Katherine Johnson, one of NASA's human computers

If you ever saw the 2016 movie Hidden Figures, you will have seen part of the story of Katherine Johnson. She was portrayed with two other Black women who worked for NASA in the very early days. They all played important roles and yet were lost to history and the cultural ways of that time. None of them should be forgotten, and this blog entry will describe Johnson's life and contributions as a "human computer".

Johnson in 1966 (Wikipedia)

She was born Katherine Creola Coleman on August 26, 1918 in the state of West Virginia, USA. She was extremely bright and talented with math from an early age. Because the county where she lived did not provide high school to Blacks after the eighth grade, she had to enroll elsewhere (120 miles away)... at the age of 10! She is quoted later in life as saying this about her childhood:

“I counted everything. I counted the steps to the road, the steps up to church, the number of dishes and silverware I washed … anything that could be counted, I did.”

After skipping grades, she graduated high school at 14. She then enrolled in West Virginia State College, a school for Blacks, and not only took every course in mathematics that they offered, but her mentor created additional math courses that she could take. He once asked her why she asked questions in math classes, because he knew she already had the answers. She said she could see other kids wanted to ask but were too afraid, so she asked for them. Katherine graduated in 1937 summa cum laude  (top 1-5% of her class) with bachelor's degrees in mathematics and French. Not bad when you consider only 2% of Black women of that time earned college degrees!

Early school years picture (from 11alive.com video)

She taught in public school for 2 years, got married (secretly, so she could keep her job), joined a graduate school program in math, and then stopped to raise a family and returned to teaching for a short time when her children got older. During that time, she and her husband Jimmie Goble needed to work extra jobs, so Katherine took on maid work in the summer. 

The Goble family (screenshot from the Timeline video)

Time to review a little aviation history.

The history of flight includes the use of kites and balloons decades and even centuries before airplanes. Orville and Wilbur Wright had made the first powered airplane flight in 1903, and shortly thereafter, World War I began. Manned kites and reconnaissance balloons were used to spy on artillery locations then (and much earlier), and planes were used as early as 1911 to shoot them down. 

Union army inflating a balloon (nps.gov)

But the U.S. was behind in European technology for aircraft, funded even less than Greece or Bulgaria, so in 1915, it created NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics). It began with fewer than two dozen people from the government, military, and industry. Its charter stated that its goals were to "supervise and direct the scientific study of the problems of flight, with a view to their practical solution."

1931 photo of NACA airplane hangars in Hampton, Virginia

The Ames Aeronautical Laboratory became a second NACA lab in 1939 and was established in Moffett Field, California to to develop and improve American aircraft during World War II. Part of the work at the Ames lab was testing wind tunnels on proposed aircraft.

1942 wind tunnel at Ames Aeronautical Laboratory

Until 1935, NACA had employed only men to do all of its mathematical calculations. They were known as "computers", not in the sense of being machines but in that they could perform computations very well and fast. But NACA soon found that women could do the job faster and more accurately, so in 1935 the first one of five, Virginia Tucker, was hired. Tucker soon helped in recruiting more, and by 1942 NACA has 75 female computers on staff. By 1946, there were 400. 

Katherine (now Goble not yet Johnson) heard from a family member about openings in NACA's Black women's group of mathematicians. She didn't get in on the first try because the quota for Black women had been filled, but a year later in 1953, she was hired to work in the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Virginia. Oddly enough, Black women needed college degrees and high GPAs to get hired, but the white women did not.

Johnson at her desk at NACA

This was also the time of the Cold War between the U.S. and Russia. The pressure was on to perform well. Aeronautical engineers and test pilots depended heavily on these human computers to calculate and check work.

As an example of Katherine's ability, within 2 weeks of being hired, she was asked to attend a meeting and review some calculations. She found an error and was commended for it. When asked years later about the women computer staff, she said that men didn't have the patience that women did!

Although NACA insisted it had no problems with equal opportunity insisted on by President Roosevelt, the Black women worked in the west wing of the facility and so were called the "West Computers". Despite that, Katherine was very outspoken and refused to abide by NACA's whites-only rules about bathrooms and cafeterias. She was commonly seen discussing details from aviation magazines with white male colleagues. As she said in a book Reaching for the Moon,

"I didn't allow their side-eyes and annoyed looks to intimidate or stop me. I also would persist even if I thought I was being ignored. If I encountered something I didn't understand, I'd just ask. … I just ignored the social customs that told me to stay in my place."

