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Chemists Build an Explosive Super-Molecule
Lockle writes "A new super explosive has been invented at the University of Chicago. It's based on an existing explosive molecule called "Cubane" but it has oxygen and nitrogen bonded to it for a bigger boom. It's called Octanitrocubane. The news release can be found at Angewandte Chemie International Edition which is a German chemistry magazine (page is in English). More detailed info about Cubane, Octanitrocubane's predecessor, can be found at a site devoted to it."
The ONCe-fired, ONCe-killed gun!
Fighting the War on the War on Drugs.
http://smokedot.org/
...In their defense, they may actually have a use for cubane.com.
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um, sigs should be heard and not seen?
rooooar
I love it - "super-explosive". Yeah... since when did exothermic reactions get to be more potent than nuclear explosives? Just wait... once it hits the cover of Wired and the NY Times it'll be potent enough to destroy entire *cities* with just a few drops of this stuff (Fact checking, what's that?). Mark my words - this'll get blown out of proportion (pun intended) by the media.
"Yotto, yotto."
"Because he's holding a molecule of Octanitrocubane!!"
"Eee cabbo nawoooshka da babble e foto Shta Treck"
"Oh, the might Jabba says that Octanitrocubane sounds like silly techno-babble and suggests you go back to Star Trek."
...would be a Beowulf cluster of these molecules! Wow!
("Bring it on. I don't care. I've got karma points to spare.")
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
If you read the article, it sais that the explosive is not as dense and therefore not as powerfull as it was expected to be. At least in its present form... Personally I am quite happy with that, because this means that there is still no cooking recipe for yet another explosive. On the other hand I hope they fix the theory for science sake.
For the Dutch people, there is a piece about it in the Volkskrant Wetenschap sectie.
Use Adsense for Charity
...the first practical antimatter explosives.
You know it's only a matter of time. Imagine it, perfect control over explosive power from strategic nuke to radioactive firecracker that can be hidden in your pocket (okay, maybe not, I guess the containment hardware will probably start out around the size of a house; but eventually... ).
That will really change the world. Who cares about wimpy chemical explosives?
Huh? It's quite official. It's from the interview on January 6th of this year.
The compound itself? Ah who cares. But Chime impressed me though.
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No Zen is good zen
It's good to see the MIC is still funding top notch Death and Destruction research. It would be a real shame to see progress come to a grinding halt with regard to clever new ways to blow things/people/fleshy-headed-mutants into smaller bits.
Maybe I'm just being cynical and this research is actually competing with fuel cells for the right to power your Crusoe in 3 to 5 years.
As evident from this page and several other sources:
So for now, we are only seeing a few molecules at a time. However, 50 pounds of CL-20, which is about 20% more powerful than HMX, has been produced, and the government appears to have just finished the testing of warheads with CL-20.
About.com has links and information:
HMX and RDX
Another resource:
Cub ane Applications
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"They misunderestimated me." --George W Bush, Nov. 6, 2000
Trust me, it was a *relief* to have something submitted that wasn't about patents or lawsuits.
- Robin
Photon torpedos are quite a while in the future. And besides, because of coservation of energy, you have to put in all of the energy that you want to get back out.
This makes me wonder how expensive these things are to make. IANACE (I'm not a chemical engineer), but I'm pretty sure that the higher energy something is, the harder is it to make (since equilibrium is not in it's favor). Looking at the structure, it's no wonder that the thing is so unstable - the bonds that are supposed to be tetrahedral (~109 degress) are bent inward to 90 degrees, which increases the energy stored in it, but also the amount of energy that you have to put into it.
-ElJefe
I did this to prove a point -- Slashdot moderators are complete morons that don't even bother to read before they moderate. I used the phrase "alternate hydrofusion techonology". Anyone who knows anything about the field will tell you that means ABSOLUTELY nothing! Veinluhg never existd, and Veinluhg isn't even a real name.
This is the most hilarious thing EVER! See, I am the Chide Molesta of Slashdot past, and I've found an even better way to kill the Karma whores. I have wasted 5 karma points getting moderated up, and you'll have to waste another 6 to get me below the default threshhold.
