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Space-age rapid transit to debut in Tel Aviv Developer of NASA-designed skyTran chose Israel
Article | November 14, 2012 - 11:22am
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If all goes as planned, within two years Israelis will be the first people to try out a futuristic rapid transport system designed by NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California. The skyTran uses two-person modules that drive along a guide rail suspended from existing power lines. Magnets in the vehicle create a magnetic field around the metal coil inside the rail, causing the vehicle to lift up and glide 60 miles per hour on a cushion of air. The system uses very little energy and potentially could be powered entirely by solar panels.
"Our objective is to build a pilot project here so that we can make Israel the center of the skyTran world,” CEO Jerry Sanders tells ISRAEL21c. The first route, on which construction could begin next spring, would run from the high-tech center in Atidim through the Tel Aviv University train station to the Tel Aviv-Jaffa Port. Another installation might be placed on Netanya’s congested east side and a third would take people into and around Ariel Sharon Park, a huge public “green belt” in central Israel.
The National Technical University of Athens in Greece has developed a method for potentially ushering in an age of cheaper electronics. The researchers successfully created polymer circuits using laser printing, which eliminates the needs for solvents that can cause more harm than good. So far, the team responsible has printed photovoltaic and biological sensing circuits.
Maria Kandyla of the University of Athens, along with a few other individuals, use the laser printing as a demonstrable alternative to traditional solvent use. The problem with solvents is their potential for damaging the unit, as well as a tendency to concentrate on the outer edge of drying droplets. Laser printing eliminates these possible damaging effects by removing the need for solvents altogether.
Using the laser printing method, solid polymer is applied directly, starting with the initial conducting layer located on a piece of either quartz or glass; this is the donor substrate. A second layer, called the receiving substrate, is placed facing the conducting polymer with a small space between them. The laser is then used through the glass or quartz and to the polymer layer, transferring part of it onto the receiving substrate.
On the coattails of CERN’s success with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), Europeans and the world at large have another grand science project to be excited about: the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) project involving 40 research and academic institutions. The project’s goal is to build powerful lasers — two in Romania and the Czech Republic and a third in Hungary. These lasers will progressively serve as prototypes for a fourth more powerful laser — the Ultra-High Field Laser — whose location hasn’t been decided yet, though the UK is the likely candidate.
As violence erupts once more in Israel and the Gaza Strip, new military technology is set to change how future conflicts will play out.
For the first time, a missile-defence system is working effectively. Nicknamed "Iron Dome", Israel's missile interceptor uses radar to identify rocket launches, track their trajectory and guide a Mach 2.2 missile to blow them up mid-air.
By noon on 19 November, 877 rockets were fired into Israel from the Gaza Strip, according to figures from the Israeli Defence Force, which claims to have downed 307 rockets on a dangerous trajectory.
Until 17 November the system had a range of only 15 kilometres but a software upgrade fast-tracked over the weekend extended the range to
75 km, says Ben Goodlad, a defence analyst with IHS Jane's, the military data publisher based in Coulsdon, UK.
That immediately allowed the system to destroy at least one Iranian-designed Fajr-5 missile headed for Tel Aviv. Although the Fajr-5 can reach Tel Aviv, about 70km away, most rockets coming out of the Gaza Strip are Qassam rockets, with ranges between 3 and 15 km. "They are very easy to produce, made of common day to day materials, but are quite unsophisticated, not guided in any way," says Goodlad.
I love it when Republicans talk about "science". Fraught with humor.
Section 4: Scientists, Politics and Religion | Pew Research Center for the People and the Press
Engineers at Surrey University and Lockheed Martin UK are working on a project to develop appliqué vehicle armour that can withstand multiple ballistic strikes.
Andrew Harris, an engineering doctorate research engineer at Surrey, explained that ceramic armour is used on many light-armoured vehicles because it is as effective as metal and can withstand a number of threats, particularly bullets.