Her husband died of brain cancer in 1956, but when the USSR launched Sputnik in 1957, the outlook on NACA's worth intensified. She frequently went home after work to see her children, then return to work until late at night. This YouTube clip from the movie The Right Stuff puts into perspective in a dramatic and slightly tongue-in-cheek fashion just how the U.S. viewed the new battle in the Cold War and the importance of jobs like Katherine's.

In response to fears of what orbiting space stations might do with nuclear weapons, the government agency NACA became incorporated into the newly formed civilian agency NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) in 1958. (For more, you can download the book NACA to NASA to Now.) NACA had previously been devoting time and research to missile technology, but it later studied the possibility of manned vehicles. It had created a plan for a spacecraft that would reenter the atmosphere with a heat shield, a worldwide tracking network, and controls for pilots as well as ground staff. This all became part of NASA. 

Meanwhile, Katherine married James Johnson in 1959; he had served 2 years in the Navy and then fought in the Army as an officer during the Korean War. 

As NASA made plans to put a man in space, their first attempt was a sub-orbital flight (just reaching space and then coming back down) with Alan Shepard aboard. Katherine calculated the trajectories for that in 1961. She also verified the calculations that machine computers had made for John Glenn's orbit around Earth in 1962. (The movie has a scene where she came up with the idea of using an old formula to solve the problem of calculating trajectory as it switched from an elliptical shape to a parabolic one.) Keep in mind that at this time, people relied on slide rulers, adding machines, formulas in books and their heads, and simple geometry tools like compasses, rulers, and triangles. Mechanical computers such as those from IBM were barely in place and not entirely trusted. In fact, before John Glenn lifted off, he asked specifically for Johnson to check the machine calculations: "Have the girl check the numbers...If she says they’re good, then I’m ready to go.”

From black-ladies.org

When it came time to send astronauts to the Moon, she computed the trajectory of Apollo 11 and how to dock the orbiting Columbia with the Eagle moon lander. Afterward, she assisted in the critical plan to save Apollo 13's crew during their mission. Here is an example of the flight paths that involve multiple calculations to solve for Apollo 11. (click to see bigger picture)

From black-ladies.org

As the movie title's name suggests, people like Katherine Johnson were truly hidden from public view. It wasn't until 2015 that Johnson was recognized by President Obama with the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom for her work on Glenn's flight.

Receiving the Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honor (NASA)

During her time at NASA, Johnson also worked on project such as the Space Shuttle and the Earth Resources Technology Satellite (ERTS, later called Landsat). Although she published 26 scientific reports, the first one was the most difficult to achieve because women weren't allowed. In 1960, she wrote the bulk of a paper regarding placement angles for a satellite with engineer Ted Skopinski, who suggested her name be on it. It was the first time a woman in the Flight Research Division had gotten her name on a paper.

Johnson comparing her data with a computer at NASA (Michael Ochs Archives)

Katherine retired from NASA in 1986 saying, “I loved going to work every single day.” And in 2016, NASA named its new computing facility after her. When asked what she thought at the ribbon cutting ceremony, humble 99-year-old Johnson replied, “You want my honest answer? I think they’re crazy,”

Johnson at the center bearing her name (From nasa.gov)

Aside from the Medal of Freedom, Johnson received many other awards and honorary degrees. And, there was even a Barbie doll made in her image.

Katherine was honored by the three Hidden Figures female stars at the 89th Academy Awards. She was accompanied on stage by NASA astronaut Yvonne Cagle. She died on February 24, 2020 at the age of 101. But her birthday coincidentally falls on Women's Equality Day.

Here is an excellent hour-long YouTube documentary of Katherine Johnson, if you want to fill in the blanks, especially about that degree in French.

Here is the brief appearance Katherine made with the stars of Hidden Figures.

Clip from YouTube

Sweet smell of success: Simple fragrance method produces major memory boost

Link to article

It is common to see news of various foods that are purported to stimulate the brain and potentially stave off dementia or slow down cognitive decline associated with old age. For example, foods rich in antioxidants, whole grains, meats like chicken, turkey, or fish, olive oil, and a little wine. But what if it were simply sniffing odors that did it? Researchers at the University of California - Irvine have proposed that this just might work.

From the Harvard Gazette article, What the Nose Knows

It has already been shown that losing your sense of smell (olfactory capacity) can sometimes predict the onset of almost 70 neurological and psychiatric diseases. These include Alzheimer's and other dementias, Parkinson's, schizophrenia and alcoholism. The COVID-19 virus is also linked to a loss of smell and cognitive ability, but research on that is still young. What's the back story on sense of smell and diseases?