Please send fanmail to chide_molesta@hotmail.com. Slashdot moderators suck, and now I can prove that they're complete dumbasses! Fuck you all!
Cyclopropene, C3H4, has an even higher degree of ring strain resulting from a C=C double bond, but ring strain really only dictates how unstable the compound is, not necessarily how explosive. There is extreme ring strain in both compounds, but neither cyclopropane's 3 C-C bonds and 6 C-H bonds nor cyclopropene's 2 C-C bonds, 1 C=C bond, and 4 C-H bonds don't hold nearly as much energy per molecule to outdo the energy released by breaking the 12 C-C bonds and 8 C-H bonds in cubane. Using a table of bond enthalpies, we can find out how much energy is contained within a mole of each substance:
cyclopropane: 3522 kJ/mol
cyclopropene: 2963 kJ/mol
cubane: 7480 kJ/mol
So cyclopropene is most likely to spontaneously blow up, but releases the least amount of energy per mole; cubane (with bond angles of 90 degrees everywhere) is the most stable of the three but also releases the most energy.
Keep in mind that some of the energy released is used up in forming the products of the reaction, so the values above do not represent the net energy; I'm just too lazy to track down the equations and calculate the delta-H.
enmity.
Yeah, but it is P. Eaton (principal investigator of the Chicago group) that got credit in 1964 for synthesizing cubane. Don't know whether Eaton had cited Veinluhg, though.
--Posting Nonanonymously
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
Containment is a major problem, as is producing sufficiently dense and stable antimatter (anti-hydrogen just ain't gonna cut it if you want to safely carry the equivalent of a strategic nuke in your pocket).
Eistein did NOT build the A-bomb, he was not part of the Manhattan Project. He layed some of the ground work (very fundamental, and important, but not direct), and recommended to the President that we start such a project; that is just about as far as you can take it. He also, later, was an outspoken critic of the program, and future programs (e.g., H-bomb).
Nevermind the politics of using the A-bomb, and the justification...
Oh, wait, I forget I am a fool...
Damned straight.
The March 1945 firebombing of Tokyo actually killed more people than either use of the atomic bomb, plus it left more people maimed, more people injured, and more people homeless. The only things the atomic bombs did over conventional firebombing was concentrate enough shock value to end the war a few months early with probably fewer lives lost in total.
And the threat of nuclear holocaust made war between the U.S. and USSR sufficiently unthinkable that there wasn't a Third World War fought over the various Berlin crises, the Prauge Spring, the Hungarian uprising, or any of the other flashpoints of the Cold War. You thought the Vietnam Memorial had a lot of names on it -- imagine if a full-out war had been fought in Europe and Asia.
In short, the sheer destructiveness of the bomb actually forced even the most militant warmongers of the last fifty-five years to see reason. As perverse as it may sound, nuclear weapons saved countless lives.
It'll probably be more unstable, but cubane will give a bigger boom. There are just more C-H bonds in cubane, which means more energy is released per molecule when they combust. Cyclopropane, and to a greater extent it's evil sister cyclopropene are less stable so they'd take less energy to blow up but the explosion wouldn't be as big as cubane. I'd take cubane for my bombmaking needs any day.
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I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
What amused me about a superconducting magnetic coil was that it didn't require much extra energy to maintain the magnetic field, only to set it up. Theoretically, were a room-temperature superconducting material discovered, you could put the trap in your pocket...wiping every credit card in your presence, making weird patterns on nearby screens, and giving your future children third arms (not really). =)
Quantity is also an issue. In order to be useable and trappable, you need "cold" antimatter (i.e., not moving at 99% of the speed of light!); LEAR used to be the #1 place for this sort of thing, but CERN closed LEAR down, so now we're just left with Fermilab, which apparently isn't very good at generating cold antimatter in quantity (that's just on hearsay). There's speculation of a new, better facility in the works...?
But yes, just to bring things back to reality, my simulations on the computer dealt with a single antiproton being eased through clouds of positrons (anti-electrons) in the hope that some of the positrons would catch onto the antiproton to form AntiHydrogen. I'm not sure that in the 4 years since then they've even managed to get a single confirmed COLD (trapped) atom of AntiHydrogen. I remember that one of the funnier and more intriguing questions was "Which way will it fall under gravity?" (the strong presumtion is DOWN, but nobody knows for sure!).
