Oh really no idea what I'm talking about eh? Its been known for over half a century that alpha radiation is dangerous. Get a fucking clue and stop posting misinformation and falsehoods as if they were true.
wow, only on slashdot would a post saying that plutonium is neither highly radioactive or toxic be modded to +5 insightful. Plutonium is used in RTG's precisely because it is intensely radioactive!! Pu238 is seventeen times more radioactive than the same mass of radium. And yes plutonium is rather toxic if ingested or inhaled not only due to the fact that it is a heavy metal but also because it is highly radioactive and emits mostly alpha particles which have a large capability to destroy cells if in close proximity. Will 1 Kg kill everyone on earth? no, we've released many Kg into the atmosphere during nuclear weapons tests and most of us are still here. Are RTG's dangerous? Not really no. But it is only because of highly redundant and cautious engineering that this is so. Would someone with half a clue want to "bury an RTG under my children's playset"? No probably not. The relaxation of the Pu nucleus after it emits a low penetrating power alpha particle also then emits a high energy gamma ray with high mass penetrating potential which is not very nice to play around.
You seem to know alot about the materials end of photovoltaics so let me ask you this. WTF ever happened to the multijunction GaN on sapphire systems that were supposed to achieve full solar spectrum conversion? This stuff came out like 3 years ago complete with huge fanfare and gushing mediagasm and then....nothing. Haven't heard a peep about it since. Sooo tired of this pattern of science by press release then nothing to show for it...
I feel I should chime in here, as the person who originally removed the geocities links from the article.
I removed the link because; number one - wikipedia does not publish original research, two -Jim Baldrson has been a known trollish crazy on Kuro5hin for years and a troll on Usenet for over a DECADE landing himself on a kook-of-the-month list way back in 1994, three -The ideas expressed on his geocities site (which is down now but I'll link anyway, maybe it'll be back up) are just plain insane. Here's a real gem: "Immigration Causes Autism" a lovely little racist tract (also, racist extremists endorse his views), fourth -he started editing wikipedia articles in suspicious anti-semitic and racist ways (see here, though these are merely revivals of his MANY earlier anti-Jewish ramblings) though his changes were reverted by other users fairly quickly, fifth -he seems to go "underground" when he's noticed by others as a problem and then starts posting changes to articles using only his IP. So in conclusion I think its quite clear that neither he nor his ideas or motives are trustworthy. He is closely watched on wikipedia right now and I doubt he will get away with too much shenanigans.
One hilarious bit of irony I can't help but relish is that he came here to cry a river about how he was being "censored" on wikipedia and then had four +5 comments posted below him agreeing with his opposition after recognizing him for the kook he is. Wow, congrats Jim!
This wattage/mile efficiency thing is always a neat trick. I doubt however, that anyone can beat what must be a record of some sort: the detection of the 10 watt (mostly) non-directional radio transmitter atop the Huygens probe while falling into the atmosphere of Titan by the Very Long Baseline Array when nearly 1 billion miles away. A feat expected to be achieved next week. The power collected by one of the 70 meter dishes on earth will be comparable to what was detected from the feeble low gain antenna on the Galileo Jupiter probe. This power is in the ZEPTOWATT range. (zeptowatt)
In addition to this, the VLBA will be used in interferometer mode (VLBI) in order to pinpoint the landing site of the probe on Titan to within 1Km!! This is equal to an angular resolution of approximately 170 microarcseconds. Thousands of times better than Hubble.
This is a really interesting concept. The designers say they won't fly the kite except in good weather so they won't have to worry about electrical storms etc. but I wonder if they have considered the atmosphere's natural electric field as well... It is estimated that the natural electric field potential between the earth's surface and the ionosphere is in the hundreds of thousands of volts range. While the current is usually very low for small but rather tall structures (regular kites, radio towers etc.) I would imagine that having a huge 5 mile wide kite 30 thousand!! feet up would make an immense difference in the current transmitted through a conducting wire to the ground. We may be talking about tens or perhaps even hundreds (??) of watts here. This will have to be dealt with and I imagine it could actually be used to perhaps, power some backup or secondary control equipment way up there.
