Did you know you can use revolution to run a magnetic motor in reverse, thereby generating current? Did you know that kind of motor can be made smaller than you're able to see? Getting a generator in a chip isn't that hard. The turbine is the problem, because there are simple limits to how close we can get the fan blades to the housing (the blades expand under heat, for example.)
Now, for something like a wind turbine, this isn't that big a problem - you just put some synthetic diamond rasps on the inside of the housing, and the blades cut themselves down to a near-perfect fit, which is great for things that don't stop. For things that *do* stop, you need to work to find a material with near-zero thermal size change, and suddenly the ratio of circumferential area (that is to say, the space between the circumference of the inner circle described by the fan blades to that of the outer area described by the casing) to the area of the fan blades becomes a governor of efficiency, and that means the larger the dynamo, the more efficient the dynamo.
Or, the smaller, the less efficient. That's the real problem here.
Wormholes originally come from John Wheeler's work with Quantum Dynamics, and are useful to string theory, superstring theory, topological branes and some particle physics models.
Wormholes go all the way back to the Einstein-Rosen bridge, which was discovered by, er, Einstein and Rosen, in 1935, lurking in the Schwarzschild solution for black holes. (Einstein and Rosen, Phys. Rev. 48, 73 (1935).)
If you do some reading in context, you'll discover that wormholes are a generalization of the concept of an Einstein Rosen bridge. What you've said is a nearly equivalent to claiming that plasma and bose-einstein condensates were discovered in Ancient Greece because they were aware of ice and steam. Wormholes are far more general than the bridge between a black hole and a white hole. Being aware of ice and steam is not the same as being aware of the generalized concept of phase transition, as well as its mechanics.
Wheeler named them wormholes in 1957, when he was proposing his famous "charge without charge" idea (the idea that wormhole mouths could simulate point charges with electric fields threading through them, despite the absence of any actual matter particle)
By metaphor, that is the discovery of phase change.
This analysis was purely within classical general relativity.
Don't confuse "presented with context to" as "arises from." Please remember that the original question was that of origin. The paper you cite is about the possibility of single particles traversing wormholes. It's a particle physics paper. Yes, the context of relativity is given, because it's germane. However, the work does not arise as a result of relativity. It would be similar to claim that a book on programming some particular sound card was a physics book, because it has to present some simple physics to explain the nyquist frequency and cancelled/overlapped waveforms for simulated 3d sound.
The paper you cite isn't about wormholes. It's about particles traversing wormholes. Big difference.
Wheeler is most famous for his work on relativity.
That's funny. The first time I heard about him, in one of my books on the history of physics, he was presented as a particle physicist. Brittanica presents him as a particle physicist. Aasimov presents him as a particle physicist. Gleick discusses his work as a particle physicist. Wikipedia calls him a particle physicist. I just called my father, who has a Ph.D. in physics from the early 1960s, when his work was fresh and new; my father remembers him as a particle physicist. I also called a friend of mine, who is a graduate student TA in the physics department at SDSU, and asked him specifically what branch of physics Wheeler occupied; he said that he was a theoretical particle physicist who had done most of his work on the S-Matrix, which is a particle physics tool, and on the Manhattan Project, which was a particle physics project (I ran this by Jim Conant, whose father was also on the Manhattan Project; he concurred in memory,) and who was best publically known for coining the term Black Hole.
A-ha!, I hear you say, since black holes are frequently such a mess for relativity, and since the Einstein Rosen bridge was for the connection between black holes and white holes. But, no: Wheeler's work in the area of black holes was in looking for what Hawking eventually found in the form of Hawking Radiation and in diminishing black holes through evaporation, from the perspective of the particle physicist, who was worried about the loss of information during radiation (he was originally clued into it by Claude Shannon.) Indeed, the reason he began dealing with relativity was because certain huge constructs from relativity provided absolutely obscene problems for particle physics, and everything he did with relativity was relativity as applied to particle physics. He continued working on particle physics after he stopped working on relativity.
Ah, insults. I love to hear myself talk because I don't like false accusation levied at me from a pompous blowhard.
Well, whatever it takes to get the last word in, right? Here's a freebie: this is the last one I'll write. You can spew whatever nonsense you like, and it'll be the closing statement. Have fun.
