|
Future Energy eNews
IntegrityResearchInstitute.org Sept. 8,
2005 |
1) English Words Identified on
a Triangular Craft -
Establishes US ownership of covert aircraft
2) Entropy: The New Order - Einsteinian implicate order emerges
from arbitrary power law
3) Gigahertz
Signals Restores Youth in Elderly - Dr. Norm Shealy stimulates DHEA with PEMF
4) Oil
Given as the Reason for Iraq War - Bush says "protection of the country's vast oil
fields"
5) Rising
Gas Prices Make Drivers Rethink Lifestyle Choices - Looks at the benefits of hybrids
6) Time-Varying Magnetic Field Affects
Neurotransmitter Release - Treats insomnia
7) Soil Found to Release
CO2 in Britain - Exactly
cancels the UK 13 ton/yr Kyoto reduction
8) Tabletop
Fusion - Sonofusion shows
"unmistakable signs of hydrogen fusion"
1)
English Words Identified on a Triangular Craft
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Occurred :
4/9/2005 19:09 (Entered as : 04/09/1905 19:09) |
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English words
identified on black triangular craft. See http://www.ufocasebook.com/sydneytexas.html for
physicist's illustration.
See http://users.erols.com/iri/EnewsJan6,2003.htm "Electric
Propulsion Systems for Flying Triangles" |
CONSTANTINO TSALLIS has a
single equation written on the blackboard in his office. It looks like one of
the most famous equations in physics, but look more closely and it's a little
bit different, decorated with some extra symbols and warped into a peculiar new
form.
Tsallis, based at the
Brazilian Centre for Research in Physics, Rio de Janeiro, is excited to have
created this new equation. And no wonder: his unassuming arrangement of symbols
has stimulated hundreds of researchers to publish more than a thousand papers
in the past decade, describing strange patterns in fluid flows, in magnetic
fields issuing from the sun and in the subatomic debris created in particle
accelerators. But there is something even more remarkable about Tsallis's
equation: it came to him in a daydream.
In 1985, in a classroom in
Mexico City, Tsallis was listening as a colleague explained something to a
student. On the chalkboard they had written a very ordinary algebraic
expression, pq, representing some number p raised to
the power q In Tsallis's line of work - describing the collective
properties of large numbers of particles - the letter "p" usually
stands for probability: the probability that a particle will have a particular
velocity, say. Tsallis stared at the formula from a distance and his mind
drifted off. "There were these pqs all over the
board," he recalls, "and it suddenly came to my mind - like a flash -
that with powers of probabilities one might do some unusual but possibly quite
interesting physics."
The physics involved may be
more than quite interesting, however. The standard means of describing the
collective properties of large numbers of particles - known as statistical
mechanics - has been hugely successful for more than a century, but it has also
been rather limited in its scope: you can only apply it to a narrow range of
systems. Now, with an insight plucked out of thin air, Tsallis may have changed
all that.
Developed in the 19th
century, statistical mechanics enabled physicists to overcome an imposing
problem. Ordinary materials such as water, iron or glass are made of myriad
atoms. But since it is impossible to calculate in perfect detail how every
individual atom or molecule will move, it seems as if it might never be
possible to understand the behaviour of such substances at the atomic level.
The solution, as first
suggested by the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, lay in giving up hope of
perfect understanding and working with probabilities instead. Boltzmann argued
that knowing the probabilities for the particles to be in any of their various
possible configurations would enable someone to work out the overall properties
of the system. Going one step further, he also made a bold and insightful guess
about these probabilities - that any of the many conceivable configurations for
the particles would be equally probable.
Boltzmann's idea works, and
has enabled physicists to make mathematical models of thousands of real
materials, from simple crystals to superconductors. But his work also has a
deeper beauty. For a start, it reflects the fact that many quantities in nature
- such as the velocities of molecules in a gas - follow "normal"
statistics. That is, they are closely grouped around the average value, with a
"bell curve" distribution.