Carl Sagan, who was on the Voyager imaging team, sent him a JPL photo (he was a member on the voyager team) with a note scribbled on the back. it said: "Thinking of you"....
I think you were replying to the AC next to me but I'll reply anyway!:o) It's not a UFO and it's not a star and it's not a comet or planet. Its a proton, or perhaps, an electron. Accelerated to relativistic velocities by the soalr wind or saturn's magnetosphere (or both) it struck the cameras CCD at an angle and as it traveleld through, excited some electrons in the valence band of the semiconducting image detection layer to the conduction band, just like a photon of visible light would if it hit the detector and produced a streak in the image. It's called a "cosmic ray hit" and there is software to remove them from the images.
I hereby bestow upon EpsCylonB the Most Insightful Comment of the Month Award. As an unrealistic and sometimes escapist type of guy, I often find myself daydreaming of a world where blind faith and fundamentalism are scorned and shunned in favor of rationality and science. I wonder what incredible things such a society could achieve and how incomprehensibly far away from it our own society, still nearly hopelessly mired in religion, mysticism and superstision is. Then I wonder if at a current age of 24 years old, I will ever live to even see the first hints of such a beautiful, proliferant civilization and then reality, with it's often painfully cruel truths (which, as a person of science and reason I find impossible to shun) sets in. And I realize that no, I will likely never know such a time.
Yes it is way more powerful than a nuclear power plant. The lasers will produce over 500 terawatts of power, far more than the entire electrical generating capacity of the world. Though only for 5ns or so. And I dont think it's a monstrosity, a debacle maybe but not a monstrosity:o). It's actually quite a beautiful machine I think; it will compress and heat its tiny hydrogen fuel capsule to temperatures and densities greater than those in the core of the sun, igniting the plasma in a self sustaining reaction. While the capsule will reach ignition (where alpha particle heating of the plasma dominates) it will not reach breakeven due to the abysmally low ~2-3% efficiency of the Nd:glass lasers used to compress the pellet and the less than perfect laser\plasma energy coupling.
That said, I must comment on the article at hand. This company and its ceo "Mark Ludwig" seem to be pure BULLSHIT. The claims of Impulse Devices cross the line from speculative/specious and would be aptly described as fraudulent. Sonoluminescence has not yet conclusively been linked to fusion and most scientists remain highly skeptical of the claim that it has, as other posts have pointed out. Even if it IS real the rate of fusion reactions is so incredibly low it's just above the threshold of detection. The rate will have to be scaled up by trillions of times to attain anything even nearing ignition scale no one has a clue how to do this and he says this will happen in 5 years??! Yeah I'm sure we're all holding our breath Mark. Oh, and another thing, the reporting on this article is a joke, for starters they're using a photo of NOVA which they apparently don't even know was totally dismantled like 5 years ago....
pffft.. who cares about some line for a new video game console. Look at the other pictures this guy's got on his page. They're really interesting and offer firsthand insight into Japanese culture. Look how neat this homeless guy's tent is! Or how, apparently, there are these weird/creepy sex museums called "Hihokan" all over the country. Fascinating.
"Counterexample: ATP, the chemical energy that human metabolic processes are based on, stores it's energy in bonds. When you remove phosphor atoms, you release that energy to do work"
It is unclear here that energy is released when bonds are formed and that it takes energy to break bonds (this is always always always the case) because you've oversimplified the reaction. The energy released by hydrolysis of ATP does not come from the breaking of the weak oxygen to phosphate bond, that TAKES energy to do, instead it comes from the formation of new bonds formed in the products. see here.
"By your reasoning therefore the only way to ever cause fusion to happen is through graviational compression. And yet there are tons of engineered systems based on the electromagnetic that have in fact done just that, we've just gotta optimize one of those systems so we put less energy into it than we get out..."
No that wouldn't follow from my reasoning. If you're thinking of a "hydrogen bomb" (thermonuclear bomb) the energy used to force the hydrogen atoms together in the thermonuclear part of the weapon is provided by fission in a "conventional" nuclear bomb using the energy released by the splitting of either uranium or plutonium nuclei (again, this involves the strong force not the electromagnetic force). The fact that energy is conveyed to the collapsing mass of H by EM radiation pressure (intense gamma and X-rays) is irrelevant.