Language is a living breathing thing, which changes with the times; it is not as rigid or absolute as you obviously wish it to be.
Do not confuse your ignorance for linguistic drift. Linguistic drift is real, and it does not occur just because you're too dumb to know what a word means.
I reject your narrow definition
Again, it's not my definition.
I reject your claims to owning the only truth.
I made no such claim, drama queen. If you told me that "blue" meant "murder," I'd call you wrong too. Why? Because you would be. It wouldn't be me "claiming to own the only truth," nor would it be "my definition" nor something "narrowly defined." You can whine and churl all you want, but just because you think you aren't wrong and just because you know how to parrot people who know what they're talking about by saying that language is motile doesn't mean you're magically correct.
Champ and stamp, if you like. The well educated around you can still see how sadly ill-equipped you are to speak in English.
I also find it ironic that you lecture me on sub-par language use when you omitted the comma before the "which" in your first sentence. That's right, I said ironic.
Ah, well as long as you repeat your ignorance it must suddenly be correct. Your attempt at criticism, much like your attempt at a dogmatic cling to any error as a correct change, is a failure. No comma is called for when appending a descriptive specificity to a sentence. That said, since you're obviously a linguist, you knew that (cough,) and thus you know your complaint is nothing more than you trying to make it seem as if you have a comparative criticism of your own.
You don't.
Anyway, feel free to continue to misuse the word. It's clear that you can't take the heat that you give other people; you threw a tantrum because someone did to you what you did to a third party. My mistake for trying to help you learn to use language more skillfully. Enjoy roasting in Dante's ninety seventh hell, the hell of pretentious fuckbags who think they're linguists.
Oh, and for whatever it's worth, when you say "language is a living breathing thing," please understand that people stop taking you seriously the second you launch into such nonsensical hyperbole. Language doesn't have lungs and can't use air, and to suggest that it's a living anthropomorphized creature in order to pretend that your error is its growth pattern is utter nonsense. There are rules governing linguistic change, because language is a purely artificial thing. I'd tell you to take a class, but it's obvious that you think you know more about it than the professional academics who've made a lifetime's work from something you feel free to rail about from your presumed Barca lounger.
If people like you had their way, there would be no such thing as a mistake in English, and any random pile of words that fell out of a person's mouth would mean whatever the fuck they wanted. Luckily, they don't, you don't, and it doesn't. Language does not change to suit your stupidity.
But, don't worry, dear heart, your mommy still thinks you're smart.
I guess I assumed wormholes were established within a particular solution to general relativity?
Why would you assume that? Wormholes originally come from John Wheeler's work with Quantum Dynamics, and are useful to string theory, superstring theory, topological branes and some particle physics models. They have nothing at all to do with relativity. Wheeler was a particle physicist involved in the Manhattan Project. He's nowhere near that side of physics.
Sarcasm that nobody can see is of poor quality. Please note that your sarcasm was poor enough that some dumb mod modded you insightful. (Given how many people were saying exactly that right around where you said it, I'll maintain my skepticism, thanks.)
Neither is it my definition nor do I care whether you "accept" the truth which most people know. The point is, if you're going to be a cock and try to criticize other people's language use, you'd better be careful that yours is up to par (it isn't;) for you to try to pretend that your own error is anything otherwise is just bad sportsmanship, bordering on hypocrisy.
I hope you'll learn from this, while you pretend not to.
And this device only had double thecapacity of an an alkaline battery.
Alkaline batteries actually have a pretty good power capacity; we just don't use them in things like cars and laptops because they're not reasonably rechargable. I for one would love to see my laptop's running life go up a ways, especially if I could just plug it in for ten seconds while I stopped for a coffee before going back out for another several hours' work.
If this kind of thing works out, you might see places like McDonalds deploying fifty cent "charge stations" in their drive-through, where you make electrical contact for a few seconds while you wait on the jerk in front of you to quit staring at his fucking hamburger and drive.
Bad news - it uses a gold strip as one of its components.
So does your $120 TV. Gold can be machined until it's ridiculously thin. Chances are there's more gold in your $10 gold plated headphone plug than in the battery. We use gold for its high electrical transfer rate, which is dependant on surface area, not volume.