The theory also explains
why, if left to their own devices, systems tend to get disorganised. Boltzmann
argued that any system that can be in several different configurations is most
likely to be in the more spread out and disorganised condition. Air molecules
in a box, for example, can gather neatly in a corner, but are more likely to
fill the space evenly. That's because there are overwhelmingly more
arrangements of the particles that will produce the spread out, jumbled state
than arrangements that will concentrate the molecules in a corner. This way of
thinking led to the famous notion of entropy - a measure of the amount of
disorder in a system. In its most elegant formulation, Boltzmann's statistical
mechanics, which was later developed mathematically by the American physicist
Josiah Willard Gibbs, asserts that, under many conditions, a physical system will
act so as to maximise its entropy.
And yet Boltzmann and
Gibbs's statistical mechanics doesn't explain everything: a great swathe of
nature eludes its grasp entirely. Boltzmann's guess about equal
probabilities only works for systems that have settled down to equilibrium,
enjoying, for example, the same temperature throughout. The theory fails in any
system where destabilising external sources of energy are at work, such as the
haphazard motion of turbulent fluids or the fluctuating energies of cosmic rays.
These systems don't follow normal statistics, but another pattern instead.
"In Mexico City,
coming out of his reverie, Tsallis wrote up some notes on his idea"
If you repeatedly measure
the difference in fluid velocity at two distinct points in a turbulent fluid,
for instance, the probability of finding a particular velocity difference is
roughly proportional to the amount of that difference raised to the power of
some exponent. This pattern is known as a "power law", and such
patterns turn up in many other areas of physics, from the distribution of
energies of cosmic rays to the fluctuations of river levels or wind speeds over
a desert. Because ordinary statistical mechanics doesn't explain power laws,
their atomic-level origins remain largely mysterious, which is why many
physicists find Tsallis's mathematics so enticing.
In Mexico City, coming out
of his reverie, Tsallis wrote up some notes on his idea, and soon came to a
formula that looked something like the standard formula for the Boltzmann-Gibbs
entropy - but with a subtle difference. If he set q to 1 in the formula
- so that pq became the probability p - the new
formula reduced to the old one. But if q was not equal to 1, it made the
formula produce something else. This led Tsallis to a new definition of
entropy. He called it q entropy.
Back then, Tsallis had no
idea what q might actually signify, but the way this new entropy worked
mathematically suggested he might be on to something. In particular, the
power-law pattern tumbles out of the theory quite naturally. Over the past
decade, researchers have shown that Tsallis's mathematics seem
to describe power-law behaviour accurately in a wide range of phenomena,
from fluid turbulence to the debris created in the collisions of high-energy
particles. But while the idea of maximising q entropy seems to work
empirically, allowing people to fit their data to power-law curves and come up
with a value of q for individual systems, it has also landed Tsallis in
some hot water. The new mathematics seems to work, yet no one knows what the q
entropy really represents, or why any physical system should maximise it.
And for this reason, many
physicists remain sceptical, or worse. "I have to say that I don't buy it
at all," says physicist Cosma Shalizi of the University of Michigan in Ann
Arbor, who criticises the mathematical foundations of Tsallis's approach. As he
points out, the usual Boltzmann procedure for maximising the entropy in
statistical mechanics assumes a fixed value for the average energy of a system,
a natural idea. But to make things work out within the Tsallis framework,
researchers have to fix the value of another quantity - a "generalised"
energy - that has no clear physical interpretation. "I have yet to
encounter anyone," says Shalizi, "who can explain why this should be
natural."
To his critics, Tsallis's
success is little more than sleight of hand: the equation may simply provide a convenient
way to generate power laws, which researchers can then fit to data by choosing
the right value of q "My impression," says Guido Caldarelli of
La Sapienza University in Rome, "is that the method really just fits data
by adjusting a parameter. I'm not yet convinced there's new physics here."
Physicist Peter Grassberger of the University of Wuppertal in Germany goes
further. "It is all nonsense," he says. "It has led to no new
predictions, nor is it based on rational arguments."
