a squirell-powered ultrasonic cleaning bath. There have been some solar panel-powered phones on the market already and I think our SquirellSonic(R) baths would be just as enviro-friendly and operate in outdoor setting.
I would maybe start with 2 product lines -the "Squirrel Companion" budget version (for university labs) and the heavy-duty "Squirrel Endeavor" model for demanding industry application. (Made of stainless steel and Teflon, with remote control and featuring multiple slots for up to 6 squirrels in tandem configuration).
1.the self-heating MREs packs contain chemicals which add quite a bit of weight. (So the special operation commandos tend to carry the non-heated meals). 2.Sure you can pee into the heating unit. But the article is about the re-hydrating the pouch content, not the heating unit
1. Problem with urea permeation is related to the fact that urea is a neutral molecule. Na+ and Cl- are smaller than urea.
2. Comparing to water and urea molecules, virus particles are HUGE. Even the smallest virus particles are built from hundreds of protein subunits (with the genetic material inside the capsule) and covered with sugars on surface. Each of these proteins is about 3 orders of magnitude bigger than urea, etc.
3. Piss contains smelly substances from the digested food and from human metabolism and those will not be removed by filtration. MREs tend to taste like Spam - or other canned luncheon meats. (It is the conservation process/curing, that does it). The combination of the two tastes must be like food from school cafeteria.
I can't see why they could not supply soldiers with some non-hydrated calory-rich stuff like M&Ms instead. I would rather live on sweets or sardines in oil for few days than having to draw on my own waters.
DMS (a very stinky volatile substance, making rotten cabbage to smell like rotting cabbage) gets oxidized to DMSO (odorless poorly volatile hygroscopic liquid). DMSO likes to stick to water molecules. Tthe resulting clump has lower vapor tension than water droplet - so the wet DMSO droplet starts growing.
DMSO is non-acidic. It may get broken down to methansulfonic acid eventualy (through dimethtlsulfone) but this is oxidative degradation is rather slow process. I think DMSO would rain out much sooner than that. I think the net contributing effect to acid rain is close to zero.
correction: liquid oxygen weight is responsible for most of the shuttle weight (8 tons of oxygen are needed to burn 1 ton of hydrogen) but the volume of liquid oxygen is actualy rather small, much smaller than the volume of liquid hydrogen. There are 2 tanks within the external tank - a small one for LOX sits on top, the rest underneath of it is filled with LH.
The reason for this "paradox" is extremely low density of liquid hydrogen.
LH tank weight is exactly the same problem with both shuttle and this approach (using LH as monopropellant + laser heating).
The main limitation of rocket propulsion is the weight of the oxidizer. Even with LOX (most weight-efficient oxidizer) the weight of the oxygen is 8x higher than the weight of hydrogen. And you need lotsa fuel/oxidizer to lift the weight of the fuel/oxidizer, etc. Any weight savings will greatly reduce the overal rocket mass and size.
Compared to shuttle (without SRBs) you would be flying the laser/hydrogen rocket with about the same tank of LH but without oxydizer.
In several technical fields I know off: Biology, Medicinal Chemistry and Medicine (MD inplace of PhD). What you need is to graduate from a good school and join a good company. For example, it is not difficult to skip a post.doc. and start working for a pharma company and make a 6-figure salary in few years. Myself, I do not have a Ph.D. - just M.S. in chemistry - and my salary is $92000 at the age of 35.
US spends more generously on research in natural sciences than any other country I know of. This wealth of government money helps to create companies and jobs. When they closed our company few yars ago, I got interviews with couple of companies located just across the parking lot. Last time I checked, there were approx 25 biotech companies just in Bay Area alone.
(Physicians have to spend 3 year in a residency program after Med. School - so they do have an equivalent of a post.doc. required for being able to practice. But after 3 years of residency and board exams - when they join a good private practice group - their income is often 6-figure right from the beginning.)
It may be hard to find a well-paying job with degree in high energy Physics, Botany or Acheology but it is not true that Ph.D. prospects in US are uniformly bleak. In fact, I am convinced that on average they are best in the world. Right now, programmers have hard time with outsourcing to Asia. (Sys-admin jobs however are stil reasonably easy to get.) But as long as US continues to have the best grad. schools in Biology and Chemistry and continue with current level of research funding, the outsourcing will probably not happen very soon in these fields.
