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OT: The F*cking Science Thread

SundinsTooth said:
It's going to backfire on them as geoscientists sour on the country and leave for greener pastures.
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Yep...there is about to be a brain drain of epic proportions if this isn't overturned and many words of apology aren't spoken to the entire scientific community. Surely if you were a cancer researcher, astronomer, or basically do any type of research on subjects that have a potentially poor outcome for people, this would give you a moments pause.
 
I am not sure what the system is in Italy, but it would be hard to believe if that verdict doesn't get overturned.
 
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/...revolutionize-fossil-and-nuclear-power-plants

A team of nanomaterial scientists and mechanical engineers at MIT have created a superhydrophobic material that is 10,000 times more slippery than existing hydrophobic surface. This could seriously boost the efficiency of fossil fuel power plants, and many other technologies that include cooling towers, such as desalination plants.

Hydrophobic, as you have probably guessed, literally means “water fear.” There are hydrophobic substances that resolutely refuse to mix with water (such as oils and fats), and hydrophobic materials and coatings that prevent water from pooling on its surface. In scientific terms, hybrophobicity is caused by surfaces that disrupt the hydrogen bonding in water. So as to minimize the disruption to its molecular makeup, the water droplet pushes itself away from the surface to minimize its contact area, becoming a very tight droplet.

It is very easy to identify a hydrophobic material because water forms into droplets that rapidly roll around — such as on your car windshield, or on a freshly waxed hood/roof. The more hydrophobic the material, the stronger this effect is, until the water effectively floats or skims across the surface with very low friction.

This is obviously very useful on car windshields, but it’s also very useful in cooling towers. In a cooling tower, water vapor comes into contact with the cool surface of the tower, condenses, and then dribbles back down. Fossil fuel and nuclear power plants (some 80% of the world’s power production) use steam turbines to create electricity — and then cooling towers to condense the steam back into water. The problem, though, is that the inside of the cooling tower isn’t hydrophobic, so the water has a tendency to hang around, significantly reducing the tower’s efficiency. This new material from MIT could change that.
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[video=youtube;_Ssc1GsqHds]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ssc1GsqHds&feature=youtu.be[/video]

This cosmological simulation follows the development of a single disk galaxy over about 13.5 billion years, from shortly after the Big Bang to the present time. Colors indicate old stars (red), young stars (white and bright blue) and the distribution of gas density (pale blue); the view is 300,000 light-years across. The simulation ran on the Pleiades supercomputer at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and required about 1 million CPU hours. It assumes a universe dominated by dark energy and dark matter.
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If my math is accurate, each second of the video represents roughly 107 million years.
 
Aberdeen said:
If I had a kid now I'd defo be pushing them towards material sciences, so many great advances coming. It's really merging with other fields: electronics, nano, particle physics.
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Hard science to learn. I took some inorganic chemistry and some of the intro stuff on the material side made me think in potato.
 
Ya there's so much to it. But I think once you can really specialize it's more manageable. A friend of mine from Uni (elec eng) went on to get her PhD in Electroactive Polymers, artificial muscles and stuff. Now she's doing super cool stuff in Germany.
 
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ya, there's a ton of research being done in canada on that stuff... a friend is just finishing a phd at queens where he's been doing work with scaffolds (basically, using cells as a 'scaffold' to grow tissue). his focus has been on spinal tissue.

another just started working on a phd at u of t... she is looking at the use of polymers and other synthetics that can be used for implants i.e. bones, joints, etc.

really fascinating stuff... we're on the verge of some pretty incredible breakthroughs vis-a-vis this research, and other work with stem cells.
 
http://www.businessinsider.com/beoi...er-microwave-advanced-missile-project-2012-10

While the U.S. geared up for the second presidential debate last Tuesday, a building sat pulsing with computers, electronic surveillance, and security systems in the Utah high desert.

The unoccupied site was awaiting the test of a weapon the Pentagon requested four years ago to the day on 16 October, 2008.

The Counter-Electronics High Power Microwave Advanced Missile Project (CHAMP), led by Boeing's Phantom works, promised to change the face of contemporary warfare, and its test was a complete success.

CHAMP flew over the Utah Test and Training Range last Tuesday, discharging a burst of High Power Microwaves onto the test site and brought down the compound's entire spectrum of electronic systems, apparently without producing any other damage at all. Even the camera recording the test was shut down.

Struggling to contain his enthusiasm, Boeing's Keith Coleman says, "We hit every target we wanted to. Today we made science fiction into science fact.".........
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> horses & bayonets
 
"Just" requires a sufficiently dense enough material. I could end with a KB joke here, but I'll leave that for the rest of you as a small gift.
 
It's probably what the U.S government does best...make up program names with awesome, fitting ass acronyms.
 
daryl3_1649.jpg

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