The problem is that most
work applying Tsallis's ideas has simply chosen a value of q to make the
theory fit empirical data, without tying q to the real dynamics of the
system in any deeper way: there's nothing to show why these dynamics depart
from Boltzmann's picture of equal probabilities. Tsallis, who is now at the
Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, acknowledges this is a limitation, but
suggests that a more fundamental explanation is already on its way.
"Tsallis has
reawakened physicists to fundamental questions they have never quite
answered"
Power laws, he argues,
should tend to arise in "weakly chaotic" systems. In this kind of
system, small perturbations might not be enough to alter the arrangement of
molecules. As a result, the system won't "explore" all possible configurations
over time. In a properly chaotic system, on the other hand, even tiny
perturbations will keep sending the system into new configurations, allowing it
to explore all its states as required for Boltzmann statistics.
Tsallis argues that if
physicists can adequately understand the details of this "exploring
behaviour", they should be able to predict values of q from first
principles. In particular, he proposes, some as yet unknown single parameter -
closely akin to q - should describe the degree of chaos in any system.
Working out its value by studying a system's basic dynamics would then let
physicists predict the value of q that then emerges in its statistics.
Other theoretical work
seems to support this possibility. For example, in a paper soon to appear in Physical
Review E, physicist Alberto Robledo of the National Autonomous University
of Mexico in Mexico City has examined several classic models that physicists
have used to explore the phenomenon of chaos. What makes these models useful is
that they can be tuned to be more or less chaotic - and so used to explore the
transition from one kind of behaviour to another. Using these model systems,
Robledo has been able to carry out Tsallis's prescription, deriving a value of q
just from studying the system's fundamental dynamics. That value of q
then reproduces intricate power-law properties for these systems at the
threshold of chaos. "This work shows that q can be deduced from
first principles," Tsallis says.
While Robledo has tackled
theoretical issues, other researchers have made the same point with real
observations. In a paper just published, Leonard Burlaga and Adolfo Vinas at
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, study fluctuations
in the properties of the solar wind - the stream of charged particles that
flows outward from the sun - and show that they conform to Tsallis's ideas.
They have found that the dynamics of the solar wind, as seen
in changes in its velocity and magnetic field strength, display weak chaos of
the type envisioned by Tsallis. Burlaga and Vinas have also found that the
fluctuations of the magnetic field follow power laws that fit Tsallis's
framework with q set to 1.75 (Physica A, vol 356, p 275).
The chance that a more
comprehensive formulation of Tsallis's q entropy might eventually be
found intrigues physicist Ezequiel Cohen of the Rockefeller University in New
York City. "I think a good part of the establishment takes an unfair
position towards Tsallis's work," he says. "The critique that all he
does is 'curve fitting' is, in my opinion, misplaced."
Cohen has also started
building his own work on Tsallis's foundations. Two years ago, with Christian
Beck of Queen Mary, University of London, he proposed an idea known as "superstatistics"
that would incorporate the statistics of both Boltzmann and Tsallis within a
larger framework.
In this work they revisited
the limitation of Boltzmann's statistical mechanics. Boltzmann's models cannot
cope with any system in which external forces churn up differences such as
variations in temperature. A particle moving through such a system would
experience many temperatures for short periods and its fluctuations would
reflect an average of the ordinary Boltzmann statistics for all those different
temperatures. Cohen and Beck showed that such averaged statistics, emerging out
of the messy non-uniformity of real systems, take the very same form as Tsallis
statistics, and lead to power laws. In one striking example, Beck showed how
the distribution of the energies of cosmic rays could emerge from random
fluctuations in the temperature of the hot matter where they were originally
created.
Cohen thinks that, if
nothing else, Tsallis's powers of probabilities have served to reawaken
physicists to fundamental questions they have never quite answered. After all
Boltzmann's idea, though successful, was also based on a guess; Albert
Einstein disliked Boltzmann's arbitrary assumption of "equal
probabilities" and insisted that a proper theory of matter had to rest on
a deep understanding of the real dynamics of particles.
