Tag: Science

LENR

Posted on by Neal Asher

You know, I still don’t know what to make of this. Search the Internet and you’ll find loads of articles, both for and against:

But the inventors do have something going for them. They have demonstrated the device publicly numerous times and their claims are looking more credible as more tests validate them. Video and reports of physicists who were present confirmed that electricity was produced.

The latest tests on the energy catalyzer by NyTeknik took place in Bologna on April 19 and 28. The test, as with previous tests, aimed to measure the net energy that the device generates as accurately as possible. The results of the tests from both dates showed a developed net power of between 2.3 and 2.6 kilowatts with and input electric power of 300 watts.

Either a couple of inventors have produced something totally game-changing, which of course I would love to believe, especially as that kind of thing is a science fiction trope, or they are completely deluded, or they are running a massive con.

Bubble Metal is Old News

Posted on by Neal Asher

I picked up on the idea of bubble metal maybe twenty years ago (possibly in Omni Magazine) in an article about space industries. The simple idea was of foaming molten metal with inert gas in zero gravity, which would allow for an even distribution of the bubbles (they wouldn’t float to the top), to produce a light and strong either closed or open cell metal. Great idea, and one I’ve used loads.

Now you’ve probably read about this already, but I feel it’s worth a mention here just to prove my aphorism that nothing dates faster than science fiction:

 “The trick is to fabricate a lattice of interconnected hollow tubes with a wall thickness of 100 nanometres, 1,000 times thinner than a human hair,” said lead author Dr. Tobias Schaedler.

The resulting nickel matter has a density of just 0.9 milligrams per cubic centimetre.

Warp Factor One Million

Posted on by Neal Asher

So the guys at CERN did another test with their superluminal neutrinos:

By tweaking the experiment in an attempt to address a potential flaw in their original experiment, they again showed that the neutrons arrived at the Italian site some 60 billionths of a second faster than if they had been travelling at the speed of light.

I do have to wonder with measurements like this if they’re getting into some error bar, some tolerance limit on actually measuring the speed of light. It’s the kind of thing that rears its head quite often in science and is quite often ignored by the mainstream media. Anyone who has worked in engineering knows about tolerances and the impossibility of exact measurement.

Nevertheless it is all exciting stuff (for a nerd like me). The MINOS team at Fermilab are going to try and replicate the results, but it’s interesting that they had similar results before but which lay within a margin for error. So, what does this all mean? Some people are already speculating:

The new findings, available here, also further strengthen a particular scenario: The neutrinos do not travel with superluminal velocity all the way. They only ‘jump’ a small initial distance shorter than 20 meters, after which they settle back and travel as usual with speeds below that of the speed of light. This initial jump would occur at speeds that are more than ten times the speed of light, perhaps even millions of times the speed of light.

I don’t really have to elaborate on why I particularly like this speculation, do I?

Linear no Threshold Hypothesis

Posted on by Neal Asher

From a Sierra Club insider:

With junk science, it is easy to scare people. There are many things that are bad for us that are present at low levels in the environment — for example, mercury, lead, radiation, or tobacco smoke. The junk science approach to trace toxins is to claim that if a high level of the bad thing would cause X people to get sick, then a level 10,000 times smaller must cause 1/10,000 as many people to get sick. Given 300 million people in the country, this math can give you thousands of people getting sick from low levels of mercury, lead, radiation, or secondhand tobacco smoke. This approach is known as the linear no threshold hypothesis.

So considering this approach, don’t you think this toxic substance should be banned or controlled?

Gotta love Fusion

Posted on by Neal Asher

This looks promising (check comments).

They are over halfway through this funded (about $8 million) project. This part is just one step towards commercial fusion and if successful could justify a $200 million follow up to develop a full commercial scale system.

As one commenter notes:

In earlier statements it was explained that WB-8 was only going to be produced if WB7/7.1 were successful — i.e. validated WB-6 results. I think we can assume that happened. WB-8 is to determine scaling. This means a lot of testing to provide a lot of conclusive data for peer review. The fact that the research is ongoing, means they’ve hit no serious snags – the contract would end if they did. This is a very very positive report, do not listen to the naysayers.

We Ain't Looking Hard Enough!

Posted on by Neal Asher

Here’s a little bit over at The Register related to the Fermi Paradox:

The problem, according to boffins Jacob Haqq-Misra and Ravi Kumar Kopparapu of Penn State uni, is that it’s entirely possible that our Solar System is littered with ancient alien space probes and we simply haven’t found them yet. Haqq-Misra and Kopparapu have investigated this mathematically.

