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American Scientific American Topic - Defense Technology
As dramatic exits go, it's on par with Major T. J. "King" Kong riding a falling nuclear bomb like a rodeo bull at the end of Dr. Strangelove . A NASA spacecraft has documented a comet's demise as it plunged toward the sun at 600 kilometers per second, broke apart and vaporized inside the solar atmosphere. Craig Hogan believes that the world is fuzzy. This is not a metaphor. Hogan, a physicist at the University of Chicago and director of the Fermilab Particle Astrophysics Center near Batavia, Ill., thinks that if we were to peer down at the tiniest subdivisions of space and time, we would find a universe filled with an intrinsic jitter, the busy hum of static. This hum comes not from particles bouncing in and out of being or other kinds of quantum froth that physicists have argued about in the past. Rather Hogan’s noise would come about if space was not, as we have long assumed, smooth and continuous, a glassy backdrop to the dance of fields and particles. Hogan’s noise arises if space is made of chunks. Blocks. Bits. Hogan’s noise would imply that the universe is digital. Before satellite images and drones could pinpoint the exact location of enemy targets, warfare was often more like a game of Battleship: a complex series of guesses based on spotty information. Humankind’s efforts to tell time have helped drive the evolution of our technology and science throughout history. The need to gauge the divisions of the day and night led the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans to create sundials, water clocks and other early chronometric tools. Western Europeans adopted these technologies, but by the 13th century, demand for a dependable timekeeping instrument led medieval artisans to invent the mechanical clock. Although this new device satisfied the requirements of monastic and urban communities, it was too inaccurate and unreliable for scientific application until the pendulum was employed to govern its operation. The precision timekeepers that were subsequently developed resolved the critical problem of finding a ship’s position at sea and went on to play key roles in the industrial revolution and the advance of Western civilization. Airborne power station : As a longtime resident of Seattle, Boeing engineer Brian J. Tillotson had often gazed up at the clouds and wondered how anyone living in such a sun-deprived place could ever hope to take advantage of solar power, the main offering of Boeing subsidiary Spectrolab. More than three years ago he came up with the answer: Why not build a power station above the clouds? POLOCHIC VALLEY, GUATEMALA--Echoes from armed raids still seem to resound in this valley, eight hours north of the capital city. In early 2011 military and paramilitary forces forcibly evicted 13 communities of indigenous Mayan peasants--some 300 families were dispossessed of disputed land they had been living on for three years to secure the property rights of one powerful local family, the Widmanns, and its agribusiness company Chabil Utzaj. If a country wants to keep a nuclear bomb test secret, it’ll probably do it deep underground. But even if you bury the bomb, some clues will reach the surface. So says a study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters . [P. Vincent et al., " Anomalous transient uplift observed at the Lop Nor, China nuclear test site using satellite radar interferometry time series analysis "] In a sign of pessimism about humanity's future , scientists today set the hands of the infamous "Doomsday Clock" forward one minute from two years ago. Ants engage in large-scale battles that in many ways call to mind human warfare. Entomologist and photographer Mark Moffett describes their bellicose behaviors in his article in the December issue of Scientific American . The raging combatants form a blur on all sides. the scale of the violence is almost incomprehensible, the battle stretching beyond my field of view. Tens of thousands sweep ahead with a suicidal single-mindedness. Utterly devoted to duty, the fighters never retreat from a confrontation--even in the face of certain death. The engagements are brief and brutal. Suddenly, three foot soldiers grab an enemy and hold it in place until one of the bigger warriors advances and cleaves the captive’s body, leaving it smashed and oozing. |
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