It all starts with how we smell, and how that gets processed in the brain. The other five senses send their signals directly to a part of the brain called the thalamus first, and then it gets interpreted and sent to other regions of the brain. With olfaction (smell), that's not exactly the case. (You can skip all this biology stuff if you like and get a preview with the 5-minute video at the end of the blog.)

Thalamus (in red) (Wikipedia)

Air enters the nose, and back inside the nasal cavity, there is a patch of several types of cells on the top. This is the olfactory epithelium. It's only 5 square cm (0.78 square inches) big. Sticking out through the mucus of the epithelium and into the nasal cavity are hair-like extensions of nerve cells. The extensions are called cilia, and on the ends they have  about 6 million specialized receptors for detecting certain smells. 

Cross section of nasal cavity and olfactory epithelium (from Cerveny et al., 2022)

Dogs have 100-300 million, and their receptors are more sensitive. Humans have 400-1,000 types of these receptors, giving us the capability of detecting about 10,000 different odors, although some research says it's really a trillion! When you think that a dog's brain has an area 40 times bigger than a human's for interpreting smells, just imagine how well they do it, from 1,000 to 10,000 times better!

The nerve cells extend up through a bony plate and into an area called the olfactory bulb. From there, the signal for an odor goes to the brain.

Route of odor signals from cilia receptors in the nasal passage (bottom) to the olfactory bulb (top)

But where exactly in the brain do the odor signals go? Signals from other senses (sight, sound, touch, taste) go directly to the thalamus, but in the olfactory bulb, two types of nerve cells carry the odor signals to a variety of other places in the brain, then the thalamus, all in a complex system that sometimes feedbacks on itself. See the diagrams below.

Odor signals from the olfactory bulb to places in the brain

Parts of these areas of the brain are associated in different ways with memories. In fact, the sense of smell is the only one that is directly linked to the memory processing areas of the brain.

Most studies say that from the age of 55, humans begin to lose their sense of smell. They probably mean noticeably lose it, because the graph below shows how many correct answers people gave when asked to identify odors, and there is a small gap between age 40 and 50s where the incorrect answers increase.

Adapted from a study by Murphy, 1986

But it's not problems identifying all smells that increase with age. A Danish comparison of 251 people 60-98 years old with 92 people 20-39 years old showed that the older population's sense of smell for fried meat, onions, and mushrooms is weaker,  but they smell orange, raspberry and vanilla just as well as younger adults.

What causes these problems in the first place? Again, the answer is complex. 

• long-term experience with nasal diseases
• cumulative exposure to various environmental insults
• eventual drying out of the mucus
• receptors losing their selectivity to many odors 

Here's a link to a very short article by the Mayo Clinic explaining more.

It might be irritating to not be able to smell pleasant aromas as much, whether flowers or foods, but it can also be dangerous if you can't detect smoke.

But what about that part of our sense of smell that seems linked to memory? Professor Michael Leon and his colleagues in California ran an experiment. They asked healthy 42 male and female adults aged 60–85 to take part in the six-month study. Some were in a control group, and none seemed to have any diagnosis of cognitive impairment or dementia. All of them were asked to run an odorant diffuser every night for 2 hours each time with one of seven fragrances: rose, orange, eucalyptus, lemon, peppermint, rosemary, and lavender. (The controls had only a weak trace of each odorant.) 

One type of diffuser common in aromatherapy

People with exposure to the odorants increased their scores on a word recall test by 226%. They also showed improvement in a part of the brain (one of many) that is related to learning and memory. Normally, that part of the brain deteriorates with age (and especially with Alzheimer's disease), and it is involved in retrieving long-term memories.

These results are not surprising. Other researchers have shown the following results.

• Loss of olfactory ability can be restored in patients with head trauma, infections, Parkinson's disease, or simple aging.
• Multiple odorants (compared to single ones) stimulated memory in mice.
• Exposure to odorants increased some gray matter in the hippocampus, a part of the brain associated with long-term and short-term memory as well as spatial memory we use to navigate our way.
• Verbal fluency of patients with Parkinson’s disease improved with odorant treatment.
• Patients with moderate dementia showed positive results on memory, olfactory identification, depression symptoms, attention, verbal fluidity, and language skills after odorant exposure.

So, bottom line, it might be worthwhile to surround yourself with an environment rich in smells, whether to hold off memory problems or maybe even to improve a fading memory a little.

In 2014, a researcher developed what he called the "ophone", a device that can send actual smells along with pictures. So, you don't necessarily have to constantly buy aromatic oils with your infuser. He claimed it could reproduce up to 300,000 odors. This website contains links that described how a popcorn manufacturer and meat company had created a dongle to do the same thing when attached to your iPhone.

