Next Big Future

DARPA Power Efficiency Revolution Project targets 75 gigaflops per watt

noreply@blogger.com (bw) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 10:12:55 PST

DARPA’s Power Efficiency Revolution for Embedded Computing Technologies (PERFECT) program seeks to improve power efficiency for embedded computer systems, providing more computing per watt of electrical power. To increase awareness of this program and attract potential researchers, DARPA has scheduled a Proposers’ Day workshop Feb. 15 in Arlington, Virginia.

The goal of 75 GFLOPS/watt would enable a 15 megawatt supercomputer to achieve an EXAFlop of processing.

In the past, computing systems could rely on increasing computing performance with each processor generation. Following Moore’s Law, each generation brought with it double the number of transistors. And according to Dennard’s Scaling, clock speed could increase 40 percent each generation without increasing power density. This allowed increased performance without the penalty of increased power.

As transistor operating voltages approach logic threshold voltage, device operating characteristics change dramatically, decreasing both reliability and maximum operating frequency. Since reliability and operating frequency are critical to its user base, commercial industry has only limited ability to reduce operating voltage to avoid these clock frequency decreases. PERFECT seeks revolutionary approaches to processing-power efficiency to overcome these limitations. This approach includes near threshold voltage operation and massive heterogeneous processing concurrency, combined with techniques to effectively use the resulting concurrency and tolerate the resulting increased rate of soft errors.

PERFECT aims to achieve the 75 GFLOPS/w goal by taking novel approaches to processing power efficiency. These approaches include near threshold voltage operation and massive heterogeneous processing concurrency, combined with techniques to effectively use the resulting concurrency and tolerate the resulting increased rate of soft errors. The program seeks to leverage and incorporate anticipated industry fabrication geometry advances to 7 nanometers. PERFECT does not plan to build hardware, rather it seeks to develop a simulation capability to measure and demonstrate progress. It plans to specifically address embedded systems processing power efficiencies and performance, and is not concerned with developments that focus on exascale processing issues.

PERFECT program envisions three phases. The first phase initiates concept development and looks to provide sufficient proof of impact on processing power efficiency to justify continuing development. The second phase will work to develop technology and techniques to obtain processing system improvement of 75-times greater processing power efficiency. In this phase the performance impact of each development expects to be validated by simulation or equivalent demonstration. The goal of the third phase is to develop each technology or technique and provide a path to implementation.

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Why there has been no rush for over 15 billion barrels of recoverable oil in Monterey California

noreply@blogger.com (bw) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 09:53:36 PST

Argus Media - California's Monterey formation, which the EIA estimates holds 15.4 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil, cannot even attract new investment from the oil major in its home state, Chevron.

Other than Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum (Oxy), no major or large independent is earmarking drilling capital for the Monterey.

The reticence to invest stems from a combination of factors, from geology to the high cost of doing business in California.

Oxy, which produces about 45,000 b/d of oil equivalent (boe/d) from California shale, said its Monterey wells have average initial production rates of about 370 boe/d. Some wells in other shale resource plays, such as the Granite Wash of Texas and Oklahoma, start up with output more than five times that high.

But one economic plus of the Monterey is that California oil sells at prices in the same range as Brent crude, rather than West Texas Intermediate (WTI). Another plus: some wells can be drilled vertically and stimulated with hydrofluoric acid, which is cheaper than horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. Monterey oil deposits are 6,000-12,000ft below ground.

“If we went back to what we said roughly a year ago or a little more than a year ago, I think we are a little more optimistic on the verticals and a little more pessimistic on the horizontals,” Oxy chief executive Stephen Chazen said.

Oxy's pace of development may be slowed by California's permitting process, which would become even more difficult under proposed state legislation. A bill seeks to impose additional reporting and record keeping requirements designed to protect groundwater, even in desert areas where no groundwater is present.

The company's California shale-drilling program, including 150-175 wells this year, will yield “more predictable production growth going forward.” While Oxy has permits in hand to continue its current pace of drilling through the end of 2011, Chazen acknowledges “some uncertainty around future permits, particularly related to injection wells.”

“If we can get the permitting issues worked out in the next six months, you will see significantly higher rig counts in California,” he said. “Right now, I just do not have a basis to raise that rig count in California. I do not have enough confidence in the permitting process.”

Companies are not only slow to move because of politics. Major producers have tied up much of the land in the Monterey, but they have little incentive to exploit the formation when shallower deposits in the same region offer lower costs and potentially higher returns, according to Mike Edwards, vice-president at US independent Venoco.

The oil boom will happen when aggressive oil players like Hess and Continental Resources buy out positions of the oil majors and overcome any regulations in California.

Monterey Geology

Energy and Petroleum Magazine - The Monterey is not likely to see the types of multi-stage fracs performed in other shale plays, with operators preferring large-volume hydrofluoric acid jobs. Edwards said that Occidental Petroleum (Oxy) published a white paper several years ago stating that its engineers didn’t see an economic benefit to hydraulic fracturing. “We’ve tried some fracs,” he said. “We haven’t concluded that the model doesn’t work, but we believe acid jobs will yield better results overall.”

Overall, the Monterey shale is estimated to contain more than 400 Billion barrels of original oil in place.

It remains to be seen if new superfracking techniques will be superior to hydroflouric acid.

The Monterey shale is rather atypical of the types of shales found elsewhere in the country. For one thing, it’s much younger, only about five to 17 million years old compared to other shales that are around 300 million years old. This means that the shale is in the peak oil generating window.

It’s also quite thick and not at all homogeneous. It’s been characterized as a large deposit of diatomaceous material. At shallower depths it has very low permeability and needs stimulation to recover oil. Further down, as temperature and pressure increase, the shale becomes more brittle and contains more natural fractures. Ultimately it evolves into a quartz phase, and any part of the shale may contain sandstones as well.

Occidental Petroleum investory report from November, 2011

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Transcript and Video Newt Talking about Space and Moon colonization

noreply@blogger.com (bw) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 08:32:06 PST

There is a seven page transcript about Newt Gingrich talking about his passion for space and colonizing the moon.

We did a movie called A City upon a Hill and we had Buzz Aldrin in the movie, and he is so convincing, and he said you have to realize the only person who had gone around the Earth at that point was Yuri Gagarin, a Russian, and the only American who had been in space had been on a suborbital flight. And here’s the President saying we will get to the Moon inside this decade. And you had to invent everything. Yeah, we had all the precursors and we had the V-2 and we had this and we had that, but the truth was if you listed every problem they solved by July of 1969, its one of the great periods of development in human history. And they just did it.

I’m giving this background for our friends in the news media because twice recently Governor Romney has made fun of me for having bold ideas in space and has suggested that the idea of having a permanent lunar colony – he actually didn’t catch the weirdest thing I’ve ever done and I’m going to tell you all because sooner or later his researchers will find it – at one point early in my career I introduced the Northwest Ordinance for Space, and I said when we get – I think the number was 13,000 – when we have 13,000 Americans living on the Moon they can petition to become a state.

And here’s the difference between romantics and so-called practical people. I wanted every young American to say to themselves: I could be one of those 13,000. I could be a pioneer. I need to study science and math and engineering. I need to learn how to be a technician. I can be part of building a bigger, better future. I can actually go out and live the future looking at the solar system and being part of a generation of courageous people who do something big and bold and heroic.

And I will as President encourage the introduction for the Northwest Ordinance for Space to put a marker down that we want Americans to think boldly about the future and we want Americans to go out and study hard and work hard, and together we are going to unleash the American people to rebuild the country we love [applause].

So, I’m going to give you a set of goals and then I’m going to make a set of observations about how to achieve those goals.

By the end of my second term we will have the first permanent base on the Moon, and it will be American.

We will have commercial near-Earth activities that include science, tourism, and manufacturing, and are designed to create a robust industry precisely on the model that was developed by the airlines in the 1930s, because it is in our interest to acquire so much experience in space that we clearly have a capacity that the Chinese and the Russians will never come anywhere close to matching.

And by the end of 2020 we will have the first continuous propulsion system in space capable of getting to Mars in a remarkably short time, because I am sick of being told we have to be timid, and I’m sick of being told we have to be limited to technologies that are 50 years old.

Candidly, if we truly inspire the entrepreneurial spirits of America, we may get some of this stuff a lot faster. Now, I’m going to make some modest observations and some big observations.

Modest Observation Number 1: We should be practical about using equipment. That is, for example, the Atlas 5 ought to be interchangeable and ought to be as usable for NASA projects as it is for Air Force projects. We should get in the habit of absorbing small units of space. You know, it’s very difficult right now to get the bureaucracy to think about the fact that somebody is about to launch a commercial launch and it actually has a little extra space for 40 pounds, but that doesn’t fit either the NASA or the military model. When we fly troops around we normally fly them on commercial airliners with other people. So we’re used to the idea that you can share space. You can send things that don’t have to be a military-only aircraft, or a NASA-only aircraft. I just suspect that even the NASA administrators actually fly on commercial planes with other people. So I want to know if we break down all the bureaucratic barriers and we go to what I want to call a common sense model: If it’s cheaper, faster, and it works – do it!

Second: We need to learn how to do five or eight launches a day, not one. We need to get in the habit of saying: You know, this is going to be like an airport. We are going to be so busy – you know, if we are going to be getting to the Moon permanently and be starting to get to Mars and build this near-Earth capability, and do it all within eight years, we better start thinking more like airports than like space systems.

And we better start figuring out – so how are we going to manage this many things? It’s not that we can’t do it, it’s just that we just don’t push ourselves, we don’t think about it, we don’t design the systems for it. But I want constant activity. There’s a reason. The World War II generation built tons of airplanes, so the designers that came out of World War II made lots of mistakes. And they learned from them. If you are a military aircraft designer today, you are lucky if you work on more than one airplane in your lifetime. That’s how slow and cumbersome and bureaucratic we’ve become. You don’t have any learning curve.

I want us to have so much constant energetic, excited activities that people are learning again. And that we’re drawing the best talent in the country back to the Space Coast because it’s exciting and it’s dynamic and who knows what next week is going to be like. And does that mean I’m a visionary? You betcha!

You know, I was attacked the other night for being grandiose. I just want you to know: Lincoln standing at Council Bluffs was grandiose. The Wright Brothers going down to Kitty Hawk was grandiose. John F. Kennedy standing there saying we’ll get to the Moon in eight years was grandiose. I accept the charge that I am an American and Americans are instinctively grandiose because they believe in a bigger future.

Now just a couple more core observations. I want you to understand where I’m coming from. I very much believe in a project you can Google called Strong America Now, which is an effort to develop “Lean Six Sigma” for the Federal Government. I believe we’ve got to become agile, lean, competent, constantly evolving, and that means replacing the civil service laws that are 130 years old with a totally new practical management system that comes much closer to the way Boeing is doing the Dreamliner. Callista and I went down to Boeing outside of Charleston and they were walking us through – I don’t know how many of you know this, but this is just an example – The Dreamliner is built in Italy, Wichita, Japan, and Korea, and it’s flown in in units that are then brought together at Charleston. And they are walking around and they said this particular work area currently takes sixteen days – our goal is to get it down to six with the same number of people.

And I looked at that and I thought to myself – Department of Housing and Urban Development [laughter]. But let’s be honest, I could have said Air Force Space Command, I could have said NASA. I mean we want to become lean and aggressive, and here’s my bias: They told me in the Corps of Engineers that in order to improve the Port of Charleston so they could receive ships that are starting to come through the Panama Canal in 2014 when they finish widening it, that to do the study of the project takes eight years. Not the project – the study! And I said to them: you know we fought the 2nd World War in three years and eight months, so we beat Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan, in 44 months.

Now I want to imprint this on you because if I become your President…you will have a 365 day a year relentless pressure to be faster, quicker, leaner, more innovative, more thoughtful, more daring, more visionary.

