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POPSLong-distance demonstration of solar-powered wireless power transmission achieved In the longer term, with sufficient investments in space infrastructure, space solar power can be built from materials from space. The full environmental benefits of space solar power derive from doing most of the work outside of Earth's biosphere. With materials extraction from the Moon or near-Earth asteroids, and space-based manufacture of components, space solar power would have essentially zero terrestrial environmental impact. Only the energy receivers need be built on Earth.
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POPSNew hyperspace engine could roundtrip Mars in 5 hours The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics awards prizes for the best papers presented each year. Last year’s winner went to a paper authored by physicist Jochem Hauser, calling for experimental tests of Heim’s theory. “This hyperdrive motor,” Hauser said, “would propel a craft through another dimension at enormous speeds. It could reach a star eleven light years away in just eighty days.”
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POPSFour Reasons Not to Give Up on Interstellar Travel It looks far, dark, and cold... Yet, 120 years ago, flight was science fiction as well. C. G. Jung said that all dreams of space travel are just an escape from one most difficult challenge of all, that is the journey to man's inner space. :-) ...and see my clip from last week on suggested FTL drive. It seems the motivation to escape an inner journey just grows.
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POPSPhysicists Seek Answers to Quantum Correlations The physicists ruled out several possible classical explanations for the instantaneous communication. For one thing, they showed that the photons did not share information before leaving Geneva, and so they didn´t travel knowing about each other´s properties. In another test, the scientists showed that no communication could have occurred through a different reference frame, as might happen because of the photons´ high speeds. According to Einstein´s theory of relativity, observers moving at high speeds can get different measurements of the same event because they have different reference frames. But, by performing tests over a complete rotation of the Earth, the researchers ruled out this possibility. "We think space and time are important because that´s the kind of monkeys we are,"
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POPSString Theory Faster-Than-Light Drive Proposed Dreams of interstellar travel may need to be put on hold for the moment, however. Cleaver and Obousy estimate that the amount of energy needed to influence the extra dimension is equivalent to the entire mass of Jupiter being converted into pure energy for a ship measuring roughly 10 meters by 10 meters by 10 meters. "That is an enormous amount of energy," Cleaver said. "We are still a very long ways off before we could create something to harness that type of energy." But what if we could make ourselves very very small??? I am ready to squeeze myself quite a bit to get really far... :-)
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POPSWill NASA Test a Plasma Drive on the ISS? A plasma engine such as the VASIMR uses radio waves to ionize a propellant, and magnetic fields to accelerate or decelerate the resulting plasma to generate thrust. The VASIMR injects a gas such as hydrogen in to an engine that turns it in to plasma. The radio waves are now used to energize the plasma further as it moves through the engine. The plasma, now accelerated and heated, is focused and directed as exhaust using a magnetic nozzle.
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POPSPrivate Space Project Rolls On White Knight Two will launch SpaceShipTwo, which will be the size of a corporate Gulfstream capable of carrying six passengers and two pilots. Both will be built wholly from ultra-light composite materials.
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POPSIs a 'Dark Force' Pushing the Universe Apart? Astronomers now recognize that the eventual fate of the universe is inextricably tied to the presence of dark energy and dark matter.The current standard model for cosmology describes a universe that is 70 percent dark energy, 25 percent dark matter, and only 5 percent normal matter.
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POPSNASA Needs to Take Space Sex Seriously The fact remains however, that we are naive of the effects of sex in space, let alone if it is even a pleasurable experience. The mechanics of "human docking procedures" (as described by tests carried out by the Russian space agency) are a lot more complicated when in zero gravity. There are also huge ethical questions hanging over possible pregnancies in space. Zero-G tests on rat embryos produced decreased skeletal and brain development, the effects on a human embryo will remain a mystery. The fact remains that NASA continues to cut back biological research in favor of future Moon missions, so much about human sexuality in space will remain a mystery.
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POPSThe Shape of Music The shapes of the space of chords we have described also reveal deep connections between a wide range of musical genres. It turns out that superficially different styles--Renaissance music, classical and Romantic music, jazz, rock, and other popular forms--all make remarkably similar use of the geometry of chord space. Traditional techniques for manipulating musical scales turn out to be closely analogous to those used to connect individual chords. And some composers have displayed a profound understanding of the higher-dimensional geometry of musical chords. In fact, one can argue that Romantic composers such as Chopin had an intuitive feel for non-Euclidean higher-dimensional spaces that exceeded the explicit understanding of their mathematical contemporaries.
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POPSAsteroid Impacts On Earth: A Protection Plan Indeed, over billions of years, the Tree of Life here on Earth has been whacked time and time again by what Schweickart labeled as “the crazy cosmic gardener.” “The good news is that we can do something about this,” the former astronaut explained. “The marriage of we human beings and the machines that we’ve created are now at a level of capability which enables us to fire the crazy cosmic gardener. We can stop this process from occurring again.”
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POPSIs Helium 3 Exploitation China's Hidden Lunar Agenda? UN Treaties in place state that the moon and its minerals are the common heritage of mankind, so the quest to use Helium-3 as an energy source would likely demand joint international co-operation. Hopefully, exploitation of the moon's resources will be viewed as a solution for the world, rather than an out-moded nation-state solution.
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POPSMars Soil Sample Reveals Presence of Nutrients for Plants to Grow “We basically have found what appears to be the requirements, the nutrients, to support life whether past, present or future,” said Samuel P. Kounaves during a telephone news conference on Thursday. “The sort of soil you have there is the type of soil you’d probably have in your backyard.”
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POPSSpace Experts Call for ‘Fewer Astronauts, More Robots’ The suggestion sure makes a lot of economical sense. Resources should be focused to develop better technologies to carry load into orbit and beyond, because this is the real bottle neck of space exploration as of now. On the other hand, we cannot overlook the fact that sending men and women to space, ignites the imagination and inspires the coming generations. Space is the next frontier of adventure and mystery. The myth and the story are not less important than the economical aspect.
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POPSUsing Causality to Solve the Puzzle of Quantum Spacetime Space time fabric at the tiniest scale is fractal and with variable dimensionality. The interesting thing here is that the very fundamental aspects of reality are described as mathematical entities, and do not possess any intrinsic properties besides causation as an organizing principle. This is where physics and metaphysics meet....
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POPSHow did the Universe Begin ? The no-boundary wave function also states that space-time was not what we see today at the outset of universal expansion. “When the universe started out,” Hartle explains, “there wasn’t ordinary space-time. Instead of three space directions, as we have now, there were four space directions. At some point, a transition was made to ordinary space-time.”
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POPSHarnessing the Weather “In weather modification, the uninitiated think you must make huge impacts on the atmosphere to get a desired result,” Griffith says. “But it’s actually the opposite. If we just make tiny modifications to existing conditions, little touches here and there, the changes then cascade upward using the existing weather’s natural actions, and that’s what gets the biggest results.”
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POPSPhysicists Demonstrate How Information Can Escape From Black Holes Hawking's idea was generally accepted by physicists until the late 1990s, when many began to doubt the assertion. Even Hawking himself renounced the idea in 2004. Yet no one, until now, has been able to provide a plausible mechanism for how information might escape from a black hole. A team of physicists led by Abhay Ashtekar, Holder of the Eberly Family Chair in Physics and director of the Penn State Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos, now has discovered such a mechanism. Broadly, their findings expand space-time beyond its assumed size, thus providing room for information to reappear.
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