The SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY News Thread

[SaintessHeart]

Originally Posted by Jinto

Well, this replica rifle is a good indicator that tells me how small that kitten actually is.

I am willing to believe that she is only JUST a little taller than the rifle if placed on the ground. That makes it good, because we are looking for a kawaiiko here, not a bishoujo.

Though if we want the legs to look alluring, there is always zettai ryouiki : what genetic engineering has problem fixing, fashion statements can help.

Uhm... SaintessHeart... err, you noticed that in both cases, they feature neither real cat ears nor do the plush cat ears (that I fail to imagine in the second image btw. because of the hat ^^') replace their real ears (which can be clearly seen). So, unless you want to create something with 4 ears...

Originally Posted by Vexx

eyeah... the "four ear" thing gets on my nerves as well .... I gave Spice&Wolf and Zakuro extra points simply because the characters had the proper number of ears.

As for the look in "real life"... my opinion is that it would look initially "alien" but cute tends to win out. And yeah.. tiny "kittens" FTW.

That is a engineering flaw I believe. It can be fixed. All we need to do is to kidnap Meotwister and every other forum member who studies biochemistry related certification, strap on bomb collar to them, and make them work in an underground lab till the issue is rectified.

Vexx, can you tell your colleagues to tune down the Satellite Moe Cannon Network? I understand it is a prototype and it needs testing, but the saturated power from the beam is forcing everyone's brain cells to shut down in response anything cute, adorable, or cuddly.

[TinyRedLeaf]

Panasonic robot to attempt Hawaii triathlon

Tokyo (Sept 15, Thu): After scaling the cliff walls of the Grand Canyon and driving the Le Mans racetrack for 24 hours, a tiny Japanese robot is set for a new challenge: Hawaii's grueling Ironman Triathlon course.

Fitted with three different bodies and three rechargeable batteries, the hand-sized "Evolta" from electronics firm Panasonic will swim, bicycle and run its way through one of the world's toughest triathlon routes, the company said today.

The robot will have to swim, run and bike for a total of around 230km. The time given to complete the task is one week or 168 hours, which is 10 times longer than it would take a sportsman.

The batteries the robot bears on its back, which go on sale in Japan on Oct 21, can be recharged up to 1,800 times by being placed on a recharger pad.

The triathlon challenge begins on Oct 24 and will continue non-stop for seven days and nights. The actual Ironman World Championship takes place in early October.

Among its other achievements, Evolta has also walked the 500km from Tokyo to the old Japanese capital of Kyoto.

REUTERS

If you've been to the cinemas, you'd probably recognise Evolta from this ad:

Evolta at Le Mans

Next challenge: Hawaii Ironman Triathlon

[AnimeFan188]

"British business magnate Richard Branson hopes to launch a vessel into space
within the next 12 months, kicking off an era of commercial space travel.

"The mother ship is finished... The rocket tests are going extremely well, and so I
think that we're now on track for a launch within 12 months of today," he told
CNN's Piers Morgan late Wednesday.

"This could be the beginning of a whole new era of space travel, which will be
commercial space travel.""

See:

http://www.defencetalk.com/virgin-ai...-a-year-37012/

[LoweGear]

Originally Posted by AnimeFan188

"British business magnate Richard Branson hopes to launch a vessel into space
within the next 12 months, kicking off an era of commercial space travel.

"The mother ship is finished... The rocket tests are going extremely well, and so I
think that we're now on track for a launch within 12 months of today," he told
CNN's Piers Morgan late Wednesday.

"This could be the beginning of a whole new era of space travel, which will be
commercial space travel.""

See:

http://www.defencetalk.com/virgin-ai...-a-year-37012/

Now, to find out where to book and how much

*wonders if his kidneys will be enough to fund it.. maybe throw in my brain in there*

[Ithekro]

Very expensive at first. But as thing become more common, or there is more competition, the price will go down. Or is they design a larger aircraft for more people (bulk transport).

Trouble at the moment is that it is really a trip to nowhere. It shouldn't be ab;e to actually make a stable low earth orbit, much less the ISS. What is needed is a place to go, for work and pleasure, since someone has to work at the palces that others find pleasure. (space vacation)

[AnimeFan188]

"So the National Reconaissance Office is celebrating its 50th birthday this
weekend by throwing a party for 4,000 guests at the National Air and Space
Museum’s very cool Udvar-Hazy Center.

What’s going to be the highlight of a night spent celebrating the secretive agency
that operates America’s spy satellites? The declassification of two famous Cold
War spy sats, of course.

NRO director and former Air Force general Bruce Carlson told reporters during a
breakfast in Washignton this morning that the office will be declassifying the KH-7
–8 series Gambit spy satellite that was used to take pictures of the Soviet Union
between 1963 and 1984 and the KH-9 Hexagon satellite (shown in a rendering
above since its still classified) used between 1971 and 1986."