Another advantage of ceramic-based shielding is that it is lightweight — an important consideration given that armour can account for half of a vehicle’s mass.
Harris explained that, despite its advantages, ceramic armour possesses a flaw that has been a problem for a number of years.
‘A very basic ceramic armour would be a very hard front-face material such as alumina or silicon carbide that is bonded to an energy-absorbing backing material, typically a composite fibre or metal that absorbs the energy of the fragments,’ he said.
‘When you get a bullet impact, it transmits a lot of energy into the ceramic and that shock causes the ceramic tiles to come off the backing material, which makes the ceramic armour only good for one hit. You can get around this by over-designing the ceramic armour, making it heavier. What we’ve done is improve the bond strength; we tested it and found that the armour performance is improved.’
Rice University scientists have unveiled a revolutionary new technology that uses nanoparticles to convert solar energy directly into steam. The new "solar steam" method from Rice's Laboratory for Nanophotonics (LANP) is so effective it can even produce steam from icy cold water. Details of the solar steam method were published online in ACS Nano. The technology has an overall energy efficiency of 24 percent.
Durham University
Researchers designing and testing the 'classroom of the future' have found that multi-touch, multi-user desks can boost skills in mathematics. New results from a 3-year project working with over 400 pupils, mostly 8-10 year olds, show that collaborative learning increases both fluency and flexibility in maths. It also shows that using an interactive 'smart' desk can have benefits over doing mathematics on paper.
Electromagnetic pulse grenades are a favorite of sci-fi storytellers and videogame designers, a la Halo and Call of Duty. The Army evidently doesn’t want to be left out: It’s seeking a real-life version that can blast electromagnetic signals and fry insurgent bombs.
To be specific, the Army wants “High Power Microwave (HPM) grenades” to “generate an electromagnetic pulse that could be used to defeat the electronics used to activate [homemade bombs] or that could be used to attack blasting caps,” according to its latest round of research contracts with small businesses. In theory, the electrical components on improvised explosive devices, like radio transmitters, could be overwhelmed by surging electromagnetic radiation emitted by such a weapon.
If the Army can actually develop this kind of Halo weapon, it’ll take a step toward making each of its soldiers a kind of one-man bomb squad.
While the improvised bomb is the primary weapon used against U.S. troops fighting overseas, not every soldier or marine can destroy a bomb like he or she can shoot an insurgent. To defuse bombs, troops rely on explosive ordnance demolition specialists, bomb-disposing robots and vehicle-mounted jammers. The Pentagon has also desperately struggled to stay a step ahead of the bombs’ technical adaptations. But if the Army has working EMP grenades, any soldier could conceivably lob one into a room, around a corner or into a ditch to fry an awaiting booby-trap’s circuits. As the Army puts it, it could mean “defeating IEDs by the individual soldier, while minimizing the collateral damage to humans.” Easier said than done.
Hirobo is a Japanese company that's best known for its line of smallish remote control helicopters. So that's nice. But now, the company is thinking bigger. Not a lot bigger, but just big enough to carry you to work and back every day in a one-seater coaxial personal microhelicopter.
Called the HX-1, Hirobo's helicopter can hoist a single person into the air at speeds of over 60 mph for up to 30 minutes at a stretch. It's completely electric, which makes it quiet enough that you can hold a conversation with your nonexistent passenger, and might even be light enough that wannabe aviators won't need a pilot's license to fly it, which is either a wonderful or terrible thing.
Collisions between protons and lead ions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have produced surprising behavior in some of the particles created by the collisions. The new observation suggests the collisions may have produced a new type of matter known as color-glass condensate.
When beams of particles crash into each other at high speeds, the collisions yield hundreds of new particles, most of which fly away from the collision point at close to the speed of light. However, the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) team at the LHC found that in a sample of 2 million lead-proton collisions, some pairs of particles flew away from each other with their respective directions correlated.