If, on the other hand you're taling about our efforts to produce controlled fusion in a lab using various sorts of EM radiation (ultra powerful lasers, huge magnets and microwave heaters, etc.) then these techniques rely on tricks we use to "artificially" concentrate and amplify energy derived from other sources. Which, yes, may be chemical in origin (burning coal, etc.). So perhaps I should've said: "Second, any chemical reaction concievable can never DIRECTLY initiate fusion of nuclei, the difference in energy scales (per atom) between chemical bonds (electromagnetic force) and nuclear bonds (strong force) is orders of magnitude..." So I guess it could be said that, in a way, what fusion researchers in the laboratory are doing is to bridge those orders of magnitude using tricks of energy intensification and confinment.
sorry but you're wrong. this melted down enough for you? How about this? Perhaps this is molten enough for you to deem worthy of "meltdown" status? THE CHERNOBYL CORE MELTED DOWN. end of story.
"Use a molecule with an explosive bond that shoves two other molecules on a predefined pathway into a range where you get a 1% chance of reaction between two hydrogen nuclei, by tunnelling, and you could do it."
Um, what is an "explosive bond"? I'm sorry but this can never happen. First energy is released when bonds are FORMED, not broken. Second, any chemical reaction concievable can never initiate fusion of nuclei, the difference in energy scales (per atom) between chemical bonds (electromagnetic force) and nuclear bonds (strong force) is orders of magnitude. THAT is why cold fusion isn't real and never will be.
BTW, I work on the opposite side of the pond as a technician on the 'other' fusion here: http://www.lle.rochester.edu/. Friendly competition and all that. cheers!
This theory does not satisfy me. Let's assume it IS a meteorite hitting a lamp post. In order for it to produce a flash that size and not an earth shattering explosion it could only be like grain of sand size or a tiny pea size at the absolute largest. That is, if we are to assume the "trail" is actually a smoke trail. So how is this possible? Something the size of a pea travelling at hundreds of miles per second simply dosen't have the knietic energy to sustain that speed (a speed necessary to create a substantial smoke trail) considering the friction caused by travelling through the thick lower atmosphere (or thin upper atmosphere for that matter!) for more than a few thousand feet (a mile at most?) I'd estimate. Furthermore, in a long exposure like this one where the whole traversal of the the meteor trail is caught within the exposure, the trail should appear BRIGHT (from the glowing hot meteor or the hot plasma in the bow shockwave in front of the meteor itself) not dark as it does in the picture. The only way a meteor trail appears dark is if an image is taken after it passes and the resulting smoke trail attenuates background light(the famous 1972 fireball over Wyoming has a bright tail because it is so high in the atmosphere it is reflecting more sunlight back to the earth's surface than it is absorbing from behind the trail. 'cause it's so high up). So the only way I can see for this to actually be a meteor would be if the meteor started out with JUST EXACTLY enough mass and velocity when it entered the atmosphere to ablate precisely enough material so that it was only pebble sized and still be travelling hypersonically (BTW did he even hear a sonic boom? I think you'd remember that.) in it's last few thousand feet as it plunged toward the lamp post AND he would have had to open the shutter at the exact instant the meteorite struck the post to create the effect seen. We're talking like plus or minus nanoseconds here. I can't possibly imagine the odds of all these things happening just right to create the effect seen. So, would it not be possible that what we're seeing is simply a blown light bulb? It appears that the picture was taken at dusk and other lights on the dock have come on. We all know that when a lightbulb blows it produces a bright flash of light...could it be that by some strange atmospheric effect this would produce a dark streak where the light flash was shadowed by the lamp housing?
Slashdot Mirror
Obvious rivers of ....something!!
"Now if it were a gamma emitter, well that's a very different story"
Right. That's what I'm saying. It IS a gamma emitter too.
