LATITUDE
KILAUEA DOING WHAT KILAUEA DOES The Kilauea Volcano reminds the world that it’s still an active volcano, with yet another eruption, May 3.
DIFFERENT TYPES OF VOLCANO, DIFFERENT PLACES Situated on Hawaii’s Big Island, the Kilauea Volcano rises 4,190 feet above sea level and makes up about 14 per cent of the land on the island. The volcano has been quietly erupting regularly since 1983. This spring, it made a particularly big scene when a magnitude-5.0 earthquake hit the island and triggered dramatic eruptions. Locals watched in horror as Kilauea spewed lava into residential subdivisions, destroying homes and forcing 1,700 people to evacuate. Since then, fissures in the volcano have continued to belch out smaller amounts of lava and ash. Kilauea is no match for Guatemala’s Volcan de Fuego, which erupted at night and continues to kill people. Volcan de Fuego is a stratovolcano, prone to spewing fast-moving flows of ash, lava, and mud; Kilauea is a shield volcano, oozing slow- moving globs of lava through its fissures. Thinner magma within Kilauea means that it can more easily release gases through fissures. Volcan de Fuego’s stickier and more viscous magma traps gases, allowing higher—and potentially more destructive and deadly—pressures to build. All this and more about the two volcanoes can be found on Live Science.
ONE SMALL HOUSE, ONE GIANT STEP Although too small for tardigrades, the nano-house is a big achievement for nanotechnologists.
ROBOTS BUILD REALLY, REALLY TINY HOME, BUT ADORABLE TARDIGRADES WILL NOT BE MOVING IN A robotics team in France has built a nano-house that’s about the width of a human hair. With each wall about 0.0006 inches across, it was constructed on the tip of an optical fibre. Each surface of the house was etched onto a sheet of silica crystal, cut with an ion beam, and assem- bled by tiny robot arms, reports Live Science. While the house would be rejected even by those tiny, cute, six-legged critters called tardigrades (too small, no en suite, one couple allegedly told their real estate agent), scientists aren’t worried. The project was not really a housing project. It was a test of a new tool called Micro- Robotex, created at the Femto-ST Institute at Besançon, France. The platform is designed to attach microscopic 3D components to very small surfaces.
64 | PEG SUMMER 2018
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