The Year In Ideas

popo writes "The New York Times Magazine has a review of the year's most original and interesting ideas. They include "The Tornado in a Can" ("A contained cyclone, it turns out, is very useful for pulverizing things") and David Stevenson's real-life proposal to dig to the center of the Earth. by sinking heavy iron through the Earth's mantle."

Comments

Discover has almost the same article

[meltoast]

Discover Magazine has the "top 100 scientific achievements of '03". It also has the most convuluted index possible for said achievements!

there already is a slashdot story...

[iamplupp]

...on the tornado in a can

Re:Ahem

[KrispyKringle]

Probably because it wouldn't work as well. The idea behind the iron thing is apparently that once you get the initial crack going and fill it with molten iron, gravity just takes care of the rest. With a laser, you'd have togo farther and farther down with the crack, which could present an issue to your equipment when the temperature rises to 4000C. And if you don't, you lose power the farther you get from the drilling point.

Plus, even if the laser heats the earth, it doesn't exert any force on it; the molten iron heats and then presses down on the crust to allow it to break through.

I'm also not sure what a laser would accomplish once you break through the crust. Since at that point the temperature is already really hot, and the earth is, if I remember right, molten, the issue is presumably the pressure to get your probes down farther (which the iron accomplishes), not the ability to break through the earth itself.

The correct link

[danila]

Here is a more helpful link to the table of contents, not to the introduction.

http://www.nytimes.com/pages/magazine/

Air Pollution?

[Politburo]

One thing I did not see in the comments on the original Tornado in a Can story is this:

A garbage-processing plant in Pennsylvania will go online with its Windhexe next month; the machine can turn two tons of trash into one ton of sterile powder.

Guess what. That other ton of material isn't getting destroyed. That doesn't happen. It's probably going into the air as (very tiny) solid particles. Now, since these particles are created from the very beginning of the process, are they also sterile? I would think not. I'm not saying this process is environmentally bad. I'm only saying that waste disposal never has a simple, clean solution.

Re:Air Pollution?

[chivo]

Actually no. The other ton of "material" is probably just the water being evaporated during the breakdown process. It appears to be a closed system, so nothing is magically disappearing. On the other hand, I've only seen a couple of pictures so magical disappearances could be possible

Re:Yeah, like we haven't fucked up the planet enou

[SurgeonGeneral]

That article you posted says that fuck can only be used as an adjective, which u clearly did not do. I fail to see why you would bother citing evidence that doesnt even support your position.

Tornado in a Can, industrial version

[Animats]

There's an industrial version installed at a University of Maryland agricultural test facility.

This is basically a high-powered cyclone dryer. Cyclone dryers have been around for decades, but they're not usually run at power levels high enough to get grinding effects.