So let’s go back to how to do it. I would want 10% of the NASA budget set aside for prize money. Lindberg flies to Paris for $25,000. You set up prizes – for example, I forget what the Bush administration estimate was, but it was something like $450 billion to get to Mars with a manned mission. So let’s put up $10 billion. And if somebody figures it out, we save $440 billion. If they don’t figure it out, it didn’t cost us anything.
But you’ll have for $10 billion – and I’d make it tax free because Americans love things tax free so much. It’s not the monetary value, it’s the psychic thrill that Uncle doesn’t get any of it. And this is why you are going to have to learn to have a lot more launches every day because if we put up the right prizes – and Bob Walker and I, shortly before I left Congress, actually hosted a two-day National Academy of Engineering Workshop on prizes, which is online, as it was published, and we were talking about the historic use of prizes going back to the 17th Century. You put up a bunch of interesting prizes, you are going to have so many people showing up who want to fly, it’s going to be unbelievable.

So the model I want us to build is largely the model of the 20s and 30s, when the government was actively encouraging development, but the government wasn’t doing it. The government was paying a reward, it was subsidizing the airmail, it was doing a variety of things. There were prizes – you know, Jimmy Doolittle got famous winning prize money before World War II, then he got famous for bombing Tokyo; I mean, he had a life that was very interesting.

We’d be better off to do 1% of the current studies and ten times the number of experiments just flying. If it doesn’t work we’ll walk off saying, well, that was kind of interesting. There is a great story of Bernie Shriver, who had been the great leader of Air Force ICBM development, calling his successor, and his said: “You know, you’ve had 17 successful launches,” and the guy said – he was very proud – “You’re right.” And he [Bernie] said: “You’re not trying, because if you had been trying you would have inevitably made mistakes. You’re only doing stuff that’s safe, what you already know how to do.”

So I came here today to ask you, because you’re here, and you know people all over the country who believe in space, you know how exciting it can be at its best, you know what a total mess, what an embarrassment our current situation is. How can we build a bureaucracy this big and get into a period when we rely on the Russians, while we watch the Chinese plan to surpass us, and we sit around bureaucratically twiddling our thumbs with no real reform?

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Spider silk for artificial corneas and brain implants

noreply@blogger.com (bw) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 01:14:38 PST

New Scientist - Spider silk has a big future in technologies from artificial corneas to brain implants.

Weight for weight, a typical spider silk is 20 times as strong as steel and four times as tough as Kevlar. It is also extremely flexible, stretching up to 50 per cent of its length without breaking. And it's not just the silk's physical properties that are impressive. It elicits no immune reaction in our bodies, it is biodegradable, and it is produced at low temperatures and pressures relative to other polymers.

The most enticing aspects of silk are its optical and biological properties.

Researchers have laser-cut a film of artificial silk to create synthetic corneas.

They have developed ways to pattern silk films and has made holograms, lenses, sensors and diffraction gratings from the stuff.

Nature Photonics - A new route for silk

Silk is now finding a new application as a useful biocompatible material in photonic devices. Thin films, diffraction gratings and organic photonic crystals are just a few of the exciting possibilities.

The growing demand for optical interfaces and sensors for biomedical applications is motivating research towards realizing biocompatible photonic components that offer a seamless interface between the optical and biological worlds. Silk — a natural protein fibre — has recently emerged as a highly promising candidate owing to its excellent mechanical and optical properties, biocompatibility, biodegradability and implant ability.

Stem cells are happy to grow around spider silk, so a silk sponge could in theory be used as a scaffold to help mend broken bones or torn muscles.

Enzymes and proteins continue to function when embedded in silk, and that the material can be engineered to release its payload after a delay lasting anything from a few seconds to a year, just by tweaking how fast it will dissolve.

Biomaterials - Silk matrix for tissue engineered anterior cruciate ligaments

A silk-fiber matrix was studied as a suitable material for tissue engineering anterior cruciate ligaments (ACL). The matrix was successfully designed to match the complex and demanding mechanical requirements of a native human ACL, including adequate fatigue performance. This protein matrix supported the attachment, expansion and differentiation of adult human progenitor bone marrow stromal cells based on scanning electron microscopy, DNA quantitation and the expression of collagen types I and III and tenascin-C markers. The results support the conclusion that properly prepared silkworm fiber matrices, aside from providing unique benefits in terms of mechanical properties as well as biocompatibility and slow degradability, can provide suitable biomaterial matrices for the support of adult stem cell differentiation toward ligament lineages. These results point toward this matrix as a new option for ACL repair to overcome current limitations with synthetic and other degradable materials.

Researchers are also developing "meltable electronics" designed to become part of the fabric of living tissue. Last year, they demonstrated that silk could be used to deliver ultra-thin electronics directly onto the surface of the brain, a capability which could one day be used to diagnose epilepsy or improve brain-computer interfaces. Silk films offer a much more useful surface on which to embed electronics than traditional silicon wafers as they can conform to the contours of the brain without damaging tissue. The idea is that once in place, the silk is dissolved with salt water and broken down by the surrounding tissue. Capillary forces between the silk and brain tissue help the electronics to wrap around the brain

Nature Materials - Dissolvable films of silk fibroin for ultrathin conformal bio-integrated electronics

Electronics that are capable of intimate, non-invasive integration with the soft, curvilinear surfaces of biological tissues offer important opportunities for diagnosing and treating disease and for improving brain/machine interfaces. This article describes a material strategy for a type of bio-interfaced system that relies on ultrathin electronics supported by bioresorbable substrates of silk fibroin. Mounting such devices on tissue and then allowing the silk to dissolve and resorb initiates a spontaneous, conformal wrapping process driven by capillary forces at the biotic/abiotic interface. Specialized mesh designs and ultrathin forms for the electronics ensure minimal stresses on the tissue and highly conformal coverage, even for complex curvilinear surfaces, as confirmed by experimental and theoretical studies. In vivo, neural mapping experiments on feline animal models illustrate one mode of use for this class of technology. These concepts provide new capabilities for implantable and surgical devices.

19 pages of supplemental material

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California high speed rail audit about $215 billion

noreply@blogger.com (bw) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 06:47:56 PST

The cost estimates for phase one of California High Speed rail increased to between $98.1 billion and $117.6 billion—of which approximately $12.5 billion has been secured. Although the Authority identifies the federal government as its largest potential funding source, the plan provides few details about how it expects to secure this money. The cost estimates do not include phase one's operating and maintenance costs, yet based on data in the plan these costs could total approximately $96.8 billion from 2025 through 2060.

The State will only be receiving profits for the first two years of operation in 2022 and 2023, and will potentially not receive profits again until 2060 in exchange for the almost $11 billion it assumes it will receive from the private sector.

The 800 mile system could end up costing over $260 million per mile, if there are no cost overruns through 2033 and ridership does not disappoint from 2025 through 2060.

The ridership model the Authority presents in its 2012 draft business plan assumes an average ticket price of $81 and projects that passengers will take a total of 29 to 43 million annual trips by the completion of phase one. However, when the Authority's chief executive officer commissioned a ridership review group to independently assess the ridership projections, he handpicked the group's members, which may call into question the independent nature of their assessment. Further, although the ridership review group determined that the ridership model was suitable for use in the 2012 draft business plan, the group presented several long-term concerns, such as potential biases in the survey data used in the model's development. The ridership review group's August 2011 report implied that if the Authority does not address these long-term concerns, the model may only be useful for projecting ridership for the operating section and not for the program's remaining sections.

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Graphene oxide membrane is 10 billion times more permeable to water than to helium

noreply@blogger.com (bw) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 23:50:19 PST

Eurekalert - A new finding at the University of Manchester gives graphene's potential a most surprising dimension – graphene can also be used for distilling alcohol.

A team led by Professor Sir Andre Geim shows that graphene-based membranes are impermeable to all gases and liquids (vacuum-tight). However, water evaporates through them as quickly as if the membranes were not there at all.

This newly-found property can now be added to the already long list of superlatives describing graphene. It is the thinnest known material in the universe and the strongest ever measured. It conducts electricity and heat better than any other material. It is the stiffest one too and, at the same time, it is the most ductile.

Chemistry World - UK researchers have created a graphene-based membrane that allows water through but not helium. The discovery of such membranes might ultimately have applications in a whole range of industries including effective separation of hydrogen from liquid or gaseous mixtures for fuel production.

They have developed a graphene oxide membrane that is 10 billion times more water permeable than it is to helium.

University of Manchester scientists have studied membranes from a chemical derivative of graphene called graphene oxide. Graphene oxide is the same graphene sheet but it is randomly covered with other molecules such as hydroxyl groups OH-. Graphene oxide sheets stack on top of each other and form a laminate.

The researchers prepared such laminates that were hundreds times thinner than a human hair but remained strong, flexible and were easy to handle.

When a metal container was sealed with such a film, even the most sensitive equipment was unable to detect air or any other gas, including helium, to leak through.

It came as a complete surprise that, when the researchers tried the same with ordinary water, they found that it evaporates without noticing the graphene seal. Water molecules diffused through the graphene-oxide membranes with such a great speed that the evaporation rate was the same independently whether the container was sealed or completely open.

Dr Rahul Nair, who was leading the experimental work, offers the following explanation: "Graphene oxide sheets arrange in such a way that between them there is room for exactly one layer of water molecules. They arrange themselves in one molecule thick sheets of ice which slide along the graphene surface with practically no friction.

"If another atom or molecule tries the same trick, it finds that graphene capillaries either shrink in low humidity or get clogged with water molecules."

"Helium gas is hard to stop. It slowly leaks even through a millimetre -thick window glass but our ultra-thin films completely block it. At the same time, water evaporates through them unimpeded. Materials cannot behave any stranger," comments Professor Geim. "You cannot help wondering what else graphene has in store for us".

"This unique property can be used in situations where one needs to remove water from a mixture or a container, while keeping in all the other ingredients", says Dr Irina Grigorieva who also participated in the research.

"Just for a laugh, we sealed a bottle of vodka with our membranes and found that the distilled solution became stronger and stronger with time. Neither of us drinks vodka but it was great fun to do the experiment", adds Dr Nair.

The Manchester researchers report this experiment in their Science paper, too, but they say they do not envisage use of graphene in distilleries, nor offer any immediate ideas for applications.

However, Professor Geim adds 'The properties are so unusual that it is hard to imagine that they cannot find some use in the design of filtration, separation or barrier membranes and for selective removal of water'.

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Newt plans for moon base and using ten percent of NASA budget fo spaceflight milestone prizes

noreply@blogger.com (bw) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 07:12:21 PST

There are many supposed "space experts" who say that Newt Gingrich's proposal for a permanent manned base on the moon by 2020 cannot be done.

They claim that the technology is there but not the money to do it.

Washington Post - Newt has said that he’d use 10 percent of the NASA budget — which would amount to nearly $2 billion a year — to create prizes, incentives for entrepreneurs to achieve spaceflight milestones.

Gingrich said his program would be “90 percent private sector” and he’d like to see space flight become so common that there would be “six or seven launches a day.” He added: “I’d like to have an American on the moon before the Chinese get there.”

Inflatable moon bases proposed by Bigelow Aerospace

Gingrich went so far as to bring up a proposal he made when he was a young congressman to create a “Northwest Ordinance” for space in which, as soon as 13,000 Americans lived on the moon, they could petition to become a state.

I believe a carefully crafted series of prizes can work.

There are already Google lunar prizes.

The $30 million Google Lunar X PRIZE is igniting a new era of lunar exploration by offering the largest international incentive prize of all time. A total of $30 million in prizes are available to the first privately funded teams to safely land a robot on the surface of the Moon and have that robot travel 500 meters over the lunar surface and send images and data back to the Earth. Since its launch, NASA has also offered a complementary $30 million in contracts to those who successfully land on the lunar surface and meet certain scientific objectives. The teams have until the end of 2015 to get to the Moon, meet the prize objectives, and win the prize purses.

Prizes that follow up
Have a $60 million prize for a robotic lunar base by 2017.
$300 milion prize for more elaborate robotic lunar base by 2018.
$200 million prize for robotic and/or teleoperated base in earth orbit by 2015.
$500 million prize for manned inflatable base at earth orbit by 2016.
$1 billion prize for manned inflatable base at a lagrange point by 2018.
$2 billion prize for manned base on the moon by 2019 (not permanent but weeks at a time.)
$10 billion prize for the permanent manned base by 2020.
Have a lot more sub-prizes for other goals.

Bigelow Aerospace has discussed proposals for private moon bases. A quick-deploy moon base capable of housing up to 18 astronauts in inflatable modules on the lunar surface.

