October 29, 2009

The Miracle of SCIENCE!!!

One of the Brickmuppets crack team of science babes brings us a collection of cool, potentially game changing developments in the field of SUPER SCIENCE!

Magnetic Monopoles?
 Tony Stark call your office. This has been one of the holy grails of physics for some time, now 4 different teams have produced considerable evidence that they exist. More on the discovery can be found here and Brian Wang has an overview of the implications, if this can eventually be replicated commercially  here.

Metallic Hydrogen?
Researchers at the University of Buffalo have found that adding lithium to hydrogen they can vastly reduce the pressures at which it becomes metallic. IF this can be made stable at reasonable pressures, the implications for this are potentially game changers for both rocketry and electronics. As a rocket fuel it would theoretically have performance heretofore never attained by man. As explained here it's applications for electronics are something that has been long sought.

Metallic hydrogen is predicted to be a high-temperature superconductor. A superconductor is a state of matter where electrons, and thus electricity, can flow indefinitely and without resistance.

Wow! There are certainly hurdles to be overcome....
The calculations also predict that LiH6 could be a metal at normal pressures. However, under these conditions it is not stable and would decompose to form LiH and H2.

...still, this takes metallic hydrogen from the purely theoretical to something that might well be made practical with refinements in stabilizing it. As a fuel it is, like regular H2, not an energy source, but an energy carrier albiet one with high density, it would require a lot of power to produce...power that might best come from....

Atomic Power Plants: We here at Brickmuppet Blog really like atomic power and we are overjoyed to report that mass production of some of the small reactors we've blogged about before is indeed iminent. Hyperion's nuclear reactors are finally going to enter production, albeit in the UK. In Japan, Drudge reports that small reactors are taking off,  Toshiba (with Westinghouse) is planning to mass market their 4s Reactor. While the reactor itself  is old news it appears that Toshiba no longer considers it experimental and is looking beyond Alaska to the third world. Mitsubishi is also developing small mass produced reactors for third world consumption. Such reactors dispersed around the US could provide a robust, redundant, reliable, decentralized and nearly carbon free source of power if it were pursued aggressively, particularly if domestic reprocessing facilities were developed. This would be a vital and necessary investment if one genuinely considered global warming to be a transcendental threat and a damned good one if one was more concerned about the well being of the U.S.A. with regards to infrastructure, strategic, and economic (cheap power=jobs) well being. Those in power seem to have little concern about any of that.
Alas...

Well...back to the miracle of SCIENCE!

Touchy Feely Bionics!
The BBC reports on the first prostetic arm with a sense of touch!

Caves on the Moon!
Japans Kayuga lunar probe seems to have spied a cave....no word on the presence of amazons, diamonds and giant spiders...but we'll keep you posted.

Finally, via Jerry Pournelle, comes this astonishing powerpoint presentation of the earth from space....look.

Science Babe is the scientist Yayoi from Mouse by Satoru Akahori

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