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The World's Nine Largest Science Projects
JBG667 writes "Nice overview of the 9 largest science projects currently ongoing. Some of the usual suspects are on the list including CERN, Space Elevator, Space Station, etc. As well as some lesser known including a 3,000-foot-tall 'Solar tower,' the ANTARES underwater neutrino detecting array, and more. Nice read for science buffs."
Aaaand soon, when #1 turns bits of Switzerland and France into Europe's newest lake, it'll be the 8 largest science projects.
I guess it's now so accepted that people forget it's beginnings as a DARPA experiment. Or perhaps it's just outgrown it's experimental status.
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and a few astronomical projects that are even bigger than that.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
How can the "space elevator" be listed? It's long on hype and short on actual effort.
I built a model of the starship Enterprise a long time ago. Building a starship is a pretty big project, so shouldn't it be listed as well?
3 things about computers: they're alive, they're self-aware, and they hate your guts.
First of all, a couple links are broken and there's major spelling errors. But to get to my real point, it says "one 200MW power station will provide enough electricity to around 200,000 typical Australian households." Oh boy, households being used as a unit of electricity again! Okay, let's do the math. That's 1000 watts per house. Wow, so everyone can have one light bulb on while their small microwave is running and that's it. Most people have 1000 watts in lights on at any given time let alone cooking and heating and cooling. What a load of bullshit. I hate sensationalist stats that are horribly, HORRIBLY incorrect.
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until recently and here they are showing off a spectacular solar power energy plant. I'm very impressed. I thought I would have heard about this on the ABC's Science Show. I haven't been this impressed since the development of the hotrocks project in Australia.
Better question: how many Libraries of Congress (LoC) would it cost to build a trans-atlantic maglev train. Dumb article.
There's an orange that roller under my workbench in the basement a couple of months ago. It is now the 10th biggest science project.
They cannot be serious. A computer simulation is one of the 9 biggest experiments? Shoot... Why didn't they list WOW then?
"It seems that we are at the age where life stops giving us things, and starts taking them away..." Indiana Jones
My kitchen has 6, 100 watt bulbs. Our living room has like 3 80s on the fan and that's it. My room has 1, 100. Our basement is on dimmers but I think they're about 12 bulbs of an unknown wattage that's at least 60. The computer monitors in my room are what like 30 watts each (duals) and my computer probably pulls at least 100 watts while processing. I have no idea what the AC system is for a 1400 sq ft house like ours but probably like 1000 watts. Just turning the lights on in two rooms hits the limit and most people have lights on in two rooms a lot of the time. So one person home alone at 8:00 at night with a 32" LCD TV and lights on constant and AC running intermittently, they've more than doubled the rate and that's one person in one room. And if half the people match this meager rate in the 200,000 homes at once, I don't care what their monthly average is, they just overloaded the power grid.
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"With a large mirror, 6.5 meter (21.3 feet) diameter mirror the $5 billion+ [James Webb Space Telescope] will launch folded up inside the space shuttle and then unfold to its full-size - several times that of Hubble." Launching a spacecraft to a 1.5 million km orbit with the space shuttle in 2013. Its good to see the discovery channel has done their research. Honestly, I expected more from these guys...
The article suggests that the James Webb Space Telescope will be launched from the Space Shuttle, and somehow make it out to 1.5 million kilometres from the Earth. Wikipedia likes to note that an Ariane 5 rocket will be used instead. This is a surprisingly flawed story!
That depends. Enterprise NX-01? Absolutely not. Any other variant? Yeah, sounds like a winner.
1) Anyone know if the Canadian Light Source Synchrotron being used for scanning the brain? It better be.
2) For 14 billion dollars, can't you harness nuclear fusion with an enormous piston? I want some engineering/science buff to chew me out on this one.
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>> JBG667 writes Nice overview of the 9 largest science projects currently ongoing.
In Soviet Russia, nice overview writes JBG667.
Sure, as long as you know the correct placement of the giant yellow duck. It's the details that really made the Enterprise work.
So you may not care about average power usage, but the people who are designing and building the electricity infrastructure certainly do. Saying that the station will provide enough power for 200000 homes is a nice *basic* statement to put the size of the station into perspective. Or would you really have preferred that they say "Enough for 80000 homes during the day in the summer, 400000 homes during the night, 150000 homes during the day in the winter,...", etc? A small blurb in a news article does not warrant such pedantry.
Perhaps my googling and wikipedia skills are off the mark but I was looking up large buildings just earlier this week and that solar tower in Australia seems to be on hold / cancelled.
Last info I could find mentioned the company attempting to do the same thing but in texas now, infact that entire project has been quiet / off the grid for maybe over a year.
If that's wrong, what else on the list isn't happening?
Holy crap! I think people like yourself overload the power grid. Why do you need so many lights on?
Mate I think you should put just a few cycles aside to consider replacing some light bulbs with the energy efficient ones. Not all at once, just one every now and then. Whenever your spare change jar hits enough. Start with the most frequently used lights. They are actually pretty good. I was extremely skeptical at first until our government bought everybody an energy efficient bulb to dismiss the skepticism.
I've rearranged all the electrical goods' power so I can turn off, at the switch, the non-essentials when I go to bed. It's a mentality change. My power bill dropped dramatically.
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NASA has already run competitions to build elevator climbers. There are millions (perhaps billions) being invested in the development of carbon nanotubes as a viable building material. If such time, energy and money were being spent on building a warp drive, then you might have a point.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Half the "projects" are imaginary, the other half are explained poorly or just plain wrong.
Trans-atlantic tunnel? Space elevator? We might as well say the establishment of psychohistory and a Foundation to guide the development of humanity is an equally large science project.