Well for one, plastic explosive means the adjective "plastic," meaning bendable and deformable, not the material plastic. C4 isn't made out of plastic. It's called "plastic explosive" because it acts like sully putty (at least before you blow it up.) That's very useful for things like shaped charges and drilled shock patterns, where you can just sort of cram it in and that's good enough.
For two, you don't detect plastic with x-ray machines, you detect it with chemical traces (or dogs,) whose results will be very different for the two machines.
For three, most plastic explosives don't come in a sealed case made by Sony, and cannot run an MP3 player.
I think this new battery probably has some relationship to the carbon nanotube supercapacitor electrical storage device that MIT is currently working on.
You think wrong. This is essentially a capacitor and battery laid edge to edge. The article goes into detail about how it works. At no point are the words "MIT," "carbon" or "nanotube" used. Also, carbon nanotubes cannot create plastic, by virtue of the chemical definition of plastic. Therefore, that they're plastic batteries should have been your first hint.
This is a potentially huge breakthrough, since unlike regular batteries this new power storage unit can be recharged hundreds of thousands of times and the recharge time is measured in minutes, not hours. That makes it possible for truly practical all-electric car
Recharge frequency is not an issue for current cars; current batteries can be charged several thousand times without more than 20-30% distress. That your laptop batteries don't survive this long reflects the way they're made, not a limit of the technology. By contrast, consider your Nintendo GBA SP, which will hold a good charge for more than five years, even if you leave it on the charger every night. Charge time is a minor issue; most people wouldn't bleed their cars and then need to do it again an hour later.
The actual limiting factor on pure electric cars is energy density. This technology is a compromise between batteries (high storage, low charge transfer rate) and capacitors (low storage, high transfer rate.) This technology is not useful to solve the current limiting problems for electric cars.
and also as a truly practical means to store power generated by wind turbines and solar cell arrays for use later.
Er, we don't have any problems with this today. The primary difficulties of wind turbines are threefold: 1) the source, wind, isn't reliable; 2) they have a significant environmental impact, and 3) they have to be put far from current homes, which makes the resistance of transmission lines an issue, as well as movement on the encroaching of urban sprawl.
No one would ever drive a car powered by something that could explode.
In the right situation, your current gas tank and starting battery can each explode. Before the development of the honeycomb isolation gas tank, it wasn't even all that uncommon in bad car accidents. If you replace "could" with "is likely to," you will begin to understand a sad truth about humanity. We gamble with everything, every day, including our lives.
Notice that there are also quite a few things in your house that can explode, including your television (temperature, electricity surge, or implosion, which is just as bad since the glass shards just bounce off the back of the CRT and outwards, also sparks, yay fire,) your furnace, your hot water heater, some kinds of dryer (lint can cause more than fires,) some kinds of microwave, gas stoves, and so on.
Gasoline needs to be in a fine mist to become explosive
Well, a spray is actually good enough, which isn't tremendously rare in bad car accidents. Also, there are ample sparks to get the party started. I saw a special on The History Channel that suggests that there's a gasoline explosion, generally due to massive compounded driver error, once every three days in the United States. To wit, I even saw one once. Sure, they don't send a car sailing through the air, but they're enough to roll it onto its top, and to send glass and metal shards flying everywhere.
The reason the US has such extensive and complex requirements regarding gas tank safety is that this is a very real issue. The reason that you almost never hear about this actually happening in a nation of 300 million compulsive drivers is that safety engineers are very good at their jobs.
The energy density is roughly double that of current lithium ion models. When you discuss a battery's power, you're not discussing storage, you're discussing release rate. That 100x regards how fast the battery can drain.
We only really need to match the energy density of gasoline in order to make it real-world practical.
A tank of gasoline is also a bomb. For that matter, so are batteries, ## todo: insert Dell laptop joke here.
How long, on average, does it take for a new technology (especially battery related) to reach the market, after an announcement like this?
The variance is huge - so large that the average is immaterial. Fuel cells made it to market in under 18 months. Francium anode batteries are still a promising technology and are still being researched, but were originally conceived of in the late 1960s. Thorium (radioactive decay) batteries were implemented in a matter of months, but it took more than ten years for regulators to make them legal. Lithium Ion batteries were released in six years, but given the current heating, distortion, bloating and occasional fire problems, it can be argued that they were underdeveloped.
Basically, this is Duke Amperage Forever. They'll promise it for a long time, but it could come out god only knows when.
