Polonium is horribly toxic BECAUSE of its unbelieveably high radioactivity rate. It is a radiotoxicity not a chemical toxicity. I'm sure Po also posesses chemical (heavy metal) toxicity properties as well but you would be stone dead from the radiotoxicity alone of a tiny dose LONG before any heavy metal toxicity was an issue. I don't think people are appreciating just how radiotoxic it actually is, for instance a mere tenth of a milligram of Po-210 would give you a dose hundreds of times greater than Louis Slotin had.
I know you're making a joke but this isn't as far fetched as I bet you think it is....It COULD have been done that way. The CEDE for ingested polonium (comitted efective dose equivalent) is an astounding 2,000 mREM/microcurie or 2,000 REM/millicurie (a lethal dose of radiation to 50% of people is only ~500 rem). He would need to ingest only.5-1 millicurie of Po-210 to get a lethal dose and each anti-static brush contains how much Po?.2-.5 millicuries per brush apparently.... I'm not saying that's how it happened, I'm sure the KGB has access to far larger amounts of Po that they would have used but it does give an idea of just how incredibly tiny an amount is needed to do harm. Even a THOUSAND TIMES the lethal dose of.5 mCi would be a mere tenth of a milligram.
If you're taking the stuff bussard spouts in that talk as reality I have a bridge to sell you. IEC schemes are nonequilibrium devices and hence ruled out for Q>1. google: Todd Rider.
interesting! especially since Bethe/Oliphant/Atkinson/Houtermans et al. didn't work out that fusion could even happen until ~1930 and the first farnsworth fusors weren't built 'till ~1960....
The Vela satellites only detect air bursts duh. They are totally obsolete. No country would be stupid enough to conduct an atmospheric test today. not even the "D"PRK.
What do you mean "nothing came of it"? Its all ponderomotive charged particle acceleration and plasma wave acceleration using lasers. THIS is what came of it!
Yeah the LHC produces proton collisions but protons are not fundamental particles, they are composite particles (3 quarks each + gluons)! They make "dirty" collisions with all sorts of particles flying everywhere. Electron positron collisions are much much "cleaner", the energy per individual fundamental particle is what matters. The international linear collider (a planned e- e+ collider) is hoped to achieve center of mass collisions of just 1 TeV and this will be sufficient to explore in depth the physics hinted at in the LHC at CERN. That means you only need two 500 GeV beams to do this. It looks to me like we're a mere ~2 orders of magnitude away from that point. All that has to be done now is a little succesive staging engineering and work to get the luminosity up.
No, the laser light is turned INTO the energy of the electron beam. It is not infinitely reusable.
That said, I don't see very many posts yet which address the central importance of this news. So let me do that now. THIS IS HUGE HUGE HUGE NEWS. I would be shocked if the LOASIS group weren't on stage with the king of Sweden in a decade or so. Seriously, that's how big this is. No one expected things to happen this fast in wakefield acceleration. No one. Just two years ago I posted a story here about the latest achievement of the same wakefield acceleration research group. They were then at 80 MeV electron energies over millimeters of acceleration distance using a 10 terawatt laser pulse. With 1,000-2,000 trillion watt (petawatt) lasers coming on line in the next few years and this new multi-cm acceleration distance possibility it is not beyond the realm of the plausible to expect to see hundred GeV, possibly even TeV energies coming out of these things. It takes the Stanford linear electron accelerator 2 miles to accelerate its 50 GeV electron positron beams! What we are witnessing is nothing short of a revolution in particle acclerators that will open up new frontiers of high TeV scale particle physics faster than anyone ever thought possible. This is the sort of breakthrough that happens once in 3 or 4 decades.... if you're lucky.
"...do we have any that can detect this sort of soft tissue beneath the bone? If so I think they should be standard equipment on any paleontological dig."