The ophone, Pop Secret dongle, and Oscar Mayer's bacon dongle

Here's a YouTube video by Demystifying Medicine explaining some of this blog article in just over 5 minutes.

Scientists Are Actually Building a Freeze Ray. The Air Force Wants It Badly.

Link to article

What could a freeze ray be? A weapon? A protective device? A fancy refrigerator? The U.S. Air Force has given almost a million dollars to fund its development. What on Earth would they use it for (or is it on Earth)? This is not a comic book or science fiction tool. It's real, and it deals with some very high tech physics but a pretty simple concept in the end.

 Freeze ray in action (news.virginia.edu)

In DC comic books, there have been two supervillains called Mr. Freeze and Captain Cold. The first appearance was Captain Cold in 1957 as a villain against The Flash. He later reappeared in 1960. His comic weapon was a pistol that fired a freezing ray. In the Batman comics, 1959 saw the origin of Mr. Zero, a scientist who used a rifle that shot a freezing beam. In 1966, the television series Batman remade the character including giving him a new name, Mr. Freeze. Two years later, he was brought back to comics with that new name. 

Comic book villains with freezing weapons

Captain Cold had to wait until 1990 to appear on television's The Flash, and then in the reboot version in 2014. Mr. Freeze was played in the 1960s Batman show by three actors, and then more famously by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the movie Batman & Robin (1997). 

TV and film versions of "chilling" villains

All characters, whether they use a rifle or pistol, fire a light blue or white ray to freeze the moisture around objects and encase them in ice blocks. The ray usually is not a smooth beam but instead is irregular around the edges, sometimes showing cold gas wafting away. Just how real is this, though, and what's the story about today's scientists wanting to build such a device?

It all centers around being able to cool electronics. They generate a lot of heat, and that can either slow down their operations or stop them entirely. In recent years, electronic devices like smartphones, tablets, and laptops have become smaller and more compact, and that leaves less space for heat to exit. What do electronics makers do now to drain off the excess heat?

Sources of heat in a smartphone (Market & Technology report, Nov., 2017)

Heat pipes and vapor chambers. These are vacuum-sealed compartments with liquid inside that heats up and spreads out across the shape of the compartment. Heat pipes (invented in 1963, used in satellites in 1965) are long and wire-like, while vapor chambers are sheets. The are placed near a heat source, where the water inside conducts the heat away. 

From micronews.com

Heat sinks. These are blocks of material in various shapes that are often in direct contact with a hot spot and drain away its heat. For example, in a personal computer, they are attached directly to fans that blow it away. A heat pipe or vapor chamber sometimes might be connected directly to the heat source, and then it distributes the unwanted heat to a heat sink block instead.

Diagram (Trenton Systems) and various designs of heat sinks (Wikipedia)

Of course, if the electronics didn't generate so much heat in the first place, these devices would not be needed. Software programs alone might regulate where the hot spots are and turn on/off various electronics as needed to adjust where heat is localized. But that's just not always possible with the demands of electrical devices nowadays. And for spacecraft in a vacuum or for high-altitude military aircraft, the air is nonexistent or too thin to draw off any heat like it can do underwater on on the ground. Spacecraft and jets are intended to use as lightweight materials as possible, so it's just not practical or efficient to carry cold liquid like a car radiator to cool things off.

We need a freeze ray!

Engineering professor Patrick Hopkins at the University of Virginia wants to help spacecraft and high-altitude jets by creating one that automatically (on demand) zaps electronic components that get hot so that they cool down. He has created a special facility called the ExSiTE Lab (Experiments and Simulations in Thermal Engineering) within the university to study these types of problems.  Graduate students below are running experiments.

From news.virginia.edu

Here's how they plan to make it work. First, you apply heat. Yes, that sounds counterintuitive, but they use something very special: plasma. According to the Plasma Science and Fusion Center at MIT, plasma is "superheated matter – so hot that the electrons are ripped away from the atoms forming an ionized gas". You find it more often than solids, liquids, or ordinary gases. Examples are in lightning, fire, stars, neon lights, and the aurora.

If it's superheated, how does it cool things down? Hopkins has created special instruments with lasers that measure temperature of surfaces the instant they are hit by plasma. A plasma beam is made by applying 1.5-2 kilovolts of electricity through a ceramic needle filled with helium. Instead of heating up, there is a moment when the temperature actually goes down before increasing. The cooling lasts for just a few microseconds (millionths of a second), but it clearly happens. Nobody else had ever been able to measure so quickly, so Hopkins repeated the work again and again with the same results. Plasma cools first, then heats up a surface.

