Tag: Science

Cold Fusion?

Posted on by Neal Asher

I really don’t know what to make of this. Is it a load of bullshit or is it true? If it is true it is a major game-changer. It’s the kind of thing that could utterly transform the world. Go and read the article over on WUWT and the ensuing comments.

Cold fusion isn’t usual fare for WUWT, at best it’s not a focus here, at worst it’s sorry science, and we talk about that enough already. However, it never has died, and this week there’s news about it going commercial. Well, it won’t be available for a couple years or so, but the excitement comes from a device that takes 400 watts of electrical power in and produces 12,000 watts of heat out.

Most people regard cold fusion as a black eye on science. It’s credited with the advent of science by press release and its extraordinary claims were hard to reproduce. Yet, unlike the polywater fiasco of the 1970s, cold fusion has never been explained away and several experiments have been successfully reproduced. Neutrons, tritium, and other products kept some researchers working long after others had given up. Even muons (from Svensmark’s Chilling Stars) have been suggested as a catalyst. Everyone agrees that theoretical help would provide a lot of guidance, but for something that flies in the face of accepted theory, little help has come from that.

Autoguns.

Posted on by Neal Asher

Thanks to Huan Tan for sending me this link.

Intelligent robot technology is one of the next generation new technologies which will lead the 21st century’s industrial and military science technologies with the development of artificial intelligence (AI). For example, a monitoring and sentry system can be a sophisticated system employing a variety of technologies such as ultra-low brightness camera technology, image recognition technology, image processing and storing technology, voice recognition technology, servo technology, image tracking technology, and system control technology.

In The Departure they are called reader-guns.

Railgun Launched Scramjet

Posted on by Neal Asher

Here’s another interesting one from my brother Bob:

In April, President Obama urged NASA to come up with, among other things, a less expensive method than conventional rocketry for launching spacecraft. By September, the agency’s engineers floated a plan that would save millions of dollars in propellant, improve astronaut safety, and allow for more frequent flights. All it will take is two miles of train track, an airplane that can fly at 10 times the speed of sound, and a jolt of electricity big enough to light a small town.

Piltdown Man

Posted on by Neal Asher

Just for those of you that might not have heard of this, here’s how scientific fraud can put us back years. it also seems to be an episode from which little has been learned.

Whoever perpetrated the crime, it is considered to be one of the most damaging scientific hoaxes of all time, because it set the development of evolutionary theory back for years while researchers labored pointlessly to integrate a fake skull into the fossil record.

From The Skeptic’s Dictionary, which rather amused me considering the stance there on other matters (I put the bold bit there):

Because of the public nature of science and the universal application of its methods, and because of the fact that the majority of scientists are not crusaders for their own untested or untestable prejudices, as many pseudoscientists are, whatever errors are made by scientists are likely to be discovered by other scientists. The discovery will be enough to get science back on track. The same can’t be said for the history of quacks and pseudoscientists where errors do not get detected because their claims are not tested properly. And when critics identify errors, they are ignored by true believers.

Scientists were fooled by this hoax for 40 years, until the weight of other finds finally drove some of them to take a close look at the skull itself, and find out it was a fake. One can hope things might work faster in this Internet age.

Nano Battery & Terminator

Posted on by Neal Asher

A couple here from my brother:

Nano-batteries

Although they don’t necessarily follow Moore’s law, batteries have still gotten smaller and more efficient as the years pass. The current go-to power cell of choice is the lithium-ion battery. It’s already quite small as it is, but some scientists think it can get even smaller. How small? Try nanometers.

Self-repairing Robots.

Well, it looks like this is one aspect of fictional robotics that’s starting to catch up with reality. Researchers at Arizona State designed a system that lets synthetics recreate the natural healing process found in organics. It uses shape-memory or mimetic polymers embedded with a network of fiber optics. The network senses any damage to the system, then delivers heat to the “wounded” area to repair it.

The Drake Equation

Posted on by Neal Asher

I did enjoy the program on BBC4 last night The Search for Life: The Drake Equation. If you can use I-player then I suggest you go take a look. But what is the Drake Equation? This explanation lifted from SETI lays it out nicely:

Is there a way to estimate the number of technologically advanced civilizations that might exist in our Galaxy? While working at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, Dr. Frank Drake conceived a means to mathematically estimate the number of worlds that might harbor beings with technology sufficient to communicate across the vast gulfs of interstellar space. The Drake Equation, as it came to be known, was formulated in 1961 and is generally accepted by the scientific community.

N = R* fp ne fl fi fc L

where,

N = The number of communicative civilizations
R* = The rate of formation of suitable stars (stars such as our Sun)
fp = The fraction of those stars with planets. (Current evidence indicates that planetary systems may be common for stars like the Sun.)
ne = The number of Earth-like worlds per planetary system
fl = The fraction of those Earth-like planets where life actually develops
fi = The fraction of life sites where intelligence develops
fc = The fraction of communicative planets (those on which electromagnetic communications technology develops)
L = The “lifetime” of communicating civilizations


Frank Drake’s own current solution to the Drake Equation estimates 10,000 communicative civilizations in the Milky Way. Dr. Drake, who serves on the SETI League’s advisory board, has personally endorsed SETI’s planned all-sky survey.

Moving no from the Drake Equation you then get to the Fermi Paradox:
 
The Fermi Paradox is the apparent contradiction between the high probability extraterrestrial civilizations’ existence and the lack of contact with such civilizations.
 
In this program, I like how these two are covered. Consider how much of the EM spectrum there is to cover, how much our usage of radio has changed in just a few decades (AM to FM for example). Consider too a simple calculation: 100 billion (the number of stars in our galaxy) divided by that number of civilizations above.

Science by Press Release

Posted on by Neal Asher

Seems to be par for the course nowadays: notoriety and money first with science coming in a distant second. Here’s a bit more at WUWT about NASAs arsenic bug:

It seems that in their flawed zeal to get some press coverage, NASA again has egg of their faces, reminiscent of the Mars fossil microbe fiasco. It’s more “science by press release” gone wild. Slate.com has a scathing review of the fire that is raging in the microbiology camp over this press release:

“It would be really cool if such a bug existed,” said San Diego State University’s Forest Rohwer, a microbiologist who looks for new species of bacteria and viruses in coral reefs. But, he added, “none of the arguments are very convincing on their own.” That was about as positive as the critics could get. “This paper should not have been published,” said Shelley Copley of the University of Colorado…

Super Earth

Posted on by Neal Asher

Now, when NASA made that announcement, I was hoping for something like this:

“Ultimately the goal is to try to look for biosignatures,” Bean said. “This work is another sort of milestone on this road. We’re going directly towards that.”

Looking at exoplanet atmospheres.

Be even better if they discovered biosignatures on one of these worlds, then managed to focus their instruments in time to pick up on the alien equivalent of Marconi.