That understanding still
eludes us, but Tsallis may have taken us closer. It is possible that, in his
mysterious q entropy, Tsallis has discovered a kind of entropy just as
useful as Boltzmann's and especially suited to the real-world systems in which
the traditional theory fails. "Tsallis made the first attempt to go beyond
Boltzmann," says Cohen. The door is now open for others to follow.
Mark Buchanan's latest book
is Small World, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003
3) Gigahertz
Stimulates DHEA in Elderly Patients
Excerpt from Bioelectromagnetic
Healing, 6th Edition, Thomas Valone, PhD, p. 23 http://users.erols.com/iri/Bioenergetics.html
A medical doctor who worked
with Nobel Prize winner, John C. Eccles, Dr. Norm Shealy has a journal
publishing history extending back to his first papers in 1957 and
neurophysiology papers with Eccles in the 1960’s. He is the inventor of the
transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) device in 1967, as well as
the recent Shealy RelaxMate II. He is also noted for BEMS procedures that
include Dorsal Column Stimulation - The control of pain by electrically
stimulating the dorsal column of the spinal cord, and Facet Rhizotomy - The
permanent, safe numbing of an irritating spinal joint nerve.
However, the most
impressive achievement for longevity, that he discussed at a recent conference
which I attended, is his Five Sacred Rings. These are different energetic
circuits associated with acupuncture points which specifically optimize DHEA,
Neurotensin, Beta-Endorphin, Aldosterone and markedly reduce Free Radicals. The
one that stimulates the youth hormone, DHEA, is called the Ring of Fire and
involves a 50 gigahertz signal device (GigaTENS) that touches the skin, one at
a time, at several points in the circuit. Through repeated laboratory testing
for careful monitoring of DHEA levels, Dr. Shealy was able to confirm the
protocol that restores youthful levels of the master hormone DHEA by
stimulating the pituitary gland to produce it. Shealy describes the unit as a
Trip-Modulated GigaTENS with Optional Bipolar Spike as covered in his US
Patent No. 5,851,223. The product has been incorporated into the
ShealyTENS which is available by prescription for $695 from Self-Health
Systems http://www.selfhealthsystems.com/ (417-267-2900).
His new book, Life
Beyond 100: Secrets of the Fountain of Youth, contains the details of this
amazing life-extension BEMS discovery. He also has a holistic university that
offers degrees related to integrative health care. Dr. Shealy is also
responsible for organizing the first accredited Energy Medicine program in
the country, which is available at Greenwich University.
References
Dr. Norm Shealy Website: http://www.normshealy.net/bibliography.htm
Holistic University: http://www.hugs-edu.org/
http://www.hugs-edu.org/sitemap.html
Bioelectromagnetic
Healing on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0964107058/qid=1126141288/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-7979356-1241431?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
4) Bush Gives New
Reason for Iraq War
By Jennifer Loven, The Associated
Press, Wednesday 31 August 2005, reprinted in Boston Globe http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2005/08/31/bush_gives_new_reason_for_iraq_war/
Says US must prevent
oil fields from falling into hands of terrorists.
Coronado,
California - President Bush answered growing antiwar protests yesterday with a
fresh reason for US troops to continue fighting in Iraq: protection of the
country's vast oil fields, which he said would otherwise fall under the
control of terrorist extremists.
The
president, standing against a backdrop of the USS Ronald Reagan, the newest
aircraft carrier in the Navy's fleet, said terrorists would be denied their
goal of making Iraq a base from which to recruit followers, train them, and
finance attacks.
"We
will defeat the terrorists," Bush said. "We will build a free Iraq
that will fight terrorists instead of giving them aid and sanctuary."