The moon harbors large amounts of water ice, along with lots of other potentially useful compounds. Shackleton — a 12-mile-wide (20-kilometer-wide) crater appears to have lots of water ice.

Lunar space elevator using 6 cubic meters of Zylon

A space elevator from the surface of the Moon – could be created with materials that are available now.

the Moon's gravity is only one sixth that of Earth, it drastically reduces the requirements of the ribbon. A material that is available now, a synthetic polymer material called Zylon (poly(p-phenylene-2,6-benzobisoxazole) which has high strength and excellent thermal stability, could be used.

* The biggest hurdle could be getting access to the 6 cubic meters of the Zylon material.

* A lunar elevator would use a ribbon at least 50,000 kilometers (31,000 miles) long extending through the Earth-Moon L1 LaGrange point from an anchor point near the center of the visible part of Earth's moon.

* This is a very small system, capable of transporting 200-250 kilos

* Once the initial ribbon is up and running, Laine said you could send up more ribbon to strengthen it

Setting up an inflatable space station at Lagrange points for teleoperated support

Any permanent space presence needs redundancy, support and quick access to robust help. By having space stations in low earth orbit, geosync, lagrange points and on the moon, then you would have easy ability to provide robust teleoperated assistance. Having multiple bases on the moon and having some robot operated would provide fallback positions in case one base is compromised. You can send crews from station to station as well with very small rockets.

Earth moon L1/L2 is enabling site for lunar surface telerobotics

Low-Latency Lunar Surface Telerobotics and Telepresence from Earth-Moon Lagrange Points by Dan Lester (27 pages)

• Latencies less than 6 times from Earth, 400 ms -so cognitive operations
• Continuous access to the near-or far-‐side (except poles …)
• Communication LOS with Earth is stable and reliable
• Little orbit maintenance needed – of order tens of m/s/yr
• Control options for multiple surface sites
• Avoid putting humans in deep gravity wells in near term

People can still go the lunar surface.

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System to deliver organ transplant drug- without harmful side effects

noreply@blogger.com (bw) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 17:20:59 PST

A new system for delivering a drug to organ transplant patients, which could avoid the risk of harmful side effects, is being developed by scientists at Strathclyde. The drug, cyclosporine (CsA), is widely used in transplant operations and helps prevent the patient’s body rejecting the organ but it can cause adverse drug reactions, of which the most serious problems are kidney and liver damage, in the doses which are currently administered in the long term.

The gap between a safe, effective dose of the treatment and a toxic dose is extremely narrow but the Strathclyde scientists have found a way of capturing CsA in very small amounts. The new system, developed in laboratory tests, enables nanoparticles of the drug to be delivered orally so that the strength of the dose can be maintained, but at a level and in a form which spares kidneys from damage.

Professor Ravi Kumar, of the Strathclyde Institute of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences, led the research. He said: “CsA is very useful in transplants and treating conditions such as arthritis, lupus and some forms of diabetes, but we need to address the risks it can present to the kidney and liver, apart from various other toxicities such as convulsions and high blood pressure.

“The damage it can cause can be dealt with if it’s caught at an early stage but can be irreversible if it continues unchecked. Furthermore, existing formulations of cyclosporine contain castor oil-based vehicle which is used owing to the drug’s poor solubility in water but which can be toxic.

“By entrapping CsA in nanoparticles, we aimed to match the maximum concentration of the most potent formulation of the drug in market. In tests, we were able to strike a balance between strength, efficacy and safety and were able to make a marked increase in the drug’s bioavailability- the level of the drug which becomes active in the system.

“We were also able to reduce the toxic effects on the kidneys by slow release of the nanoparticles, which brought the drug gradually to its maximum concentration.

“As well as its use in transplants, we hope to look into the effectiveness of this system with arthritis and address what is a hugely debilitating condition for many people.”

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AVA iRobot Video

noreply@blogger.com (bw) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:44:18 PST

iRobot CEO Colin Angle shows off the company's latest robot designed to help people with home health care needs. AVA is a robot with a tablet for head. Tablet provides cameras, sensors and compute power.

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Reason features the key players in New Commercial Space

noreply@blogger.com (bw) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:40:28 PST

Reason has a feature on the key people driving New Space

Elon Musk of Spacex
Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic
Jeff Greason of XCOR
Peter Diamandis of the Xprize
Charles Simonyi who has paid twice to be a passenger to the Space Station
Robert Bigelow of Bigelow Aerospace who is making inflatable space stations
John Carmack of Armadillo Aerospace
Dana Rohrabacher is a Congressman who helped enact the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act
George Nield associate administrator for commercial space transportation at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)

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Three-dimensional plasmonic cloak hides a cylinder from microwaves

noreply@blogger.com (bw) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 13:23:03 PST

New Journal of Physics - Experimental verification of three-dimensional plasmonic cloaking in free-space (14 pages) They optimized the cloak design for the 3 GHz range. They have hidden a cylinder from microwaves, demonstrating cloaking of an object in free space, rather than a two-dimensional image. The group has not been able to scatter visible light, but it expects that cloaking small objects is possible. The results pave the way to realistic, practical applications of 3D stand-alone cloaks for radar evasion and non-invasive radio frequency probing.

BBC News - The approach used is unlikely to work at the visible light part of the spectrum. Prof Alu explained that the approach could be applied to the tips of scanning microscopes - the most high-resolution microscopes science has - to yield an improved view of even smaller wavelengths of light.

In future applications, plasmonic materials could be combined with the structured metamaterials idea already in development elsewhere. Light can be channelled where it needs to go, or its effects undone, as need be.

Prof Apu said that if he had to bet in five years what kind of cloaking technique might be used for applications, for practical purposes, then he would say plasmonic cloaking is a good bet.

We report the experimental verification of metamaterial cloaking for a 3D object in free space. We apply the plasmonic cloaking technique, based on scattering cancellation, to suppress microwave scattering from a finite-length dielectric cylinder. We verify that scattering suppression is obtained all around the object in the near- and far-field and for different incidence angles, validating our measurements with analytical results and full-wave simulations. Our nearfield and far-field measurements confirm that realistic and robust plasmonic metamaterial cloaks may be realized for elongated 3D objects with moderate transverse cross-section at microwave frequencies.

Photographs of: (top) the assembled cloak on the test cylinder with end caps; (bottom left) a cross-sectional view of the assembly with end cap removed; (bottom right) a shell segment edge with copper tape used to form the metallic strip for the metamaterial cloak.

We have reported here what we believe to be the first experimental verification of a 3D standalone cloak in free space, achieved by applying the plasmonic cloaking technique to a finite cylinder approximately two wavelengths long illuminated by microwave radiation. Our results show that robust and strong scattering suppression can be obtained over a moderately broad frequency range, weakly dependent on illumination and observation positions. Experimental measurements follow quite closely our theoretical predictions and numerical simulations validating our results. Scattering is strongly reduced even for large incidence angles and neargrazing incidence for various forms of excitation, and even in the near-field. Moreover, it is evident that the extensive near-field and far-field experimental measurements are in full agreement with the total SCS predicted from our full-wave numerical simulations of the realized plasmonic cloak reported in below.

Total SCS, as predicted by full-wave simulations, of the cloaked and uncloaked cylinders around the design frequency for normal incidence illumination.

The design chosen here limited the thinness of our cloak, and its functionality to one polarization.We are currently exploring alternative realizations using the mantle-cloaking technique which may further reduce the overall cloak thickness and achieve scattering suppression for all polarizations.

Near-field mapping of the electric field distribution (snapshot in time) around and on top of the object under test. The first and fourth rows (2.7 and 3.8 GHz, respectively) correspond to frequencies at which the cloak is expected to perform poorly. The second row (3.1 GHz) shows the lack of near-field scattering at the design frequency. The third row (3.3 GHz) corresponds to the upper-band edge of the cloak’s performance.

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Asthma rate and costs from traffic-related air pollution are much higher than once believed

noreply@blogger.com (bw) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 12:39:49 PST

Eurekalert University of Massachusetts Amherst - The total cost of asthma due to pollution is much higher than past traditional risk assessments have indicated and there is growing evidence that exposure to traffic-related air pollution is a cause of asthma and a trigger for attacks, so it should be included.

They conducted the study in Long Beach and Riverside, Calif., communities with high regional air pollution levels and large roads near residential neighborhoods. Total additional asthma-specific costs there due to traffic-related pollution is about $18 million per year, almost half of which is due to new asthma cases caused by pollution.

Using updated techniques that count asthma cases attributable to air pollution for the first time and including a broader range of health care costs such as parents' missed work days, extra doctor visits and travel time along with prescriptions, the researchers found that a single episode of bronchitic symptoms cost an average $972 in Riverside and $915 in Long Beach. Bronchitic symptoms (daily cough, congestion or phlegm, or bronchitis for three months in a row) are a critical outcome for children with asthma.

European Respiratory Journal - Costs of childhood asthma due to traffic-related pollution in two california communities

People who live in cities with high traffic-related air pollution bear a higher burden of these costs than those in less polluted areas, they say.

Brandt and colleagues say the total annual cost for a typical asthma case was $3,819 in Long Beach and $4,063 in Riverside, and "the largest share of the cost of an asthma case was the indirect cost of asthma-related school absences." School absences are an important economic consequence, they add, because "they often lead to parents or caregivers missing work."

Overall, Brandt points out that the results are relevant and applicable to many settings and "families with children who have asthma are bearing a high cost. The total annual estimate between $3,800 and $4,000 represents 7 percent of median household income in our study in these two communities. This is troublesome because that is higher than the 5 percent considered to be a bearable or sustainable level of health care costs for a family."

Riverside and Long Beach account for about 7 percent of the total population of California, the authors say, which suggests that state-wide costs of asthma related to air pollution are "truly substantial."

Recent research suggests the burden of childhood asthma attributable to air pollution has been underestimated in traditional risk assessments, and there are no estimates of these associated costs. We estimated the yearly childhood asthma-related costs attributable to air pollution for Riverside and Long Beach, California, including: 1) the indirect and direct costs of health care utilization due to asthma exacerbations linked to traffic-related pollution (TRP); and 2) the costs of health care for asthma cases attributable to local TRP exposure.

We estimated these costs using estimates from peer-reviewed literature and the authors' analysis of surveys (Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, California Health Interview Survey, National Household Travel Survey, and Health Care Utilization Project).

A lower-bound estimate of the asthma burden attributable to air pollution was $18 million yearly. Asthma cases attributable to TRP exposure accounted for almost half of this cost. The cost of bronchitic episodes was a major proportion of both the annual cost of asthma cases attributable to TRP and of pollution-linked exacerbations.

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Pac Man Video Game is NP Hard

noreply@blogger.com (bw) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 12:21:32 PST

Arxiv - Gaming is a hard job, but someone has to do it! (12 pages)

We establish some general schemes relating the computational complexity of a video game to the presence of certain common elements or mechanics, such as destroyable paths, collecting items, doors activated by switches or pressure plates, etc.. Then we apply such \metatheorems" to several video games published between 1980 and 1998, including Pac-Man, Tron, Lode Runner, Boulder Dash, Deektor, Mindbender, Pipe Mania, Skweek, Prince of Persia, Lemmings, Doom, Puzzle Bobble 3, and Starcraft. We obtain both new results, and improvements or alternative proofs of previously known results.

A game is said to exhibit the location traversal feature if the level designer can somehow force the player's avatar to visit several specifi c game locations, arbitrarily connected together, in order to beat the level. Locations may be visited multiple times in any order, but the first one is usually fi xed (starting location), and sometimes also the last one is (exit location).

Metatheorem 1. Any game exhibiting both location traversal and single-
use paths is NP-hard.

Doors and pressure plates

A door is a game element that can be open or closed, and may be traversed by the avatar if and only if it is open. A door's status may be modifi ed
by certain actions of the avatar, such as activating a pressure plate. A
pressure plate is a button that is pushed whenever the avatar steps on it,
and its e ffect may be either the opening or the closure of a specifi c door.
Each pressure plate is connected to just one door, and each door may be
controlled by at most two pressure plates (one opens it, one closes it).

