This doesn't require laser cooling in anyway, as Liquied He cryostats can get to 30mK, Laser cooling isn't required unless you want to hit 1nK, and only really works on a few atoms at a time.
The actual advance is that it could become easier to create superconducting circuits that can do a job that normal silicon can't. e.g superconducting circuits can operate quite easily in the 100 GHz region, where all silicon circuits have to laid out as waveguides etc.
Most of the useful effects in superconducting circuits come from the presence of Shapiro steps and other microwave resonances in Josephson junctions and their ilk.
Quite a few, but not all of them have the other properties that DNA has. Basically there has to be a small band gap at the Fermi surface of the crystal, and a strong electron phonon interaction.
Some Japanese companies were working on this, but I think they're still building the prototype (it takes a long time to build a ship and a long time to modify what's inside it).
that's not the point. The point is that these circuits could be made self-assembling. Anyway, once you've got somethig to that temperature, it's quite easy to keep it there, especially since superconductors don't give off a lot of heat. This would allow much more complicated superconducting circuits, which no analogues in normal electronics, and also givves very low noise devices (thermal noise way down at these temps)
Most superconductors work between temperatures of 1mK and 4K, and it's not difficult to work at this temperature. Obviously it's not a lot of use for building MagLev trains or those sorts of uses for superconductivity, but it is very useful for building superconducting electronics, which have very different properties to semiconducter electronics. Self asssembly is one of the major goals of nanoelectronics and engineering, because it's far too hard to use lithography techniques at these scales (you have to use x-ray lithography, and that doesn't exist yet). So the idea is you mix up these enzymes, DNA strands etc. and give them the right heat treatments, and out pops your circuit. At the moment nanoelectronics uses electron microscopes and atomic force microsopes to make circuits, which is very slow.
Re:In the scheme of things it doesn't really matte
on
Heart Surgery By Robot
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· Score: 1
Not average, maybe. But medicine is more worried about individual cases, where surgery on a child born with a hole in the heart (a fairly common condition, for childhood illnesses) adds 70 odd years. Plus surgery is used for fixing accidents and trauma, which will never go away.
But it's right to dismiss him because he's a media whore, doesn't back up his speculation with logic and still calls it science, and gives crap lectures with really bad demonstrations (i.e. can't even get a pendulum to work right).
Oh and he has a chip in his arm, which communicates with one in his wife's arm, and reads his muscle movements, and somehow makes him a cyborg. As Jeremy Paxman said in a radio 4 interview with him, "So it doesn't do anything a human couldn't"
If you prepared to actually block the domians of anything that might be bad in your eyes, then it's quite possible. It's not like the Chinese government care about how much is blocked for no reason. A case in point is that a compsci here at Cambridge wrote a web proxy that altered the html going through it in order to improve the presentation for visually impaired people (including himself). This also had the effect of allowing Chinese web users to view blocked sites. As a result, the Chinese government blocked the entirity of the Cambridge University domain, and only after negotiations with their embassy and a code change to prevent anyone from inside China using the proxy, was the block lifted.
W.H.Smith (a newsagents/bookstore chain) in the UK at least, is selling adventure holiday packages (you know the type, rally car driving, paragliding, helicopter flights type stuff), and at the expensive end of the range is a package promising a trip on a commercial passenger spaceflight at the earliest opportunity. The asking price is either £10,000 or £100,000 (There wasn't a price easily on display in the shops, but my brother works for them and couldn't remember the number of zeros). They reckon you should collect on your purchase sometime in 2003 (by which time your £100,000 should have grown somewhat as well), and give you various things to help prepare you for your trip.
Hmm, the machine this story talks about isn't a Z pinch though, but a birdcage inertial confinement device, like those built by Imperial College, London for the last few years.
I suppose the problems here is with making the birdcage of frozen D wires big enough that the amount of energy used to vaporise the wires is less than that released by the D-T reaction. The main problem here is that the multiple outwards going shockwaves of the vaporising wires have to be modified so that it squeezes an amount of D and T inwards in a cylindrically symmetric fashion. This is a very difficult problem as the team that worked on the plutonium bomb found out. Their solution (explosive lenses) can't be used here, so the problems with scaling up the birdcage is making the implosion of the D-T wires smooth enough to confine the D-T together for a useful amount of time.
