Advanced Invention

Turns out that a body reveals more details about its death than once thought

Whether it’s the blue, ragged fingernails of a heroin-overdose victim or the scaly skin of someone poisoned by arsenic, a corpse bears signs that unveil the secrets behind its life and death. Right now, 40,000 John and Jane Does wait in morgues. Although accident and murder victims are 15 to 30 times as likely to be autopsied as those who die of natural causes, even run-of-the-mill autopsies can yield important information on how a person died. This data has important implications for public health and safety and the legislation that governs those areas of interest. Autopsy findings have led to tougher military gear, fire-resistant clothing, crashworthy fuel systems and child-safe toys. They have also helped reveal how HIV, tuberculosis and West Nile virus are transmitted. Medical examiners are always looking for smarter, faster and more reliable ways to uncover the truth.

Here are five technologies that epitomize the old morgue maxim Mortui vivos docent: The dead teach the living.

Two chemicals create a glowing (and poisonous) mixture that’s a window into the weird world of quantum physics

True Color: The release of photons that results from the combination of hydrogen peroxide and chlorine causes a vivid orange-red glow.

Before the discovery in the 1920s of quantum mechanics—laws that explain the way the world works on the very small scale of atoms and electrons—the fact that bleach and peroxide glow when mixed would have seemed like just another chemical reaction that gives off light, like fire or fireflies. But it’s actually a glimpse into the impossible.

NASA’s experimental space plane, the X-43A, set a new speed record for aircraft on November 16, 2004. In the unmanned test flight, the plane reached Mach 10 — 10 times the speed of sound, or about 6,600 miles (10,600 kilometers) per hour. This flight broke the previous speed record of Mach 7, set in March 2004 by the X-43A in a previous test flight.

Photo courtesy NASA
The X-43A is the first aircraft to reach hypersonic speeds using an air-breathing engine.

What sets the X-43A apart from other rocket-powered aircraft is that it is powered by a scramjet engine. Instead of using onboard oxygen to combust the hydrogen fuel, the scramjet scoops up oxygen as it travels through the atmosphere. By eliminating the need for onboard oxygen, cutting the weight of the spacecraft, the X-43A could lead to cheaper Earth-to-orbit space travel.

In this article, we’ll take a look at hypersonic planes and learn about their air-breathing engines.

A New Jersey resident generates and stores all the power he needs with solar panels and hydrogen

EAST AMWELL, N.J.—Mike Strizki has not paid an electric, oil or gas bill—nor has he spent a nickel to fill up his Mercury Sable—in nearly two years. Instead, the 51-year-old civil engineer makes all the fuel he needs using a system he built in the capacious garage of his home, which employs photovoltaic (PV) panels to turn sunlight into electricity that is harnessed in turn to extract hydrogen from tap water.

Although the device cost $500,000 to construct, and it is unlikely it will ever pay off financially (even with today’s skyrocketing oil and gas prices), the civil engineer says it is priceless in terms of what it does buy: freedom from ever paying another heating or electric bill, not to mention keeping a lid on pollution, because water is its only by-product.

“The ability to make your own fuel is priceless,” says the man known as “Mr. Gadget” to his friends. He boasts a collection of hydrogen-powered and electric vehicles, including a hydrogen-run lawn mower and car (the Sable, which he redesigned and named the “Genesis”) as well as an electric racing boat, and even an electric motorcycle. “All the technology is off-the-shelf. All I’m doing is putting them together.”

“I’m a self-sufficiency guy,” he adds. Strizki, a civil engineer, has been interested in alternative energy sources since 1997 when he began working on vehicles fueled by alternative means during his tenure with the New Jersey Department of Transportation.

Strizki’s two-story colonial on an 11-acre (4.5 hectare) plot 12 miles (19 kilometers) north of Trenton is the nation’s first private hydrogen-powered house, which he now shares with his wife, two dogs and a cat. (His two daughters and son, all in their 20s, have left the nest.) It has been running entirely on electricity generated from the sun and stored hydrogen since October 2006, when Strizki—in a project that his wife Ann fully supports—built an off-grid energy system with $100,000 of his own cash and $400,000 in grants from the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, along with technology from companies such as Sharp, Swagelok and Proton Energy Systems.

Field of corn in Manitoba, Canada (Photograph: Corbis)

You can power laptops - and, potentially cars - using hydrogen extracted from water. The trouble is that it takes a lot of electricity. A simpler way would be to do it naturally, using enzymes - proteins which catalyse reactions - and bacteria. These do exist: certain green algae and “cyanobacteria” can split water using photosynthesis to produce molecular hydrogen.

But to create a generation of cars that would run on water with some sludge in the back, we need to learn how to design our own bacteria and enzymes that can co-opt natural processes for our ends.

Natural hydrogen-producing enzymes are complex, often using metal atoms to help them work. “For many of the enzymes related to energy production, people have no idea how they are actually organised,” says Giovanna Ghirlanda, a protein-design researcher at the University of Arizona. In some cases, no one knows where the metal atoms lie within the protein, she says.

Natural enzymes won’t work too well in future fuel cells; they need to be modified, as the best hydrogen producers are poisoned by oxygen. “But oxygen is one of the main products of photosynthesis,” says Professor Alfonso Jaramillo of the Ecole Polytechnic, near Paris.

Some researchers are trying to tweak the enzymes to make them less sensitive to oxygen, but with limited success. As a part of the EU-funded BioModularH2 project, Jaramillo’s team is using a different approach: stick with the natural enzyme and engineer another set of proteins that take oxygen out of the cell before it can do any harm. These hydrogen producers are longer-term options: it may take 10 years to get to a prototype, says Jaramillo.