Slashdot Mirror
Engine On a Chip May Beat the Battery
Krishna Dagli writes, "MIT researchers are putting a tiny gas-turbine engine inside a silicon chip about the size of a quarter. The resulting device could run 10 times longer than a battery of the same weight, powering laptops, cell phones, radios, and other electronic devices." From the article: "All the parts work. We're now trying to get them all to work on the same day on the same lab bench." The goal is to do that by the end of the year.
Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr! Ye' have never fought the likes o' a man eat'n shark with lasers atop their skulls!
Pffft! Chips with lasers! You yellow-belly land-lubber!
One thing that many people forget - mostly due to the impression given by hollywood - is that gasoline and diesel don't explode at the drop of a hat. But the liquid form doesn't ignite, it must first be vaporized and mixed with oxygen before you have something that will readily combust. If you had a closed container of fuel, and prevented oxygen from getting in, it would be pretty safe. Even when liquids were allowed on airplanes, there weren't many stories [possibly none - does someone know of any?] of terrorists using gasoline in a bomb, despite the fact that it is easier to get than explosives and readily concealed.
Even a gas tank, which gets filled with air as the gas is used, rarely explodes even in the most violent car crashes. Usually what happens is that the fuel gets sprayed everywhere and burns on the surface. An explosion wouldn't come from all the gas suddenly burning, as happens with a genuine explosive, but from the vapors in the tank combusting and causing the tank to rupture.