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Using EMP To Punch Holes In Steel
angrytuna writes "The Economist is running a story about a group of researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Machine Tools and Forming Technology in Chemnitz, Germany, who've found a way to use an EMP device to shape and punch holes through steel. The process enjoys advantages over both lasers, which take more time to bore the hole (0.2 vs. 1.4 seconds), and by metal presses, which can leave burrs that must be removed by hand."
Nonsense. The human body has an average resistance of 300-1000 ohms. Not great, but far weaker than modern electrical insulation.
Evidence has been shown that some frequencies in the EM spectrum indeed do cause damage to DNA and in some cases that damage is propagated to future divisions of that cell, meaning the damage is permanent.
From an industrial point of view, this is very interesting. Laser cutter machines are expensive to purchase, but upkeep isn't high and they are very versatile. A machine like this doesn't seem to have the versatility of a laser and might even consume more power. Punches are very fast but manual deburring is expensive.
I noticed in the article they said this works based on magnetic repulsion, and also that it works on stainless steels. I'm curious if this works on the largely non-magnetic 300 series SS.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
To add something new to what the other repliers have said, human body is mostly transparent to EMP. It's not mostly transparent to bullets, knives, and a variety of other lethal tools. The EMP punch wouldn't add anything new to the huge list of ways to deliberately kill people.
"urine streams do not tend to break apart"
Interestingly enough, I have done the appropriate experiment to really determine whether that is true. I was in a bathroom where a strobe light was running (at a science-themed party, no less), and by tuning its frequency, I could get a good view of the nature of my urine stream. Initially it is continuous, but it breaks up into small droplets fairly quickly--perhaps after a foot or so. With the strobe set correctly, the droplets appear almost stationary.