Appearing
at Naval Air Station North Island to commemorate the anniversary of the Allies'
World War II victory over Japan, Bush compared his resolve to President Franklin
D. Roosevelt's in the 1940s and said America's mission in Iraq is to turn it
into a democratic ally just as the United States did with Japan after its 1945
surrender. Bush's V-J Day ceremony did not fall on the actual anniversary.
Japan announced its surrender on Aug. 15, 1945 - Aug. 14 in the United States
because of the time difference.
Democrats
said Bush's leadership falls far short of Roosevelt's.
"Democratic
Presidents Roosevelt and Truman led America to victory in World War II because
they laid out a clear plan for success to the American people, America's
allies, and America's troops," said Howard Dean, Democratic Party
chairman. "President Bush has failed to put together a plan, so despite
the bravery and sacrifice of our troops, we are not making the progress that we
should be in Iraq. The troops, our allies, and the American people deserve
better leadership from our commander in chief."
The
speech was Bush's third in just over a week defending his Iraq policies, as the
White House scrambles to counter growing public concern about the war. But the
devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf Coast drew attention away;
the White House announced during the president's remarks that he was cutting
his August vacation short to return to Washington, D.C., to oversee the federal
response effort.
After
the speech, Bush hurried back to Texas ahead of schedule to prepare to fly back
to the nation's capital today. He was to return to the White House on Friday,
after spending more than four weeks operating from his ranch in Crawford.
Bush's
August break has been marked by problems in Iraq.
It
has been an especially deadly month there for US troops, with the number of
those who have died since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 now nearing 1,900.
The
growing death toll has become a regular feature of the slightly larger protests
that Bush now encounters everywhere he goes - a movement boosted by a vigil set
up in a field down the road from the president's ranch by a mother grieving the
loss of her soldier son in Iraq.
Cindy
Sheehan arrived in Crawford only days after Bush did, asking for a meeting so
he could explain why her son and others are dying in Iraq. The White House
refused, and Sheehan's camp turned into a hub of activity for hundreds of
activists around the country demanding that troops be brought home.
This
week, the administration also had to defend the proposed constitution produced
in Iraq at US urging. Critics fear the impact of its rejection by many Sunnis,
and say it fails to protect religious freedom and women's rights.
At
the naval base, Bush declared, "We will not rest until victory is
America's and our freedom is secure" from Al Qaeda and its forces in Iraq
led by Abu Musab al Zarqawi.
"If
Zarqawi and [Osama] bin Laden gain control of Iraq, they would create a new
training ground for future terrorist attacks," Bush said. "They'd
seize oil fields to fund their ambitions. They could recruit more
terrorists by claiming a historic victory over the United States and our
coalition."
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6)
Influence of Time-Varying Magnetic Field on the Release of Neurotransmitters in
Raphe Nuclei of Rats I
Jie Zhang , Xuemin Wang ,
Mingshi Wang
Corresponding information: zhang132@umn.edu; Mayo Clinic Rochester
Abstract: A specially designed time-varying
magnetic field was developed to treat insomnia. Clinical results showed that
this method could shorten the time to go to sleep and prolong the sleep
duration. However, the mechanism of this method is still not well understood.
In this study, the effect of magnetic stimulation on the release of serotonin
(5-HT), noradrenaline (NE), dopamine (DA) in raphe nuclei of rats, which are known
to play an important role in the sleep-wake regulation, was investigated. It
was shown that there was a significant difference in the release of serotonin
between control group and experimental group (p<0.01). The release of
serotonin of the experimental group increased significantly. No obvious release
changes of NE and DA are found (p>0.05). The results indicate that one
possible mechanism of inducing sleep using specially designed magnetic field is
to change the release of sleep-related neurotransmitters.
Keywords: Functional Electrical Stimulation
Presented at:
The 27th Annual
International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology
Society was held in
Shanghai, China, on September 1-4, 2005 with a focus on Innovations
through Biomolecules and Biosystems. This
conference offered an opportunity to gather researchers, educators and
developers from academic fields and industries worldwide to share their
research results and exchange ideas covering all the areas of biomedical
engineering.