How, exactly, does General Motors (or any other car maker) benefit by selling you a car that gets worse gas mileage?
GM doesn't. Ford, however, who has large financial stakes in the fuel provision industry, does.
They are not in the oil business
Actually, it's the other way around. The oil business has been buying significant voting interest in vehicle manufacturers, and when looked at from their perspective (and the size of their wallets,) it makes a hell of a lot of sense. GM has actively resisted the practice, putting several poison pills into their corporate bylaws designed specifically to prevent this sort of manipulation. Funny how GM has been making America's most fuel efficient cars for the last ten years.
Now, the well-educated conspiracy theorist will suggest that this is just because GM knew peak oil was coming and didn't want to get dragged down with the other ship (and that's probably true; they've been experimenting with alternative fuels for decades,) but the point remains.
and even the slightest hint of collusion with the oil industry in that regard would have the NHTSA crawling up their ass with a microscope
The current laws allow parent "umbrella organizations" which already existed to purchase stakes in both oil and cars, provided they're otherwise diversified. Why do you think Chrysler started so many weird side businesses (my favorite example of which is a roofing materials manufacturing company) ?
Granted it's only a fraction of what up-front consumption rate manipulation would allow, but it's better than zero, from their persective.
Hell, they're already up their ass with a microscope with CAFE regulations
Yep. And current regulations are being tightened to prevent this sort of malarky. However, oil has a very powerful lobbying industry, which slows reform down, and has a lot of very, very smart lawyers who find loopholes to let them pull it off legally for a few more years each time.
We've been waging this war since the 1960s. We're winning, but it's slow going.
On top of that, they have no vested interest in the fuel production industry to begin with.
Even if there wasn't a formal interest, the oil marketplace is served by a very few producers, almost none of whom are significantly subject to US corporate law. Look where the oil is coming from: Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Russia. These are not bastions against commercial corruption.
Granted ExxonMobil is prevented from behaving this way, but ExxonMobil is essentially a ginormous middleman in the way that McDonalds is. The producers are the problem here, not the refiners. To follow the McDonalds parallel, you're looking at the resteraunt when you should be looking at the cattle ranchers.
Think about it rationally: if Ford had found a way to make a regular car get 80mpg using some Magic Carburetor Technology (to reference the urban legend in its 70's form), they could make a killing in the marketplace.
In 1940, Tucker released an automobile that got almost 40 miles per gallon. His top of the line model, the Tucker '48, got 36. Ford's best fuel economy in 2006 was the Ford Escape Hybrid, which got 33 miles per gallon. Do you honestly believe that there's been no progress in the last 60 years?
Besides, 80 mpg isn't actually unreasonable. The problem is getting 80mpg in a car at over 25 miles per hour, in a vehicle with amenities that will sell (the weight of the car is significant,) which is built in a way that if there's an accident, not everyone dies. To give you a sense of scale, Suzuki makes and sells a motorcycle that gets 216 miles per gallon. On one 11-gallon tank, you can make it from Las Vegas to Washington DC. That's not fringe science.
Things work as if Einstein was right, but there is no evidence that he was right.
To me this just seems like a play on words. Observation is the only way in which we can test the validity of a model. If the model fits experimental data consistently and throughout a large number of experiments, we can only conclude it is right -- at least until someone makes an experiment whose results disprove it, but that's part of the nature of a scientific theory.
The point grandparent was getting at is that scientists never "decide something is right," but rather say "this theory matches data to within a tolerance of ± whatever%." And, in context, not only is grandparent correct to point this out, but what he's saying is very important to keep in mind. It's a pity he's not a better writer.
What is germane is that we never ever ever say "this model is correct" in any non-abstract scientific field. For any reason. Ever.
Nothing. A ratio with only one component stated is explicitly in contrast to one. You might as well complain that x=y+4 should actually be written as (1x+0) = (1y+0)+4.
Maybe you could explain why the example is bullshit, for those less educated than you are? Y'know, 'cause I have coursework credits in both physics and logic, and I don't see it. Indeed I'm curious whether in fact it's there, or whether you're just some blowhard who wants to sound smart.
Whoever modded parent insightful should have a stick placed squarely into their left retina. Insightful doesn't mean "talks shit without discussing the reason therefor."
Slashdot Mirror
Are those... frickin' sharks? With fricken lasers on their heads?
