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Stealth Paint From German Inventor Werner Nickel
Gerhardius writes "Werner Nickel sounds like a Disney-style wacky inventor. He moved to the UAE to develop his previous invention: he had bred a worm whose excrement made it possible to grow radishes in the dry desert sand. That project failed so he moved on to the next item on his agenda, naturally a radar absorbing paint. While it certainly is not unique, there is some interesting history behind the development, and a proposed civilian use."
Except that commercial airports use transponders, not radar, to locate planes.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Oh, jeez...
The transponders are in the airplanes, not on the airports. They help the airport's radar to see airplanes.
A transponder is a combination of a receiver and a transmitter that receives the pulses from a radar; generates a train of pulses that encode the identification and altitude of the airplane; and transmits them back to the radar. That way the guy sitting at the radar not only sees the airplane more easily, but knows which airplane it is and how high.
rj
If you don't get it, the OP is a reference to Frank Herbert's novel Dune where the chemical produced by the sandwords of the desert planet Arrakis proved the key to faster-than-light travel by giving starship steersmen superhuman powers.
While I admire Herbert's creation of a science fiction novel based on modern studies of desert ecology, I felt the whole spice deal weakened the hard sci-fi goodness of what otherwise would have been a less fantastical book.