What is bad in US is primary and high-school education. The salaries of primary and high school teachers in US are shitty so these teachers often tend to be low-qualified and low-spirited. The amount of red tape in elementary and high school is incredible, the discipline of students is appaling. High school often serve as reservoirs for kids that should be learning some useful skills in trade schools instead. It is hard to get good technical education with teachers and classmates like these. The highschool curriculum in science, math and history is on the level of the sixth-to eight grade in Eastern Europe. Colleges even sometimes canot make up the difference. When I did my GRE (an standard entry exam for grad school application) the hardest math problems in general section were about triangles and and equations with one x.
So it is logical that grad schools are looking for students from abroad and that industry loves to employ forigners. (I am Czech, my colleague is Swiss, our boss Chinese). I belive the problem is that good universal elementary and high school education would be too expensive. With elementar and high-school quality tied to local taxes, forigners in technical fields are the outcome.
Technologicaly speaking, you are daydreaming. It is unbelievably difficult to make even microscopic amount of differentialy end-functionalized nanotubes. You would need tonns of that stuff for the elevator.
I was thinking something rather different. It is known that single-wall carbon nanotubes in fluffy state (some preparation of nanotubes look like black cotton) will self-ignite on air when iradiated by fash from a camera.
(This has been discovered 2-3 years ago by accident, by a grad student making pictures of his own nanotubes - so that he could impress his date. As he was taking pictures, he noticed funny popping sounds coming from the nanotubes. So he called his prof to have look at the noisy nanotubes. They made few more close-up flashes and then the damn thing caught fire!)
This self-ignition happens because of the strong light absorbtion and extremely poor thermal conductivity of the single wall nanotubes.
So I was thinking - now you can spun the weak unbound fiber and take it into inert, oxygen-free atmosphere (maybe enriched with some hydrogen or hydrocarbon added). Then you "cure" the weak fiber with laser, preferably in a continuous process. With strong pulse irradiation, the achievable temperatures spikes could be extremely high. The hope is that the individual strands would cross-link. In the crosslink the structure will not be single-wall nanotube, of course, but somethig slightly less strong. But we may need perhaps only 2-5 crosslinks per one nanotube on average.
the physics in Prey was all wrong. If you want a swarm of microbes chasing people around (before eating them) the individual machines would have to be insect-sized (if they were smaller, microbe-like, the air drag would be so huge that they would need a nuclear power source to fly fast).
Take triphenylphosphine, reduce off one phenyl with sodium in liquid ammonia (or potassium in hot dioxane), alkylate the produced diphenyl phosphide anion with methyl iodide, reduce off the second phenyl. Isolate and purify by vacuum distillation. The entire synth 3-step sequence can be done in one flask.
Oh, and the apparatus with residue after the distillation likes to catch on fire when you let the air in. It is realy wonderful chemistry.
Rotting animals smell differently: there is a noticable difference between rotting cow and rotting pig smell (pig has a pork-chops like tone into the rot).
The worst smelling odour ever is Phe-PH-Me, methyl phenyl phosphine - It smells completely rotten sweet, like corpses mixed with over-ripe watermelons. I got fired from a university lab for making the stuff. (We did it on Sunday, in a remote abadoned lab. We though we de-contaminated all the glassware with bleach. I guess we just paralyzed our noses and could not smell the stuff anymore. We then brought the glassware back to our lab. The professor came back on Monday and that was end of my project and my work there. They actualy evacuated the whole building - we were late, people there were getting sick from the smell and they could not figure out what was it and where it was comming from)
Anything organic can be turned into gasoline. During WWII, german industry made petrol from soft brown coal. The coal-derived gasoline was expensive, about double the price of regular gasoline from oil.
John C. Lilly was one of the first victims of ketamine abuse. (He called it "my vitamine K") Lilly made quite a downhill route - from a brilliant iconoclastic scientist/physician all the way to a new-age incoherent shaman.
There was very telling, sad interview with Lilly in OMNIMAG archives (I believe it was taken offline recently). He ended up believing in a "world control center" staffed by aliens which was sending him messages by telephaty.
Also, the comments like "I took acid 20 times and feel no ill effects" sounds lot like "I played russian rullete and it did nothing to me". The stats are off because acid burnouts usualy do not post on Slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
a squirell-powered ultrasonic cleaning bath. There have been some solar panel-powered phones on the market already and I think our SquirellSonic(R) baths would be just as enviro-friendly and operate in outdoor setting.