"Somehow they fly at the same direction even though it's not clear how they can communicate their direction with one another. That has surprised many people, including us," says MIT physics professor Gunther Roland, whose group led the analysis of the collision data along with Wei Li, a former MIT postdoc who is now an assistant professor at Rice University.
Based on these results, we believe that isopropylamine used in commercial farming can induce genetic damage, depending on the dose used and the physiological characteristics of the plants exposed to it.
(Phys.org)—An international team of researchers has succeeded in genetically altering wheat seeds to prevent the production of gluten in subsequent plants. The effort focused, the team writes in their paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, on disabling the enzyme responsible for activating genes responsible for the development of gluten protein.
Military uniforms of the future may offer a new layer of critical protection to wearers thanks to research by teams at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and several other institutions who are developing a nanotube-based fabric that repels chemical and biological agents.
UMass Amherst polymer scientists Kenneth Carter and James Watkins, collaborating with team leader Francesco Fornasiero of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), recently received a five-year $1.8 million grant to design ways to manufacture the new material as part of a $13 million project funded by the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency. It's estimated that the new uniforms could be deployed in the field in less than 10 years.
The researchers say the fabric will be able to switch reversibly from a highly breathable state to a protective one in response to the presence of the environmental threat without the need for an external control system. In the protective state, the uniform material will block the chemical threat while maintaining a good breathability level. "The uniform will be like a smart second skin that responds to the environment," says Fornasiero.
Lockheed Martin today announced that it has successfully demonstrated a portable, ground-based military laser system in a series of tests against representative airborne targets. Lockheed Martin developed the Area Defense Anti-Munitions (ADAM) system to provide a defense against short-range threats, such as rockets and unmanned aerial systems.
Since August, the ADAM system has successfully engaged an unmanned aerial system target in flight at a range of approximately 1.5 kilometers (0.9 miles) and has destroyed four small-caliber rocket targets in simulated flight at a range of approximately 2 kilometers (1.2 miles).
"Lockheed Martin has invested in the development of the ADAM system because of the enormous potential effectiveness of high-energy lasers," said Doug Graham, Lockheed Martin's vice president of advanced programs for Strategic and Missile Defense Systems. "We are committed to supporting the transition of directed energy's revolutionary capability to the war fighter."
Lead author and former JPL postdoctoral scholar Longtao Wu, now an assistant researcher at the UCLA-JPL Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science and Engineering, said the study could lead to improvements in hurricane intensity forecasts.
"Our results show relative humidity and its variations within a hurricane's large-scale environment may be useful predictors in improving intensity forecast models," Wu said. "This is the first satellite analysis to quantify this small but statistically significant correlation." Results of the study were published recently in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
The team found substantial differences in relative-humidity levels between storm quadrants. One factor may be the shape of the Atlantic basin. Hurricanes in the Atlantic usually travel to the west or northwest -- regions that are drier, climatologically-speaking, than from where the storms originated. This causes the front two quadrants of Atlantic hurricanes to be drier than their rear two quadrants.
A unique result the team found is that in their front-right quadrants, rapidly intensifying hurricanes tended to have sharply higher amounts of upper tropospheric moisture near their centers than they did farther from their centers.
"We speculate that decreasing relative humidity levels farther from a storm's center may be an important factor in a cyclone's rapid intensification," said JPL co-author Hui Su. "A drier environment farther from a storm's center limits the development of its outer rain bands and favors the growth of its inner core. Conversely, a wet environment farther from a storm's center can weaken a cyclone by making it easier for rain bands to form outside the storm's core, which compete with the inner core's growth."
"Most scientists have tended to view hurricane intensification as a process that takes place within a cyclone's inner core and depends more on smaller-scale processes than on a storm's large-scale environment," said JPL co-author Bjorn Lambrigtsen. "This study shows a different path, and the usefulness of incorporating large-scale environmental data collected far away from a storm's center."
Su said NASA is exploring collaborations with NOAA forecasters to incorporate AIRS relative humidity data into NOAA's real-time hurricane prediction system.