Thanks to Norman
Kettner, DC, Radiology Department Head at Logan College of Chiropractic for
sending www.bodyfields.com the above
abstract.
For more
information:
http://www.ieee.org/services/join/societies/society15.html
7) Soil May Spoil
UK’s Climate Efforts
John Pickrell, Dublin, New
Scientist, 18:45 07 September 2005 http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7964
Unexpectedly vast quantities
of carbon released from British soils since 1978 may be critically reducing
their effectiveness as carbon sinks, claims a rigorous new survey. The
phenomenon effectively cancels out the UK's recent successes in reducing
greenhouse gas emissions, and the finding could have wider global implications.
It suggests
that so-called terrestrial sinks across the planet are mopping up much less
carbon than predicted, on balance, and so the planet may warm at an even faster
rate than expected. Most climate models assume that forests and soils absorb
about 25% of the greenhouse gases humans produce.
"The
buffering effect of soils mopping up emissions is not as strong as we
expected," says study author Guy Kirk of the UK's National Soil Resources
Institute at Cranfield University. "The scary thing is that the amount of
time that we have to do something about climate change is now smaller."
Soils are a
vitally important sink for carbon dioxide – twice as much carbon is wrapped up
in soils as in Earth's vegetation or atmosphere. It is estimated that they
store 300 times the amount of carbon dioxide now released annually by burning
fossil fuels.
Kirk and
colleagues surveyed soil at 6000 sites, spaced 5 kilometres apart, across
England and Wales between 1978 and 2003.
They found
that average carbon content of the soils had dropped at an average rate of
0.6% per year, or around 4 million tonnes annually. Extrapolating the
results across the UK suggests that 13 million tonnes of carbon could
have been lost per year. "These are really big numbers,"
says Kirk.
The
calculated carbon lost by UK soil each year since 1978 is equivalent to 8%
of the UK's carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels in 1990. And it is
more than the entire reduction in emissions the UK has achieved between 1990
and 2002 as part of its commitment to the Kyoto Protocol – 12.7 million tonnes
annually.
The overall
carbon loss was consistent across environments as varied as grasslands, bogs,
arable fields and woodland, suggesting the change is largely due to warming and
not changes in land use. The average temperature across England and Wales has
increased by 0.5°C over the survey period.
Up to
one-tenth of the missing carbon may have leached into ground water, but Kirk
says the majority is likely to have been lost as carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere. This is likely to be due to plant matter and organic material
decomposing at a faster rate as temperatures rise.
More
worryingly, soil sinks are predicted to release their carbon at an even faster
rate as temperatures increase, giving rise to a feedback loop.
Models had
predicted that the rate of carbon released from terrestrial sinks would
eventually outpace the rate of absorption of carbon dioxide, says Kirk, but it
was thought this would not happen for another 10 to 50 years. "We've shown
that it's happening rather faster than that."
"These
losses… completely offset the past technological achievements in reducing CO2 emissions, putting the United Kingdom's success in
reducing greenhouse gas emissions in a different light," write E Detlef
Schulze and Annette Freibauer of the Max-Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry
in Jena, Germany, in a commentary accompanying the study, in Nature.
"The
scientific and political implications of the new findings are
considerable," they add, and are "the first hint that regional
climate variation may be contributing to a surprisingly large release of CO2 from soils to the atmosphere."
Much smaller
surveys have hinted that carbon may be being lost from soil – in China and
Finland, for example – but this had previously been attributed to changes in
land use.
Just last
month another study warned that this summer's European drought could unleash large amounts of CO2 from warm soils into the atmosphere.
Kirk also
presented his group's findings on Wednesday at the BA Festival of Science in
Dublin, Ireland.