I would maybe start with 2 product lines -the "Squirrel Companion" budget version (for university labs) and the heavy-duty "Squirrel Endeavor" model for demanding industry application. (Made of stainless steel and Teflon, with remote control and featuring multiple slots for up to 6 squirrels in tandem configuration).
The band Aqua got sued for their Barbie song. Mattel lost - even though the song used copyrighted Barbie slogans, verbatim.
...especialy from those vaccines recommended by "Professor Nutt, head of psychopharmacology "
1.the self-heating MREs packs contain chemicals which add quite a bit of weight. (So the special operation commandos tend to carry the non-heated meals).
2.Sure you can pee into the heating unit.
But the article is about the re-hydrating the pouch content, not the heating unit
1. Problem with urea permeation is related to the fact that urea is a neutral molecule. Na+ and Cl- are smaller than urea.
2. Comparing to water and urea molecules, virus particles are HUGE. Even the smallest virus particles are built from hundreds of protein subunits (with the genetic material inside the capsule) and covered with sugars on surface. Each of these proteins is about 3 orders of magnitude bigger than urea, etc.
3. Piss contains smelly substances from the digested food and from human metabolism and those will not be removed by filtration.
MREs tend to taste like Spam - or other canned luncheon meats. (It is the conservation process/curing, that does it). The combination of the two tastes must be like food from school cafeteria.
I can't see why they could not supply soldiers with some non-hydrated calory-rich stuff like M&Ms instead. I would rather live on sweets or sardines in oil for few days than having to draw on my own waters.
...and too salty
(Capt'n Crunch)
DMS (a very stinky volatile substance, making rotten cabbage to smell like rotting cabbage) gets oxidized to DMSO (odorless poorly volatile hygroscopic liquid). DMSO likes to stick to water molecules. Tthe resulting clump has lower vapor tension than water droplet - so the wet DMSO droplet starts growing.
DMSO is non-acidic. It may get broken down to methansulfonic acid eventualy (through dimethtlsulfone) but this is oxidative degradation is rather slow process. I think DMSO would rain out much sooner than that. I think the net contributing effect to acid rain is close to zero.
correction: liquid oxygen weight is responsible for most of the shuttle weight (8 tons of oxygen are needed to burn 1 ton of hydrogen) but the volume of liquid oxygen is actualy rather small, much smaller than the volume of liquid hydrogen.
There are 2 tanks within the external tank - a small one for LOX sits on top, the rest underneath of it is filled with LH.
The reason for this "paradox" is extremely low density of liquid hydrogen.
You are wrong.
LH tank weight is exactly the same problem with both shuttle and this approach (using LH as monopropellant + laser heating).
The main limitation of rocket propulsion is the weight of the oxidizer. Even with LOX (most weight-efficient oxidizer) the weight of the oxygen is 8x higher than the weight of hydrogen. And you need lotsa fuel/oxidizer to lift the weight of the fuel/oxidizer, etc. Any weight savings will greatly reduce the overal rocket mass and size.
Compared to shuttle (without SRBs) you would be flying the laser/hydrogen rocket with about the same tank of LH but without oxydizer.
In several technical fields I know off: Biology, Medicinal Chemistry and Medicine (MD inplace of PhD). What you need is to graduate from a good school and join a good company. For example, it is not difficult to skip a post.doc. and start working for a pharma company and make a 6-figure salary in few years. Myself, I do not have a Ph.D. - just M.S. in chemistry - and my salary is $92000 at the age of 35.
US spends more generously on research in natural sciences than any other country I know of. This wealth of government money helps to create companies and jobs. When they closed our company few yars ago, I got interviews with couple of companies located just across the parking lot. Last time I checked, there were approx 25 biotech companies just in Bay Area alone.
(Physicians have to spend 3 year in a residency program after Med. School - so they do have an equivalent of a post.doc. required for being able to practice. But after 3 years of residency and board exams - when they join a good private practice group - their income is often 6-figure right from the beginning.)
It may be hard to find a well-paying job with degree in high energy Physics, Botany or Acheology but it is not true that Ph.D. prospects in US are uniformly bleak. In fact, I am convinced that on average they are best in the world. Right now, programmers have hard time with outsourcing to Asia. (Sys-admin jobs however are stil reasonably easy to get.) But as long as US continues to have the best grad. schools in Biology and Chemistry and continue with current level of research funding, the outsourcing will probably not happen very soon in these fields.