Metatheorem 2. If a game features doors and pressure plates, and the
avatar has to reach an exit location in order to win, then:

a) Even if no door can be closed by a pressure plate, and if the game is non-planar, then it is P-hard.
b) Even if no door is controlled by two pressure plates, the game is NP- hard.
c) If each door may be controlled by two pressure plates, then the game is PSPACE-hard.

Metatheorem 3. If a game features doors and k-switches, and the avatar
has to reach an exit location in order to win, then:

a) If k greater than or equal to 1 and the game is non-planar, then it is P-hard.
b) If k greater than or equal to 2, then the game is NP-hard.
c) If k greater than or equal to 3, then the game is PSPACE-hard.

Boulder Dash (First Star Software, 1984) is NP-hard.
Deflektor (Vortex Software, 1987) is in L
Doom (id Software, 1993) is PSPACE-hard
Lemmings (DMA Design, 1991) is NP-hard
Lode Runner (Br derbund, 1983) is NP-hard
Mindbender (Magic Bytes, 1989) is NL-hard

Pac-Man (Namco, 1980) is NP-hard. The decisional problem is whether a level can be completed without losing lives. We assume full con gurability of the amount of ghosts and ghost houses, speeds, and the durations of Chase, Scatter, and Frightened modes

Pipe Mania (The Assembly Line, 1989) is NP-complete.
Prince of Persia (Br derbund, 1989) is PSPACE-complete
Puzzle Bobble 3 (Taito, 1996) is NP-complete
Skweek (Loriciel, 1989) is NP-complete
Starcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 1998) is NP-hard
Tron (Bally Midway, 1982) is NP-hard

The Complexity of well known games are listed at wikipedia

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Department of Energy will fund up to Two Small Modular Nuclear Reactors for 2022

noreply@blogger.com (bw) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 11:48:15 PST

World Nuclear News - The US Department of Energy (DoE) is to help push forward the manufacture of small modular nuclear reactors through new cost-sharing arrangements with private industry to support design and licensing activities. The DoE intends ultimately to fund up to two designs for small modular reactors (SMRs) through a cost-shared partnership which will support first-of-a-kind engineering, design certification and licensing. To that end, it has issued a draft Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) to solicit inputs from industry in advance of the full FOA, aiming at a deployment date for the reactors of 2022.

Platts - The US Department of Energy is seeking applications for two grants, estimated to total $452 million over five years. The funds will pay up to half the cost of developing and deploying up to two small modular reactor designs.

Pittsburgh-based engineering company Westinghouse Friday said it will apply for government funding to advance nuclear technology that would produce a new type of small reactors.

The DOE's announcement launches an Obama administration initiative to position the US to lead the world in SMR technology, which the president and Energy Secretary Steven Chu have said will boost exports and create domestic manufacturing jobs. But the program has been delayed for more than a year by congressional standoffs on how to fund the federal government. The DOE's SMR program received $67 million for fiscal 2012, which ends September 30. Funding levels in future years will depend on congressional appropriations.

The department defines SMRs as reactors of 300 MW or below. "The government is particularly interested in SMR designs that incorporate passive safety features," which rely on physics -- such as gravity -- instead of mechanical means or human interference to keep the reactor safe, DOE said Thursday in a draft funding opportunity notice Thursday.

It also said DOE will only consider applications for SMR designs that can be licensed by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and begin commercial operation in the US by 2022. Applications that propose an earlier deployment date will be considered favorably

Small modular reactor projects that will likely apply are as follows

Integral Light Water Reactors (LWR)
o Babcock & Wilcox – mPower Reactor (160 MW)
o NuScale Power Inc. – NuScale Reactor (45 MW)
o Westinghouse – AP 1000 derived SMR (200 MW)
o Holtec – Inherently Safe Modular Underground Reactor (HI-SMUR 140) (140 MW)

High Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactors
o AREVA – Antares
o General Atomics – Gas Turbine Modular Helium Reactor (GT-MHR)
o Pebble Bed Modular Reactor Ltd. – Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR)

Liquid Metal-Cooled and Fast Reactor
o GE Hitachi – Nuclear Power Reactor Innovative Small Module (PRISM) (311 MW)
o Hyperion Power Generation – Hyperion Power Module (HPG) (70 MW thermal)
o Toshiba – Toshiba 4S (Super Small, Safe and Simple) (10 MW)

Overview of Small Modular Reactors

An overview of the status of small modular reactors that are being developed around the world is here.

Overview and Status of SMRs Being Developed in the United States (17 pages)

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First for accelerator-driven nuclear reactor

noreply@blogger.com (bw) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 11:36:21 PST

A first-of-a-kind reactor system has been set up in Belgium by coupling a subcritical assembly with a particle accelerator. The equipment, known as Guinevere, is a demonstration model that supports the project for a larger version that will be called Myrrha (Multipurpose Hybrid Research Reactor for High-tech Applications). The overall project is supported by 12 other European laboratories and the European Commission.

Guinevere is designed to be subcritical if it were not for an accelerator system that sends a constant stream of protons to a target that emits neutrons to trigger fission. SCK-CEN said, "This type of reactor is very safe because the reactor section relies on a particle accelerator: when it is turned off, the reactor will stop immediately."

As well as this kind of accelerator-driven operation, Guinevere is also capable of 'classic' criticality triggered by a neutron source in the reactor core and maintained by the reactor geometry and operation of its lead cooling system. This mode of operation was 'inaugurated' in February 2011.

Guinevere has "very limited power" and is being used to learn more about the operation and control of this kind of reactor arrangement. The knowledge will be put to use at Guinevere's larger relation, Myhrra, which should begin operation in 2023.

MYRRHA: Multi-purpose hybrid research reactor for high-tech applications project pages

MYRRHA, a flexible fast spectrum research reactor (50-100 MWth) is conceived as an accelerator driven system (ADS), able to operate in sub-critical and critical modes. It contains a proton accelerator of 600 MeV, a spallation target and a multiplying core with MOX fuel, cooled by liquid lead-bismuth (Pb-Bi).

MYRRHA will be operational at full power around 2023. During the 2010-2014 period the following items will be accomplished:

* The Front End Engineering Design (FEED) and the associated R&D programme.
* The licensing process.
* The set-up of the international consortium.

Construction of the facility and assembly of the components is foreseen in the period 2015-2019.

Three years (2020-2022) are foreseen for the full commissioning of the facility. The total investment cost is currently estimated at M€ 960 (€ 2009).

The total cost of Myrrha has been put at €960 million ($1.2 billion), with 40% of this coming from the Belgian government. SCK-CEN is looking to set up an international consortium to ensure additional financing and has completed a memorandum of understanding with the Chinese Academy of Sciences focusing on Myrrha.

Myrrha will be able to produce radioisotopes and doped silicon, but its research functions would be particularly well suited to investigating transmutation. This is when certain radioactive isotopes with long half lives are made to 'catch' a neutron and thereby change into a different isotope that will decay more quickly to a stable form with no radioactivity. If achievable on an industrial scale, transmutation could greatly simplify the permanent geologic disposal of radioactive waste. Myrrha can also be used to test the feasibility of lead fast reactor technology and is seen as complimentary to the Jules Horowitz Reactor, a thermal spectrum reactor under construction in Cadarache, France.

Types of Accelerators

The proton accelerator is the driver of the ADS (accelerator driven system). It provides the high energy protons that are used in the spallation target to create neutrons which in their turn feed the sub-critical core.

3 fundamental types of particle accelerators

Single gap accelerators: In the context of MYRRHA these are discarded because the energy they can reach is far too low.

Recirculating accelerators: The particles are repeatedly accelerated by successive passages through the same accelerating cavities. In order to achieve this, the particle beam has to be bent after each acceleration and brought back to the entry of the cavity. Bending is usually obtained by magnetic fields. Higher energy is translated into a larger diameter machine due to the larger bending radius. Typical examples of recirculating machines are synchrotrons (having a constant orbit) and cyclotrons (having constant bending field).

Linear accelerators: The particles are repeatedly accelerated by successive single passages through many subsequent accelerating cavities. There is no need for bending. The cavities are organized as a linear chain, hence the name Linear Accelerator or Linac. Higher energy is translated into a longer machine due to the need for more cavities.

2 types of accelerator for MYRRHA - ADS

For MYRRHA (or ADS in general) a high intensity CW beam is required. Practically 2 types of accelerator can provide this:

The isochronous cyclotron: Like any cyclotron it is a recirculating machine with constant magnetic field, but in which the magnetic field is shaped in such a way that the particle's revolution time is constant with energy (even if relativistic effects appear). Thereby it is also a constant frequency machine, which makes it CW compatible.

The Continuous Wave linac: For technological and functional reasons, most linacs operate as pulsed machines. However, fundamentally the linac satisfies the double condition of fixed frequency and fixed fields, as a consequence of a frozen particle velocity profile along the accelerator. It is therefore a steady state machine, and CW compatible.

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Elon Musk indicates design for bringing a rocket back to launchpad

noreply@blogger.com (bw) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 09:15:07 PST

Elon Musk announces a milestone towards a reusable rocket

Twitter - Design completed for bringing rocket back to launchpad using only thrusters.

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Nuclear Katyusha Launching

noreply@blogger.com (bw) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 09:10:29 PST

The Nextbigfuture nuclear launch gun has been described several times. It is a one pulse variant of a project orion external pulse propulsion system. It is simple though dramatic: Dig a kilometers deep shaft—a salt layer would be easiest to penetrate (some exist 3.5 kilometers thick) —build at the bottom a giant shell, from components lowered into place, layer by layer enclosing its internal payloads with external structures (such as a supporting sabot) and sealing the unit to flight-ready status. Place sets of guide rails around the perimeter of the shaft with ‘slippers’—metal contact shoes—touching the rails from the edges of the Shell. Finally, after all is in readiness, pump reaction mass through an access shaft under the sabot into a prepared chamber and place a thermonuclear explosive device in the midst of the reaction mass. A 150 kiloton version would not violate the nuclear test ban treaties which permit underground nuclear explosions up to 150 kilotons. About 85% of heat energy of the nuclear explosion should be converted into kinetic energy to launch the roughly 3500 ton shell to over escape velocity.

Pictured are project Orion nuclear pulsed propulsion, this system is variant with only one charge instead of hundreds and where the explosion is underground with all fallout and electromagnetic effects contained like hundreds of previous underground nuclear tests performed throughout the 1950s-1980s.

Consider Mass Launching of Nuclear Cannons - Nuclear Katyusha

There are over 6000 nuclear bombs are about 150 kilotons. The yield can be adjusted with the amount of tritium. So there are enough bombs for six thousand 150 kiloton launches without starting production of more bombs.

W80 mod 1 (cruise missile warhead) 1450 active, 361 inactive
384 inactive W84 cruise missile warheads. They would need a full load of tritium added to get them to their 150 kiloton yield and back to active status.
B61 -mod 3 (170 kilotons) could have some reduction in tritium to reduce it to 150 kilotons. (200 active, 186 inactive)
W62-Mk-12 (170 kilotons, 580 active or inactive)
W76-Mk4 (100 kilotons, 3030 active or inactive)

Making the 3500 tons Shells is Comparable to the Effort for making a Liberty Ship

Liberty cargo ships of world war 2 had 3425 tons of hull steel. The construction time for liberty ships dropped to about 28 days and one of them was built in 4 days and 15 hours. Eighteen American shipyards built 2,751 Liberty ships between 1941 and 1945.

Thousands of deep oil wells are drilled

It is conceivable that a couple of thousand of two mile deep holes could be drilled each year.

Six thousand 3500 ton launches would be 21 million tons.

Cost Estimate per Launch

Dig a deep 2 mile hole (like the deeper oilwells but a bit wider). Cost about $10 million. Conservatively round up to $40 million.

About 3000 ton projectile (depends upon coupling efficiency). Set it off and launch it at 5000Gs into orbit or towards the moon.

$10 million for the projectile and the propellant.
$20 million for the work of setting it up.
Launch costs for supplies and refined metals would become $10/lb. (assuming the nuclear bombs in stockpile are donated)

Launch people and delicates the regular way. The supplies and refined metals would allow for industrialization of space.

10 Megatons of TNT, equal to 4.185x10^16 Joules (1 ton of TNT = 4.185x10^9 Joules, One Joule is one kilogram/M^2/S^2 )The average power produced during the entire fission-fusion process, lasting around 39 nanoseconds, was about 1.1×10^24 watts or 1.1 yottawatts. Configuring a nuclear device the way project Orion had planned would direct 85% if the energy at the pusher plate.

so 3.5*10^16 Joules towards kinetic energy.