Yeah, either that, or the fuel tanks standardise, and the airline starts selling them for a dollar, along with batteries and booze.
Did you know you can use revolution to run a magnetic motor in reverse, thereby generating current? Did you know that kind of motor can be made smaller than you're able to see? Getting a generator in a chip isn't that hard. The turbine is the problem, because there are simple limits to how close we can get the fan blades to the housing (the blades expand under heat, for example.)
Now, for something like a wind turbine, this isn't that big a problem - you just put some synthetic diamond rasps on the inside of the housing, and the blades cut themselves down to a near-perfect fit, which is great for things that don't stop. For things that *do* stop, you need to work to find a material with near-zero thermal size change, and suddenly the ratio of circumferential area (that is to say, the space between the circumference of the inner circle described by the fan blades to that of the outer area described by the casing) to the area of the fan blades becomes a governor of efficiency, and that means the larger the dynamo, the more efficient the dynamo.
Or, the smaller, the less efficient. That's the real problem here.
Beatings on a Dead Horse.
Wormholes originally come from John Wheeler's work with Quantum Dynamics, and are useful to string theory, superstring theory, topological branes and some particle physics models.
Wormholes go all the way back to the Einstein-Rosen bridge, which was discovered by, er, Einstein and Rosen, in 1935, lurking in the Schwarzschild solution for black holes. (Einstein and Rosen, Phys. Rev. 48, 73 (1935).)
If you do some reading in context, you'll discover that wormholes are a generalization of the concept of an Einstein Rosen bridge. What you've said is a nearly equivalent to claiming that plasma and bose-einstein condensates were discovered in Ancient Greece because they were aware of ice and steam. Wormholes are far more general than the bridge between a black hole and a white hole. Being aware of ice and steam is not the same as being aware of the generalized concept of phase transition, as well as its mechanics.
Wheeler named them wormholes in 1957, when he was proposing his famous "charge without charge" idea (the idea that wormhole mouths could simulate point charges with electric fields threading through them, despite the absence of any actual matter particle)
By metaphor, that is the discovery of phase change.
This analysis was purely within classical general relativity.
Don't confuse "presented with context to" as "arises from." Please remember that the original question was that of origin. The paper you cite is about the possibility of single particles traversing wormholes. It's a particle physics paper. Yes, the context of relativity is given, because it's germane. However, the work does not arise as a result of relativity. It would be similar to claim that a book on programming some particular sound card was a physics book, because it has to present some simple physics to explain the nyquist frequency and cancelled/overlapped waveforms for simulated 3d sound.
The paper you cite isn't about wormholes. It's about particles traversing wormholes. Big difference.
Wheeler is most famous for his work on relativity.
That's funny. The first time I heard about him, in one of my books on the history of physics, he was presented as a particle physicist. Brittanica presents him as a particle physicist. Aasimov presents him as a particle physicist. Gleick discusses his work as a particle physicist. Wikipedia calls him a particle physicist. I just called my father, who has a Ph.D. in physics from the early 1960s, when his work was fresh and new; my father remembers him as a particle physicist. I also called a friend of mine, who is a graduate student TA in the physics department at SDSU, and asked him specifically what branch of physics Wheeler occupied; he said that he was a theoretical particle physicist who had done most of his work on the S-Matrix, which is a particle physics tool, and on the Manhattan Project, which was a particle physics project (I ran this by Jim Conant, whose father was also on the Manhattan Project; he concurred in memory,) and who was best publically known for coining the term Black Hole.
A-ha!, I hear you say, since black holes are frequently such a mess for relativity, and since the Einstein Rosen bridge was for the connection between black holes and white holes. But, no: Wheeler's work in the area of black holes was in looking for what Hawking eventually found in the form of Hawking Radiation and in diminishing black holes through evaporation, from the perspective of the particle physicist, who was worried about the loss of information during radiation (he was originally clued into it by Claude Shannon.) Indeed, the reason he began dealing with relativity was because certain huge constructs from relativity provided absolutely obscene problems for particle physics, and everything he did with relativity was relativity as applied to particle physics. He continued working on particle physics after he stopped working on relativity.
So,
Ah, insults. I love to hear myself talk because I don't like false accusation levied at me from a pompous blowhard.