Oh really no idea what I'm talking about eh? Its been known for over half a century that alpha radiation is dangerous. Get a fucking clue and stop posting misinformation and falsehoods as if they were true.
wow, only on slashdot would a post saying that plutonium is neither highly radioactive or toxic be modded to +5 insightful. Plutonium is used in RTG's precisely because it is intensely radioactive!! Pu238 is seventeen times more radioactive than the same mass of radium. And yes plutonium is rather toxic if ingested or inhaled not only due to the fact that it is a heavy metal but also because it is highly radioactive and emits mostly alpha particles which have a large capability to destroy cells if in close proximity. Will 1 Kg kill everyone on earth? no, we've released many Kg into the atmosphere during nuclear weapons tests and most of us are still here. Are RTG's dangerous? Not really no. But it is only because of highly redundant and cautious engineering that this is so. Would someone with half a clue want to "bury an RTG under my children's playset"? No probably not. The relaxation of the Pu nucleus after it emits a low penetrating power alpha particle also then emits a high energy gamma ray with high mass penetrating potential which is not very nice to play around.
Seriously. I mean he's already got the pimp lifestyle all the ladies love.....
As always there are updates at spaceflightnow.com. It appears the spacecraft has safed itself as of a few minutes ago....not good.
You seem to know alot about the materials end of photovoltaics so let me ask you this. WTF ever happened to the multijunction GaN on sapphire systems that were supposed to achieve full solar spectrum conversion? This stuff came out like 3 years ago complete with huge fanfare and gushing mediagasm and then....nothing. Haven't heard a peep about it since. Sooo tired of this pattern of science by press release then nothing to show for it...
I feel I should chime in here, as the person who originally removed the geocities links from the article.
I removed the link because; number one - wikipedia does not publish original research, two -Jim Baldrson has been a known trollish crazy on Kuro5hin for years and a troll on Usenet for over a DECADE landing himself on a kook-of-the-month list way back in 1994, three -The ideas expressed on his geocities site (which is down now but I'll link anyway, maybe it'll be back up) are just plain insane. Here's a real gem: "Immigration Causes Autism" a lovely little racist tract (also, racist extremists endorse his views), fourth -he started editing wikipedia articles in suspicious anti-semitic and racist ways (see here, though these are merely revivals of his MANY earlier anti-Jewish ramblings) though his changes were reverted by other users fairly quickly, fifth -he seems to go "underground" when he's noticed by others as a problem and then starts posting changes to articles using only his IP. So in conclusion I think its quite clear that neither he nor his ideas or motives are trustworthy. He is closely watched on wikipedia right now and I doubt he will get away with too much shenanigans.
One hilarious bit of irony I can't help but relish is that he came here to cry a river about how he was being "censored" on wikipedia and then had four +5 comments posted below him agreeing with his opposition after recognizing him for the kook he is. Wow, congrats Jim!
It's calld a "printer friendly version".
This wattage/mile efficiency thing is always a neat trick. I doubt however, that anyone can beat what must be a record of some sort: the detection of the 10 watt (mostly) non-directional radio transmitter atop the Huygens probe while falling into the atmosphere of Titan by the Very Long Baseline Array when nearly 1 billion miles away. A feat expected to be achieved next week. The power collected by one of the 70 meter dishes on earth will be comparable to what was detected from the feeble low gain antenna on the Galileo Jupiter probe. This power is in the ZEPTOWATT range. (zeptowatt)
In addition to this, the VLBA will be used in interferometer mode (VLBI) in order to pinpoint the landing site of the probe on Titan to within 1Km!! This is equal to an angular resolution of approximately 170 microarcseconds. Thousands of times better than Hubble.
This is a really interesting concept. The designers say they won't fly the kite except in good weather so they won't have to worry about electrical storms etc. but I wonder if they have considered the atmosphere's natural electric field as well... It is estimated that the natural electric field potential between the earth's surface and the ionosphere is in the hundreds of thousands of volts range. While the current is usually very low for small but rather tall structures (regular kites, radio towers etc.) I would imagine that having a huge 5 mile wide kite 30 thousand!! feet up would make an immense difference in the current transmitted through a conducting wire to the ground. We may be talking about tens or perhaps even hundreds (??) of watts here. This will have to be dealt with and I imagine it could actually be used to perhaps, power some backup or secondary control equipment way up there.
