Beirut Science Club

bionic pancreas

Outpatient Glycemic Control with a Bionic Pancreas in Type 1 Diabetes — NEJM Original Article from The New England Journal of Medicine — Outpatient Glycemic Control with a Bionic Pancreas in Type 1 Diabetes

Questions and Answers 16:

Q: If I were to send a tree to mars with sufficient nutritients and water(everything it would need to grow on earth), would it be able to grow and produce oxygen?

A: Nasa, among other groups with space exploration in mind, are asking that question themselves:
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2004/25feb_greenhouses/[1]
It seems the biggest problem to overcome is the low atmospheric pressure, which sucks the already rare water out of plants. Nutrients don't seem to be a problem.

Questions and Answers 15:

Q: will it ever be possible to 'zoom in' on a distant planet and take a google earth quality picture?

A: Yes, if you use the Sun as a gravitational lens. Massive objects bend starlight. In fact, the bending of starlight by the Sun was the first verification of Relativity theory in 1919. If you stand far enough back from the Sun, the bending from all sides comes to a focus. In order to block the Sun itself, you need to be about 800 times the Earth's distance (800 AU), opposite the direction of the object you want to examine.
The diameter of the lens is then about 2 million km, which produces a theoretical resolution of 1.2 meters per light year of distance of the object. The practical resolution you will get is unknown, but astronomers are pretty good at squeezing out the best views from their telescopes.
Nobody is going to do this any time soon, because we don't have a good way to place an instrument that far from the Sun. The physics tells us some interesting things, though. This gravitational lens has a focal plane which is a sphere around the Sun, imaging the entire sky. Each pixel of resolution is 1.5 cm in size at 800 AU. So the camera would likely use a large primary optic to direct the light to the electronic sensor. To save weight they might use a long narrow mirror that rotates about the optical axis to fill in the view, rather than a full disk mirror.
Since the focal plane around the Sun is so large, you would likely send multiple sensors in different directions, and mine outer Solar System Scattered Disk objects for fuel to move the sensors around to look at different targets.

Darine Hotait is an award winning writer/director based in NYC originally from Lebanon making a science fiction short film that takes place in Beirut in the year 2050 about immortality and technological advancement in the field of artificial intelligence where the human and inhuman become identical in form and heart.
Science fiction is highly underrepresented in Middle Eastern cinema so this is considered a rare production.

She launched a fundraising campaign on Zoomaal.com. She has raised so far 54% of the budget. However, She has to reach 100% otherwise She won't receive any of the funds. It's all or nothing.

Here is a link to the campaign:
http://www.zoomaal.com/projects/orb/1739?ref=1423216

Help her out :)

Orb: A Sci-Fi short film by Darine Hotait | Darine Hotait | Lebanon Orb is a Sci-Fi short film about immortality, repulsion and Beirut City in the year 2050.