Well, whatever it takes to get the last word in, right? Here's a freebie: this is the last one I'll write. You can spew whatever nonsense you like, and it'll be the closing statement. Have fun.
Language is a living breathing thing, which changes with the times; it is not as rigid or absolute as you obviously wish it to be.
Do not confuse your ignorance for linguistic drift. Linguistic drift is real, and it does not occur just because you're too dumb to know what a word means.
I reject your narrow definition
Again, it's not my definition.
I reject your claims to owning the only truth.
I made no such claim, drama queen. If you told me that "blue" meant "murder," I'd call you wrong too. Why? Because you would be. It wouldn't be me "claiming to own the only truth," nor would it be "my definition" nor something "narrowly defined." You can whine and churl all you want, but just because you think you aren't wrong and just because you know how to parrot people who know what they're talking about by saying that language is motile doesn't mean you're magically correct.
Champ and stamp, if you like. The well educated around you can still see how sadly ill-equipped you are to speak in English.
I also find it ironic that you lecture me on sub-par language use when you omitted the comma before the "which" in your first sentence. That's right, I said ironic.
Ah, well as long as you repeat your ignorance it must suddenly be correct. Your attempt at criticism, much like your attempt at a dogmatic cling to any error as a correct change, is a failure. No comma is called for when appending a descriptive specificity to a sentence. That said, since you're obviously a linguist, you knew that (cough,) and thus you know your complaint is nothing more than you trying to make it seem as if you have a comparative criticism of your own.
You don't.
Anyway, feel free to continue to misuse the word. It's clear that you can't take the heat that you give other people; you threw a tantrum because someone did to you what you did to a third party. My mistake for trying to help you learn to use language more skillfully. Enjoy roasting in Dante's ninety seventh hell, the hell of pretentious fuckbags who think they're linguists.
Oh, and for whatever it's worth, when you say "language is a living breathing thing," please understand that people stop taking you seriously the second you launch into such nonsensical hyperbole. Language doesn't have lungs and can't use air, and to suggest that it's a living anthropomorphized creature in order to pretend that your error is its growth pattern is utter nonsense. There are rules governing linguistic change, because language is a purely artificial thing. I'd tell you to take a class, but it's obvious that you think you know more about it than the professional academics who've made a lifetime's work from something you feel free to rail about from your presumed Barca lounger.
If people like you had their way, there would be no such thing as a mistake in English, and any random pile of words that fell out of a person's mouth would mean whatever the fuck they wanted. Luckily, they don't, you don't, and it doesn't. Language does not change to suit your stupidity.
But, don't worry, dear heart, your mommy still thinks you're smart.
I guess I assumed wormholes were established within a particular solution to general relativity?
Why would you assume that? Wormholes originally come from John Wheeler's work with Quantum Dynamics, and are useful to string theory, superstring theory, topological branes and some particle physics models. They have nothing at all to do with relativity. Wheeler was a particle physicist involved in the Manhattan Project. He's nowhere near that side of physics.
Aha. Thank you for the clarification.
Sarcasm that nobody can see is of poor quality. Please note that your sarcasm was poor enough that some dumb mod modded you insightful. (Given how many people were saying exactly that right around where you said it, I'll maintain my skepticism, thanks.)
Neither is it my definition nor do I care whether you "accept" the truth which most people know. The point is, if you're going to be a cock and try to criticize other people's language use, you'd better be careful that yours is up to par (it isn't;) for you to try to pretend that your own error is anything otherwise is just bad sportsmanship, bordering on hypocrisy.
I hope you'll learn from this, while you pretend not to.
And this device only had double thecapacity of an an alkaline battery.
Alkaline batteries actually have a pretty good power capacity; we just don't use them in things like cars and laptops because they're not reasonably rechargable. I for one would love to see my laptop's running life go up a ways, especially if I could just plug it in for ten seconds while I stopped for a coffee before going back out for another several hours' work.
If this kind of thing works out, you might see places like McDonalds deploying fifty cent "charge stations" in their drive-through, where you make electrical contact for a few seconds while you wait on the jerk in front of you to quit staring at his fucking hamburger and drive.
Bad news - it uses a gold strip as one of its components.
So does your $120 TV. Gold can be machined until it's ridiculously thin. Chances are there's more gold in your $10 gold plated headphone plug than in the battery. We use gold for its high electrical transfer rate, which is dependant on surface area, not volume.