Carl Sagan, who was on the Voyager imaging
team, sent him a JPL photo (he was a member on the voyager team) with a note scribbled on the back. it said: "Thinking of you"....
I think you were replying to the AC next to me but I'll reply anyway! :o) It's not a UFO and it's not a star and it's not a comet or planet. Its a proton, or perhaps, an electron. Accelerated to relativistic velocities by the soalr wind or saturn's magnetosphere (or both) it struck the cameras CCD at an angle and as it traveleld through, excited some electrons in the valence band of the semiconducting image detection layer to the conduction band, just like a photon of visible light would if it hit the detector and produced a streak in the image. It's called a "cosmic ray hit" and there is software to remove them from the images.
on second thought, try this server instead. Seems to be moving rather faster than the now /.ed "saturn.jpl.nasa" one.
....also many more images if you go straight to the raw feed.
I hereby bestow upon EpsCylonB the Most Insightful Comment of the Month Award. As an unrealistic and sometimes escapist type of guy, I often find myself daydreaming of a world where blind faith and fundamentalism are scorned and shunned in favor of rationality and science. I wonder what incredible things such a society could achieve and how incomprehensibly far away from it our own society, still nearly hopelessly mired in religion, mysticism and superstision is. Then I wonder if at a current age of 24 years old, I will ever live to even see the first hints of such a beautiful, proliferant civilization and then reality, with it's often painfully cruel truths (which, as a person of science and reason I find impossible to shun) sets in. And I realize that no, I will likely never know such a time.
Actual image of huygens receding from cassini here. Or right here---> [ .]
........."2005 is definitely the year for linux on the desktop!!"
Yes it is way more powerful than a nuclear power plant. The lasers will produce over 500 terawatts of power, far more than the entire electrical generating capacity of the world. Though only for 5ns or so. And I dont think it's a monstrosity, a debacle maybe but not a monstrosity :o). It's actually quite a beautiful machine I think; it will compress and heat its tiny hydrogen fuel capsule to temperatures and densities greater than those in the core of the sun, igniting the plasma in a self sustaining reaction. While the capsule will reach ignition (where alpha particle heating of the plasma dominates) it will not reach breakeven due to the abysmally low ~2-3% efficiency of the Nd:glass lasers used to compress the pellet and the less than perfect laser\plasma energy coupling.
That said, I must comment on the article at hand. This company and its ceo "Mark Ludwig" seem to be pure BULLSHIT. The claims of Impulse Devices cross the line from speculative/specious and would be aptly described as fraudulent. Sonoluminescence has not yet conclusively been linked to fusion and most scientists remain highly skeptical of the claim that it has, as other posts have pointed out. Even if it IS real the rate of fusion reactions is so incredibly low it's just above the threshold of detection. The rate will have to be scaled up by trillions of times to attain anything even nearing ignition scale no one has a clue how to do this and he says this will happen in 5 years??! Yeah I'm sure we're all holding our breath Mark. Oh, and another thing, the reporting on this article is a joke, for starters they're using a photo of NOVA which they apparently don't even know was totally dismantled like 5 years ago....
pffft.. who cares about some line for a new video game console. Look at the other pictures this guy's got on his page. They're really interesting and offer firsthand insight into Japanese culture. Look how neat this homeless guy's tent is! Or how, apparently, there are these weird/creepy sex museums called "Hihokan" all over the country. Fascinating.
"Counterexample: ATP, the chemical energy that human metabolic processes are based on, stores it's energy in bonds. When you remove phosphor atoms, you release that energy to do work"
It is unclear here that energy is released when bonds are formed and that it takes energy to break bonds (this is always always always the case) because you've oversimplified the reaction. The energy released by hydrolysis of ATP does not come from the breaking of the weak oxygen to phosphate bond, that TAKES energy to do, instead it comes from the formation of new bonds formed in the products. see here.
"By your reasoning therefore the only way to ever cause fusion to happen is through graviational compression. And yet there are tons of engineered systems based on the electromagnetic that have in fact done just that, we've just gotta optimize one of those systems so we put less energy into it than we get out..."