What is bad in US is primary and high-school education. The salaries of primary and high school teachers in US are shitty so these teachers often tend to be low-qualified and low-spirited. The amount of red tape in elementary and high school is incredible, the discipline of students is appaling. High school often serve as reservoirs for kids that should be learning some useful skills in trade schools instead. It is hard to get good technical education with teachers and classmates like these. The highschool curriculum in science, math and history is on the level of the sixth-to eight grade in Eastern Europe. Colleges even sometimes canot make up the difference. When I did my GRE (an standard entry exam for grad school application) the hardest math problems in general section were about triangles and and equations with one x.
So it is logical that grad schools are looking for students from abroad and that industry loves to employ forigners. (I am Czech, my colleague is Swiss, our boss Chinese).
I belive the problem is that good universal elementary and high school education would be too expensive. With elementar and high-school quality tied to local taxes, forigners in technical fields are the outcome.
Is the inflatable escort doll included?
Technologicaly speaking, you are daydreaming. It is unbelievably difficult to make even microscopic amount of differentialy end-functionalized nanotubes. You would need tonns of that stuff for the elevator.
I was thinking something rather different. It is known that single-wall carbon nanotubes in fluffy state (some preparation of nanotubes look like black cotton) will self-ignite on air when iradiated by fash from a camera.
(This has been discovered 2-3 years ago by accident, by a grad student making pictures of his own nanotubes - so that he could impress his date. As he was taking pictures, he noticed funny popping sounds coming from the nanotubes. So he called his prof to have look at the noisy nanotubes. They made few more close-up flashes and then the damn thing caught fire!)
This self-ignition happens because of the strong light absorbtion and extremely poor thermal conductivity of the single wall nanotubes.
So I was thinking - now you can spun the weak unbound fiber and take it into inert, oxygen-free atmosphere (maybe enriched with some hydrogen or hydrocarbon added). Then you "cure" the weak fiber with laser, preferably in a continuous process. With strong pulse irradiation, the achievable temperatures spikes could be extremely high. The hope is that the individual strands would cross-link. In the crosslink the structure will not be single-wall nanotube, of course, but somethig slightly less strong. But we may need perhaps only 2-5 crosslinks per one nanotube on average.
these DNA-script kiddies, sitting all night behind their little small-poxes: I bet they are running pirated Windows on them too.
the physics in Prey was all wrong. If you want a swarm of microbes chasing people around (before eating them) the individual machines would have to be insect-sized (if they were smaller, microbe-like, the air drag would be so huge that they would need a nuclear power source to fly fast).
(...if you could work from her home)
Take triphenylphosphine, reduce off one phenyl with sodium in liquid ammonia (or potassium in hot dioxane), alkylate the produced diphenyl phosphide anion with methyl iodide, reduce off the second phenyl. Isolate and purify by vacuum distillation. The entire synth 3-step sequence can be done in one flask.
Oh, and the apparatus with residue after the distillation likes to catch on fire when you let the air in. It is realy wonderful chemistry.
Rotting animals smell differently: there is a noticable difference between rotting cow and rotting pig smell (pig has a pork-chops like tone into the rot).
The worst smelling odour ever is Phe-PH-Me, methyl phenyl phosphine - It smells completely rotten sweet, like corpses mixed with over-ripe watermelons. I got fired from a university lab for making the stuff. (We did it on Sunday, in a remote abadoned lab. We though we de-contaminated all the glassware with bleach. I guess we just paralyzed our noses and could not smell the stuff anymore. We then brought the glassware back to our lab. The professor came back on Monday and that was end of my project and my work there. They actualy evacuated the whole building - we were late, people there were getting sick from the smell and they could not figure out what was it and where it was comming from)
I memorized all common highly poisonous mushroom from a book at age of 5. The more ugly and dangerous, the more these mushroom attracted me.
Anything organic can be turned into gasoline. During WWII, german industry made petrol from soft brown coal. The coal-derived gasoline was expensive, about double the price of regular gasoline from oil.
John C. Lilly was one of the first victims of ketamine abuse. (He called it "my vitamine K") Lilly made quite a downhill route - from a brilliant iconoclastic scientist/physician all the way to a new-age incoherent shaman.
There was very telling, sad interview with Lilly in OMNIMAG archives (I believe it was taken offline recently). He ended up believing in a "world control center" staffed by aliens which was sending him messages by telephaty.
Also, the comments like "I took acid 20 times and feel no ill effects" sounds lot like "I played russian rullete and it did nothing to me". The stats are off because acid burnouts usualy do not post on Slashdot.