Archive
Engineer Details Plans to Build a Real, Burj-Dubai-Sized Starship Enterprise in 20 Years
By Rebecca Boyle Posted 05.14.2012
The year 2245 is just too distant — we should build and commission a real USS Enterprise right now, cracking the champagne across her hull within 20 years, according to an enterprising engineer. The gigantic ship would use ion propulsion, powered by a 1.5-GW nuclear reactor, and could reach Mars in three months and the moon in three days. Its 0.3-mile-diameter, magnetically suspended gravity wheel spinning at 2 RPM would provide 1G of gravity, and the thing looks just like the “Star Trek” ship of lore.
This project is the brainchild of an engineer who calls himself BTE Dan. As in “Build The Enterprise,” which is also the name of his brand-new website.
“We have the technological reach to build the first generation of the spaceship known as the USS Enterprise – so let’s do it,” BTE Dan writes. He even sifts through the federal budget and proposes tax hikes and spend ing cuts to cover the $1 trillion cost.
Though the “Star Trek” connection lends the project an air of sci-fi fun, BTE Dan is hardly the only engineer dreaming up a next-generation spaceship to the stars. DARPA’s 100-Year Starship project is designed partly to foster ideas just like this one, from a project planning roadmap to a real ship.
Tokyo Soil So Contaminated with Radiation it Would be Considered Nuclear Waste in US
Thursday, 24 May 2012
‘Radioactive fallout from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster continues to show up at dangerously high levels in the city of Tokyo, which is located roughly 200 miles from the actual disaster site. According to an analysis of five random soil samples recently taken by nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen, the soil around Tokyo is so contaminated with Fukushima radiation that it would be considered nuclear waste here in the U.S.
During a recent trip to Tokyo, Gundersen collected soil samples from a sidewalk, a children’s playground, a rooftop, a patch of moss by the side of a road, and the lawn of a judicial building. After sending those samples in for testing, it was revealed that each one had high levels of radioactive cesium-134 (CS134) and cesium-137 (CS137), while three of the samples contained high levels of cobalt-60 (CO60). One of the samples also tested positive for uranium-235 (U235).’
Read more: Tokyo Soil So Contaminated with Radiation it Would be Considered Nuclear Waste in US
Russian Space Chief: ‘We’re Talking About Establishing Permanent Bases’ On the Moon
By Clay Dillow Posted 05.23.2012 at 1:07 pm
Would You Ride This Pencil-Shaped Capsule To Space?
By Rebecca Boyle Posted 05.23.2012
Kepler Spots a Doomed Planet Slowly Evaporating into Space
By Clay Dillow Posted 05.21.2012 at 12:51 pm @ http://www.popsci.com/
Italian court rules MMR vaccine did trigger autism
By Staff Writer
NYR Natural News
Natural Health News — An Italian court has ruled there is a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. In what may be a ground-breaking decision, the Italian Court of Rimini has ruled that causation between an MMR vaccine and the resulting autism in a young child “has been established.” The unnamed child received the vaccine in March of 2004 and on returning home immediately developed adverse symptoms. During the next year the child regressed, receiving the autism diagnosis one year later and is now 100% disabled by the disease. The Italian court ruled that the child “has been damaged by irreversible complications due to vaccination (prophylaxis trivalent MMR)” and ordered the Ministry of Health to compensate the child with a 15 year annuity and to reimburse the parents of their court cost.
“Map of Life” Shows the Location of All Organisms, Large and Small
By Rebecca Boyle 05.15.2012 at 4:45 pm http://www.popsci.com/
The Outer Limits: Nasa Probe Sees the ‘Edge’ of Our Solar System for First Time – and it’s Completely Different From What We Thought
Sunday, 13 May 2012
‘Nasa’s probes have seen the ‘edge’ of our solar system for the first time – and it’s completely different from what scientists thought.
Our solar system is flying through space more slowly than we thought – and Nasa’s IBEX – Interstellar Boundary Explorer – has found it doesn’t have a ‘bow shock’, an area of gas or plasma that shields our solar system as it hurtles though space
‘The sonic boom made by a jet breaking the sound barrier is an earthly example of a bow shock,’ says Dr. David McComas, principal investigator of the IBEX mission.’
In Metallic Glasses, Researchers Find a Few New Atomic Structures
“The fundamental nature of a glass structure is that the organization of the atoms is disordered-jumbled up like differently sized marbles in a jar, rather than eggs in an egg carton,” says Paul Voyles, the principal investigator on the research. (Credit: © marionbirdy / Fotolia)
Published May 11 in the journal Physical Review Letters, the findings fill a gap in researchers’ understanding of this atomic structure. This understanding ultimately could help manufacturers fine-tune such properties of metallic glasses as ductility, the ability to change shape under force without breaking, and formability, the ability to form a glass without crystalizing.
Glasses include all solid materials that have a non-crystalline atomic structure: They lack a regular geometric arrangement of atoms over long distances. “The fundamental nature of a glass structure is that the organization of the atoms is disordered-jumbled up like differently sized marbles in a jar, rather than eggs in an egg carton,” says Paul Voyles, a UW-Madison associate professor of materials science and engineering and principal investigator on the research.
Researchers widely believe that atoms in metallic glasses are arranged only as pentagons in an order known as five-fold rotational symmetry. However, in studies of a zirconium-copper-aluminum metallic glass, Voyles’ team found there are clusters of squares and hexagons-in addition to clusters of pentagons, some of which form chains-all located within the space of just a few nanometers. “One or two nanometers is a group of about 50 atoms-and it’s how those 50 atoms are arranged with respect to one another that’s the new and interesting part,” he says.
Chinese Physicists Teleport Photons Over 100 Kilometers
Teleportation is the extraordinary ability to transfer objects from one location to another without travelling through the intervening space.
The idea is not that the physical object is teleported but the information that describes it. This can then be applied to a similar object in a new location which effectively takes on the new identity.
And it is by no means science fiction. Physicists have been teleporting photons since 1997 and the technique is now standard in optics laboratories all over the world.
The phenomenon that makes this possible is known as quantum entanglement, the deep and mysterious link that occurs when two quantum objects share the same existence and yet are separated in space.
Teleportation turns out to be extremely useful. Because teleported information does not travel through the intervening space, it cannot be secretly accessed by an eavesdropper.
For that reason, teleportation is the enabling technology behind quantum cryptography, a way of sending information with close-to-perfect secrecy.
Unfortunately, entangled photons are fragile objects. They cannot travel further than a kilometre or so down optical fibres because the photons end up interacting with the glass breaking the entanglement. That severely limits quantum cryptography’s usefulness.
However, physicists have had more success teleporting photons through the atmosphere. In 2010, a Chinese team announced that it had teleported single photons over a distance of 16 kilometres. Handy but not exactly Earth-shattering.
Now the same team says it has smashed this record. Juan Yin at the University of Science and Technology of China in Shanghai, and a bunch of mates say they have teleported entangled photons over a distance of 97 kilometres across a lake in China.
Read more: http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27843/
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