Images from ExSiTE files

Hopkins' team used data from other applications of plasma on materials to determine the most likely reason cooling happens is that something is on the surface and evaporates, thus carrying away the heat energy from the plasma. That something is probably a super-thin layer of water or carbon monoxide. Once it is gone, the plasma energy can heat up the surface as expected. Hopkins likens this process to the heat leaving our bodies when sweat or water evaporate from our skin.

Image from okfirst.mesonet.org

So, the big challenge now is to (1) develop something to detect hot spots and (2) move a plasma jet gun around to hit it (3) with enough short bursts and (4) see how well it cools the electronics. That involves a lot of factors, but with Air Force funding, Hopkins' ExCiTE lab and his spinoff company Laser Thermal will work on that. 

In a final unique twist, let's go back to the comic book character Captain Cold. In his origin story, he thought that by using radiation from a cyclotron, he could make a weapon to stop The Flash. However, his weapon was experimental and instead created a cold ray. Cyclotrons (made originally in the 1930s) normally shoot charged particles like protons and electrons in a magnetic field, and they release radiation. Plasma found in space or around black holes emits the same type of radiation! So, maybe the story has come full circle.

Batteries made out of paper

The average home uses about 21 batteries every year, and then they throw them away. The United States throws away over 3 billion batteries, which is about one-fifth of the entire world's amount tossed into the garbage. "Garbage" means they end up mostly in landfills, which in itself is not good for the environment. The most common types of battery these days are alkaline or lithium.  Alkaline types are made of steel and a mix of zinc/manganese/potassium/graphite, plus paper and plastic. Lithium batteries contain heavy metals (cobalt, copper and nickel) and organic solvents, and these can all leach into the ground and groundwater when the batteries corrode. Lithium batteries can also ignite and set landfills on fire! What if batteries were made of simple paper instead? Recent discoveries in science have shown this is becoming more of a commercial reality.

From mepits.com

What are the basics of a battery anyway? It's a device with a positive pole (cathode) and a negative pole (anode) separated by a liquid (electrolyte) that makes a chemical reaction to generate electricity. Actually, the reaction happens between the electrolyte and the anode, and it produces electrons, which are negative in charge. Since negative charges repel each other, the electrons leave the anode and flow down a circuit if the anode and cathode are connected. On the way, they can do special jobs like light up a bulb before they return to the battery's cathode where they are attracted. 

Electrons flowing in and out of a battery (learn.sparkfun.com)

The first battery was invented by Italian physicist Alessandro Volta in 1799. He noticed that two different metals would somehow generate electricity when they both made contact with a frog's leg and cause the leg to twitch. Volta experimented with this after he heard that Luigi Galvani, an Italian physician, had made the legs twitch, but Galvani thought the cause was electricity already flowing in the body. Volta proved it was the chemical reaction of two metals connected by the fluids in the body (electrolytes). He used cloth or paper soaked in simple salt water (brine) and stacked disks of that material with two metal disks (copper and zinc) into what he called a "pile" to generate electricity.

A Voltaic pile (Wikipedia)

So, if all you need is two different metals and some type of salty water, how can you make a battery with just paper? Quite a bit of research has taken place along these lines.

Researchers at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, used carbon nanotubes embedded in their paper. A stamp-sized batter could light a bulb, and the scientists predicted that sheets of these batteries might even be strong enough to run a car.

Postage stamp-sized paper battery design (BBC News)

In 2022, scientists at the Cellulose & Wood Materials Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa) printed the anode and cathode as inks onto the front and back of a piece of paper. The paper was soaked with salt and dried, and when the paper is dampened with water, the salt dissolved in the water and acts as the electrolyte. It is not active when the paper is dry, but when wet, it produces 1.2 volts. With two of these battery cells on one strip of paper, they powered an alarm clock and its liquid crystal display.

Paper battery stenciled with the Empa name (Nature.com)

Earlier, in 2021, scientists from the NTU School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering developed a similar technology.  They screen printed an ink layer of manganese on one side of a sheet of strengthened paper, and a layer of zinc and conductive carbon on the other. The paper was ordinary cellulose material that has been reinforced with hydrogel, a polymer that acts as the electrolyte. It also makes the end product very clear and flexible. The nearly transparent hydrogel paper lets people see exactly where the anode and cathode inks are when they are printed on. The picture below looks like they are printing the anode on top of the cathode, but that's just an optical illusion from the semi-transparent hydrogel paper. They used zinc for the anode and either nickel or manganese for the cathode.

