Category: Science

DIY Underwater Rocket Launcher

You know, nothing says ‘Fourth of July’ like rockets shooting out of the pool!

Joe Peck has extended the pursuit of realism in model rocketry to the launch environment. Think Poseidon here — this rocket launches from underwater. Initially, it’s sealed watertight from nose to nozzle. Ignition is triggered by bringing a magnet close to a sensor contained in the upper section. The motor ignites, blowing off the bottom end cap and we have liftoff! If you’re into model rocketry, here’s your next challenge.

[via MAKE]
Project Dragon Fish: Joe Takes Rocket Science to New Depths

Minuteman III Launch On Wednesday

This is of interest if you are in southern California or, if people are lucky, in Arizona.

For the first time in years, the countdown for a Minuteman 3 missile test will include blasting open the 106-ton silo door at Vandenberg Air Force Base.
The year’s first liftoff from the Central Coast also marks a return of closed-door missile tests. It’s planned for 12:01 a.m. Wednesday from Launch Facility 10 on north Vandenberg. The launch window remains open until 6:01 a.m. to accommodate any delays from unfavorable weather or technical problems.

Opening the doors isn’t a small matter. There are four explosives that are fired to generate gas that flings the multi tone octagonal door open so the missile can be launched in seconds. Normally the tests launches are done when the door has been winched open slowly but in this case it’s the whole show. It should be quite a site if you can be close enough to see the base when it launches.
The test is of an unarmed re-entry vehicle to see how well the missile works using GPS based satellite navigation instead of radio transponders.

Launch to test both missile, silo door

No Pulse? No Problem!

Simply amazing, I find the notion of not hearing your own pulse fascinating and very eerie.

A 65-year-old Quebec man who received a new long-term mechanical heart last month is being described as the only living Canadian without a pulse.
Dr. Renzo Cecere implanted the “Heartmate II” mechanical heart into Gerard Langevin in an three-hour operation Nov. 23.
Officials at the McGill University Health Centre say the device, which is about the size of a flashlight battery, could last up to 10 years

[via jwz]
Man with no pulse considered a medical breakthrough

Realtime Mandelbrot Fractal Generation

Now you can explore the wonders of fractals with this online generator. I’m with Revo of Ektopia on this one, I used to sit in front of my Commodore 64 and wait for hours as a short fractal zoom loop slowly rendered on the screen. After I moved to the PC platform I did the same thing with Fractint. Now there was a program!

[via ektopia]
Realtime Mandelbrot Fractal Generation CGI

Ultra-Dense Optical Storage — on One Photon

Ultra-Dense Optical Storage — on One PhotonThis could make all of our current storage mediums of today look as advanced as knotted strings in a few years.

“It sort of sounds impossible, but instead of storing just ones and zeros, we’re storing an entire image,” says John Howell, associate professor of physics and leader of the team that created the device, which is revealed in today’s online issue of the journal Physical Review Letters. “It’s analogous to the difference between snapping a picture with a single pixel and doing it with a camera—this is like a 6-megapixel camera.”

Sounds a bit like a holographic process:

To produce the UR image, Howell simply shone a beam of light through a stencil with the U and R etched out. Anyone who has made shadow puppets knows how this works, but Howell turned down the light so much that a single photon was all that passed through the stencil. Quantum mechanics dictates some strange things at that scale, so that bit of light could be thought of as both a particle and a wave. As a wave, it passed through all parts of the stencil at once, carrying the "shadow" of the UR with it.

My biggest question is how will you back up all of your data, assuming that this is used for anything but short term buffers.

University of Rochester Press Releases