case of the uncovering the secrets of the human mind, such proactive consideration would be better off earlier than later. The writer is James Olds is the director of the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University. This is an important read.
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