White cellulose paper changed to clear hydrogel paper with anode and cathode (Yang et al., 2021)

The NTU paper battery was tested as a  4 cm x 4 cm (1.6 inch x 1.6 inch) sheet, and it powered a small fan for 45 minutes. What's more, as you can see below, the battery could be bent considerably without losing its capability to run the fan.

Paper battery running a fan and showing bendability (Yang et al., 2021)

Not only is the hydrogel paper battery flexible, but it costs 10 times less than lithium type batteries to make. And, its materials are less harmful to the environment. The NTU researchers even tested it buried in soil on a rooftop garden exposed to nature. It was completely decomposed in a month. 

YouTube demonstration (1:09) of the NTU research

They see several applications for these sorts of batteries.

• As a medical skin patch, it could warn the wearer to take insulin or asthma medication.
• As a GPS tracking device, it could be used on smaller items that current trackers can't attach to.
• As replacements for lithium batteries in smart watches, they could be used in different shapes and locations (like the wristband) and be lighter.

For now, there are down sides to overcome. The "just add water" type operates only when wet. The hydrogel paper type has a limited shelf life.

Here is a short (10-min) YouTube video showing how to make ink for paper batteries.

Here is a short YouTube video showing how to put carbon nanotube ink on paper to create a battery.

FLOAT -- Flexible Levitation on a Track

Link to article

The Moon has attracted a lot of attention lately. China landed on the far side on January 2, 2019 with its Chang'e 4 lander and Yutu 2 rover after putting its Queqiao relay satellite in a nearby orbit. India touched down safely its Chandrayaan-3 lander on August 23, 2023 on the south pole to explore for water. The United States is teaming up with six agencies in a multi-stage Artemis program to build an orbital Gateway and base camp experimental station there. The first stage, Artemis 1, has already been accomplished. But other than sending rovers and orbiters, what can we expect to do to explore the Moon's more than has been done before? How are people actually going to transport materials on the Moon's surface or Mars? The answer may be levitation.

The NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program is funding a lunar railway system called FLOAT (Flexible Levitation on a Track). Just as railroads provide transportation systems on Earth, something is needed in space to move cargo from mining stations to processing stations. But on the Moon, there is no air to run steam-powered engines, and the atmosphere of Mars is 95% carbon dioxide, so another means is needed. FLOAT provides a magnetic robot ore carrier system powered by solar panels.

Artist conception of FLOAT (Ethan Schaler)

There are three parts to the FLOAT design. The track on the bottom is made out of PCB and is connected to the upper layer of solar panels. The PCB FLOAT track uses power from the solar panels to generate a electromagnetic (EM) field. This causes the FLOAT robot (the ore carrier) to levitate because the base of the robot is a sheet of many permanent magnets, and the EM field lifts (levitates) the robot as it interacts with the magnets. The key is that there are no moving parts to propel the ore carrier robot.

Cross section of FLOAT (from Schaler et al., 2021)

The FLOAT system is made of materials that flex easily, so it can be wound around a spool and laid out on the Moon's or Mars' surface without the need for cables, rails, stakes, or any other securing devices. It can also be rolled up and relocated easily if need be. The artistic representation below shows sheets that are closely connected almost as if they are one piece, but the concept designers have more than one option in mind, sometimes with flexible joints between sheets that are about 1 meter (3 feet) long.

From Schaler et al., 2021

Trial runs have already been made on Earth on a very small scale, mostly to test power requirements.

But lunar dust itself might pose a problem. The term "dust" is not the same as house dust on Earth, which is made of pollen, bacteria, smoke, ash, hair, and dead cells. Lunar dust is silicon dioxide glass as fine as talcum powder. Millions of years of bombardment of the Moon's surface by meteors not only has pulverized the rocky surface again and again, but also the speed of the meteors is so high that meteors heat up the rock and dust to create larger glassy bits called agglutinate. The dust is 1000 times smaller.

Lunar soil (regolith) vs. lunar dust (Apollo 17 sample)

As described in the 8-minute YouTube video below, lunar dust has caused major problems in the past. These include scratches on space suits and cameras, blockage of seals on suits and storage compartments, and health hazards to eyes and lungs.

So, a non-mechanical ore transportation system like FLOAT minimizes the dust that would be thrown up by wheels, carts, or assembly line devices. The location of lunar landers would have to be carefully planned, too, because dust has been shown to be thrown at least as far away as 160 meters (525 feet) at the speed of bullets, with severe damaging effects. Schaler's tests have also looked into how to deal with solar panels that might become covered with lunar dust.