Well for one, plastic explosive means the adjective "plastic," meaning bendable and deformable, not the material plastic. C4 isn't made out of plastic. It's called "plastic explosive" because it acts like sully putty (at least before you blow it up.) That's very useful for things like shaped charges and drilled shock patterns, where you can just sort of cram it in and that's good enough.
For two, you don't detect plastic with x-ray machines, you detect it with chemical traces (or dogs,) whose results will be very different for the two machines.
For three, most plastic explosives don't come in a sealed case made by Sony, and cannot run an MP3 player.
I think this new battery probably has some relationship to the carbon nanotube supercapacitor electrical storage device that MIT is currently working on.
You think wrong. This is essentially a capacitor and battery laid edge to edge. The article goes into detail about how it works. At no point are the words "MIT," "carbon" or "nanotube" used. Also, carbon nanotubes cannot create plastic, by virtue of the chemical definition of plastic. Therefore, that they're plastic batteries should have been your first hint.
Try reading the article next time, pontiff.
This is a potentially huge breakthrough, since unlike regular batteries this new power storage unit can be recharged hundreds of thousands of times and the recharge time is measured in minutes, not hours. That makes it possible for truly practical all-electric car
Recharge frequency is not an issue for current cars; current batteries can be charged several thousand times without more than 20-30% distress. That your laptop batteries don't survive this long reflects the way they're made, not a limit of the technology. By contrast, consider your Nintendo GBA SP, which will hold a good charge for more than five years, even if you leave it on the charger every night. Charge time is a minor issue; most people wouldn't bleed their cars and then need to do it again an hour later.
The actual limiting factor on pure electric cars is energy density. This technology is a compromise between batteries (high storage, low charge transfer rate) and capacitors (low storage, high transfer rate.) This technology is not useful to solve the current limiting problems for electric cars.
and also as a truly practical means to store power generated by wind turbines and solar cell arrays for use later.
Er, we don't have any problems with this today. The primary difficulties of wind turbines are threefold: 1) the source, wind, isn't reliable; 2) they have a significant environmental impact, and 3) they have to be put far from current homes, which makes the resistance of transmission lines an issue, as well as movement on the encroaching of urban sprawl.
No one would ever drive a car powered by something that could explode.
In the right situation, your current gas tank and starting battery can each explode. Before the development of the honeycomb isolation gas tank, it wasn't even all that uncommon in bad car accidents. If you replace "could" with "is likely to," you will begin to understand a sad truth about humanity. We gamble with everything, every day, including our lives.
Notice that there are also quite a few things in your house that can explode, including your television (temperature, electricity surge, or implosion, which is just as bad since the glass shards just bounce off the back of the CRT and outwards, also sparks, yay fire,) your furnace, your hot water heater, some kinds of dryer (lint can cause more than fires,) some kinds of microwave, gas stoves, and so on.
Gasoline needs to be in a fine mist to become explosive
Well, a spray is actually good enough, which isn't tremendously rare in bad car accidents. Also, there are ample sparks to get the party started. I saw a special on The History Channel that suggests that there's a gasoline explosion, generally due to massive compounded driver error, once every three days in the United States. To wit, I even saw one once. Sure, they don't send a car sailing through the air, but they're enough to roll it onto its top, and to send glass and metal shards flying everywhere.
The reason the US has such extensive and complex requirements regarding gas tank safety is that this is a very real issue. The reason that you almost never hear about this actually happening in a nation of 300 million compulsive drivers is that safety engineers are very good at their jobs.
How long, on average, does it take for a new technology (especially battery related) to reach the market, after an announcement like this?
The variance is huge - so large that the average is immaterial. Fuel cells made it to market in under 18 months. Francium anode batteries are still a promising technology and are still being researched, but were originally conceived of in the late 1960s. Thorium (radioactive decay) batteries were implemented in a matter of months, but it took more than ten years for regulators to make them legal. Lithium Ion batteries were released in six years, but given the current heating, distortion, bloating and occasional fire problems, it can be argued that they were underdeveloped.
Basically, this is Duke Amperage Forever. They'll promise it for a long time, but it could come out god only knows when.
How, exactly, does General Motors (or any other car maker) benefit by selling you a car that gets worse gas mileage?