It's going to be a long time before we have to worry about anti-matter bombs, especially small, portable, undetectable ones. (6 Tesla magnetic fields and the devices that make them are pretty hard to sneak around in a subtle fashion!)
David E. Weekly (dew, Think)
David E. Weekly
Code / Think / Teach / Learn
h4x0r for
That's more than escape velocity from earth. Now we can really blow things away...
bla
I'm not sure if it would be possible to synthesise, or if it would revert to an adamantane structure, but a 4 Carbon Tetrahedronically arranged molecule would have even greater bond strain. We did say above that bond strain didn't directly relate to delta-H(combustion) but that would still be an extremely reactive molecule.
Hows about tetranitrotetrahedrane? (having mental blackout on how to name polycyclics, and can't see how one would name this anyway, 1,2,2-tricyclo?). That would have to go somewhere on their 'strength tester' of how many bricks of steel it goes through when you blow it up.
Does this compound exist (I think it would be similar to the structure for white phosphorus?), and is it possible to make?
-Muttley
M.
First, you do not RELEASE energy by
breaking C-H or C-C bonds. These bonds
are exothermic. In order to explode the
compound, you must OVERCOME the C-H and CC bonding
energies, by compensating with the released energy
of newly formed strong C=O and N*N-bonds (N and
O from the nitro groups). Explosives often use compounds where the C-C bonds
are intentionally weakened by ring strain and similar effects. Cubane derivatives are a good example.
Second, it is not the amount of energy released
by a molecule which counts, but the energy
per liter or kilogram. And you can pack
1 molecule of cubane into less space than
~2.5 cylcopropane molecules, even if
we are talking about solid derivatives (unsubstituted cyclopropane and -ene are gases!)
Third, there are other effects like the kinetics
of reaction and the speed of sound in
the compound which determine its usefulness
as an explosive. And of course you need a gas
release (CO2, N2) to be effective, because you want a rapid volume increase, not just burning
heat (like with Thermite).
Antimatter containment is 100% feasable.
What you do is take your anti-proton, and then make a proton orbit it, in a manner exactly analogus to a conventional atom. They don't touch, so they do not anhilate. The anti-proton orbits at a radius much closer than that of the electron in hydrogen (due to it's much greater mass. In fact it's mor accurate to say that they orbit around a common centre of mass).
This configuration is stable, until you excite the system, to seperate the two constituents, and allow them to recombine. This is exactly analogus to the photoelectric effect, and can be done by application of electromagnetic radiation (I belive that it's somewhere in the ultraviolet range, all though it might need to be x-rays).
The system is pretty stable, as things go. Until made in bulk, it's impossable to say how stable, but predictions show that the rate of spontaneus decay is low enough to be a viable system of antimatter containment.
This as the nice advantage that all you need to do to liberate energy is irradiate it, and it presents no more containment problems than, say, tritium.
I belive that three (3) 'atoms' of this were made, although I can't find a reference on that. Problem is that in order to make it, you require to pass two streams, one matter, one anti matter past each other. The yield from this is exceptionally low.
Still, problem of containment, and ignition, has been solved. With this, in a system, it would be feasable to have a 1 mg antimatter bomb the size of your computer. If memory serves me correct, that's enough to destroy Earth.
Sweet dreams...
--
But Charlie is no more.
What he thought was H2O
Was Octanitrocubane.
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The March 1945 firebombing of Tokyo actually killed more people than either use of the atomic bomb,
This sounds dubious. I asked a friend, who's a history major specializing in Japanese history, and she says that the figures are controversial, especially if you take into account the subsequent deaths from radiation sickness. Korean slave laborers injured by the A-bomb weren't registered as victims and weren't counted in the death toll either.
In short, the sheer destructiveness of the bomb actually forced even the most militant warmongers of the last fifty-five years to see reason.
Which is the point exactly. The A-bomb was less necessary as a tool to force Japan to surrender, but more necessary as a show of US military might; it marked the beginning of the cold war rather than the end of the war in the Pacific. The Japanese were made an example of, which makes the morality of the A-bomb highly questionable.