Circa 2016
Joins Play-Doh and champagne as the world’s best unintended innovations.
Category: innovation – Page 148
Electric dipole propulsion bigsmile
One reason we look so often at sail technologies in these pages is that they offer us ways of leaving the propellant behind. But even as we enter the early days of solar sail experimentation in space, we look toward ways of improving them by somehow getting around their need for solar photons. Robert Zubrin’s work with Dana Andrews has helped us see how so-called magnetic sails (magsails) could be used to decelerate a craft as it moved into a destination system. Now Zubrin looks at moving beyond both this and solar wind-deflecting electric sails toward an ingenious propellantless solution. Zubrin presented the work at last April’s Breakthrough Discuss meeting, and today he fills us in on its principles and advantages. Read on for a look at a form of enhanced electric sail the author has christened the Dipole Drive.
by Robert Zubrin
The dipole drive is a new propulsion system which uses ambient space plasma as propellant, thereby avoiding the need to carry any of its own. The dipole drive remedies two shortcomings of the classic electric sail in that it can generate thrust within planetary magnetospheres and it can generate thrust in any direction in interplanetary space. In contrast to the single positively charged screen employed by the electric sail, the dipole drive is constructed from two parallel screens, one charged positive, the other negative, creating an electric field between them with no significant field outside. Ambient solar wind protons entering the dipole drive field from the negative screen side are reflected out, with the angle of incidence equaling the angle of reflection, thereby providing lift if the screen is placed at an angle to the plasma wind. If the screen is perpendicular to the solar wind, only drag is generated but the amount is double that of electric sail of the same area.
Ever wonder what’s under the hood of your favorite electronic device? The transistor is the engine that powers every Intel processor. To build a modern computer chip, our engineers place billions of these tiny switches into an area no larger than a fingernail. It’s one of mankind’s most complex feats, and it’s happening every day across Intel’s global network of chip manufacturing facilities. Check out this video to learn more about how we turn sand into the silicon chips that power the world.
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A team led by Prof. Guo Guangcan from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and collaborators first realized distribution of high-dimensional orbital angular momentum entanglement over a 1 km few-mode fiber. The result is published in Optica.
Increasing the channel capacity and tolerance to noise in quantum communications is a strong practical motivation for encoding quantum information in multilevel systems, qudits as opposed to qubits. From a foundational perspective, entanglement in higher dimensions exhibits more complex structures and stronger non-classical correlations. High-dimensional entanglement has demonstrated its potential for increasing channel capacity and resistance to noise in quantum information processing. Despite these benefits, the distribution of high-dimensional entanglement is relatively new and remains challenging.
The orbital angular momentum of photon is a high dimensional system which has been paid much attention to in recent years. However, orbital angular momentum entanglement is susceptible to atmospheric turbulence or mode crosstalk and mode dispersion in optical fibers. It can only transmit a few meters, and is limited to two-dimensional entanglement distribution.
Solid-state batteries could deliver a range approaching 500 miles, according to Korean tech giant Samsung.
Hope on the horizon:
1. Researcher make a breakthrough: Professor Katherine Kedzierska leads research at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity that discovers how the human body overcomes coronavirus.
Melbourne researchers have mapped immune responses from one of Australia’s first novel coronavirus (COVID-19) patients, showing the body’s ability to fight the virus and recover from the infection.
Lead researcher Professor Kedzierska (Microbiology and Immunology) said the antibodies released by the human immune system to overcome coronavirus are very similar to those it uses to combat influenza — despite it never having being exposed to the disease.
While the CDC has a vaccination in clinical trials Israel claims they could have a COVID-19 vaccination available within 90 days:
Israeli Science and Technology Minister Ofir Akunis confirmed Thursday that scientists are close to developing the first vaccine against the COVID-19 novel coronavirus.
The vaccine could be ready within a few weeks and available in 90 days if all continues going according to plan, Akunis noted.
“Congratulations to MIGAL [The Galilee Research Institute] on this exciting breakthrough. I am confident there will be further rapid progress, enabling us to provide a needed response to the grave global COVID-19 threat,” Akunis is quoted as saying, the Jerusalem Post reported.
The US is going to lockdown for 15 days to start.
Members of the Trump administration’s coronavirus task force, led by Vice President Mike Pence, hold a press briefing at the White House.
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There’s a new breakthrough that might just be the secret ingredient to commercialize “the holy grail of energy,” nuclear fusion.
An international team of researchers, affiliated with UNIST has for the first time succeeded in demonstrating the ionization cooling of muons. Regarded as a major step in being able to create the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, this new muon accelerator is expected to provide a better understanding of the fundamental constituents of matter.
This breakthrough has been carried out by the Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment (MICE) collaboration, which includes many UK scientists, as well as Professor Moses Chung and his research team in the School of Natural Sciences at UNIST. Their findings have been published in the online version of Nature on February 5, 2020.
“We have succeeded in realizing muon ionization cooling, one of our greatest challenges associated with developing muon accelerators,” says Professor Chung. “Achievement of this is considered especially important, as it could change the paradigm of developing the Lepton Collider that could replace the Neutrino Factory or the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).”