CASIC, a major Chinese defense contractor, has made major breakthroughs for China to build and deploy military railguns.
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Medical Innovations
Posted in biotech/medical, innovation
Shailesh Prasad Photo
Posted in futurism
In Brief:
This new development in photoelectronics makes the technology more cost (and quantum) efficient. This opens ways for graphene to be further integrated in the field of photoelectronics.
EICREA professors Frank Koppens and Gerasimos Konstantatos led researchers in the ICFO in developing a hybrid photodetector that is better-performing in terms of speed, accuracy and range, and operates in the visible spectrum, near infrared (NIR) and short-wave infrared (SWIR), with wavelengths ranging from 400 to 3000 nm.
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Antimatter and the Sail
Posted in materials, space travel
Interesting!
An antimatter probe to a nearby star? The idea holds enormous appeal, given the colossal energies obtained when normal matter annihilates in contact with its antimatter equivalent. But as we’ve seen through the years on Centauri Dreams, such energies are all but impossible to engineer. Antimatter production is infinitesimal, the by-product of accelerators designed with a much different agenda. Moreover, antimatter storage is hellishly difficult, so that maintaining large quantities in a stable condition requires multiple breakthroughs.
All of which is why I became interested in the work Gerald Jackson and Steve Howe were doing at Hbar Technologies. Howe, in fact, became a key source when I put together the original book from which this site grew. This was back in 2002–2003, and I was captivated with the idea of what could be called an ‘antimatter sail.’ The idea, now part of a new Kickstarter campaign being launched by Jackson and Howe, is to work with mere milligrams of antimatter, allowing antiprotons to be released from the spacecraft into a uranium-enriched, five-meter sail.
Reacting with the uranium, the antimatter produces fission fragments that create what could be considered a nuclear-stimulated ablation blowing off the carbon-fiber sail. As to the reaction itself, Jackson and Howe would use a sheet of depleted uranium U-238 with a carbon coating on its back side. Here’s how the result is described in the Kickstarter material now online:
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