The cutting-edge ‘KNasa Chef Knife’ is twice as sharp as other blades and stays sharp for five times longer.
The brains behind it claim it is the first true innovation in knife making in over 200 years.
The knife is made from an ultra-hard alloy developed by scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and has been tested by engineers at NASA.
Rice University researchers have discovered a hidden symmetry in the chemical kinetic equations scientists have long used to model and study many of the chemical processes essential for life.
The find has implications for drug design, genetics and biomedical research and is described in a study published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. To illustrate the biological ramifications, study co-authors Oleg Igoshin, Anatoly Kolomeisky and Joel Mallory of Rice’s Center for Theoretical Biological Physics (CTBP) used three wide-ranging examples: protein folding, enzyme catalysis and motor protein efficiency.
In each case, the researchers demonstrated that a simple mathematical ratio shows that the likelihood of errors is controlled by kinetics rather than thermodynamics.
Circa 2019
But perhaps soldiers should be glad that the Army didn’t go with the infamous Heckler & Koch G11 or the futuristic XM29 OICW, or the ill-fated XM8 assault rifle.
Instead of a very conventional rifle firing the 5.56 NATO round, the Army is now rapidly progressing towards developing and field-testing a new weapon that can double the muzzle speeds of a bullet.
The primary advantages to this new (and no-so-new) technology are insane armor-penetration capabilities at close ranges, and next-level accuracy at longer ranges.
The U.S. Air Force’s fleet of B-52H heavy strategic bombers are on track to becoming a fleet of flying centenarians. The service wants to purchase over 600 new engines for its B-52s, ensuring that the “Big Ugly Fat Fella” can fly on to 2050 or later. This will practically ensure that some bombers, delivered in the early 1960s, will still be dropping bombs in the early 2060s.
The high-tech outfit’s features includes compatibility with vaping and a subwoofer soundsystem.
The Pentagon has created top secret military artificial intelligence that has a higher intellect than humans.
A Defense Intelligence Agency experiment shows AI and humans have different risk tolerances when data is scarce.
In the 1983 movie WarGames, the world is brought to the edge of nuclear destruction when a military computer using artificial intelligence interprets false data as an imminent Soviet missile strike. Its human overseers in the Defense Department, unsure whether the data is real, can’t convince the AI that it may be wrong. A recent finding from the Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA, suggests that in a real situation where humans and AI were looking at enemy activity, those positions would be reversed.
Artificial intelligence can actually be more cautious than humans about its conclusions in situations when data is limited. While the results are preliminary, they offer an important glimpse into how humans and AI will complement one another in critical national security fields.
British Air Traffic Control says Russia’s long-range military aviation, flying south outside Norway towards the North Sea, is posing a hazard to civilian air traffic.
GE offshore wind: massive offshore turbine Haliade-X 12MW looks like a winner.
GE-Hitachi Nuclear Energy may be a receding opportunity.
GE might sell its steam power business and rationalise its fossil fuel interests.
The power and renewables businesses are important in considering investment in GE.
The Newtonian laws of physics explain the behavior of objects in the everyday physical world, such as an apple falling from a tree. For hundreds of years Newton provided a complete answer until the work of Einstein introduced the concept of relativity. The discovery of relativity did not suddenly prove Newton wrong, relativistic corrections are only required at speeds above about 67 million mph. Instead, improving technology allowed both more detailed observations and techniques for analysis that then required explanation. While most of the consequences of a Newtonian model are intuitive, much of relativity is not and is only approachable though complex equations, modeling, and highly simplified examples.
In this issue, Korman et al.1 provide data from a model of the second gas effect on arterial partial pressures of volatile anesthetic agents. Most readers might wonder what this information adds, some will struggle to remember what the second gas effect is, and others will query the value of modeling rather than “real data.” This editorial attempts to address these questions.
The second gas effect2 is a consequence of the concentration effect3 where a “first gas” that is soluble in plasma, such as nitrous oxide, moves rapidly from the lungs to plasma. This increases the alveolar concentration and hence rate of uptake into plasma of the “second gas.” The second gas is typically a volatile anesthetic, but oxygen also behaves as a second gas.4 Although we frequently talk of inhalational kinetics as a single process, there are multiple steps between dialing up a concentration and the consequent change in effect. The key steps are transfer from the breathing circuit to alveolar gas, from the alveoli to plasma, and then from plasma to the “effect-site.” Separating the two steps between breathing circuit and plasma helps us understand both the second gas effect and the message underlying the paper by Korman et al.1
