Could a Tyrannosaurus Rex bite through a modern day tank?
Per Glasstone and Sesonske’s Nuclear Reactor Engineering, “Alpha phase uranium is “soft and ductile, Beta phase is hard and brittle and Gamma phase is very soft”. Therefore I don’t believe the depleted uranium would help with a T-Rex on the battlefield.
via @rands
Chocolate printer crafts sculptures from cocoa
Using new digital technology, a printer designed by researchers in England allows you to create your own designs on a computer and reproduce them physically in three dimensional form in chocolate.
Kilobots Are Cheap Enough to Swarm in the Thousands
Kilobots or kill-o-bots?
Kilobots aren’t designed to be used on an individual basis. Costing a mere $14 each and buildable in about five minutes, you don’t just get yourself one single Kilobot. Or ten. Or a hundred. They’re designed to swarm in the thousands, although the Harvard group that’s working on them is starting out with a modest 25
New Alloy Can Convert Heat Directly Into Electricity
[T]he new alloy — Ni45Co5Mn40Sn10 — undergoes a reversible phase transformation, in which one type of solid turns into another type of solid when the temperature changes, according to a news release from the University of Minnesota. Specifically, the alloy goes from being non-magnetic to highly magnetized. The temperature only needs to be raised a small amount for this to happen.
But if it’s a phase transformation, it should be happening at a specific temperature. Once the material has heated up and you get your magnetic field, what then? The article and press release on which it was based don’t go into that.
During a small-scale demonstration in a University of Minnesota lab, the new material created by the researchers begins as a non-magnetic material, then suddenly becomes strongly magnetic when the temperature is raised a small amount. When this happens, the material absorbs heat and spontaneously produces electricity in a surrounding coil.
Faraday’s law tells us this should happen upon the creation of the magnetic field, but once it has happened — nada. You would need to cycle between states to maintain a changing field needed to continually produce electricity, so after heating you would need to then cool the substance.
The paper confirms this requirement
The design of the coil is to give a maximal component of E parallel to the wire, thereby driving a current. A potential difference across the coil of opposite polarity is obtained on the reverse phase transformation upon cooling.
So here “directly” doesn’t mean “directly” in the sense that you slap it on a car engine and produce electricity. You need a temperature gradient, just like always, and in this case, you need to bracket a specific temperature. Promising, but these headlines always seem to outnumber new products by a fair margin.
Lytro Camera Lets You Focus Pictures After Taking Them
When you take a picture, light is reflecting off various surfaces in various directions. A standard camera takes a ’shapshot’ of what it sees, recording the light that’s reflecting, but nothing about the direction. That gives you a standard photo. Light field pictures, however, also record information about the direction of the light, resulting in a picture that is more similar to a digital replica of the scene than a traditional ‘picture’ is. That is what lets you refocus.
SkydiveArena Prague, is a cutting edge engineering, 4,3m wide, first in the world 5m high all glass, completely circular & frameless, high tech wind tunnel – indoor skydiving facility, located in the heart of Europe, in Prague, Czech Rep.
Robots have better manual dexterity than I do. [sigh]
Australian built Hoverbike prepares for takeoff
Australian guy builds himself a hoverbike. A hoverbike!
Chris Malloy’s prototype hoverbike has so far not done anything but hover while tied to the ground, but that is in no way stopping its designer from making all kinds of wildly optimistic projections about its performance and availability.
I worry about stability. Primarily of the hoverbike, but also of the users if this thing goes into production. I don’t see a lot of resistance to rolling (rotation around the longitudinal axis), though there is mention of gyros in it. I’m guessing that the optimism of going to production soon, is going to meet up with harsh reality once he is able to do some actual flight tests.
The only video on their web page is a smoke test