Yes. X-ray micro-computedtomographic scanning at what is rapidly approaching the submicron resolution level utilizing monochromatic intense collimated beams of synchrotron radiation coupled to high resolution scintillating film joined CCD detectors is fully up to the task. But you'll have to bring the fossils to it.
Are you kidding me? Either you didn't even bother to read the very article you linked to or you have the reading comprehension of a 3rd grader. The ENTIRE ARTICLE you linked is riddled with young earth creationist conspiracy wackyness!! It does matter what your source is for news. It always matters.
In your obvious haste to be first to point this out you clearly just linked to the first source you found on a simple search, which is a nutty creationist website. How about a slightly less wacky news source?
No problem. I think its fine to say we're certainly within the breakeven regime, we're obviously within a factor of 2 of the mark on the best devices with DT. It is not unlike the current state of things in the ICF world where we frequently talk of being "within the 'ignition regime'" for experiments done on, for instance, petawatt laser coupled fast ignition implosion experiments which are scaled for relevancy to the NIF 'true ignition' experimental regime.
I believe the GP is right. No one has actually achieved breakeven (except for Dr. Edward Teller in the 50's but those weren't exactly practical power producing devices since they tended to obliterate everything in a 20 mile radius!!). The JET in Culham UK came closest a few years back at ~70% breakeven with a 50/50 DT plasma. Those dots you are seeing on that plot are almost certainly extrapolated breakeven points. meaning they represent the DD reactions done on the Japanese JT-60 device which WOULD, if done with a DT plasma, have achieved breakeven at 125% gain. But since they have never gone to DT plasmas on that device, because they don't have the facilities to handle T, they have not strictly broken even. The first thermonuclear device to break even in the laboratory will be the national ignition facility at LLNL when it is completed in 3 years.
I concur about the tritium thing. There's NO WAY they've gone DT yet, that would be nuts. Am I correct in thinking that HT-7U (also (was) in china) is the only other superconducting tokamak ever built? That can't be right. KSTAR the Korean superconducting reactor is still in the planing stages and I am unaware of any others (perhaps with the exception of the hightemp superconductor in the levitated dipole experiment but that's not a tokamak really). It seems so obvious, if you want high B fields....why are there so few of these?
So, besides your own ass, could you tell us where you are pulling all these random indisputable facts about a technology which hasn't even been built yet from? super.
Yes I saw your LOX image, I suspected something because the edge of the bowl also looked suspiciously blue!! Its ok you are forgiven.;) really, making nitrogen ice by placing some liquid in a dewar and putting it under vacuum is surprisingly easy (look at the simple setup here for instance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Cryopreservatio n.jpg ). I've done it in a plastic cup and all you need is a vacuum pump of moderate heft. Unfortunately my bell jar was utterly filty and taking pictures would've been pointless. I also found it was impossible to get the ice (it looks just like an unflavored snowcone or slushie) out of the bell jar without melting it. No matter how quickly I let the air back in, much of the ice would melt from contact with the cold air blowing around inside and I would be left with an N2 slush by the time I was up to atmosphere. You know, on second thought, about the solid O2 thing..... I might be slightly worried about igniting the vacuum pump oil. There's not much of it usually and you could obviously cut off the pump retty quickly preventing a REAL catastrophe but better have an extinguisher on hand. Wait what the hell am I talking about you have experience with pounds of Na in a pond!!!
The image of liquid nitrogen in the unsilvered dewar you have is remarkably perfect. It is rare to see a picture of it so clearly due to the ever present misty cold vapor. It looks like you are using a bell jar to cover the dewar and take images of it. If so, have you ever considered pulling a vaccum on it so you could get nice pictures of solid nitrogen and oxygen? I would love love love to see how much of a deeper blue solid oxygen is compared to the liquid. cheers.