Journal
reference
8)
Tabletop fusion
Excerpt from "The
List" by Chappell Brown, EE Times, 8/8/2005, http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=167600232
The latest news in the field of fusion research is the decision by the International
Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) Consortium to conduct its latest
experiment in Cadarache, France. And what an experiment it will be: With
up-front construction costs of $5 billion, the facility is expected to be in
service for 30 years, and the initial experiment may require an additional $5
billion. But even if successful, it is only an experiment. The ITER tokamak
(toroidal magnetic-field generator) will never become a power plant.
Purdue University physicist Rusi Taleyarkhan
can only dream about such largesse. He has been involved in a number of
tabletop experiments with a special chemical solution of deuterated acetone,
stimulated with ultrasound, that he says have revealed unmistakable signs of
hydrogen fusion. The results of the sonofusion experiments have passed peer
review in major journals and have been independently confirmed by other groups.
And Taleyarkhan is convinced that an experiment to scale up the system will
result in the elusive goal of energy break-even. But so far he hasn't been able
to get the funding to do it.
"We are not looking
for billions of dollars up front, only for a chance," he said, explaining
the engineering problems his experiment will have to overcome. "We have
been doing some small preliminary scaling experiments, but you end up in a
Catch-22 where you really need to directly tackle some difficult engineering
problems."
In one respect, Taleyarkhan
is more afraid of success than failure: A scaled-up version of his current
apparatus, if it works as predicted by computer simulation, could deliver a
lethal dose of neutrons. Consequently, before he can run the experiment, a
fail-safe facility with adequate protection against radiation must be built.
"You can change
parameters such as the temperature of the working fluid or the drive amplitude
with which you are forcing the deuterated bubbles down to the nanometer scale
from a size of thousands of microns," he explained. "You find that
with a small increase in the drive amplitude, from 150 pounds per square inch
to around 350 psi, the rate of reaction jumps by four or five orders of
magnitude. "
But apart from the
practical matter of energy generation, the experimental approach reveals an
engineering principle that could have many applications. "The idea of using
simple mechanical energy to initiate and control nuclear-level forces, the very
workings of the universe — that is exciting in itself," Taleyarkhan said.
"Immediate applications of the technology could produce neutrons or gamma
rays for radiography or explosives detection. And then there is the ultimate
that we are all striving for and hoping for, and that is to resolve the
energy crisis."
1. The challenge: Tabletop fusion http://news.uns.purdue.edu/html4ever/2005/050712.Xu.fusion.html
Project: Scale up previous sonofusion experiments to higher pressures;
demonstrate energy break-even
Principal investigator: Rusi Taleyarkhan, Purdue University,
(765) 420-7537, rusi@ecn.purdue.edu
Payoff: An unlimited source of clean energy
2. The challenge: Room-temperature superconductors
Project: Create artificial optical crystal lattices using high-intensity
lasers to study electron behavior
Principal investigator: Richard Saam, Proteus Systems Inc.
Payoff: Across-the-board performance and power boost for electronic and
electromechanical systems
3. The challenge: Design system for nanotechnology
Project: BioBricks, a DNA parts catalog and design system for
biosynthesis
Principal investigator: Open development community coordinated by
MIT's Randy Rettberg, BioBricks catalog director
Payoff: Self-reproducing molecular machines; engineered materials with
any predetermined physical properties
4. The challenge: The ultimate supercomputer
Project: PlanetLab, an overlay network that transforms the Internet into
one large computer
Principal
investigator: Open design community administered by the PlanetLab
Consortium (www.planet-lab.org)
Payoff: The network is the computer
5. The challenge: Implement a globe-spanning digital
network with infinite bandwidth and zero latency
Project: The Global Lambda Integrated Facility, a test bed for
developing dense wavelength-division multiplexing optical networks and
middleware that would unite high-performance computers and scientific
instruments worldwide
Principal investigator: Open development community established by Kees
Neggers of Surfnet and Cees de Laat of the University of Amsterdam (www.glif.is)
Payoff: Construction work on the Information Superhighway finally wraps up;
could spark a new era of scientific research and technical innovation
Become a Member of www.IntegrityResearchInstitute.org
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