Science!! Fucking magnets, how do they work?

khorum

khorum

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Palum_sl said:
Oh, that's actually cool. Still not a legit 'hoverboard' per se but the orientation fix thing is very cool.
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Yeah, the quantum locking principle is very exciting. Theoretically it should work just using the earth's magnetic field but they use magnets for demonstration. Unlike magnetic repulsion it lets the hoverboard bank/pitch and even roll and the energy onboard would be used to keep the superconductors frozen.

Apparently it can also bear 70,000 times more than the weight of the actual semiconductor 'control surfaces'. The Israeli team who discovered it made a TED talk a few years ago:

 
pharmakos

pharmakos

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uncognito_sl said:
Christina Smolke, a bioengineering professor at Stanford University, points out that while we now know the genes that enable the entire opiate production process in poppies, it doesn?t mean that making yeast mimic that process will be easy. ?If you have to engineer yeast to make about twenty enzymes it doesn?t normally make, it?s really complex,? she says. ?This work is certainly a piece of the puzzle, but we still need a lot more pieces.?

Smolke?s lab has recently replicated some of the opiate-producing steps in yeast and has been aiming to not only to have the yeast produce the opiates, but also further refine the chemicals into purer forms like hydrocodone that pharmaceutical companies need?essentially making the fermentation vat into a pharmaceutical factory. But scientists like Smolke and Graham can?t forge ahead blindly in their laboratory goals: When they finally manage to make yeast produce opiates, this may open new legal questions regarding the risk of people procuring the genetically modified yeast and homebrewing the opiates themselves.

http://www.wired.com/2015/06/last-st...opiates-yeast/
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they said the main thing this discovery will help them do is genetically modify the poppy to make different / more opioids.

maybe they can figure out a way to get a poppy to exclusively make D- isomer morphinans

a dissociative junkie can dream
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Sentagur

Sentagur

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Furry_sl said:
Cool, a theory that takes a massive dump on the fundamentals behind quantum entanglement experiments. Cold star to anyone who knows why.
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Are you suggesting that you (and number of other "in the know" people) knew all about this property but never bothered to tell anyone or write any papers or collect any Nobel prizes?
 
Furry

Furry

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Sentagur_sl said:
Are you suggesting that you (and number of other "in the know" people) knew all about this property but never bothered to tell anyone or write any papers or collect any Nobel prizes?
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The standards to say you've discovered something are much higher than the standard for other people to say you haven't discovered anything. As much as this theory suits me, they still need to prove it.
 
Cad

Cad

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How is NASA not busy validating/improving the EmDrive with all their resources right now? Or are they?
 
khorum

khorum

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NASA has a bunch of drive systems in competitive testing that are plenty feasible. Most of them are brute-force applications of existing off-the-shelf ideas---and if NASA had a motto nowadays, it would be "Off-the-shelf".

Basically it doesn't matter how nifty a given idea is, if it's more cost-effective than putting a 60-year-old nuclear technology into orbit and having thatflying shit to Mars in 39 daysas soon as people stop getting rustled by putting anything nuclear into orbit, NASA's prolly already put money into it.

They already have nuclear-powered stuff in space too. Curiosity runs off a RTG "nuclear" reactor.
 
Cad

Cad

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khorum_sl said:
NASA has a bunch of drive systems in competitive testing that are plenty feasible. Most of them are brute-force applications of existing off-the-shelf ideas---and if NASA had a motto nowadays, it would be "Off-the-shelf".

Basically it doesn't matter how nifty a given idea is, if it's more cost-effective than putting a 60-year-old nuclear technology into orbit and having thatflying shit to Mars in 39 daysas soon as people stop getting rustled by putting anything nuclear into orbit, NASA's prolly already put money into it.

They already have nuclear-powered stuff in space too. Curiosity runs off a RTG "nuclear" reactor.
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The thing about the emdrive is that it could be the holy grail of continuous acceleration. If it really works off of light, then it theoretically should provide thrust up to .99c, right? If so, then we can put gigawatt reactors on a large ship and assemble it in space from pieces flown up on chemical rockets, then let that thing accelerate at .05g continuously and make it to alpha centauri in 20 years.. None of the VASIMIR or any of the others are reactionless afaik.
 
iannis

iannis

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Cad_sl said:
How is NASA not busy validating/improving the EmDrive with all their resources right now? Or are they?
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There are multiple labs working with it.

By multiple I mean at least 3. And probably only 3. There's the original dude who built it in the first place, then there's these other guys making a different version who will be testing it later this month, then there's nasa kinda dicking around with it but mostly to lend credibility to the project and defray the "this sounds like SERIOUS bullshit" strangeness of the initial observations. Science does have politics as well.

From what I understand NASA is more mission focused these days and throwing everything to subcontractors than they are a think tank of experimental physics.
 
iannis

iannis

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Like the dudes at NASA drive the rover and decide what tools to put on it. IT's the dudes over at JPL that actually build the thing.
 
iannis

iannis

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3 might not sound like a lot. But give it some intial vetting and peer review, and if it's not just a bunch of nerds having a giant communal brainfart and there is potential for a practical application... it'll become a hell of a lot more than 3 right quick.
 
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