No that wouldn't follow from my reasoning. If you're thinking of a "hydrogen bomb" (thermonuclear bomb) the energy used to force the hydrogen atoms together in the thermonuclear part of the weapon is provided by fission in a "conventional" nuclear bomb using the energy released by the splitting of either uranium or plutonium nuclei (again, this involves the strong force not the electromagnetic force). The fact that energy is conveyed to the collapsing mass of H by EM radiation pressure (intense gamma and X-rays) is irrelevant.
If, on the other hand you're taling about our efforts to produce controlled fusion in a lab using various sorts of EM radiation (ultra powerful lasers, huge magnets and microwave heaters, etc.) then these techniques rely on tricks we use to "artificially" concentrate and amplify energy derived from other sources. Which, yes, may be chemical in origin (burning coal, etc.). So perhaps I should've said: "Second, any chemical reaction concievable can never DIRECTLY initiate fusion of nuclei, the difference in energy scales (per atom) between chemical bonds (electromagnetic force) and nuclear bonds (strong force) is orders of magnitude..." So I guess it could be said that, in a way, what fusion researchers in the laboratory are doing is to bridge those orders of magnitude using tricks of energy intensification and confinment.
Hope this clears things up.
sorry but you're wrong. this melted down enough for you? How about this? Perhaps this is molten enough for you to deem worthy of "meltdown" status? THE CHERNOBYL CORE MELTED DOWN. end of story.
"Use a molecule with an explosive bond that shoves two other molecules on a predefined pathway into a range where you get a 1% chance of reaction between two hydrogen nuclei, by tunnelling, and you could do it."
Um, what is an "explosive bond"? I'm sorry but this can never happen. First energy is released when bonds are FORMED, not broken. Second, any chemical reaction concievable can never initiate fusion of nuclei, the difference in energy scales (per atom) between chemical bonds (electromagnetic force) and nuclear bonds (strong force) is orders of magnitude. THAT is why cold fusion isn't real and never will be.
Is your username a cold fusion pun?
BTW, I work on the opposite side of the pond as a technician on the 'other' fusion here: http://www.lle.rochester.edu/. Friendly competition and all that. cheers!
This theory does not satisfy me. Let's assume it IS a meteorite hitting a lamp post. In order for it to produce a flash that size and not an earth shattering explosion it could only be like grain of sand size or a tiny pea size at the absolute largest. That is, if we are to assume the "trail" is actually a smoke trail. So how is this possible? Something the size of a pea travelling at hundreds of miles per second simply dosen't have the knietic energy to sustain that speed (a speed necessary to create a substantial smoke trail) considering the friction caused by travelling through the thick lower atmosphere (or thin upper atmosphere for that matter!) for more than a few thousand feet (a mile at most?) I'd estimate. Furthermore, in a long exposure like this one where the whole traversal of the the meteor trail is caught within the exposure, the trail should appear BRIGHT (from the glowing hot meteor or the hot plasma in the bow shockwave in front of the meteor itself) not dark as it does in the picture. The only way a meteor trail appears dark is if an image is taken after it passes and the resulting smoke trail attenuates background light(the famous 1972 fireball over Wyoming has a bright tail because it is so high in the atmosphere it is reflecting more sunlight back to the earth's surface than it is absorbing from behind the trail. 'cause it's so high up). So the only way I can see for this to actually be a meteor would be if the meteor started out with JUST EXACTLY enough mass and velocity when it entered the atmosphere to ablate precisely enough material so that it was only pebble sized and still be travelling hypersonically (BTW did he even hear a sonic boom? I think you'd remember that.) in it's last few thousand feet as it plunged toward the lamp post AND he would have had to open the shutter at the exact instant the meteorite struck the post to create the effect seen. We're talking like plus or minus nanoseconds here. I can't possibly imagine the odds of all these things happening just right to create the effect seen. So, would it not be possible that what we're seeing is simply a blown light bulb? It appears that the picture was taken at dusk and other lights on the dock have come on. We all know that when a lightbulb blows it produces a bright flash of light...could it be that by some strange atmospheric effect this would produce a dark streak where the light flash was shadowed by the lamp housing?