Nanoscale Mold

Killing people and blowing stuff up has been losing appeal recently, and I suppose that that would be a sign of a sort of maturity. But other than weapons and means of war, there is still plenty to be contributed to the world, and the topic today is nanoscale materials.

Arranging all the atoms in a mass of material yields materials with properties nothing short of magical. A thread of light alkali metals linked together in a series of organized ionic bonds held in a precise triangular lattice strung across a road has the potential to cut a car in half. But the potential of such materials aside, how do we efficiently organize atoms on a large enough scale so that we can actually produce enough material to b of use?

The aforementioned NME (nano material engineered) thread/car cutter would consists of trillions of individual atoms per centimeters of thread, how can we then, rapidly arrange so many atoms? Well, isn't this a question asked by the earliest of industrialists? So much material has to be shaped to make a chunk of iron into a usable knife or pan, having individual blacksmiths pound away at the ingot is definitely not the way to go, instead, we make a mold that produces one shape over and over again.

When we feel or push something, like my fingers feeling and pushing the keys on my keyboard, the atoms in my finger are not actually touching the atoms in the plastic keyboards. I feel the keys under my fingers when the electron clouds of the two collide, the actual atomic nuclei never comes into contact. Even now, between your buttocks and your seat, there lies a few angstrom units of space dominated by the electron clouds of whatever you are wearing on your butt (I hope you are wearing something there) and whatever the materials of your seat.

The distance between atoms I mentioned is a nice little nonstick coating of you will, for the mold I now propose. To make the mold we use conventional means to aline a grid of nanoscale electrodes, each with its own electrical field. To shape the mold, we provide ore power to some electrodes while giving less to others, creating an uneven electron surface in order to acquire a desired shape, such as a nanoscale triangular lattice. Once the desired shape is set, the material that needs to be shaped is ground down to a fine nanoscale powder and heavily ionized negatively to maximize the distance between it and the mold, and to also prevent clumping of the substrate material before it takes the shape of the mold.

A few seconds later after the mold is filled, the substrate material is de-ionized and normal ionic and covalent bonding takes over, "solidifying" the material into its desired shape, and the mold is reset for another shape, another batch of material, and produces another NMEed batch of material.

The Great Firewall of China

For reasons of my own I am currently in China and find that I simply must make a post about the internet here.

I'm sure that all of you are aware that in China the government blocks any websites that might speak agianst it and this includes personal websites such as bloggger (yes, I am using a bypass program to get this post posted...), facebook, youtube, and more. Instead of bitching and whining about how stupid this whole affair is, I think I will tell you all a story.

When George Bush was giving a speech one day he was hit in the head by a rather large shoe, I'm sure everone knows about this story, but there is another one behind it. Shortly after George Bush received his negative feedback from the crowd it was announced that the head programmer of the Chinese firewall was going to visit the US and give a short public press confrence. Little did he know, there was a feed setup on Twitter by Chinese intelectuals who have figured out how to bypass the wall full of people offering certain rewards for hitting the programmer with certain objects, hitting the guy with a shoe for example was worth a medal and a plane ticket to LA, the latter offered by a Chinese travel agent.

That little feed grew and sure enough, the guy was actually struck by a shoe on the day of his press confrence. After his bodyguards safely escorted him away from the steady stream of miscallaneous projectiles he stormed angrily into his office and immediately begin a video confrence with his subordinates, to whom he said something along the lines of "Why didnt you block the feed?". The response was simple, "Twitter was blocked, we had no idea the feed was there..."

Proposed Muscular Growth Therapy

Body builders and athletes have already demonstrated to the world that with enough time and dedication, along with the proper resources, the average human being can develop into a very physically strong organism on whose strength is on par with many other "lower" creatures of the same size.

Humans are not readily born with such strength and yet human society value this strength for rather obvious reasons, I think it is time that a reliable and safe method of rapidly developing physical strength to be developed and that the field of modern medicine is well enough developed to make this possible.

Stem cell therapy has already been proven to repair muscles, and there are already several cases where regenerative stem cell therapy has repaired large (40 ish) percents of the heart muscles of heart disease patients.

The reason that injured muscles and healthy ones grow so slowly, and that is because the human body ceases to create new muscle cells once the infant is born. You most likely have now, the same or less number of muscle cells you had since you were born, you are stronger because those cells have grown individually stronger.

But what if we can generate more muscle cells and control them? Not only would that result in an immediate increase in strength, the gains from working out would also increase, allowing for faster muscular training and recovery, only problem now is how.

Well, most of the pieces are in place, we simply need a drug which temporarily severs a small percentage of muscle cells from the nervous system. The cells affected are still there, but as far as the body is concerned, there is nothing there. Because only a small percentage of cells are deactivated, the body can still function.

At this point, we introduce the same regenerative stem cell therapy which has benefited heart disease patients. The body will regenerate new cells, wired into the same nerves, to replace the cells "lost" due to the drug. Once the new cells are matured, an antidote is given to flush out any remaining drugs and the old inactivated cells are reintegrated into the nervous system, basically cloning themselves as far as muscle mass is concerned.

Assuming the body fully integrates all the new muscle fibers, rejection is not an issue because stem cells are grown from your own cells, repeated sessions of the described procedure will rapidly strengthen any fit human being past human limits on physical strength.

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Nuclear Powered Flight and its Practicality

Ever since the world entered the atomic age predictions were made that one day just about everything would become nuclear powered. Today, the world sees wonders such as nuclear powered aircraft carriers and many other naval engineering marvels.