See:

http://defensetech.org/2011/09/15/nr...py-satellites/

[AnimeFan188]

"It's a real-life Tatooine. A spectacle made popular by the "Star Wars" saga — a
planet with two suns — has now been confirmed in space for the first time,
astronomers revealed.

Scientists using NASA's Kepler space telescope captured details of a giant planet
in orbit around the pair of binary stars that make up the Kepler-16 system, which
is about 200 light-years away."

See:

http://news.yahoo.com/planet-star-wa...181404397.html

[TinyRedLeaf]

Dwarf galaxies suggest dark-matter theory may be wrong

Bradford, Britain (Sept 16): Scientists' predictions about the mysterious dark matter purported to make up most of the mass of the Universe may have to be revised.

Research on dwarf galaxies suggests they cannot form in the way they do if dark matter exists in the form that the most common model requires it to. That may mean that the Large Hadron Collider will not be able to spot it.

The current theory holds that around 4 per cent of the Universe is made up of normal matter — the stuff of stars, planets and people — and around 21 per cent of it is dark matter. The remainder is made up of what is known as dark energy, an even less understood hypothetical component of the Universe that would explain its ever-increasing expansion.

Scientists' best ideas for the formation and structure of the Universe form what is called the "cosmological standard model" — or lambda-CDM — which predicts elementary particles in the form of cold dark matter (CDM). These CDM particles are believed to have formed very early in the Universe's history, around one millionth of a second after the Big Bang, and they are "cold" in the sense that they are not hypothesised to be particularly fast-moving.

'Disturbing possibilities'
Professor Carlos Frenk at Durham University, working with the Virgo Consortium, now has data suggesting that our understanding of the formation and composition of the Universe is incomplete.

These data come from an unlikely source: dwarf galaxies, a "halo" of which surrounds our own Milky Way. These dwarf galaxies are believed to be mostly made up of dark matter, and contain just a few stars. Their dimness has made them difficult to study in the past.

But the Virgo Consortium has created computer simulations to visualise how the dwarf galaxies formed, using their assumptions about CDM. The team found that the final results of these simulations did not at all match what we observe. The models showed many more small galaxies in a wide halo around the Milky Way, whereas in reality there are fewer, larger dwarf galaxies.

Prof Frenk explained that there were two "equally disturbing possibilities" for why this is the case.

One idea is that many dwarf galaxies formed as in the simulation, but there were violent supernova explosions during their formation that radically changed the structure of the dwarf galaxy halo. "If this were the case, it would mean that galaxy formation is a much more exciting process than we thought," said Prof Frenk. But there are still uncertainties over whether the small fraction of normal matter in the Universe (4 per cent) could have such a fundamental effect on the structure of the dark matter.

An alternative cause for the discrepancies between the modelled data and what we observe is much more fundamental: that CDM does not exist, and the predictions of the standard model relating to it are false.

Prof Frenk said that after working for 35 years with the predictions of the standard model, he is "losing sleep" over the results of the simulations.

BBC News

To a layman like me, the whole concept of "dark matter" has always reminded me of "ether", the hypothetical substance once thought necessary for the propagation of electromagnetic waves. That aside, any physicists here like to clarify and explain, in everyday terms, what these findings might imply?

[SaintessHeart]

Originally Posted by TinyRedLeaf

Dwarf galaxies suggest dark-matter theory may be wrong


To a layman like me, the whole concept of "dark matter" has always reminded me of "ether", the hypothetical substance once thought necessary for the propagation of electromagnetic waves. That aside, any physicists here like to clarify and explain, in everyday terms, what these findings might imply?

Remember J.J Thomson? He almost got his idea right but was still wrong. That is how science evolves - over time we discover something to debunk a certain prediction, but the big picture is same or almost close as the old one.

Self-driving car takes to the road (1:44)

Can we hack the car's software to make it drive at 150km/h?

Human skin strengthened with spider silk can stop a bullet (2:16)

And one step we are closer to creating gene-seeds for space marines. Long live the Emperor!

Singapore scientists create world's smallest gear (1:41)

Vexx. you might want to consider coming to live here and join A-Star as a senior researcher after retiring from the CIA. They treat foreign talents better than their own citizens.

[AnimeFan188]

"SpaceX, the upstart start-up rocket company founded by famous techwealth
kingpin Elon Musk, is to build and test-fly a "Grasshopper" hover rocket based on
the massive first-stage fuel tank of the company's Falcon 9 vehicle, capable of
carrying ten tonnes of cargo or seven people into orbit.