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Polonium is horribly toxic BECAUSE of its unbelieveably high radioactivity rate. It is a radiotoxicity not a chemical toxicity. I'm sure Po also posesses chemical (heavy metal) toxicity properties as well but you would be stone dead from the radiotoxicity alone of a tiny dose LONG before any heavy metal toxicity was an issue. I don't think people are appreciating just how radiotoxic it actually is, for instance a mere tenth of a milligram of Po-210 would give you a dose hundreds of times greater than Louis Slotin had.
I know you're making a joke but this isn't as far fetched as I bet you think it is....It COULD have been done that way. The CEDE for ingested polonium (comitted efective dose equivalent) is an astounding 2,000 mREM/microcurie or 2,000 REM/millicurie (a lethal dose of radiation to 50% of people is only ~500 rem). He would need to ingest only .5-1 millicurie of Po-210 to get a lethal dose and each anti-static brush contains how much Po? .2-.5 millicuries per brush apparently.... I'm not saying that's how it happened, I'm sure the KGB has access to far larger amounts of Po that they would have used but it does give an idea of just how incredibly tiny an amount is needed to do harm. Even a THOUSAND TIMES the lethal dose of .5 mCi would be a mere tenth of a milligram.
If you're taking the stuff bussard spouts in that talk as reality I have a bridge to sell you. IEC schemes are nonequilibrium devices and hence ruled out for Q>1. google: Todd Rider.
interesting! especially since Bethe/Oliphant/Atkinson/Houtermans et al. didn't work out that fusion could even happen until ~1930 and the first farnsworth fusors weren't built 'till ~1960....
yaay someone found one of my spectra useful! :) :) neato.
The light produced by a space heater is not inefficient. It is still absorbed by the walls etc. and converted to heat. no?
so, one wonders, how high were you when you posted this tosh?
The Vela satellites only detect air bursts duh. They are totally obsolete. No country would be stupid enough to conduct an atmospheric test today. not even the "D"PRK.
82-Sr cardio
What do you mean "nothing came of it"? Its all ponderomotive charged particle acceleration and plasma wave acceleration using lasers. THIS is what came of it!
Yeah the LHC produces proton collisions but protons are not fundamental particles, they are composite particles (3 quarks each + gluons)! They make "dirty" collisions with all sorts of particles flying everywhere. Electron positron collisions are much much "cleaner", the energy per individual fundamental particle is what matters. The international linear collider (a planned e- e+ collider) is hoped to achieve center of mass collisions of just 1 TeV and this will be sufficient to explore in depth the physics hinted at in the LHC at CERN. That means you only need two 500 GeV beams to do this. It looks to me like we're a mere ~2 orders of magnitude away from that point. All that has to be done now is a little succesive staging engineering and work to get the luminosity up.
No, the laser light is turned INTO the energy of the electron beam. It is not infinitely reusable.
That said, I don't see very many posts yet which address the central importance of this news. So let me do that now. THIS IS HUGE HUGE HUGE NEWS. I would be shocked if the LOASIS group weren't on stage with the king of Sweden in a decade or so. Seriously, that's how big this is. No one expected things to happen this fast in wakefield acceleration. No one. Just two years ago I posted a story here about the latest achievement of the same wakefield acceleration research group. They were then at 80 MeV electron energies over millimeters of acceleration distance using a 10 terawatt laser pulse. With 1,000-2,000 trillion watt (petawatt) lasers coming on line in the next few years and this new multi-cm acceleration distance possibility it is not beyond the realm of the plausible to expect to see hundred GeV, possibly even TeV energies coming out of these things. It takes the Stanford linear electron accelerator 2 miles to accelerate its 50 GeV electron positron beams! What we are witnessing is nothing short of a revolution in particle acclerators that will open up new frontiers of high TeV scale particle physics faster than anyone ever thought possible. This is the sort of breakthrough that happens once in 3 or 4 decades.... if you're lucky.
"...do we have any that can detect this sort of soft tissue beneath the bone? If so I think they should be standard equipment on any paleontological dig."