Despite all that, there has yet to be any sort of nuclear powered devices on land, and for good reasons. Any military vehicle to be powered by nuclear power will require huge amounts of shielding and armor around the reactor to make a possible tank capable to withstanding damage. The raw power of a nuclear reactor could not be directed for offensive purposes unless such a vehicle carries a large arsenal of conventional or a very bulky directed energy weapon. And at the end of all this, the speed of such a thing is limited due to the huge amount of weight it has to carry, making it out of place in a modern battlefield where speed is key. For civilian uses, conventional power is simply much cheaper and much more reliable, not to mention much more safe. The thought of a literal thermonuclear train wreck alone should discourage the use of nuclear power on land for transport.

But in the skies, I believe, lies a different future for the fruits of the Manhattan Project.

Say we built the smallest safe reactor the modern world could build, and around it built a engine which takes magnetized or electrically charged conventional fuel pellets, accelerated them into the combustion chamber of a normal ramjet engine, and pressurized even further the combustion chamber itself with intense magnetic fields powered by a small nuclear reactor. Such a hybrid jet engine, even if it can only provide the thrust of a normal rocket motor, would use up much less fuel compared to a liquid fueled rocket and would be able to lift a relatively large fixed wing aircraft and accelerate it to immense speed.

At this point, assuming such a device is capable of flight, one could argue that all we have created is a very large and bulky target practice drone which can be seen by even the most primitive of radar, and shot down by even more primitive weapons. Even if we stealth-coated such a beast, which would no doubt be several times larger than most aircraft due to the sheer bulk of a nuclear reactor, this aircraft would not be maneuverable enough even for commercial use as a cargo plane, assuming it is even capable of taking on cargo.

Well, once such an aircraft gets off the ground, I would like to remind everyone that there is no speed limit in the skies. Using the same electromagnet-boosted engines we continue to accelerate the aircraft past the efficient speeds of conventional aircraft, and eventually reach a speed where the plane is constantly falling towards the horizon, or extreme low earth orbit. At this point, the engines can be shut off, and the plane is essentially invulnerable from surface threats as it would be moving so fast relative to the ground that no weapons system could react to it. From this immense speed, one could observe, command, and even fire ordnance onto virtually the entire globe without fear of retaliation.

The Finals

Well, if you notice that I have been a little lazy in my posting, it would be due to the fact that finals in coming up and I would actually like to pass all of my classes, which means studying. Speaking of studying, I've noticed something rather interesting in the efficiency of test prep.

Being in band does not help this issue, but lately I seem to have a song or two stuck in my head 24/7, besides being annoying, I think that this is reducing my studying and thinking capacities by quite a lot. There are studies out there that show listening to music while studying reduces efficiency, and I have quit listening to my mp3 player for about half a month now. The result of me boycotting my mp3 player is that I constantly have songs stuck in my head, and every time those songs hit a small climax my chain of thought gets interrupted.

If anyone out there have a sure fire way of quieting the mind short of taking a bullet to the head, please speak up.

Project Skymine

I have tons of ideas floating around my head, but this one in particular I wanted to share because it actually does good and makes really big explosions, what more can you possibly ask for?

So we earthlings are always under the constant threat of doom by ICBMs, which we really haven't done anything about. Its like having a sword over your throat, but you don't move away from it. Well, here is my proposed solution.

ICBMs, before they hit their targets, have to go into low earth orbit to efficiently cover ground. if a country had the money, you could create a low orbit geostationary satellite, made of nothing but a small computer, battery, and a giant fuel tank surrounded by a shrapnel coat. Place said device into geostationary orbit between you and the country that is most likely to nuke you, and repeat said process a couple hundred more times in different orbits and possible trajectories. When some crazy North Korean kid decides to launch his excuse of a nuke at you, you find one of your mines in orbit closest to the nukes trajectory, maneuver it into the path of said nuke, and detonate it.

ICBMs are NOT meant to take a beating, a little scratch on the fuel tank, and the entire missile harmlessly explodes in orbit.

Railway Launcher

11.3 kilometers per second, that is the velocity a ballistic projectile must attain to leave the gravity of the Earth. That's about three times the speed of a rifle bullet, thirty times the speed of sound.

So far the only method of leaving earth comes from large rocket engines which burn fuel by the tones and could only lift a few tonnes of weight into orbit, hardly efficient if you ask me.

Then there is the proposed launch method of basically firing a payload into orbit by an explosion/jet-assisted rail/coil gun. This method, if ever a practical example of it was built, would be only able to send a solid projectile into space due to the fact that the immense acceleration that takes the projectile from 0km/s to over 11km/sec will destroy any electronics, not to mention anything alive on board the payload. Perhaps this will be useful for launching explosives into some part of the planet, but I doubt that even something as simple as a nuclear warhead will survive the acceleration.

Instead, what I suggest is a very long piece of magnetic levitation track about 300 or so kilometers long. Multiple conducting rails below, on top, and to the sides of a "train car" will serve as rails to both levitate the vehicle, reducing friction, and accelerate it in a rail gun like manner. For those who do not know how a rail gun functions, two or more conducting rails complete a circuit with the projectile in between them. The opposite magnetic fields on the rails and in the projectile send the projectile speeding down the track.

To further accelerate the "train car", a tunnel of coils that are magnetized will pull on the train as it approaches, and push the train away as it passes through the tunnel, much like a coil gun. The final sections of the rail will gradually curve skywards, and rockets on board the train will only have to maintain a velocity that is already close to escape to reach orbit.

This device will be much more gentile with its payload, as it has 300 km in which to accelerate to the highest attainable speed, meaning the acceleration is gradual, and no unlucky astronauts are flattened to a pulp.