Gilded

Electromagnets seem to work just fine without superconducting, judging by the ~550km/h speeds attained by Japanese maglev trains.

As for whether to go with electromagnetic or electrodynamic suspension, some info can be found here.

I am not a chemist so chemical notation might as well be a foriegn language to me but how is it that O2 + H2 <=> 2H2O instead of H2O2 or H2O + O? Am I confused that the sides should be equal?

Yeah, it isn't balanced. The balanced form is [ce]O2 + 2H2 <=> 2H2O[/ce]

Also, move this thread to speculations already...

but that's assuming an even distribution!

For large populations it's very close to normal distribution.

No energy, matter or information is transferred. A crudely simplified, classical analogy is having two identical boxes, one with a black marble inside and one with a white marble inside. The boxes are then mixed up so that you have no idea which box contains which marble, and then send the other box to someone. If you then open your box and discover a black marble you will instantly know that the other person has the white marble. Obviously, no information was transferred superluminally. FTL communication would be possible only if you could actually somehow decide which marble to discover, thus "controlling" which marble the other person has in their box. This isn't the case with the marbles, nor is it the case with entangled photons.

Ah, to be young again...

iMovie HD is awesome for this, if you have a Mac

When it comes to multimedia even Microsoft chooses Mac software.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter

Yes? There is nothing to imply that an antistar's photon output could be distinguished from a normal star's output.

Well, recently it has been all over the TV news, newspapers and news websites that there's this country called the United States of America where an election has been going on for what seems like decades (Conan O'Brien joked a while back that this particular one started in 1955). Crazy, crazy stuff. A lot of people here are taking it very seriously, but of course there's really nothing we can do except sit back and watch the show.

My dad heard some stories from his American colleagues back in 2004 (one even gave him a Kerry campaign button), but not this year. Might be that they're too busy harrassing their countrymen.

Decent movie, especially considering all the recent junk scifi flicks. As for scientific accuracy it's pretty much on par with WALL·E.

so it can last infinitly?

I think that would mean the particle has 0 energy. So no.

Japan. I'm short so I'd prefer a country full of short women.

At 6'4" I'd probably be freakishly tall.

Anyway, if I had to leave Finland I'd probably move to the UK, the U.S. or Canada.

Seeing how the 13th is my birthday, with my luck I think I know where it's going to hit... :|

Anyway, the asteroid is certainly disruptable by thermonuclear weapons, should the probability reach an alarming level in the next 20 years or so.

Tribology is a branch of physics (or materials science) you don't hear about too often, but this is a very intriguing discovery:

Physicists discover an unexpected source of X-rays

"Even the lowliest kind of sticky tape can leave physicists befuddled. Unrolling tape in a vacuum produces X-rays — enough of them to do X-ray imaging, researchers have found. No current theory can explain such intensity of X-ray emissions, the scientists write in the Oct. 23 Nature."

The mechanism resembles closely to that of X-ray tubes so it doesn't work without a vacuum, but it's still pretty damn amazing. MacGyver would be proud.

I'd emigrate to Scandinavia because they have a great economy, which is mostly technology based. There is a lot of space for everybody. It is similar enough to what I am used to, so I am sure I can settle there... I wouldn't go mad within a month from the culture shock..

I don't know if you count Finland as being a part of Scandinavia, but it's sad how many people here are xenophobic (some people blame basically everything from unemployment to social care problems on immigrants). I think at least Sweden and Denmark are more open-minded.

In an antimatter universe, or even in just a theoretical antistar, where all of the charges were reversed - electrons, protons, reverse hydrogen atoms, etc. - the antistar's output would be antiphotons.

Indistinguishable from photons etc...

Also, that sounds like a misconception about antimatter.

To turn a flame green, you just need to stick regular copper wire in it.

That isn't nearly as fun as burning copper compounds in methanol/ethanol though.

It would make the difference in weight much smaller as a percentage.

The mass (and thus reaction rate) that matters is of deuterium vs. hydrogen. The "parent" atom (sulfur, oxygen...) doesn't seem to be as much of a concern in the process.

The more I read about this the more I'm convinced that initially chemical enrichment methods require actually significantly less energy than distillation or electrolysis. Of course eventually you will have to move on to (vacuum) distillation if you want a reasonably pure product.

Perhaps a bit weirdly, I've found no mention of gas centrifuge cascades similar to those used to enrich uranium. Distilling liquid hydrogen is possible (2.7K boiling point difference between H2 and D2), but that seems unfeasible compared to distillation of water.

I figure the deuterium would be much easier to separate as a gas and without the heavy O atom.

The relatively heavy oxygen doesn't really matter that much in isotopic exchange though.

In base 3, 10/3 is 10.1.

 

Mind blown!!!!!

That made me realize that Scanners should've been about mathematics.

if you're trying to separate two components that have the exact same chemistry with only a slight difference in reaction rates its going to be very energy expensive to do. there isn't much of a way round this.

The slight difference isn't so slight with H vs. D as opposed to let's say U-238 vs. U-235. While basically every isotope enrichment process requires significant amounts of energy I'm pretty sure a gas centrifuge setup is less efficient than the Girdler setup in this case.

I think terminal velocity is pretty much key here, good that you mentioned it. A diary isn't exactly the most aerodynamic object ever, and its structure prevents it from breaking into thousands of pieces even if it does drop from high enough to achieve terminal velocity.

I love the smell of fried neurons in the morning! Inducing desired currents in neural pathways is certainly doable but I'm a bit skeptical about it helping depression without having some sort of awkward side effects.

What insane_alien said. Regarding batteries to power combat suits, that's certainly one technology that will benefit tremendously from improvements in nanotechnology and will most likely take giant leaps forwards in the next few decades. For example nanowire batteries look very promising.

ok, so would it be theoratically possible to re-create this on a very small scale, even for a matter of a nanosecond?

I think this experiment has alread been tried but i am not completely sure, any thoughts, feelings, or arguments welcome

Small-scale nanosecond sun? That's pretty much what thermonuclear weapons ("H-bombs") do.

It's estimated that 600 million tons of hydrogen is converted to helium each second in the Sun. While that's not the only kind of fusion that keeps it going, it illustrates well what kind of resources you would need to extend a star's lifespan, even if you could dump it all directly into the core.