HackingTheUniverse

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Atomic Rockets Please go visit this awesome site about space travel. The table of contents is displayed below. One of the highlights of the site is a page (Engine List) that includes a comprehensive list of engine/propulsion technologies with a technical table showing thrust, mass, efficiency and more … calculations. The “Common Misconceptions” page dispels [...]

Expanding on earlier work done by John Aitken, Charles Wilson invented the first cloud chamber in 1911. Cloud chambers are used to detect and study particles that leave trails of ionization visibly displayed by vapor formation. Alpha particles (a helium nucleus) and beta particles (electrons) will leave trails of water vapor, much like a miniature [...]

http://www.isecpartners.com/tools.html This is a list of tools available from iSEC Partners in several categories: Applications Infrastructure Storage VOIP

A new form of alumina membranes coated with carbon thin films show promise for use in implanted bio-sensor devices. Glucose sensors and dialysis membranes that the body won’t reject are among the possibilities. NC State finds new nanomaterial could be breakthrough for implantable medical devices Researchers have long sought to develop medical devices that could [...]

MIT’s Media Lab has a team working on integrating real world data into virtual worlds. The project uses the Second Life virtual world from Linden Labs to extend perception across the virtual interface and back into the real world. A Realer Virtual World According to Paradiso’s plan, anyone in the building wearing a small electronic [...]

Genetically engineered microbes may serve a variety of purposes: Manufacturing other substances such as medicines and vitamins Delivery of various substances to specific targets in the body Protect teeth from cavities Help handle lactose intolerance Engineering Edible Bacteria Probiotics, a field that seeks to use edible bacteria to improve human health, may soon undergo a [...]

In 1965, Gordon Moore (co-founder of Intel) wrote an article about the rate at which the number of transistors inside an integrated chip was increasing. By 1975, he had focused the statement on a rate of doubling the number of transistors every two years. This has become known as “Moore’s Law”. Such an exponential rate [...]

al-Jazari was an Arabic engineer and inventor from Mesopotamia born around 1136. In 1206 he wrote a book called, “Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices” which described how to construct and use fifty mechanical devices. Inventions: Crankshaft and connecting rod mechanism to convert rotary motion into linear motion. Gearing and mechanical controls in a [...]

Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev was born in a village near Tobolsk in Russia in 1834. He invented the periodic table of elements and used it to predict properties of other elements that had not yet been discovered. Mendeleev was also a chemist and did research with explosives and petroleum fuels. He worked on hydrodynamics and thermodynamics [...]

If, when something is left to itself it tends to become more organized, we describe that something as “self-organizing”. This is most commonly studied in the field of cellular automata, which involves very simple programming rules that have the ability to produce quite complex output. Cellular automata is used to model developmental growth patterns that [...]