New materials, including alloys based on metals with higher melting points, such as molybdenum (Mo) and niobium (Nb) alloyed with silicon (Si), are now being seriously examined as alternatives by academic and industrial groups.
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Tuesday, November 24, 2009
'Smart' Armor Learns More With Every Bullet
Smart armor being developed by scientists and engineers at U.S. Army Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center in Michigan can not only predict its own failure, but also identify the size of bullets shot at it and even generate electrical power upon impact.
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Switchgrass Looks Like a Dream Field
If you grow it, the cars will run. That's still the idea behind cellulosic ethanol, which is biofuel from tough, reedy, and often discarded plant parts. A recent study indicates that switchgrass could yield the most biomass for this fuel.
Airbus A330 MRTT Demos Simultaneous Refuelling of 2 Fighters
The Airbus Military A330 MRTT (Multi Role Tanker Transport) continues to pass new programme milestones and has now demonstrated simultaneous refuelling of two fighters.
Splitting Time from Space—New Quantum Theory Topples Einstein's Spacetime
Was Newton right and Einstein wrong? It seems that unzipping the fabric of spacetime and harking back to 19th-century notions of time could lead to a theory of quantum gravity.
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IBM Reveals the Biggest Artificial Brain of All Time
IBM has revealed the biggest artificial brain of all time, a simulation run by a 147,456-processor supercomputer that requires millions of watts of electricity and over 150,000 gigabytes of memory. The brain simulation is a feat for neuroscience and computer processing—but it's still one-eighty-third the speed of a human brain and is only as large as a cat's.
How to Stop a Hurricane With Cold Water
Intellectual Ventures, a private company funded in part by Bill Gates, is in the business of chasing wild scientific ideas and, through research, finding out how feasible they are. Their latest project: How to stop hurricanes with cold water.
Warm surface water fuels big storms, so Intellectual Ventures proposes to suppress them by dumping cool water from massive floating bowls of unspecified size, deployed by airplane in front of a storm’s path.
New Reactor Uses Sunlight to Turn Water and Carbon Dioxide Into Fuel
Scientists at Sandia National Labs, seeking a means to create cheap and abundant hydrogen to power a hydrogen economy, realized they could use the same technology to "reverse-combust" CO2 back into fuel. Researchers still have to improve the efficiency of the system, but they recently demonstrated a working prototype of their "Sunshine to Petrol" machine that converts waste CO2 to carbon monoxide, and then syngas, consuming nothing but solar energy.
World's First Osmotic Power Plant Goes Live in Norway
The world's first osmotic power plant opened today in Tofte, Norway, utilizing the properties of salty seawater to generate a whopping 4 kilowatts of electricity for the grid, or about enough to power a coffee maker. But the Norwegian company running the project, Statkraft, is a glass-half-full kind of company, claiming that eventually osmotic plants could draw half of Europe's electricity from the saltiness of the sea.
New Mobile X-Ray Scanner for EOD Robots
At Milipol 09 Vidisco is introducing two new portable systems utilizing flat amorphous silicon panels – the Flat foX-17 and foX-Rayzor designed for operation with EOD robots. With these inspection systems a bomb disposal technician can analyze images on-site, identify and differentiate organic materials like explosives or drugs from inorganic substances like metals.
More Testing For New USAF Surveillance Radar
Testing of the U.S. Air Force’s new $1.2-billion developmental ground surveillance radar, which has previously suffered technical setbacks, is continuing and officials are confident that they have surpassed some of the more complex technical challenges with new modes for the system.
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