Depends on the quantity of deuterium and tritum in the thing and how often a reaction takes place, basically each collision between deuterium and tritum nuclei that react releases a few MeV of energy (can't remember the exact amount, but it's 6 MeV for 4 x hydrogen -> helium in p-p chain in stars).
Power output = number of reactions per sec x few MeV - power input to keep machine running. For tokamaks the power output / power input ratio improves as the machine gets bigger, but so do the difficulties of making the magnets. The same is true of a Z Pinch (which is actually a magnetic confinement device) but the rate the ratio increases with size is different.
Of course shielding the fast neutrons so that they don't reach the outside world at high energies requires... wait for it... 3 metres of concrete.
The activated material (which isn't that much as some of the material can just absorb neutrons without being activated) has a fairly short half life (~50 yrs) during which time it can be stored in... more concrete. This is much easier than fission waste which has a half-life ~50000 yrs during which it must be stored safely.
theres no side effects of using it in the same way that theres no side effects of having your photo taken, it just picks up what radiation (in the very general sense of the word) your brain already gives out.
Given that computer hardware shipments to Iraq have been banned since 1991, a PS2 is a hell of a lot more useful than you might think, even if you rip it's guts out for components. Plus I expect Iraq has a few experts who have been looking at cannabalisation of old computer equipment to try and keep up with the rest of the world.
The fact that extremely intelligent kids also count as special needs (in the sense that the normal school curriculum will be far to easy for them) is only just being realised nationally in Britain.
I was extremely bored at school, until I started reading a lot of other stuff outside of school and thinking about that in lessons instead. Unfortunately I then got in trouble for not listening to the teacher, right up till I maxed the test on what was being taught in lessons.
Other very bright kids sometimes tend to go in for trouble making, just because they're bored. My mother works as a special needs helper and has to deal with one boy (7 or 8) that attacks classmates randomly in lessons, but when he is removed from the class and sent to sit in the library will quite happily read encyclopedias and maths textbooks. In this case it is much better for the child that he isn't taught with his peers, since he does socialise with them in breaks etc. and if he is bored from class he tends to carry on acting in a violent manner.
There are no laws of nature, as they're all theories. The only laws that can have no exceptions are mathematical theorems, and they are still dependent on the assumed axioms being correct (which isn't really a problem, if the axioms are stated as part of the law)
I want to earn lots of money so I can buy lots of shit that will make me happy.
Actually, no I don't, I want to do science. I can't think of anything more boring than just trying to make money, by working in a high paying job in a bank or management consultancy.
Besides, lots of physicists are now making money, such as all my lecturers, who have invented several polymer semiconductor technologies.
What's the cost of storing the spent fuel for ~10,000 years before it's radioactivity drops below background? Certainly fusion only produces helium 4 which is entirely safe and makes up 25% of the universe, and a few neutron irradiated waste components, which generally have short half lives, whereas uranium and plutonium fission produce large amounts of radioactive thorium, and middleweight elements (around the mass of krypton).
The capital costs of fusion plants aren't yet known as it depends on the rate of building and the future availability of large quantities of superconducting materials. In a AIP report last week the Los Alamos lab reported a novel method of making high Tc superconducting tape in large quantities which would reduce the cost of the poloidal magnets in a regular D x-section tokamak as used at JET. I would say that the figures in this report are tenuous in the extreme as until fusion plants are built on regular basis, the capital costs are unknown. Noone knows how hard it would be to produce fusion plants until the first one is built at least.
On other matters, the cost of the fuel also depends heavily on demand. The current demand for deuterium and tritum is minuscule compared to the demand for uranium. both deuterium and tritum are far more widely available than uranium, and are universially available in much larger quantities.
So they can get a signal at a flux of 5.7 x 10^-21 W/m^2. I'm impressed. Even on a 70m telescope this is 3.5 x 10^-16 Watts, which is the a signal to thermal noise at 20C of 0.025
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This doesn't require laser cooling in anyway, as Liquied He cryostats can get to 30mK, Laser cooling isn't required unless you want to hit 1nK, and only really works on a few atoms at a time.
The actual advance is that it could become easier to create superconducting circuits that can do a job that normal silicon can't. e.g superconducting circuits can operate quite easily in the 100 GHz region, where all silicon circuits have to laid out as waveguides etc.