Yes. X-ray micro-computedtomographic scanning at what is rapidly approaching the submicron resolution level utilizing monochromatic intense collimated beams of synchrotron radiation coupled to high resolution scintillating film joined CCD detectors is fully up to the task. But you'll have to bring the fossils to it.
lol. you fail it.
Are you kidding me? Either you didn't even bother to read the very article you linked to or you have the reading comprehension of a 3rd grader. The ENTIRE ARTICLE you linked is riddled with young earth creationist conspiracy wackyness!! It does matter what your source is for news. It always matters.
In your obvious haste to be first to point this out you clearly just linked to the first source you found on a simple search, which is a nutty creationist website. How about a slightly less wacky news source?
ZOMGZ! u work at FNAL on CDF?
No problem. I think its fine to say we're certainly within the breakeven regime, we're obviously within a factor of 2 of the mark on the best devices with DT. It is not unlike the current state of things in the ICF world where we frequently talk of being "within the 'ignition regime'" for experiments done on, for instance, petawatt laser coupled fast ignition implosion experiments which are scaled for relevancy to the NIF 'true ignition' experimental regime.
I believe the GP is right. No one has actually achieved breakeven (except for Dr. Edward Teller in the 50's but those weren't exactly practical power producing devices since they tended to obliterate everything in a 20 mile radius!!). The JET in Culham UK came closest a few years back at ~70% breakeven with a 50/50 DT plasma. Those dots you are seeing on that plot are almost certainly extrapolated breakeven points. meaning they represent the DD reactions done on the Japanese JT-60 device which WOULD, if done with a DT plasma, have achieved breakeven at 125% gain. But since they have never gone to DT plasmas on that device, because they don't have the facilities to handle T, they have not strictly broken even. The first thermonuclear device to break even in the laboratory will be the national ignition facility at LLNL when it is completed in 3 years.
I concur about the tritium thing. There's NO WAY they've gone DT yet, that would be nuts. Am I correct in thinking that HT-7U (also (was) in china) is the only other superconducting tokamak ever built? That can't be right. KSTAR the Korean superconducting reactor is still in the planing stages and I am unaware of any others (perhaps with the exception of the hightemp superconductor in the levitated dipole experiment but that's not a tokamak really). It seems so obvious, if you want high B fields....why are there so few of these?
So, besides your own ass, could you tell us where you are pulling all these random indisputable facts about a technology which hasn't even been built yet from? super.
Yes I saw your LOX image, I suspected something because the edge of the bowl also looked suspiciously blue!! Its ok you are forgiven. ;) really, making nitrogen ice by placing some liquid in a dewar and putting it under vacuum is surprisingly easy (look at the simple setup here for instance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Cryopreservatio n.jpg ). I've done it in a plastic cup and all you need is a vacuum pump of moderate heft. Unfortunately my bell jar was utterly filty and taking pictures would've been pointless. I also found it was impossible to get the ice (it looks just like an unflavored snowcone or slushie) out of the bell jar without melting it. No matter how quickly I let the air back in, much of the ice would melt from contact with the cold air blowing around inside and I would be left with an N2 slush by the time I was up to atmosphere. You know, on second thought, about the solid O2 thing..... I might be slightly worried about igniting the vacuum pump oil. There's not much of it usually and you could obviously cut off the pump retty quickly preventing a REAL catastrophe but better have an extinguisher on hand. Wait what the hell am I talking about you have experience with pounds of Na in a pond!!!
The image of liquid nitrogen in the unsilvered dewar you have is remarkably perfect. It is rare to see a picture of it so clearly due to the ever present misty cold vapor. It looks like you are using a bell jar to cover the dewar and take images of it. If so, have you ever considered pulling a vaccum on it so you could get nice pictures of solid nitrogen and oxygen? I would love love love to see how much of a deeper blue solid oxygen is compared to the liquid. cheers.
you can put one detector in a single spot below it and just have it look in all directions using atmospheric muons which come in at low angles.
I predict two people will understand what you are talking about there......and here we are.