Science Made Cool

. . . Two Steps Back

The unfortunate news about the Allen Telescope array having to shut down saddens me, but not as much as it would have a week ago. That's because just a couple of days ago I discovered this: the SETI League.

The League is an all-volunteer group using actual backyard radiotelescopes to survey the skies, listening for possible radio signals from space. It's a great project, and if you're interested, toss 'em a donation. Or build your own antenna and join in. (I was tempted, but the high-tension power lines cutting across my property make this a bad location for radio astronomy.)

So the big research-class instruments aren't the only game in town. With government budgets squeezed by the demographic time bomb of retiring Baby Boomers, and charitable billionaires like Paul Allen squeezed by the tax hikes to pay for said time bomb, small and decentralized is the way to go.

Of course, radiotelescopy may be a dead end in the search for civilizations elsewhere in the Universe. Most of Earth's radio transmissions nowadays are digital, compressed, and often encrypted. They would be very hard to distinguish from random space noise if any alien radiotelescope could detect them.

Help Schoolkids Hurl

There's nothing quite like loading up a siege engine and lobbing stuff -- balls, coins, very small rocks -- across the yard. Any kid would relish the experience, right? That's what Evan Murphy and Michael Woods thought when they designed their miniature plywood trebuchet, so they're not just running a Kickstarter drive to sell their one-foot-high laser-cut snap-together model to enthusiasts -- they're also taking donations so they can give trebuchet kits to schools. And unlike a lot of other treb models, theirs has an adjustable throwing arm so you can play with the length of the arm and the location of the counterweight and actually learn some physics.

The Kickstarter drive runs until midnight on Thursday, April 21, so there's still time to jump in.

Wand of Flame Control

Now this is cool -- or rather, hot. A group of Harvard researchers have studied how powerful electric fields can shape or even suppress flames. Here's a news story about it, and, yes, the lovable maniacs at DARPA are funding it.

It makes perfect sense when you think about it: flame is a plasma, which means it's ionized. Plasma-screen televisions and similar devices work by manipulating plasmas with electromagnetic fields, so why not manipulate fire the same way? The reverse, using plasmas moving through fields as a way to extract energy from them, is the basis for magnetohydrodynamic systems.

This is one of those developments which has all kinds of potential applications as soon as you start thinking about it. Shaping and controlling flames could be used in power plants to maximize the transfer of heat from burning fuel to the working fluid. It has applications in pollution control. It could even be an art form.

And let's face it, the ability to control flames would be an AWESOME power for a supervillain. Let's hope nobody ever laughed at Dr. Ludovico Cademartiri back at the university, or called him mad. Otherwise the world may yet tremble before DOCTOR FLAME.

 

BIG Space News

If you follow space-industry news, you already know about this. SpaceX, the private space-launch outfit founded by Internet billionaire Elon Musk, has unveiled their newest rocket, and it's a doozy. The Falcon Heavy can put fifty tons into orbit, for about a thousand dollars a pound. That's a lot of payload: the mighty Saturn V Moon rocket had a low-orbit payload of about 100 tons, so you could put together a pretty good manned space mission with a couple of Falcons. Or launch a small space station.

The size isn't the really big deal. The Saturn was hoisting bigger loads forty years ago and the Russian Energia can still out-lift the Falcon today. What is impressive is the cost. A thousand bucks a pound was the (entirely mythical) cost aim of the Space Shuttle program back in the 1980s. That was the threshold for "cheap access to space." At that level private groups like the Mars Society could quit lobbying Congress for NASA funding and just launch their own goddamned Mars missions.

Well, it looks like we've may have reached that point at last. The Space Age may finally be leaving its "pioneer era" and entering something more like the "airmail era" of the 1920s. Virgin Galactic just flew a spaceship to its new terminal in San Francisco and plans to operate suborbital flights from there beginning next year. For space enthusiasts, things are definitely looking up.

Cool Pix

Not an April Fool's joke, sadly. Here are some good aerial pictures of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi powerplant in Japan, from the always interesting Pink Tentacle 'blog. You can see the damage caused by gas explosions, as well as the initial tsunami.