Tag: Technology

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.

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.

Cellweld Inc.

Posted on by Neal Asher

Over here at Technology Review:

Today, a broken hip usually means surgery and extensive rehab. But what if all you needed was an injection and a shorter recovery period? That’s the vision that inspires Thomas Webster, an associate professor of engineering at Brown University.

Webster has developed a nanomaterial that quickly solidifies at body temperature into a bone-like substance. This week, Brown announced a deal with medical device maker Audax Medical of Littleton, Massachusetts, to further develop the material and launch trials in animals.

The material contains the same nucleic acids as DNA, Webster says. Each molecule has two covalent bonds and links with other molecules to form a tube. Hence it’s called a “twin-base linker.” (Audax will develop it under the name Arxis.)

Well, not quite the same but getting there:

“Fascinated as he was by this exchange, Stanton could not concentrate on it. The robot now removed the splint and bandages from his arm with a scuttling of curved scalpels. This would have been bad enough in a proper hospital, but here? It then split his shirt sleeve and parted it … only, Stanton suddenly realised it wasn’t just his shirt that the machine had opened. He looked away quickly from the neatly snapped bone he could see there, and cringed at the sound of small tubes sucking away the blood that started to well up. There was movement next, but no pain, then came the reassuring drone of a bone welder. Stanton could not say he was impressed with Sylac’s bedside manner.”

Railgun

Posted on by Neal Asher

And thanks to Sean Price for sending me this one. I’ve seen this on You Tube but now apparently they’ve broken their own record. This was a 33 megajoule firing and: ‘A single megajoule is roughly equivalent to a 1-ton car traveling at 100 mph. Multiple that by 33 and you get a picture of what would happen when such a weapon hits a target.’ Ouch.

A theoretical dream for decades, the railgun is unlike any other weapon used in warfare. And it’s quite real too, as the U.S. Navy has proven in a record-setting test today in Dahlgren, VA.

Rather than relying on a explosion to fire a projectile, the technology uses an electomagnetic current to accelerate a non-explosive bullet at several times the speed of sound. The conductive projectile zips along a set of electrically charged parallel rails and out of the barrel at speeds up to Mach 7.

Rex Bionics

Posted on by Neal Asher

Well, seeing as after alibaba’s comment about Rex Bionics someone from the company left a comment too, I finally went and had a good look at the site. Excellent stuff. It’s quite surprising to realize we are still in an age when the inventor(s) in a shed can make a difference:

Rex, the Robotic Exoskeleton, is primarily the invention of two men, Richard Little and Robert Irving who have been close friends since they first met at high school over 20 years ago in Fort William, Scotland.

Sharing a love for cars and tinkering with machines, the two friends left school to study engineering and went on to work together at various times and in various climates throughout their careers until they both decided to emigrate to New Zealand in the early 1990s.

With already so much in common, the two friends also had first-hand knowledge of some of the obstacles and access issues faced many wheelchair users. Both have mothers who use wheelchairs, and when Robert Irving received a diagnosis for Multiple Sclerosis himself just over seven years ago, he understood that he might also need to use a wheelchair one day.

That was when the two friends and founders of Rex Bionics decided that they would use their engineering know-how to develop a realistic standing and walking alternative to wheelchairs.

Watching this video my first thought was about how slow these robotic legs are, but then realized that it’s not just about being able to walk, since there’s lots of health issues involved too: blood supply, muscle movement, bladder etc. I then have to wonder about other practicalities, like battery life, but it turns out that ain’t such a probem. Two hours isn’t going to take you along the length of the Penine Way, but the improvements in lifestyle could be huge. Then there are things like unit cost what with these bionic legs having ‘4700 parts and a complicated array of software’ as compared to a wheelchair (with our NHS and NICE these things must be thought about in Britain), but you cannot make comparisons like that. I don’t know if these things are quite well enough developed to enable a paraplegic to go to the toilet, but I’m guessing that possibility is not far away, then just think of the overall savings to society as a whole: no more houses needing to be built with wheelchair access, no more the necessity of toilets for the disabled.

However, they need to move faster, and they need to be designed in such a way that a person can sit and take a dump while wearing them. Sorry to be crude, but that’s reality. Maybe if you’re still checking in, Thomas, you can tell us about this sort of stuff?

Squishy Memristers and Diodes.

Posted on by Neal Asher

Damn but I love this shit:

Brain-Machine Interface

Neural Networks

Squishy Memristers and Diodes

So (Ju-Hee So) says these quasi-liquid components could one day be used to build bioelectronic circuits to provide connections between living tissue and computers, such as brain-machine interfaces. “People want to put information into the brain and read information out,” she says. Such an interface might, for instance, allow an amputee to control a prosthetic limb the same way he would control his real limb—with just a thought. Similar devices made with conventional technology tend to be rigid and must be encapsulated to protect the electrical circuits from the moisture inherent in biology. So believes the materials her team is working with will be compatible with human tissue. Gallium salts, for instance, are injected into people to improve the contrast in scans of human lungs, and hydrogels have many biological uses. The devices might also be used as components in artificial neural networks, an application to which memristors are already being applied in earnest.

Space Plane.

Posted on by Neal Asher
And space planes too. If The Departure was left for another year I think it would be getting out of date.
Thankfully no one has started building robot ‘shepherds’ for crowd control … have they?

When the Air Force launched its secret, robotic space plane this spring, military officials confessed that they weren’t exactly sure when it was coming back. More than seven months later, the X-37B landed at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, where it was met with Air Force personnel in SCAPE suits (self-contained atmospheric protective ensemble). They gave the robo-orbiter an initial once-over — and made sure the area was safe for humans, too.