Kinetic Energy =1/2*Mass*Velocity^2
Escape velocity=11186 M/S
EV ^ 2 = 125 million (m^2/s^2)

2.8*10^8 kg or 280,000 tons. Say 70,000 tons to double escape velocity if we wanted to be pretty sure that the projectile cargo could go the moon if we aimed it right.

1 megaton would launch 28,000 tons to escape velocity.
150 kilotons would launch about 3,500 tons to a bit over escape velocity.

The asteroid and meteor FAQ explains how atmospheric resistance is a problem for small objects. A meteoroid of 1000 tons (9 x 10^5 kg) would retain about 70% of its cosmic velocity. A 100,000 ton object passes through the atmosphere like it is not there. The firing of the nuclear gun would be a like an aerodynamic asteroid in reverse.

150 kilotons would crack rock up to about 600 meter radius and crush rock to 200 meters.

One launch can crack underground for about 0.7 square miles. So 4200 square miles for 6000 one time launches. This is less than half the area of Vermont (9620 square miles) and less than the area of Connecticut (5541 square miles) and about the size of the Big Island of Hawaii (4028 square miles).

The system could also be used as a future weapon if the nuclear bombs were taken or built on the moon and it was used to send bombardment back to Earth. In the future, a system on the Earth could also attack the moon. Of course you would already have nuclear bombs and you could just forgo the launching of a kinetic weapon. A kinetic weapon would be less vulnerable to anti-missile and bomb defences (like lasers) that would destroy the bomb before it explodes. It would be tougher to deflect or effect 3500 tons of solid metal moving at escape velocity.

Sea Based Launch Option

Joseph Friedlander had a brainstorm on how to launch the Wang Bullet (project Orion pulsed propulsion variant) from under the sea. The core idea for the nuclear verne launch gun is simple though dramatic: Dig a kilometers deep shaft—a salt layer would be easiest to penetrate (some exist 3.5 kilometers thick) —build at the bottom a giant shell, from components lowered into place, layer by layer enclosing its internal payloads with external structures (such as a supporting sabot) and sealing the unit to flight-ready status. Place sets of guide rails around the perimeter of the shaft with ‘slippers’—metal contact shoes—touching the rails from the edges of the Wang Bullet. Finally, after all is in readiness, pump reaction mass through an access shaft under the sabot into a prepared chamber and place a thermonuclear explosive device in the midst of the reaction mass.

The reaction mass (in our conceptual model, water, but many other substances would work) not only becomes the propulsive hypersonic plasma and impulsive gas but also serves as an accelerative, radiation (boron included against neutron flux) and impact shield relative to the extreme violence of the blast chamber. So it is not the nuclear blast that directly accelerates. The blast acts on the propellant and filler.

Terms -
Nuclear Verne BlowGun - the entire system, the hole, the nuclear device, the cistern of propellant and the projectile
Wang Bullet - the projectile being launched
Friedlander Sabot - the base of the projectile

One of the biggest objections to the nuclear cannon concept has to be the idea of a radioactive hole left behind. It is an emotional feeling.

Suppose the launch tube and setup at sea costs $75 million, and the Wang Bullet and thermonuclear device all together, including launch and payload costs $200 million. That is less than a shuttle launch. But instead of 15 tons to orbit (the equivalent of 3 tons to the Moon) we are talking probably 1000 tons to the Moon. That is $200000 a ton to the Moon, or $100 a pound. The benefit would remain very low cost to launch material and payloads that are resistant to high G forces and no radiation in the atmosphere and no radiation in the ground. The sea would disperse the radiation from the underwater explosion. The underwater explosion will make it easier to prevent radiation from getting to the atmosphere.

* Nuclear bombs exist and there is no question that they work and there are thousands that have built, paid for and in storage
* There were tests which showed that nuclear bombs can launch heavy metal objects at high speed and the objects survive
* The system is taking material and using a nuclear bomb to provide the energy to make it into more energetic propellent. Chemical propellant maxes out at lower speed and energies. Nuclear take the same chemicals and ups the heat (100 million degrees instead of a few thousand) for more speed and energy
* the Ocean already contains 3.5 billion tons of Uranium

The current space capability versus the proposed system is the difference between starting a colony and industry with the supplies you can put in a pickup truck or what you can put into a container ship.

Nuclear effects would not get into the air, what will be in the water is safe, hundreds of times more supplies at one hundred times lower cost for space using technology that exists.

Joseph Friedlander Presents the Under the Sea Verne Gun

True nuclear wastelands are few and far between—there is the B30 tank at Sellafield' in the UK and Lake Karachay in Russia Where a lethal dose of radiation can be obtained by simply picnicking for a few hours at most in the immediate vicinity. To obtain such levels usually you would have to be the drainage sump of a garbage dump (as these were) of a nuclear materials complex (single bombs, even large ones, usually keep the isotope dump under a ton!) And even though a bomb could make thousands of square kilometers temporarily uninhabitable—that is only through short lived very active isotopes. (One minute after detonation a 1 mt bomb cloud has the radioactivity of 300,000 tons of radium) TNT

To get lots of decades- half lifed longer-lived isotopes, you really have to work at it on one place.

Nuclear detonations from the 1950’s and 1960’s on land have left isolated regions which are safe to transit or even camp upon but not live permanently (or grow food) upon. This does not mean that wildlife does not flourish—it does, but some isotopes climb up the biological chain to become concentrated in the apex predator, man.

By contrast, the site of ocean-based detonations quickly fills in and detectable radioactivity is usually gone in weeks unless the detonation was in shallow water—in which case an analogy to the unsafe to grow food zone can exist—there are very probably reefs in the South Pacific—downwind of former test sites-- where the fish are spectacularly thick, but where the catch would be unsafe to eat.

In deep water, however, even this disadvantage is much lessened. There is life on the abyssal plain, but not much that man eats. The oceans are huge, and most particles that rain down are sequestered in deep sediments. This would go for radioactive particles as well. Not that we advocate unlimited—or indeed any-- nuclear leakage or environmental vandalism—merely that when leaks and accidents happen, it is far better that any such occur in the remote deep ocean rather in the midst of farmlands.

Important to know is one fact: That the ocean basins are – so to speak—downhill from the land. If we think for a moment about the relative wisdom of setting off bombs in the Nevada desert--- highlands uphill and upwind from the USA’s agricultural regions and great cities--- and the deep ocean—the choice would be obvious.

Of course, what happened in the era of above ground testing, before the 1963 treaties, was that Nevada was closer than the South Pacific, and many people expected Soviet bombs all over the country and promptly, so what are you bothering me about?! So logistics won out for small bomb tests. In regard to the large tests, even a fool could see it was politically untenable, so... the remote Pacific. But that was then. Now getting X-rays to kids is politically questionable, and you want an open-air bomb test?!

Well, no, we don't. We want a contained test where nearly all the tritium is captured, where nearly everything else is confined. A whole series of Wang Bullets--- enough to bootstrap an entire space economy, rendering itself obsolete-- would release about as much into the environment as one smallish bomb test of the old days; if we capture 98% of the tritium, obviously it takes 50 contained tests to equal one uncontained test. 99% capture might be achievable, and the tritium is the hardest thing to contain. 99.9% and greater capture for the bomb isotopes in the detonation chamber should be easy. (Remember, it is a cave with one very distant small and remote skylight, and a simple open shaft in the Pascal A test kept in 90% of the radioactivity from escaping, despite the fact that there was no shell to push against and rebound the trajectories of bomb debris particles. Also remember that this is in essence an UNDERWATER underground test and you will see that it is very very hard for any given particle to make its' way uncaptured to the surface.)

Also frankly most of those open air bomb tests were-- duh-- weapons tests. For example the 300 kiloton Chinese test of December 28th, 1966.

Weapons want to be compact and robust and consequently usually use a little fusion to trigger lots of fission. If we design the bomb with a 1 kiloton fission trigger, (known to be enough to ignite fusion because it works in the neutron bomb) no secondary spark plug (the Russians have done this) and 149 kilotons of fusion (the Russians use modular 30 kiloton pure fusion secondaries) AND we have 99.9 percent containment of fission isotopes, we see that 300,000 launches would be needed to equal the debris from just one 300 kilotons of fission open air test-- ITSELF just one thousandth or so of all bomb testing in the open test era. 300 MILLION launches of several thousand tons each using Wang Bullet technology would be needed to equal the fallout the world ALREADY has survived-- and frankly, several dozen should be all that are needed for an industrial bootup in space.

Turning to the case of an oceanic Wang Bullet launch, it should be obvious that the ‘launch tube’ will be destroyed. The Wang Bullet can and will leave swiftly, the launch tube cannot.

The Launch Tube

This picture merely conveys the concept of an evacuated launch tube, a cap, the energizing chamber and thermonuclear device under the Wang Bullet. It portrays the Wang Bullet as a unitary device when in reality it will almost certainly consist of the crushable Friedlander Sabot beneath and an aeroshell atop a modular construction beneath.

Looking like a thermometer tube with a bulb at the bottom, the launch tube remarkably thin walled for its’ structure.
Because it CANNOT be filled with seawater, it however cannot be very thin walled.

If it is a kilometer deep, the water pressure outside would be on the order of 100 bar, and it would be as stout as a supertall concrete chimney. It need be strong in compression but not so strong in tension, for buoyancy floaters can be attached to its side to ‘levitate it’ in addition to the lines suspending it by tension from the erecting ship. It must be rigid and very straight, so it is segmented.
An alternate-track method might be to use subring segments stacked like chimney bricks held together with fibers –cables-- strong in compression-- lowered from ship with a proprietary sealant between parts. Remember, a chimney is an arch and will resist massive compression.

Assembly--- It is put together like an oil well pipe string in say 10 meter segments, with the bulb at the bottom and the cap on the top.

The bulb is lowered in and filled with fresh water, the bomb suspended under the Wang Bullet, an evaporation cap placed on that and the Friedlander Sabot and Wang Bullet itself then inserted, then segment after segment added until the top cap itself is added. Then the system is pumped down.

Why?

Inertia.

Those early milliseconds are critical, the guide rails constrain the motion before they begin to fail, the speed begins to build up, and also in that time whatever is ahead of the Wang Bullet in the barrel is compressed. Pumping down the chamber helps get the initial acceleration rate up even if it slows down when hitting actual sea level atmosphere just outside the limits of the barrel.
Even a partial vacuum will assist greatly in achieving the escape velocity that is our goal (or more precisely, cut friction losses until the Wang Bullet exits at sea level…) Because the atmosphere (if compressed equally) is only the equivalent height of about 8 kilometers ‘thick’ a sea launch tube of 1 kilometer pumped down will save about 12 percent extra drag losses. This may not be strictly necessary; we may decide on an open tube because of the sheer power available, but then ablation within the tube will complicate things. It will be a lot easier to get going with the air out of the way.

Natural meteors above 100,000 tons are essentially not slowed down by atmosphere—in the 1000-3000 ton range this can also hold true by clever design i.e. like ICBM RVs—incidentally the Quicklaunch http://quicklaunchinc.com people have come up with a figure of a shell over >10 kg penetrating atmosphere, and Professor Warren D. Smith's magnetic catapult concept paper http://www.math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/launcher.ps
came up with a figure of a shell over >4000 kg penetrating atmosphere so a 1000-3000 ton range shell certainly can neglect atmospheric drag if it is moving with enough excess velocity to pay the price of punching through the atmosphere)

Ordinary molecular steam will top out at around 4-4.5 kilometers a second exhaust velocity, and we need more than that. We want to get moving at escape velocity, and the closer (but still survivable) to the bomb the impact absorbing Friedlander Sabot and Wang Bullet are the faster they will get moving, fast enough to escape the Earth (11.2 km/sec plus) if the reaction fluid-filled detonation chamber around the bomb is over-energized for steam, resulting in a state of plasma there.