Ideally, the FLOAT system is hoping to haul up to 33 kg (73 pounds) per robot carrier at speeds of >0.5 m/s (2.2 miles per hour). The regolith that is mined may be examined for its chemical and physical properties, but there are also thoughts that regolith might also be used as a building material ("lunarcrete") with blood as a binder, or for growing plants. 

Here's a cool video link to explain diamagnetism compared to other types of magnetism.

George Washington Carver, the "Peanut Man" and more

The exact date of birth for George Washington Carver is unknown, presumed to be January or June of 1864, just a year before the Civil War (War Between the States) ended. What is known is that he was born into slavery in a one-room shack on a 240-acre farm somewhere near Diamond, Missouri in the southwest corner of the state. He was captured along with his mother and sister by slave raiders and resold into slavery in Kentucky, but his original slaveowner Moses Carver got him back. George's father had died before he was born, and his mother was not recovered by his Missouri slaveowner. A year later, he was freed, but he and his brother remained on the Carver farm.

What is left of Carver's birthplace (nps.gov)

He was too frail to work in the fields, though. Moses' wife taught him how to cook, mend clothes, embroider, wash clothes, and do gardening, as well as how to prepare simple herbal medicines. He walked 10 miles to attend a school for blacks at age 11. He stayed in the home of a Black couple Andrew and Mariah Watkins, where he helped around the house. He had always referred to himself as "Carver's George", and Mariah suggested he take that as his family name.

At 13, he  moved to Fort Scott, Kansas to attend academy there, and after moving around to other towns, he finally graduated from high school in Minneapolis, Kansas in 1880. At that time, there was confusion in the post office with his name and another George Carver, so he randomly chose the middle initial W to clearly identify himself. It was just a letter, and when someone asked if it was for Washington, he adopted the full name. 

Teen Carver (from Food Tells A Story)

For two years beginning in 1886, he homesteaded in Kansas with a small conservatory of plants and flowers and a rock collection. He also raised rice, corn, maize and various fruit trees, forest trees, and shrubbery. Spurred on by Mariah Watkins telling him earlier to "learn all you can, then go back out into the world and give your learning back to the people", George enrolled in Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa in 1888. Although he wanted to study art and music, a teacher there convinced him that his talents were more suited toward studying botany, so me moved to Iowa State University (Ames). 

 In 1894, Carver became the first Black American to get a Bachelor of Science degree. He had studied fungal infections of soybean plants, and his teachers encourage him to stay on for a master's degree in 1896. His reputation was known as an excellent researcher in identifying and treating plant diseases.

Carver, 1893 

Another Black man, Booker T. Washington, had been born into slavery in 1856. Although he never graduated from college, he made a name for himself at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia. The founder was a white Hawaiian missionary's son named Samuel Chapman Armstrong, who had voluntarily commanded all-Black regiments in the Civil War. Armstrong fervently believed that the fate of freedmen depended on getting a practical and utilitarian education which also gave them character and morality. So, his all-Black Institute suited Booker T. Washington, and after his graduation, he appointed Booker as principal of the newly established (1881) Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (later Tuskegee Institute, now Tuskegee University) in Alabama. Booker bought a plantation where students worked and studied, and he wanted to set up an agricultural department and research facility. Since he wanted only fellow Blacks to teach, and George Washington Carver was the only one in the country with an advanced degree in that field, he asked him to join in 1896.

Pictures from Wikipedia and tuskegee.edu

Carver wasn't well liked by other teachers at first, because of his high salary and because Booker allowed him a second dormitory room to store his plant collection. He was administrator of the Agricultural Experiment Station farms, where he managed the production and sale of its farm products to generate income for the school. But he was not good at that. He was also expected to teach, be a member of several committees, and ensure the school’s toilets and sanitary facilities worked properly. He didn't like teaching or any of the other duties, and he argued for years over many of these things with Washington. Instead, he wanted to do research to help poor farmers in the South.

Carver, second from right, at Tuskegee (1902)

Despite being at odds with Washington, he was praised by him as "one of the most thoroughly scientific men of the Negro race with whom I am acquainted". When Washington died in 1915, his replacement removed many administrative responsibilities from Carver and let him focus on what he was good at.

He had already taught poor farmers to save money by feeding acorns to hogs instead of commercial feed. Carver also showed them how to improve soil with swamp muck instead of fertilizers. Cotton was the staple crop of the South, but Carver's studies on soil science showed how it depleted valuable nutrients from the soil. To replenish those nutrients, especially nitrogen, he suggested rotating with sweet potatoes, soybeans, or peanuts, and these worked well to improve subsequent cotton yields.