GM doesn't. Ford, however, who has large financial stakes in the fuel provision industry, does.
They are not in the oil business
Actually, it's the other way around. The oil business has been buying significant voting interest in vehicle manufacturers, and when looked at from their perspective (and the size of their wallets,) it makes a hell of a lot of sense. GM has actively resisted the practice, putting several poison pills into their corporate bylaws designed specifically to prevent this sort of manipulation. Funny how GM has been making America's most fuel efficient cars for the last ten years.
Now, the well-educated conspiracy theorist will suggest that this is just because GM knew peak oil was coming and didn't want to get dragged down with the other ship (and that's probably true; they've been experimenting with alternative fuels for decades,) but the point remains.
and even the slightest hint of collusion with the oil industry in that regard would have the NHTSA crawling up their ass with a microscope
The current laws allow parent "umbrella organizations" which already existed to purchase stakes in both oil and cars, provided they're otherwise diversified. Why do you think Chrysler started so many weird side businesses (my favorite example of which is a roofing materials manufacturing company) ?
Granted it's only a fraction of what up-front consumption rate manipulation would allow, but it's better than zero, from their persective.
Hell, they're already up their ass with a microscope with CAFE regulations
Yep. And current regulations are being tightened to prevent this sort of malarky. However, oil has a very powerful lobbying industry, which slows reform down, and has a lot of very, very smart lawyers who find loopholes to let them pull it off legally for a few more years each time.
We've been waging this war since the 1960s. We're winning, but it's slow going.
On top of that, they have no vested interest in the fuel production industry to begin with.
Even if there wasn't a formal interest, the oil marketplace is served by a very few producers, almost none of whom are significantly subject to US corporate law. Look where the oil is coming from: Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Russia. These are not bastions against commercial corruption.
Granted ExxonMobil is prevented from behaving this way, but ExxonMobil is essentially a ginormous middleman in the way that McDonalds is. The producers are the problem here, not the refiners. To follow the McDonalds parallel, you're looking at the resteraunt when you should be looking at the cattle ranchers.
Think about it rationally: if Ford had found a way to make a regular car get 80mpg using some Magic Carburetor Technology (to reference the urban legend in its 70's form), they could make a killing in the marketplace.
In 1940, Tucker released an automobile that got almost 40 miles per gallon. His top of the line model, the Tucker '48, got 36. Ford's best fuel economy in 2006 was the Ford Escape Hybrid, which got 33 miles per gallon. Do you honestly believe that there's been no progress in the last 60 years?
Besides, 80 mpg isn't actually unreasonable. The problem is getting 80mpg in a car at over 25 miles per hour, in a vehicle with amenities that will sell (the weight of the car is significant,) which is built in a way that if there's an accident, not everyone dies. To give you a sense of scale, Suzuki makes and sells a motorcycle that gets 216 miles per gallon. On one 11-gallon tank, you can make it from Las Vegas to Washington DC. That's not fringe science.
If you make a car out of composite fiberg
Things work as if Einstein was right, but there is no evidence that he was right.
To me this just seems like a play on words. Observation is the only way in which we can test the validity of a model. If the model fits experimental data consistently and throughout a large number of experiments, we can only conclude it is right -- at least until someone makes an experiment whose results disprove it, but that's part of the nature of a scientific theory.
The point grandparent was getting at is that scientists never "decide something is right," but rather say "this theory matches data to within a tolerance of ± whatever%." And, in context, not only is grandparent correct to point this out, but what he's saying is very important to keep in mind. It's a pity he's not a better writer.
What is germane is that we never ever ever say "this model is correct" in any non-abstract scientific field. For any reason. Ever.
Nothing. A ratio with only one component stated is explicitly in contrast to one. You might as well complain that x=y+4 should actually be written as (1x+0) = (1y+0)+4.
Not all coefficients must be visible.
Maybe you could explain why the example is bullshit, for those less educated than you are? Y'know, 'cause I have coursework credits in both physics and logic, and I don't see it. Indeed I'm curious whether in fact it's there, or whether you're just some blowhard who wants to sound smart.
Whoever modded parent insightful should have a stick placed squarely into their left retina. Insightful doesn't mean "talks shit without discussing the reason therefor."
surity
Me fail english? That's unpossible! Hey Ranger Rick, try "certainty" next time.