Of course it might also be the case that we have no idea what they might look like. Maybe they wrap them up in a big black rock the size of an aircraft carrier…

Too Close for Comfort

Posted on by Neal Asher

Bloody hell. I caught this out of the corner of my eye on a recent news report but didn’t follow up on it. So, from The Register:

A vast, inky black sphere approximately the size of a nuclear aircraft carrier is plunging through the void of space towards planet Earth, though NASA rather panickily insists that it will definitely not smash into our planet with devastating force.

“The asteroid safely will safely fly past our planet slightly closer than the moon’s orbit on Nov 8”, says a NASA statement issued yesterday (our emphasis), perhaps indicating a certain level of flap at the space agency’s press office.

Now excuse me ‘slightly closer than the moon’s orbit’! In astronomical terms that’s what called too fucking close for comfort. No wonder there’s a bit of buttock clenching going on, and that’ll increase if someone’s calculations are a bit off. Of course, if this ‘blacker than charcoal object’ were to slightly alter its course and fall into orbit around Earth I suspect there’ll be a bit of pants filling too.

For Frack's Sake

Posted on by Neal Asher

On (I think) April 2nd last year this happened:

While we sat in the sunshine sipping cold beers the earth shrugged, grumbled then continued shaking. Some people ran out into the street – one Greek woman all hysterical and crossing herself and doubtless praying to the god who chucks tsunamis about. We remained seated, since we weren’t anywhere anything was going to fall on us, and watched the street lamps whipping about like reeds and nearby trees thrashing. I’ve experienced quakes here before but never seen that.

As far as I recollect this was an earthquake of 6.3 on the Richter scale. On April 1st and May 27th fracking in Lancashire caused, respectively quakes of 2.3 and 1.4, and immediately the media and green hairshirts were shouting for a moratorium on this country accessing an energy supply that might just drag us out of the pit (in fact, do a search of ‘fracking’ and yu get pages and pages of hysteria). So let’s take a look at the Richter scale:

Here is the simplest explanation of it:

A logarithmic scale used to express the total amount of energy released by an earthquake. Its values typically fall between 0 and 9, with each increase of 1 representing a 10-fold increase in energy.

So, the earthquake I experienced in Crete was roughly 10,000 times stronger than the strongest one caused by fracking. In fact, as you can see from the graph the lowest one is in the region of ‘not felt’ and the highest one is ‘minor’.

Now go read Counting Cats and the comments. This one I find particularly illuminating;

A butterfly flapping its wings in Mexico will cause small seismic tremors in Lancashire. Even the lefty dolts at wikipedia know that earthquakes under 2.0 occur “continuously” and those of 2.0-2.9 are ‘Generally not felt, but recorded.’ with 1.3 million of them per year.

Let’s do some maths. A 2.0 quake has 63 MJ of energy, a 2.5 one has 360 MJ. Gasoline contains about 35 MJ/L. Every time some lefty jerk drives to a demo and burns 2 litres of gas he releases as much energy as a 2.0 quake. For a 2.5 quake the dolt has to drive for a couple of hours. Big deal.

Devil’s Kitchen also has something to say…

Update
Here’s a link to an interesting report passed onto me. If this sort of stuff is of interest to you then read it carefully and consider the words ‘correlation is not causation’, or even, ‘which came first the chicken or the egg?’ Remember too that one of the big criticisms of the alarmist film ‘Gaslands’ was that people had methane in their water supply before any fracking.

Fukushima Radiation

Posted on by Neal Asher

Thanks Peter Walker for directing my attention here. Wow, I’m astounded to read this on a BBC news website (though he lost me a bit with his mention of climate change), and really wish this kind of sanity appeared in its TV news programs . It doesn’t. I select out the BBC in this respect mainly because it’s funded by a compulsory tax, yet ITV and Sky have been just as bad. I must add that I have found a TV news program that seems free of much of the bias of the ones above and from which I at last obtained some sensible perspective on what’s happening in Libya. Ironically that program is ‘Russia Today’.

And Chernobyl? The latest UN report published on 28 February confirms the known death toll – 28 fatalities among emergency workers, plus 15 fatal cases of child thyroid cancer – which would have been avoided if iodine tablets had been taken (as they have now in Japan). And in each case the numbers are minute compared with the 3,800 at Bhopal in 1984, who died as a result of a leak of chemicals from the Union Carbide pesticide plant.

So what of the radioactivity released at Fukushima? How does it compare with that at Chernobyl? Let’s look at the measured count rates. The highest rate reported, at 1900 on 22 March, for any Japanese prefecture was 12 kBq per sq m (for the radioactive isotope of caesium, caesium-137).

A map of Chernobyl in the UN report shows regions shaded according to rate, up to 3,700 kBq per sq m – areas with less than 37 kBq per sq m are not shaded at all. In round terms, this suggests that the radioactive fallout at Fukushima is less than 1% of that at Chernobyl

Go read the whole thing.