The incredible power (literally, energy output divided by time) of even a small thermonuclear blast will give an unspeakable kick to the Friedlander Sabot and crush it; (while starting its’ upper part on the acceleration rails headed straight upward-- the Wang Bullet will be kicked skyward, still far beneath the sea – and the less ahead of the Wang Bullet the more speed it will achieve for the same kick behind it spitting it skyward.

But at this point the reader may ask, “Hey—this is not a reinforced cannon barrel but a simple tube. Why won’t it burst open!”

It might be good to think about the shaft-based, land launch version of the Wang Bullet. Why doesn’t every single (properly and deeply buried) underground nuclear test site burst open? Simply, balance of dynamic and static forces reaching an accommodation.

When a defective cannon bursts open what is happening is that the steel is trying to hold back the pressure and there is a flaw in it. So the expanding gas takes the easy way out. In the deep ocean, a moment's reflection will convince, there is no easy way out-- other than straight up the barrel. The barrel does NOT hold IN the gas-- it holds OUT the water. (The Wang Bullet can punch through the atmosphere easily enough-- but NOT the ocean, not without disintegrating)

Similarly, while the back of the tube will be eaten up progressively as the blast rises, the top hasn’t been gotten to yet in the early blast stages. If the Wang Bullet leaves fast enough, it will not be consumed.

Inertial confinement works in the thermonuclear bomb itself, i.e. trusting in the survival of the fusing secondary even though the expanding primary explosion is already chewing up one end of the H-bomb. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teller%E2%80%93Ulam_design it has been proven to work literally hundreds of times there. Inertial confinement of a sort will also keep the ocean out of the damaged launch tube because literally the ocean hasn't time to implode inwards until the Wang Bullet has shot outwards already.

Those who read the book or saw the 1955 movie, The Dam Busters
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dam_Busters_(film)
will know that the "Upkeep" bouncing bomb (designed to bounce over defensive torpedo nets then sink next to the dam) had to be detonated when it was in close contact with the target dam.
Simply, if the explosive blew in open water even a moderate distance from the dam, the shock waves would simply rebound off the dam.

However, if the explosive was sinking very close to the dam wall when it detonated, the force of the blast—the high pressure underwater bubble-- would be confined by the hydrostatic resistance of the water against the dam and burst it.

Some call this the “bubble pulse effect”—it is not very intuitive to people who have seen many blasts on land. But air is 800 times less dense than water—water confines the blast far more effectively than air, about two or three times less effectively (density considerations) than tamping with sandbags. Folks who want to demolish a bridge use explosives tamped down so the blast goes through the bridge and not into the air.

And this is the result of only a few meters of tamping material.

Now consider the Wang Bullet’s launch tube—the ‘Thermometer Bulb' the bomb chamber below the Wang Bullet would be filled with fresh water pumped from tanker (with neutron absorbing boron rich layers) to prevent long lived isotope generation by neutron activation.
(we want to create neither Carbon-14 or Chlorine 36 from the surrounding seawater)
and the thermonuclear device placed within it. The bomb flashes to plasma and a new star is born under the ocean—but not of infinite size. Just as under the ground, a bubble or void is formed. Because ground is denser than water, (and has a higher vaporization temperature) the bubble is larger under water--
But not that much larger.

There are not just a few meters of water on top but nearly a kilometer—EXCEPT for the hollow of the launch tube—with the Wang Bullet blocking the way.
I think it is safe to predict that the Wang Bullet will be forced out of the launch tube. Because literally that is the easiest way out. The alternative is pushing billions of tons of water … hydrodynamic and hydrostatic forces will reach an accommodation

The huge pressure of the gas wants to rapidly vent out the launch tube—which is why we have called the land based version the Verne Blowgun. On an intermediate time scale, the bottom of the launch tube is being destroyed by the spreading force of the explosion. On a much slower time scale, the gas bubble around the bomb wants to rise toward the surface. The Wang Bullet is forced skyward, and then the tube is chewed up from bottom to top.

Pictured below is a Bolonkin Dome (air supported) to contain the tritium escaping from the launch. In real life the mushroom cloud would not have risen before the Wang Bullet was long clear of atmosphere (a matter of a few seconds). Ideally this structure could further contain the radiation/tritium but let the spacecraft out through a rapid shut doorway known as the Oculus.

The hole fills in seconds, the waves die out in minutes, within a day the debris has sank or dispersed; (small particles more slowly than large) radioactivity nearly gone in weeks unless an island is splashed. Obviously we have chosen a deep site so that is not an issue. The ocean is huge, vast stretches of it are quite remote, near massive shipping capacity, and (to a degree) self-cleansing.

We can imagine the Wang Bullet as a transitory stage in space travel history, just to aid in the bootup of vast space industries. It is a period which will only last a few years---

Consider the capacity being sent up. Each launch sends up more than ALL Saturn V launches. Depending on the yield, literally the amount lifted could be more than all space launches (payload only—not counting spent stages--) ever.

What size should the thermonuclear charges be? The most common impulse is a kind of liberal guilt about using thermonukes at all and trying to limit the size of the energizing devices. See Project Pacer for an example of how to kill a promising idea. (LINK) Wrong, wrong, wrong. First of all the fission trigger will be hard to limit to less than a kiloton for reliable firing, (even the Russians used a 30 kiloton primary on the staged modular 4 x 30 kt secondary thermonuclear device) although neutron bombs and the history of the ~450 ton yield W-54 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W54 argue strongly half a kiloton is possible with sufficient testing- (and apparently they needed over 20 tests to get it right)- but the folks who don't like the Orion launch system didn't like testing either, as memory serves. And in general, if there was an equally cheap non-nuclear way to send stuff skyward, I am sure neither Brian or I would wish to use the nuclear way. But if the alternative is a societal collapse or a danger of human extinction due to the danger of being trapped on a closed world with another 60 years of planet-killer technological development coming down the pike (EZ biowar kits, new classes of manseeker weapons, name your nanopoison, etc...) Then we will take the emergency exit. The Wang Bullet is at least an option for discussion.
The treaties set against it (which can be abrogated in case of supreme national interest or by common agreement in case of international necessity) include the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty. There is also a 1974 Threshold Test Ban Treaty which sets a 150 kiloton limit. Although the original conception of the Wang Bullet involved a much larger device, there are penalties for largeness as well as incentives. So let us consider a 150 kiloton device as the energizer. As for the urge to go below 150 kilotons-- I don't think so. Antinuclear folks will moan and yell just as much for 1 kiloton as 150, so why not get 150 times the payload or cut cuts per kilogram to escape velocity 150 times more?

Suppose the launch tube and setup at sea costs $75 million, and the Wang Bullet and thermonuclear device all together, including launch and payload costs $200 million. That is less than a shuttle launch. But instead of 15 tons to orbit (the equivalent of 3 tons to the Moon) we are talking probably 1000 tons to the Moon. That is $200000 a ton to the Moon, or $100 a pound. That is cheap enough to do real operations there. (Note that this does not include low-G cargo, including people, but see below on ideas to do that cheaply) Using a 1.5 kiloton device would soar the price per pound to $10000. Conventional rockets could do it cheaper if the system were well designed (currently they cost (to lunar surface) about 10 times that.)
150 kilotons perfectly used would transport about 10000 tons to earth escape velocity. 20% of the energy in the Bikini Baker test of 1947 went to raising water, and the explosion was not even confined. Assuming 30 percent of the energy is coupled in shell motion, 3000 tons to escape velocity looks doable.
As for larger explosions, beyond a certain point each shot requires much more logistics (the flight article is much heavier-- 3000 tons is already the mass of a small destroyer, the launch tube gets more massive, etc). A 3000 tons launch vehicle is a good enough load to start with.

Assume extremely robust packaging, about a third of the weight, and merely robust cargoes should make it up usable, about 2000 tons worth. So the packaging is 1000 tons, the contents say 1000 tons and we can imagine a fuel reserve of say 1000 tons of water which can be used as Dr. Zuppero has outlined, http://www.neofuel.com using small heat sources (nuclear or solar) for fine trajectory and orbital adjustments once clear of the Earth. If just over escape velocity, and with around 2 km/sec exhaust velocity, 1100 degrees Kelvin being the nozzle temperature-- and using 1000 tons of water as the throwaway and 2000 tons of cargo and packaging as the remnant, we find that we get around 800 meters a second delta v, sufficient for capture into lunar orbit (a bare capture is better than a tight capture as long as there is a high perilune (closest spot to moon in orbit).. (An alternative is to crash it directly to a given spot into the moon, and retro just the contents of the packages-- this could also involve some delta v expenditure to aim the impact to a precise site for easy scrap (powder!) recovery. The robust packaging could be for example of copper, zinc, boron or some other substance desirable for industrial bootup as powdered scrap, heavy or light enough to easily separate from lunar regolith.

Note that too high over escape velocity gets you to an orbit we can't reach easily. So fine tuning by sensing muzzle velocity and putting ablative mass of very small particle size in the way may be needed to keep things to barely over escape velocity-- or if fine control is impossible, the Moon's bulk will stop it and we can go for lunar surface rendezvous with whatever sub-packages soft land (and the powdered scrap on the lunar surface)
So by whatever path we get there we probably will involve the Moon in our plans.

The working assumption of this article is that after all the packaging is dealt with, we have around 1000 tons to work with of net cargo from a 150 kiloton launch-- (using, again, 1000 tons for the packaging (Wang Bullet structure, possibly modular like a shotgun shell's contents or egg sac), 1000 tons payload, 1000 tons water). If we aim at the Moon and have say 1000 2 ton mini-landers (obviously with robust engines, but working rocket engines have been shot from cannons before) and assuming an exhaust velocity of 2500 meters a second (typical of solids) then of each 2 tons we may be able to get 650 kilograms down-- say 500 kilograms net cargo. So 500 tons to softlanded lunar touchdown, plus 1000 tons of powdered rarer element scrap from the packages. (say we can salvage half of that). You will lose some to keep the price of each lander say around a couple hundred thousand dollars (The V-2 was made for around this much) John Walker calculated in 1993 http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/rocketaday.html that a V-2 in 1943 dollars was $13000 marginal cost for each new copy and manufacturing cost alone was $43750 in 2009 dollars. The inflation calculator http://www.westegg.com/inflation/infl.cgi gives

What cost $13000 in 1943 would cost $159515.32 in 2009.
What cost $43750 in 1943 would cost $536830.42 in 2009.

This is for a delta-v capability, around 2 km/sec which is just a touch below the 2.4 km sec lunar landing speed. (but they used alcohol, modern fuels would supply the difference and more) As long as 70% of the landers make it and cargoes are not unique but well duplicated and distributed packages, do you care which ones crash? (and even a crash at hundreds of miles an hour and certainly at terminal touchdown would presumably leave much to salvage in terms of hardened cargo).

But think about this-- the massive Nova Rockets, never built, only would lift a million pounds (500 tons) to low Earth orbit, and typically only one eighth 60 tons + would make it to the lunar surface from that, if RP1/LOX, and one fifth (100 tons) if liquid hydrogen/LOX. For a Saturn 5 you can probably assume about 18.75 tons down (with a substitute lunar module with liquid hydrogen/LOX discarding, not landing, the S-IV B). So each one of these is the equivalent of 26 dedicated Saturn V all-to-the-surface landers. You could stock a small base (other than the people or low-g cargo!) with this.

Land the people at the first impact site, raid the mini- landers, assemble an outpost and large rover from pieces (possibly inflatable), then using landed fuel (or lunar ice deposits) journey overland to the next one, do work there. You could explore and set up the bases at the same time, then land more people ready to work. Among the landed high G cargo would be MREs (meals ready to eat) ice (melting to water) and a solar powered electrolyzer on the rover could make oxygen (or a roaster make oxygen out of certain classes of moonrock). Supply constraint would not be hanging on Mission Control's neck as in the rigidly limited early landings, where astronauts would be reminded continually of timeline.

Another idea: You could (if fine tuning muzzle velocity works) capture into lunar orbit, and from there launch an egg-sac like multi sphered water carrier craft on a staged mission, leaving tanks cached behind in various places. The idea would be to rendezvous with a modified (say) Dragon or Soyuz spacecraft that could capture each tank, pump in the water, used solar energy to heat it, and change orbit to the next tank. Using this (unconventional!) staging strategy, an ordinary LEO spacecraft like we can make today (with those key modifications) could rendezvous with the mother ship still in lunar orbit and make a super lunar Skylab out of it-- and indeed, assemble moon landers from the scrap, fuel them, and set up base at ground hit sites on the Moon as outlined above.