Most of the useful effects in superconducting circuits come from the presence of Shapiro steps and other microwave resonances in Josephson junctions and their ilk.
Quite a few, but not all of them have the other properties that DNA has. Basically there has to be a small band gap at the Fermi surface of the crystal, and a strong electron phonon interaction.
And you'd ready have the leetest oc cooling system in place, liquid helium cooling.
Some Japanese companies were working on this, but I think they're still building the prototype (it takes a long time to build a ship and a long time to modify what's inside it).
that's not the point. The point is that these circuits could be made self-assembling. Anyway, once you've got somethig to that temperature, it's quite easy to keep it there, especially since superconductors don't give off a lot of heat. This would allow much more complicated superconducting circuits, which no analogues in normal electronics, and also givves very low noise devices (thermal noise way down at these temps)
Most superconductors work between temperatures of 1mK and 4K, and it's not difficult to work at this temperature. Obviously it's not a lot of use for building MagLev trains or those sorts of uses for superconductivity, but it is very useful for building superconducting electronics, which have very different properties to semiconducter electronics. Self asssembly is one of the major goals of nanoelectronics and engineering, because it's far too hard to use lithography techniques at these scales (you have to use x-ray lithography, and that doesn't exist yet). So the idea is you mix up these enzymes, DNA strands etc. and give them the right heat treatments, and out pops your circuit. At the moment nanoelectronics uses electron microscopes and atomic force microsopes to make circuits, which is very slow.
Not average, maybe. But medicine is more worried about individual cases, where surgery on a child born with a hole in the heart (a fairly common condition, for childhood illnesses) adds 70 odd years. Plus surgery is used for fixing accidents and trauma, which will never go away.
But it's right to dismiss him because he's a media whore, doesn't back up his speculation with logic and still calls it science, and gives crap lectures with really bad demonstrations (i.e. can't even get a pendulum to work right).
Oh and he has a chip in his arm, which communicates with one in his wife's arm, and reads his muscle movements, and somehow makes him a cyborg. As Jeremy Paxman said in a radio 4 interview with him, "So it doesn't do anything a human couldn't"
Someone got to 8 qubits last year I think. Imagine... a computer that can operate on 8 bits only (one of, not clustered in any way what so ever).
You can't really program it yet (your program would have to less than 8 bits)
If you prepared to actually block the domians of anything that might be bad in your eyes, then it's quite possible. It's not like the Chinese government care about how much is blocked for no reason. A case in point is that a compsci here at Cambridge wrote a web proxy that altered the html going through it in order to improve the presentation for visually impaired people (including himself). This also had the effect of allowing Chinese web users to view blocked sites. As a result, the Chinese government blocked the entirity of the Cambridge University domain, and only after negotiations with their embassy and a code change to prevent anyone from inside China using the proxy, was the block lifted.
W.H.Smith (a newsagents/bookstore chain) in the UK at least, is selling adventure holiday packages (you know the type, rally car driving, paragliding, helicopter flights type stuff), and at the expensive end of the range is a package promising a trip on a commercial passenger spaceflight at the earliest opportunity. The asking price is either £10,000 or £100,000 (There wasn't a price easily on display in the shops, but my brother works for them and couldn't remember the number of zeros). They reckon you should collect on your purchase sometime in 2003 (by which time your £100,000 should have grown somewhat as well), and give you various things to help prepare you for your trip.
Hmm, the machine this story talks about isn't a Z pinch though, but a birdcage inertial confinement device, like those built by Imperial College, London for the last few years.
I suppose the problems here is with making the birdcage of frozen D wires big enough that the amount of energy used to vaporise the wires is less than that released by the D-T reaction. The main problem here is that the multiple outwards going shockwaves of the vaporising wires have to be modified so that it squeezes an amount of D and T inwards in a cylindrically symmetric fashion. This is a very difficult problem as the team that worked on the plutonium bomb found out. Their solution (explosive lenses) can't be used here, so the problems with scaling up the birdcage is making the implosion of the D-T wires smooth enough to confine the D-T together for a useful amount of time.