And whats with the passing jab at cold fusion in the ITER blurb? Poor attempt at a joke? Author who doesn't understand the difference? Or perhaps someone not aware about how much research actually is happening in that space?
I'd say they should be embarassed, but they're probably off watching "Ghost Hunters", I think the new season started on the Discovery Channel recently ...
Sadly, in this day and age, it's not surprising at all.
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Mechanical translation provided by Google, just scroll down to "Electricity".
1 person household: 2220 kWh
2 person household: 3095 kWh
3 person household: 3875 kWh
Average over all households: 3230 kWh
3 things about computers: they're alive, they're self-aware, and they hate your guts.
What makes you think they are not? Most researchers into nanotubes (and there are some in my department) when asked what the applications of their work are will mention space elevators first. There are few other applications that require such ridiculously strong materials - steel suffices for pretty much everything people want to build right now.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Well shame on you. Why the heck are you still using regular bulbs. Energy saving bulbs not only save energy, they also last a lot longer.
The 3-person household I live in used 2000 kWh last year. That's slightly more then two of your kitchen light bulbs on at all times.
Do something about it.
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Jes' askin'...
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Never been known to fail..."
Because the hot air created by the project diffuses into the atmosphere, as gases are wont to do, so the project's proportions become planetary.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
I sometimes wish the LED household lightbulb suppliers would offer a bulb-of-the-month club. I want to subscribe, pay the $25/month for 1 bulb a month, and like Netflix, put a stack of bulbs in my queue. When they come in, swap out the old incandescent or CFL for the LED bulb and be done with it.
The scheme saves the trouble of saving up the bux to order them all, or (heaven forbid) actually going online once a month to place an order.
Either way, you've replaced all your bulbs after a short time, and when you move, take them with you.
If we can devise a method to manufacture them cheaply, they'll become very widely used.
Think about it.... a material that is stronger, lighter, and less voluminous than steel could replace it in any application where weight, space, or amount of material is an issue. Bridges, automobiles, and buildings come to mind very quickly.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Because color temperatures tend to vary slightly, do this an entire room at a time. When one bulb burns out, toss the dead bulb, and replace all of the others in the room with energy-efficient CFLs. Save the other "partially-used", and use them to replace dead bulbs elsewhere around the house.
Repeat this process each time you run out of spares, and within a few years, you should be running entirely on energy-efficient bulbs.
I'm not sure how much energy actually goes into the manufacture of an incandescent lightbulb, but if you're looking to do things gradually, there's no use in unnecessarily wasting lightbulbs!
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
From TFA:
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Places where the lights are on for a long time are better suited for fluorescent lighting. Make sure to get good bulbs: they last longer and end up being cheaper in the long run. The color spectrum of cheap fluorescents is usually terrible too. That should cut power consumption a lot. I do not know how is the weather where you live, but different housing construction can reduce the AC requirement a lot. Most people here live without AC.
Yeah, this is clearly a case where cheap energy led to a completely inefficient house design.
If energy costs had been on consumers' minds, the kitchen would be made with lighter colors, more windows etc so that 600W wasn't necessary just to chop some onions and see what you're doing.
In really hot dry places, you can design a house that keeps the interior shaded and cool without air conditioning... but this simply hasn't been done in the US, both because of humidity which completely invalidates the above, and also cheap energy prices which remove the incentive to even think about complete redesigns.
Same goes for cold environments; instead of heating a house like crazy, which is so common, you can position the windows so that solar energy shines in and doesn't reflect back out again.
The US isn't full of bad people trying to be wasteful... it's just that in so many regions there's never been any paucity of resources* to influence behaviors like there has been in other places.
*potable water is the only exception I can think of...
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I really hate CF lights, but I found if you can mix and match them with the really low wattage incandescent lights (15W or so) the color is warm and acceptible.
Keep in mind also, that if you are in a region where you use electric heating, there's nothing at all wrong with loading up on incandescent lights and running them all night (during the winter!) They are essentially electric heaters; the light is a by-product and consumes a very small amount of the energy.
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Not forgetting the cost put towards the war against terrorism! You have to factor that in because there's no point building a tower that big if some terrorist prick is just going to fly another plane into it!
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1. Do you light the exterior of your building with that electricity?
2. Do you regulate the temperature of your interior with that electricity?
Just wondering. I'm thinking you live in a building with hot water based heating that gets given to you from a shared resource, and exterior lighting is either not needed for security or is provided by the landlord or a municipal source.
How are my guesses?
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The first batch of CF lights I got were that cold white light that I used to hate, but after having them, I've gotten used to them. I recently bought another one that was 'warm' and I gotta say, is a very comfortable light. As good as the old type of bulbs. In fact, when you put the covers over them, you can't tell the difference between it and ye olde type.
Thankfully I don't live in a cold climate. I think I can understand needing warmth anyway that you can get it.
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Both correct. Also in the summer no cooling is necessary and in the winter we only need minimal amounts of heating because the house is well isolated.
I remember it being Indy speaking to his dean buddy...
Indy had just commented on the tough year they had with the loss of both his father and Marcus (former dean) he then commented to the new dean that they seemed to be at an age where life had stopped giving them things and started taking them away. I am reasonably sure this is accurate...
I will let you know for sure when it comes out on DVD. Not worth paying to see twice.
"It seems that we are at the age where life stops giving us things, and starts taking them away..." Indiana Jones
because they're packed full of mercury (and look like crap and depending on what you believe, damage your eyes and skin)
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Nice work!
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I don't know why you would think that.
The "easy bake" oven used a light bulb to bake cakes!
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