This suggests a strategy of aiming for the Moon first, getting ground hits, (and mini-lander soft landings) and when fine tuning the speed works, getting a capture into Lunar orbit and then sending down refueling tanks to Low Earth orbit for a mission to Lunar orbit and ultimately for Lunar landings. Eventually you would be able to mine the powdered scrap, and native lunar deposits as well.

We should note there might well be a role for Quicklaunch even in a world with the Wang Bullet. Stores get huge container deliveries all the time. They also get UPS and FedEx packages in between those to plug specific logistic gaps. We forget the scale of lunar bases projected in the early 1960s for the present time, but consider 1000 people on the Moon, or 10000. Even with 100 kilograms a year personal cargo each sent them, you can imagine at least one Quicklaunch system kept busy that way-- not to mention emergency scientific supplies to cover losses, burnouts, etc. At this stage we are well into minor industrial development on the Moon.

Brian has discussed the possibility of the shaft-launched original Wang Bullet system. The sea launch option I think is superior because of the lack of a contaminated hole. Actually reloading a shaft launch is problematic because, like a hot-launch ICBM, the Wang Bullet damages your hole-- and unlike that ICBM, it is a radioactive hole your men have to work in. I don't see it happening. The industrial capability to create several 150 kt launches from in the same contaminated site (and by definition, the land launches will be remote sites—this is one case where NIMBY makes total sense...) Also difficult to see happening.
Every difficulty you encounter shows up in the increased cost to space. We already noted the beginnings of the slide to out of control costs and lack of cost benefit that are the death knell of space projects. The idea is to not only keep it cheap, but to achieve far less than current COMMERCIAL cheapness.

The sea launch option acknowledges each shaft as being regarded as disposable (though in fact there
may be a way to reuse materials after a few years) and literally builds a shaft, a chimney of minimum thickness and known composition, of steel reinforced concrete rings. The sea does the containment without the permanent ground cracking and stress that land sites endure, and without any concern as to water table contamination or ongoing environmental monitoring. We consider it a superior option. (Also the one less favored by treaty, because the 1963 treaty prohibits underwater explosions. As we noted however, it may be modified by either agreement or supreme national interest).

A few final advantages to the Sea Launch Option for the Wang Bullet--

Less restriction on launch locations. Not just stable strata in the abandoned Arctic or Antarctic. Not just remote hard to reach places (even with access to sea) The Moon is directly over head in a band varying from 17 North to 17 South, minimum, to 29 North and 29 South, maximum. So straight up and straight down (hitting the Moon) is possible.

The far open ocean is by definition, near massive shipping capacity, remote from people, etc. Also, no one owns international waters.

Also, smaller powers like the UK which lack suitable huge barren territories for a Wang Bullet land launch, may find it easier to do it at sea.

At this point we probably should acknowledge that people have a thing about nuclear. Brian has already reviewed documents by supposedly objective organizations which were so cosmically biased against nuclear power that Brian concluded,

'I laugh at their claims of objectivity'
--I had a similar 'hold on' moment when I started reading Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Gradually it dawned upon me that an amazing amount of their time was --um-- opposing atomic stuff. I wanted to read about mega atomic engineering, Thrilling Mechanix style-- alas...the dreams of a young boy.

In a way this Wang Bullet work goes back to that early enthusiasm for the potential of nuclear power. In the spirit that there has got to be a small scale way to do it sensibly that will have LESS impact then the REAL impact of coal (thousands dead a year simply from mining, before we even touch on pollution, which surely is tens of thousands, mostly elderly from respiratory events, mostly in China).

In a similar way, nuclear space systems should not be dismissed out of hand IF the conventional alternatives do not measure up and cannot be made to boot a space economy in reasonable time intervals. Now as it happens, the Wang Bullet possibly is NOT the best answer, if there are cheaper and more economical and lower G methods that will send this level of cargo up and allow this level of space activity, bring them on!

But if you don't, don't complain if we discuss this... A little word there for free speech...

As the saying goes, show me the money. Show us a launch system cheaper per kilo to the lunar surface, that opens up space operations like this one, that does not rely on nuclear, and we will concede that that is the superior system.

As it happens, there may be one. But that is for another article...

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More Details on Super fracking

noreply@blogger.com (bw) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:09:02 PST

New Energy and Fuel - “super fracking” as its becoming named is based on three basic improvements.

This is a follow up from this article

1. Schlumberger’s “HIWAY” idea is an innovation in the material forced into the rock. (The linked page has a good animation to explain the process in detail.)

Schlumberger's Flow-Channel Fracturing Illustrated

2. The second idea called “RapidFrac” comes from Halliburton with a set of highly developed specialized pipe fittings that go into a newly drill hole. (This page also has a high quality animated video, though quite a large file.) Much like valves, these sections of the pipe when activated open passages to the rock.

Halliburtons RapidFrac System Illustrated. The explanation is part of the jpg, click the image to see the largest view.

Halliburton’s new technology also has a second benefit, the accurate and limited groups require about half the water and much less time. Where time is money this level of conservation and efficiency really adds up

3. Baker Hughes has developed disintegrating frack balls (No company info yet.). This solves the need to have a drilling rig return to the well, and spend several days drilling and fishing out the perhaps a many as 20 or even 30 balls dropped in to do the frack in stages.

4. Baker Hughes is developing and testing “super cracks,” a method of blasting deeper into dense rock to create wider channels in order to funnel more oil and gas. The aim for the technology, branded “DirectConnect,”(pdf file link) is to concentrate fracking power to target oil or gas buried deeper in the formation.

Perhaps the best news is the new technologies are reducing costs in a big way. Investor stock trackers have noticed and estimates like the one from JPMorgan Chase projects drops from $2.5 million per well down to an astonishing $750,000 – a drop of 70% – money that will get reinvested in more drilling and production.

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Advantage of China's Fast GDP Growth - They can Outgrow Debt Problems

noreply@blogger.com (bw) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:26:17 PST

Wall Street Journal - In 2011, China's gross domestic product came in at 47.1 trillion yuan ($7.11 trillion). That represented nominal growth of 17.5 per cent from 2010, a blistering pace that makes many of the problems of debt and credit that trouble investors, and which hang over valuations for Chinese stocks, appear a little more manageable.

Take local-government debt. The government's auditor put the number at 10.7 trillion yuan at the end of 2010. That was equal to 26% of China's GDP. In 2011, it shrank to 22%. Even if weaker demand and lower inflation mean a slightly lower nominal growth rate in 2012, by the end of the year local-government debt could shrink to 19% of GDP. Debt may be creeping up, but not enough to push the ratio in the wrong direction.

Investors also worry about China's credit binge, which saw the ratio of loans to GDP soar from 96% at the end of 2008 to 119% at the end of 2010, as the pace of new loans ran far ahead of GDP growth. An expanding economy means that ratio was down to 116% in 2011. That reduction reflects the fact that banks' loan books are expanding, though not as fast as GDP.

Slow growth in the US, Europe and Japan mean there is almost no room for error managing issues like real estate and debt.

China can overbuild real estate and then absorb the capacity with 30 million people moving to cities every year.

China can run up debt but easily have GDP/Debt ratio shrink by pulling back so that debts grows less than the nominal GDP growth rate. China's nominal 17% in 2011 and which should still be 12% or more in 2012 through 2020.

This is an issue that runs into those who are against pro-growth economic policies. Those against pro-growth want a society that has very little growth or even no growth. This is often for some ideology related to resource usage and the environment and some aspect of a philosophy of what they consider to be right and wrong.

This ignores the fact that the world can easily support an economy that is one hundred times larger, if cities and transportation are structured correctly and technologies like deep burn nuclear fission power were developed or nuclear fusion were available. The economy could be one hundred times larger still with advanced molecular nanotechnology. The economy could be over a billion times larger than that with development of resources in the solar system.

Zero growth plans leave a society on the razors edge of economic disaster. In the far future, after civilizations has expanded to somewhere between Kardashev 2 and 3, there could be some consideration of transitioning and managing with almost no growth. This is something the future society should take the time to determine how to do correctly. That is not something that should happen now.

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World’s Most Powerful X-ray Laser Creates 2-Million-Degree Matter

noreply@blogger.com (bw) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 12:42:07 PST

Researchers working at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have used the world’s most powerful X-ray laser to create and probe a 2-million-degree piece of matter in a controlled way for the first time. This feat, reported today in Nature, takes scientists a significant step forward in understanding the most extreme matter found in the hearts of stars and giant planets, and could help experiments aimed at recreating the nuclear fusion process that powers the sun.

The experiments were carried out at SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), whose rapid-fire laser pulses are a billion times brighter than those of any X-ray source before it. Scientists used those pulses to flash-heat a tiny piece of aluminum foil, creating what is known as “hot dense matter,” and took the temperature of this solid plasma – about 2 million degrees Celsius. The whole process took less than a trillionth of a second.

This photograph shows the interior of a Linac Coherent Light Source SXR experimental chamber, set up for an investigation to create and measure a form of extreme, 2-million-degree matter known as... (Photo courtesy University of Oxford/Sam Vinko

“The LCLS X-ray laser is a truly remarkable machine,” said Sam Vinko, a postdoctoral researcher at Oxford University and the paper’s lead author. “Making extremely hot, dense matter is important scientifically if we are ultimately to understand the conditions that exist inside stars and at the center of giant planets within our own solar system and beyond.”

Scientists have long been able to create plasma from gases and study it with conventional lasers, said co-author Bob Nagler of SLAC, an LCLS instrument scientist. But no tools were available for doing the same at solid densities that cannot be penetrated by conventional laser beams.

“The LCLS, with its ultra-short wavelengths of X-ray laser light, is the first that can penetrate a dense solid and create a uniform patch of plasma – in this case a cube one-thousandth of a centimeter on a side – and probe it at the same time,” Nagler said.

The resulting measurements, he said, will feed back into theories and computer simulations of how hot, dense matter behaves. This could help scientists analyze and recreate the nuclear fusion process that powers the sun.

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Green Wall of China and plans for the Great Green Wall of the Sahara

noreply@blogger.com (bw) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 12:37:15 PST

Wikipedia - The Green Wall of China, also known as the Green Great Wall or Great Green Wall will be a series of human-planted forest strips in the People's Republic of China, designed to hold back the expansion of the Gobi Desert. It is planned to be completed around 2050, at which point it is planned to be 2,800 miles (4,500 km) long. China has seen 3,600 square km (1,390 square miles) of grassland overtaken every year by the Gobi Desert. Each year dust storms blow off as much as 900 square miles (2,000 square km) of topsoil, and the storms are increasing in severity each year. The Green Wall project was begun in 1978 with the proposed end result of raising northern China’s forest cover from 5 to 15 percent and thereby reducing desertification.

As of 2009 China’s planted forest covered more than 500,000 square kilometers (increasing tree cover from 12% to 18%) – the largest artificial forest in the world. However, of the 53,000 hectares planted that year, a quarter died and of the remaining many are dwarf trees, which lack the capacity to protect the soil. In 2008 winter storms destroyed 10% of the new forest stock, causing the World Bank to advise China to focus more on quality rather than quantity in its stock species

Yale University - in an extensive analysis of such “afforestation” efforts published last year in Earth Science Reviews, Beijing Forestry University scientist Shixiong Cao and five co-authors say that on-the-ground surveys have shown that, over time, as many as 85 percent of the plantings fail.

Writing in Nature in September, 2011 Jianchu Xu, senior scientist at the World Agroforestry Centre and a professor at the Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Science, echoed concerns about the dangers of planting maladapted tree species in China’s arid environments, noting that native perennial grasses, “with their extensive root systems would be better protectors of topsoil.”

“Plantation monocultures harbor little diversity; they provide almost no habitat for the country's many threatened forest species. Plantations generate less leaf litter and other organic inputs than native forests, so soil fauna and flora decrease... Afforestation in water-stressed regions might provide windbreaks, and tree plantations offer some carbon storage. But these benefits come at a high cost to other ecological functions.”

What could work? Going native. Beyond protecting what native ecosystems remain, some research suggests that simply preventing further abuse of degraded ecosystems can allow them to recover.