Depends on the quantity of deuterium and tritum in the thing and how often a reaction takes place, basically each collision between deuterium and tritum nuclei that react releases a few MeV of energy (can't remember the exact amount, but it's 6 MeV for 4 x hydrogen -> helium in p-p chain in stars).
Power output = number of reactions per sec x few MeV - power input to keep machine running. For tokamaks the power output / power input ratio improves as the machine gets bigger, but so do the difficulties of making the magnets. The same is true of a Z Pinch (which is actually a magnetic confinement device) but the rate the ratio increases with size is different.
Of course shielding the fast neutrons so that they don't reach the outside world at high energies requires... wait for it... 3 metres of concrete.
The activated material (which isn't that much as some of the material can just absorb neutrons without being activated) has a fairly short half life (~50 yrs) during which time it can be stored in... more concrete. This is much easier than fission waste which has a half-life ~50000 yrs during which it must be stored safely.
Umm
It's PASSIVELY scanning the brainwaves
theres no side effects of using it in the same way that theres no side effects of having your photo taken, it just picks up what radiation (in the very general sense of the word) your brain already gives out.
Except if you read the article, you'll see that he can't because computer hardware is sanctioned, but video games aren't (I don't know why).
If all you had was a bunch of PS2s, a bunch of 286's and American codes to crack, what would you think about using?
The cow certainly rocked
Briefly
Given that computer hardware shipments to Iraq have been banned since 1991, a PS2 is a hell of a lot more useful than you might think, even if you rip it's guts out for components. Plus I expect Iraq has a few experts who have been looking at cannabalisation of old computer equipment to try and keep up with the rest of the world.
The fact that extremely intelligent kids also count as special needs (in the sense that the normal school curriculum will be far to easy for them) is only just being realised nationally in Britain.
I was extremely bored at school, until I started reading a lot of other stuff outside of school and thinking about that in lessons instead. Unfortunately I then got in trouble for not listening to the teacher, right up till I maxed the test on what was being taught in lessons.
Other very bright kids sometimes tend to go in for trouble making, just because they're bored. My mother works as a special needs helper and has to deal with one boy (7 or 8) that attacks classmates randomly in lessons, but when he is removed from the class and sent to sit in the library will quite happily read encyclopedias and maths textbooks. In this case it is much better for the child that he isn't taught with his peers, since he does socialise with them in breaks etc. and if he is bored from class he tends to carry on acting in a violent manner.
There are no laws of nature, as they're all theories. The only laws that can have no exceptions are mathematical theorems, and they are still dependent on the assumed axioms being correct (which isn't really a problem, if the axioms are stated as part of the law)
I want to earn lots of money so I can buy lots of shit that will make me happy.
Actually, no I don't, I want to do science. I can't think of anything more boring than just trying to make money, by working in a high paying job in a bank or management consultancy.
Besides, lots of physicists are now making money, such as all my lecturers, who have invented several polymer semiconductor technologies.
I keep forgetting this point.
What's the cost of storing the spent fuel for ~10,000 years before it's radioactivity drops below background? Certainly fusion only produces helium 4 which is entirely safe and makes up 25% of the universe, and a few neutron irradiated waste components, which generally have short half lives, whereas uranium and plutonium fission produce large amounts of radioactive thorium, and middleweight elements (around the mass of krypton).
Oops, calculator + beer error (Milton brewery's Mammon is very good and very strong)
ignore this comment, it's full of shit.
The capital costs of fusion plants aren't yet known as it depends on the rate of building and the future availability of large quantities of superconducting materials. In a AIP report last week the Los Alamos lab reported a novel method of making high Tc superconducting tape in large quantities which would reduce the cost of the poloidal magnets in a regular D x-section tokamak as used at JET. I would say that the figures in this report are tenuous in the extreme as until fusion plants are built on regular basis, the capital costs are unknown. Noone knows how hard it would be to produce fusion plants until the first one is built at least.
On other matters, the cost of the fuel also depends heavily on demand. The current demand for deuterium and tritum is minuscule compared to the demand for uranium. both deuterium and tritum are far more widely available than uranium, and are universially available in much larger quantities.
So they can get a signal at a flux of 5.7 x 10^-21 W/m^2. I'm impressed. Even on a 70m telescope this is 3.5 x 10^-16 Watts, which is the a signal to thermal noise at 20C of 0.025
Frankly that's amazing.