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A Stable Plasma Ring Has Been Created In Open Air For the First Time Ever (futurism.com)
New submitter mrcoder83 shares a report from Futurism: Engineers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have been able to create a stable plasma ring without a container. According to the Caltech press release, it's "essentially capturing lightning in a bottle, but without the bottle." This remarkable feat was achieved using only a stream of water and a crystal plate, made from either quartz and lithium niobate. The union of these tools induced a type of contact electrification known as the triboelectric effect. The researchers blasted the crystal plate with an 85-micron-diameter jet of water (narrower than a human hair) from a specially designed nozzle. The water hit the crystal plate with a pressure of 632.7 kilograms of force per centimeter (9,000 pounds per square inch), generating an impact velocity of around 305 meters per second (1,000 feet per second) -- as fast as a bullet from a handgun. Plasma was formed as a result of the creation of an electric charge when the water hit the crystal surface. The flow of electrons from the point of contact ionizes the molecules and atoms in the gas area surrounding the water's surface, forming a donut-shaped glowing plasma that's dozens of microns in diameter. Caltech posted a video of the plasma ring on their YouTube channel.
The hell kind of weird bastardized units are these writers using? Kilograms are mass. Newtons are force. Do you mean 9.8N, which is about the force of 1kg under 1g (g-force, not grams) of acceleration?
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If you had told me half a century ago that there could be any land that might eclipse the US in terms of technology and progress, I would have called you insane. Remember? The time when the US built those huge rockets to go where nobody has gone before?
20 years ago I would probably have said something along the lines of "Yeah, Japan. but they can't compete in raw production power"
Today, I'd probably ask if there is actually still any research and development done in the US, and whether there is actually any US-owned corporation left, or whether the Chinese are finally done taking over.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
But that is far from the only possible source of RF noise
Indeed.
You're hitting crystal plates with a water jet. Oscillating crystals causing electromagnetic noise was pretty much how radio transmitters were born.
They're not. Get over it.
SI has a perfectly good unit of force (the newton). It will be really great when SI advocates actually start using SI, rather than bastardizing it with things like "kilograms of force"....
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