In 1906, Carver used donations from Morris Jesup, a New York banker, to invent the Jesup Agricultural Wagon, or "movable school". He designed the equipment and lessons to educate farmers and sharecroppers how to grow crops, such as sweet potatoes, peanuts, soybeans, and pecans. It contained farming equipment, soil samples, plants, recipes,  a revolving churn, butter mold, cultivator, planters, a cotton chopper, plows, different types of fertilizers, seeds, food stuffs, a milk tester, and a cream separator, as well as a number of charts and demonstration materials to be used as teaching tools.

Horse-drawn Jesup wagon (aces.edu)

Carver's "Farmers' College on Wheels" would first visit farms to demonstrate modern plowing

practices or cutting edge technology in animal husbandry or plant varieties, fertilizer applications,

and soil testing. Farmers' wives were also given lessons in raising poultry, cooking, preserving and canning, home maintenance, and health. After that, he would park the wagon in the center of town to answer questions. People raved over this innovation in farming education, and an average of 2,000 people per month were reached in the first year. Eventually, white plantation owners asked him to come. The Jesup wagon is still being used today in various forms.

Despite Carver's success in improving cotton yields with his concept of crop rotation, there was an unexpected problem. People had little use for peanuts, soybeans, and sweet potatoes. So, he developed edible products like flour and vinegar as well as other things such as stains, dyes, paints, and writing ink from sweet potatoes. His major success, and what he seems to be remembered for most of all, is his 325 uses for peanuts. These ranged from food byproducts to industrial and commercial products. 

• milk
• Worcestershire sauce
• chili sauce
• punches
• cooking oils
• salad oil
• paper
• cosmetics
• shaving cream
• glue
• soaps
• wood stains

Oddly enough, the list does not include peanut butter! That honor goes to Canadian chemist Marcellus Gilmore Edson, who patented peanut paste in 1884 (although Aztecs and Incas had been roasting and mashing peanuts centuries earlier). Carver also investigated peanut-based medicines, such as antiseptics, laxatives, and goiter medications. Later, by 1940, peanuts ranked as one of the six main crops in the country and became the second-most popular cash crop in the South after cotton.

Carver in his lab (Food Tells A Story)

For some reason, Carver thought peanut oil would be helpful in combatting polio, which was rampant in the 1930s. He advocated for its use in massages on polio patients. Patients said it helped, and even President Franklin Roosevelt gave it a try, but there was no scientific basis for the results. People later attributed them to the massages alone.

Carver applying peanut oil massage (from video on history.com)

Despite all of these products and their uses, Carver filed for only 3 patents. His reason was simple:

"One reason I never patent my products is that if I did, it would take so much time I would get nothing else done. But mainly I don't want any discoveries to benefit specific favored persons. I think they should be available to all peoples."

Even though he had become famous for his agricultural successes, with many bulletins written on farming methods, cooking, and nutrition, he wore only shabby tattered clothing. This didn't help his presentation at the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee who were seeking tariff protections on peanuts, but overall his talk did win them over. 

Some bulletins Carver published at the Tuskegee Institute (USDA National Agricultural Library)

Click on image for bigger view.

In 1937, he met Henry Ford at a meeting of applied chemistry and industrial products. They hit it off, and Carver gave him ideas of creating a binder for car paint, enabling more than just 2 colors to be used. They also discussed uses for crops to make ethanol fuel. In the 1940s, with Carver's ideas, Ford also made a plastic car body out of soybeans and a synthetic rubber from goldenrod. Ford later built a school for Blacks and named it after Carver. Ford also donated an entire laboratory to Carver for his research.

Ford and Carver at the Tuskegee Institute

Other notable figures that played roles in Carvers life included the following:

• Thomas Edison, who tried to lure Carver away from the Tuskegee Institute to work with him
• Gandhi, who asked for nutritional advice for Indian agriculture
• Joseph Stalin, who asked Carver to help with agrarian reforms

Carver has been honored many times over, starting with the George Washington Carver National Monument. His image has also been on two U.S. stamps (1948, 1998), and together with Booker T. Washington on the half dollar coin (1951-54).

Stamps and coins with Carver's image

George Washington Carver died on January 5, 1943 at 79 from complications of a fall down a flight of stairs. He was buried next to Booker T. Washington at the Tuskegee Institute.

Carver, 1938

Here is one of the best biographies on George Washington Carver, including a PDF link to a commemorative booklet.

Here are some recordings of Carver's high-pitched voice.