As yet SpaceX is not discussing the Grasshopper publicly, but we learn some
interesting details of the new craft from an environmental impact statement
covering planned test flights filed with the Federal Aviation Administration (65-
page PDF/1.4MB).

According to the filing, the Grasshopper is seen as a "Reusable Launch Vehicle"
(RLV). It will be 106ft tall, and built around the first-stage fuel tank of the existing
Falcon 9 rocket stack:"

See:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09...hopper_spacex/

[Ithekro]

Interesting concept. Get it to the point where you can reuse everything except the fuel would cut the cost down a lot...aside from the increased fuel cost. But you would not need to build a new rocket or fuel tank every time you launched something.

What I'd like to see is such a system used to get parts for a larger spacecraft into orbit. Built it there and then use it for actual space travel, as unless we get some more viable means of moving an object from Earth in to space, I doubt we could build a huge spacecraft in a Shipyard and launch it into space all at once. (Which was the main reason people who do Star Trek used Spacedocks for ship construction until recently...or built pieces on the planet and assembled them in orbit. The cost to fly the whole thing up at once would be gigantic.).

[Jinto]

Originally Posted by Ithekro

Interesting concept. Get it to the point where you can reuse everything except the fuel would cut the cost down a lot...aside from the increased fuel cost. But you would not need to build a new rocket or fuel tank every time you launched something.

The components (booster stages etc.) are typically highly stressed when used. Therefore reuse wasn't tried yet, since micro fractures can be expected from usage, which would reduce the reliability of the parts in successive reuses and increase the risk of accidents. Reusing everything requires the usage of fuels that are less destructive - but those might actually mean insufficient boost for rockets.

[synaesthetic]

What it'd require is a form of propulsion that doesn't rely on essentially blowing shit up and directing said explosion out of a small nozzle.

[SaintessHeart]

Originally Posted by synaesthetic

What it'd require is a form of propulsion that doesn't rely on essentially blowing shit up and directing said explosion out of a small nozzle.

You mean something like the Orion project?

[Bri]

Originally Posted by SaintessHeart

You mean something like the Orion project?

Project Orion - Nuclear Propulsion

Hmm, one launch could bring up to 8 million tonnes in to orbit. That's like 80 Nimitz class aircraft carriers all at once. Enough to build some siginicant industrial capability in space, I'd imagine.

However detonating some 1000+ nuclear bombs in the atmosphere...can you imagine the public outcry against that

[Ithekro]

What about a large railgun to get it into orbit (or pieces of it into orbit), than finish it there.

[ganbaru]

Originally Posted by Ithekro

What about a large railgun to get it into orbit (or pieces of it into orbit), than finish it there.

Or a space elevator ?

[Ithekro]

Space Elevator will take longer due to technical constrants.

A railgun might be more practical in the short term while the space elevator is being built. Also it could be used to get parts into orbit for the space elevator to be constructed.

[synaesthetic]

Originally Posted by Ithekro

What about a large railgun to get it into orbit (or pieces of it into orbit), than finish it there.

Pretty much. Mass drivers are the most likely interim solution until a proper space elevator can be realized.

[Jinto]

Originally Posted by Bri

Project Orion - Nuclear Propulsion

Hmm, one launch could bring up to 8 million tonnes in to orbit. That's like 80 Nimitz class aircraft carriers all at once. Enough to build some siginicant industrial capability in space, I'd imagine.

However detonating some 1000+ nuclear bombs in the atmosphere...can you imagine the public outcry against that

The most ridiculous idea of the whole concept is the part about nuclear shaped charges. Usually a shaped charge is a charge that is specifically directed and channeled in a certain direction. Shaped charge explosives are used to cut through armor (military) or other stuff like e.g. reinforced concrete (demolition).

However, the idea to shape charge a plasma is just... well okay... the problem is not that it is impossible... the problem is, that it is impossible when at the same time, the nuclear device shall have a good efficiency (the whole point of this project). If you want a nuclear device to detonate most efficiently, then you have to keep the fission material as long as possible in a state of a critical mass that is fissioning. Typically you'ld use a strong container (lots of high strength steel) to confine the fission material. However, the longer - and hence more efficiently - the fission material converts mass into energy, the more energy is released... to the point where the enclosing device entirely vaporates. Whats left then is a plasma. Now to shape charge the plasma you'ld need something that can either reflect/channel the plasma or something else that becomes the charge and is propelled by the plasma. Both principles of shape charging won't work, because there simply is no material that remains stable long enough (before it turns into plasma) to either shape the plasma or being shaped and propelled by the plasma. Additionally that device would be rather weak in space... in the earth's atmosphere a thermonuclear bomb (as its name implies) creates a lot of heat... so much that thermobaric shockwaves are created (when surrounded by air). I think in space most of this heat energy could not even be converted into propulsion because there is no thermobaric effect.