Chinese ecologist Jiang Gaoming has called for “nurturing the land by the land itself.” In a region of Inner Mongolia called the “Hunshandake sandy land,” his team of researchers has shown that native grasslands will restore themselves in as little as two years if fencing can be installed to eliminate livestock grazing and other human incursions.

One project underway in a region of Southwest China, under a partnership between Conservation International and China’s Center for Nature and Society, could serve as a better model. In a 100,000-square-mile region that includes ecosystems ranging from coniferous and broadleaf forests, to grasslands, wetlands and bamboo groves, the project has already restored more than 12,000 acres using native species.

In what could be a hopeful turn, China’s State Forestry Administration has indicated that it has gotten the message. The nation’s lead forestry agency has begun collaborating on projects aimed specifically at restoring native species. The agency is working with the Climate Community and Biodiversity Alliance (CCBA), whose members include Conservation International, the Nature Conservancy, and the Rainforest Alliance.

One of the first of the proposed projects would reforest more than 10,000 acres of severely degraded former forest lands in five counties in Sichuan province, a mountainous region surrounding the upper reaches of the Yangtze and Daduhe Rivers. The area in general is classified by Chinese environmental agencies as a “biological hotspot” that includes — where it’s still intact — habitat for the giant panda.

Following new standards developed by CCBA, the project will primarily use native species, including Armand pine, China cedar, and local varieties of fir, spruce, poplar, and alder

Sahara Forest Project and the pan Africa Great Green Wall

There has been studies considering the implementation of a Sahara forest

UK Guardian - The building of a pan-African Great Green Wall (GGW) was approved by an international summit this week in the former German capital Bonn in 2011

It would be 15km wide, and up to 8,000km long – a living green wall of trees and bushes, full of birds and other animals. Imagine it just south of the Sahara, from Djibouti in the Horn of Africa in the east, all the way across the continent to Dakar, Senegal, in the west.

The GGW, as conceived by the 11 countries located along the southern border of the Sahara, and their international partners, is aimed at limiting the desertification of the Sahel zone. It will also be a catalyst for a multifaceted international economic and environmental programme.

The Sahel zone is the transition between the Sahara in the north and the African savannas in the south, and includes parts of Burkina Faso, Chad, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Sudan.

The GGW initiative initially involved the planting of a 15km-wide forest belt across the continent, with a band of vegetation as continuous as possible, but rerouted if necessary to skirt around obstacles such as streams, rocky areas and mountains – or to link inhabited areas.

During the meeting in Bonn, the Global Environment Facility (GEF) confirmed its promise to allocate up to $115m to support the construction of the green wall. Other international development institutions also made investment pledges to support building the wall, of up to $3bn.

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Seawater Greenhouses

noreply@blogger.com (bw) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 10:25:10 PST

Seawater greenhouse technology is described here

The greenhouses produce more than five times the fresh water needed to water the plants, some of it can be released into the local environment to grow other plants.

Seawater is evaporated at the front of the greenhouse to create cool humid conditions inside. A proportion of the evaporated seawater is then condensed as fresh water that can be used to irrigate the crops. Excess freshwater created in the Seawater Greenhouse can be used to irrigate additional crops grown outside the greenhouse.

The air going into the greenhouse is first cooled and humidified by seawater, which trickles over the first evaporator. This provides good climate conditions for the crops. As the air leaves the growing area, it passes through the second evaporator over which seawater is flowing. This seawater has been heated by the sun in a network of pipes above the growing area, making the air much hotter and more humid. It then meets a series of vertical pipes through which cool seawater passes. When the hot humid air meets the cool surfaces, fresh water will condense as droplets that run down to the base where they can be collected.

The cool and humid conditions in the greenhouse enable crops to grow with very little water. When crops are not stressed by excessive transpiration, both the yield and the quality are higher.

The simplicity of the process imitates the hydrological cycle where seawater heated by the sun evaporates, cools down to form clouds, and returns to the earth as rain, fog or dew.

Economics of seawater greenhouses

There are several commercial seawater greenhouse projects that are at various stages

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Environmental Benefits of lab-grown meat and genetically engineered fish

noreply@blogger.com (bw) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 09:57:04 PST

UK Guardian - a recent study calculates that cultured meat has 80-95% lower greenhouse gas emissions, 99% lower land use and 80-90% lower water use compared to conventionally produced meat in Europe. Every kilo of conventionally produced meat requires 4kg-10kg of feed, whereas cultured meat significantly increases efficiency by using only 2kg of feed. Based on our results, if cultured meat constituted half of all meat consumed we could halve the greenhouse emissions, and increase the forest cover by 50%, which is equivalent to four times of Brazil's current forest area.

The measurement of feed for kilogram of meat is for beef.

Cattle require 8-10 kilograms of feed per kilogram of live weight. Poultry require 3 kilograms of feed per kilogram of live weight. Fish, because they are poikilothermic ("cold-blooded"), only require 1.2 to 2 kilograms or less of feed per kilogram of live weight. No energy is required to maintain body temperature.

The first versions of genetically engineered fish are 10-30% more efficient at converting feed into body mass. Genetically engineered fish are more efficient than lab grown beef in converting feed into body mass.

Feed conversion ratio (FCR) at wikipedia

Sheep and cattle FCR 8 kg of feed to put on 1 kg of live weight
Pork (pigs) FCR of 3.4-3.6
Farm raised Atlantic salmon FCR of about 1.2
Tilapia, typically, 1.6 to 1.8
Poultry (chicken) has a feed conversion ratio of 2 to 1

UK Guardian - there are ways to increase the direct use of even more efficient "feed"

How do you free up huge amounts of farmland to grow more food for humans? Easy – switch to commercial algae farms. Algae are simple, single-cell organisms that can grow very rapidly at sea, in polluted water and in places that would normally kill food crops.

Scientists say that under optimum conditions, commercial algae farms can produce 5,000-10,000 gallons of oil per acre, compared to just 350 gallons of ethanol biofuel per acre grown with crops like maize. In addition, algae could feed millions of animals and act as a fertiliser. Replacing all US ethanol (biofuel) production with algae oil would need around 2m acres of desert, but, says Arizona State university professor Mark Edwards, it would potentially allow 40m acres of cropland to be planted with human food, and save billions of gallons of irrigation water a year.

Algae are at the bottom of the food chain but they are already eaten widely in Japan and China in the form of seaweeds, and are used as fertilizers, soil conditioners and animal feed.

China has new super rice that will increase yields by 15% over the 2004 version of rice. They are targeting another 15% gain in yields by 2020. This gain was achieved without genetic engineering. Genetic engineering may increase the speed of yield improvement.

Feed conversion efficiency discussion of regular meat versus insects

FCEs are generally higher for insects than for vertebrates. One must be careful in making such comparisons, however. One problem is that insect values are reported on the basis of dry weights, whereas livestock values are reported as "gain" which typically includes 70% water. After adjusting for water weight, ballpark figures for efficiency of gain are seen below. Clearly, the insects are superior to mammals when fed the same food. FCEs of vertebrates can approach or even surpass those of insects when they are fed especially nutritious and digestible food such as grain.

Chicken (grain) 30%
Pigs (grain) 11 %
Beef (grain) 5%
Beef (grass) 3%
About rearing grasshoppers on forbs: I would expect higher ECIs than when reared on grass. Insects fed grass are in the 8-30% efficiency range. So the best insects are in the efficiency range of chicken.

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Autophagy is one of the Mechanism of Longevity Activated by Exercise

noreply@blogger.com (bw) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 09:33:22 PST

Fightaging - Exercise extends healthy life in laboratory animals, but not maximum life span as is the case for calorie restriction. Present evidence suggests exercise and calorie restriction to have broadly similar - though very different in detail - effects on life expectancy. There is as yet no study on exercise that reproduces similar eye-opening changes in underlying biomarkers of health to those found in human calorie restriction practitioners. Exercise is "merely" great for health, as opposed to amazingly superb for health.

The Economist - exercise protects against a host of illnesses, from heart attacks and dementia to diabetes and infection.

Autophagy could the mechanism for the benefits of exercise. Autophagy is the process by which cells break down damaged components, the first step in recycling and replacement: fewer damaged components at any given time is a good thing, and so more autophagy should also be a good thing.

Autophagy is an ancient mechanism, shared by all eukaryotic organisms (those which, unlike bacteria, keep their DNA in a membrane-bound nucleus within their cells). It probably arose as an adaptation to scarcity of nutrients.

Critters that can recycle parts of themselves for fuel are better able to cope with lean times than those that cannot. But over the past couple of decades, autophagy has also been shown to be involved in things as diverse as fighting bacterial infections and slowing the onset of neurological conditions like Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s diseases.

Most intriguingly of all, it seems that it can slow the process of ageing. Biologists have known for decades that feeding animals near-starvation diets can boost their lifespans dramatically. Dr Levine was a member of the team which showed that an increased level of autophagy, brought on by the stress of living in a constant state of near-starvation, was the mechanism responsible for this life extension.

The SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) Apoptosens project is related to autophagy. It is a project to removing cells that the body tries but fails to kill.

Donate to SENS here

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Weaving electronics into the fabric of our physical world

noreply@blogger.com (bw) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 17:32:30 PST

University of Cambridge - The integration of electronics with materials opens up a world of possibilities, the surface of which is just being scratched. Professor Arokia Nathan has joined the University to take up a new Chair in Engineering, where he will be exploring the application of research that allows us to glimpse a world rivalling our wildest dreams of the future.

The potential applications for nanophotonics and nanoelectronics are truly startling, suggesting the brink of a revolution in human–machine interfaces that could turn science fiction into a reality. From interactive paper to clothing that generates energy and light-weight material with X-ray capabilities, weaving electronics into the building blocks of everyday materials will undoubtedly impact how we live in the future.

Professor Nathan and colleagues within the Division will be developing electronic systems that can be seamlessly layered on to a material or substrate, such as plastic or polyester, with embedded transistors and sensors for transmitting and receiving information. While at UCL, Nathan and a team of collaborators from CENIMAT/FCTUNL, Portugal demonstrated the first inverter and other circuit building blocks on a piece of paper, representing the first step towards animated images and videos on magazine pages.

Power is a vital question for these processes to address. “If a magazine has electronic displays as an integral part of a page, then it’s got to cover its own power,” says Nathan. “Solar energy will be a major focus of the work. I can see it becoming commonplace for clothing to have embedded electronics that generate energy from solar and even body heat, essentially doubling as a battery that can be charging your phone as it’s in your pocket.

This could be coupled with what’s known as ‘green broadcasting’, to build a picture of an individual self-powering their portable electronics as they are out and about. “These portable devices which otherwise lay idle could be sending out information at very low bit rates without using much energy. It could always be active – this is where our photonics group has expertise,” says Nathan. “It’s easy to see how these technologies might appeal to major industry, from clothing manufacturers to publishers, and certainly the military.”

Nanowires will be a key area of investigation for Nathan in the coming years. These structures have an extraordinary length-to-width ratio, only a few nanometres in diameter, and a much greater capacity in terms of speed. “Uniformly dispersed over large areas, the wires could result in millions of transistors on a single sheet of A4 for example,” says Nathan.

“While it hasn’t been done yet, we will be working on this in an attempt to match the speeds of a Pentium-like chip, scaled to A4. Pentium chips cost 10 dollars per centimetre squared, while a nano thin film transistor could cost as little as 10 cents per centimetre squared, a much cheaper alternative.”

Industries such as biomedicine could also benefit hugely from this interlacing of nano-electronics into materials. “You could foresee a time when you can take the X-ray to the patient rather than vice-versa,” says Nathan. “Patients might lie on a surface woven with electronics, so that data can be broadcast straight from the material. You couldn’t do this with Pentium-like chips because of yield and cost issues.”

“With these non-conventional materials you have a great deal of freedom. We believe this approach to circuitry in substrates will lead to the creation of smart substances, and once you start thinking about the possible applications, it’s hard to stop: surgeon’s gloves with smart skin, walls of a house that store energy and generate large-scale displays, magazines with interactive video in the pages, devices that dissolve the toxins in water, bio-interfaces in mobile phones with diagnostic capabilities, clothing that generates energy – the possibilities are endless!”

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