forza science per sempre!

[belchardo]

Fighter jet flies with 3D printed parts

British fighter jets have flown for the first time with parts made using 3D printing technology.

BAE Systems said the metal components were successfully used on board Tornado aircraft that flew from the defence firm's airfield at Warton, Lancashire, in late December.

The company said its engineers were using 3D technology to design and produce parts that could cut the Royal Air Force's maintenance and service bill by over £1.2m over the next four years.

BAE Systems is working at RAF Marham, Norfolk, to engineer ready-made parts for four squadrons of Tornado GR4 aircraft, including protective covers for cockpit radios and guards for power take-off shafts. Some of the parts cost less than £100.

Mike Murray, head of airframe integration at BAE Systems, said: "You are suddenly not fixed in terms of where you have to manufacture these things. You can manufacture the products at whatever base you want, providing you can get a machine there, which means you can also start to support other platforms such as ships and aircraft carriers.

"And if it's feasible to get machines out on the front line, it also gives improved capability where we wouldn't traditionally have any manufacturing support."

http://www.theguardian.com/business/...ed-parts/print

crazy.

[Schultz]

Awesome shot that Rocknerd.
They recently released another shot of Earth and the Moon from Mercury.
There's quite a lot happening at the moment and much more to come.

[Bon]

Pretty awesome stuff..
http://www.businessinsider.com.au/fi...s+Insider%2529

[belchardo]

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articl...03/4118961.htm

[snake]

Tesla announces low-cost batteries for homes

Elon Musk
The electric car company Tesla has announced its entry into the energy market, unveiling a suite of low-cost solar batteries for homes, businesses and utilities, “the missing piece”, it said, in the transition to a sustainable energy world.

The batteries, which will retail at $3,500 in the US, were launched on Thursday at a Tesla facility in California by the company’s ambitious founder, Elon Musk, who heralded the technology as “a fundamental transformation [in] how energy is delivered across the earth”.

Wall-mounted, with a sleek design, the lithium-ion batteries are designed to capture and store up to 10kWh of energy from wind or solar panel. The reserves can be drawn on when sunlight is low, during grid outages, or at peak demand times, when electricity costs are highest.

The smallest “Powerwall” is 1.3m by 68cm, small enough to be hung inside a garage on or an outside wall. Up to eight batteries can be “stacked” in a home, Musk said, to applause from investors and journalists at the much-anticipated event.

The batteries will initially be manufactured at the electric car company’s factory in California, but will move production to its planned “gigafactory” in Nevada when it opens in 2017.

The Nevada facility will be the largest producer of lithium-ion batteries in the world, and it is hoped its mass-production scale will help to bring down costs even further.

It is not the only battery storage system on the market, but the Powerwall boasts a relatively high storage capacity, a competitive price, and the heft of investment and excitement generated by Musk’s vision.

The entrepreneur, who helped to invent the online payment system, PayPal, has also founded a private space company, Space X, and is experimenting with a high-speed public transportation system called Hyperloop.

Musk also unveiled a larger “Powerpack”, a 100kWh battery block to help utilities smooth out their supply of wind and solar energy - which is generated intermittently - or to pump energy into the grid when demand soars.

He said on Thursday about two billion Powerpacks could store enough electricity to meet the entire world’s needs. “That may seem like an insane number,” he said. “But this is actually within the power of humanity to do.”
Deutsche Bank estimates sales of battery storage systems for homes and businesses could yield as much as $4.5bn in revenue for Tesla. The energy storage industry is expected to grow to $19bn by 2017, according to research firm IHS CERA.

Tesla is currently taking orders for the systems, with the first units expected to shift in August.

http://www.theguardian.com/technolog...ries-elon-musk

this bloke

[Blackmac79]

Apparently, and I haven't looked into this in depth I have just heard it, Costa Rica is now officially running on 100% sustainable energy.

I don't know what the mix is however.

The reasonability of solar and even to and extent wind tubines for individual houses is increasingn rapidly.

[militiamon]

How good's the peer review process hey?

We're reviewing one now, some dudes are trying to publish in a journal with impact factor of 16 which is meant for novel materials/surface science. Other reviewer was giving them a pull with their comments (must be mates), but they were fuming with ours. It's good work but they're claiming it's the first time that what they're doing has been done before when they dedicated 4 paragraphs to it in their seminal work on the subject

Oh and they didn't cite us. Kents.


Anyone else have some lol stories about the peer review process?

[snake]

once accidentally clicked minor review instead of major review ops:

they addressed all my comments, though, so all good. crisis averted

having a bit more luck on the other side lately. must be more covincing than i am in the religion thread (or the reviewers are nicer )

[militiamon]

Yeeww, just saw the latest.

Ooof, how's that table of contents image. Did you make it yourself? Looks far better than my effort

[snake]

Yeeww, just saw the latest.

Ooof, how's that table of contents image. Did you make it yourself? Looks far better than my effort

nah, i would have done it in paintbrush

our man jb (of the blog fame) was the editor, but just got juan of his assistants to deal with it as there was no comments. to answer the question, yes, she's attractive (y)

[q-money]

got knocked back by your various Nature journals etc for a paper characterizing a hitherto un-discovered system in the human CNS..eventually published in a specialist ophthalmic journal earlier this year...then got cited in Nature by another group characterizing a hitherto un-discovered system in a different spot of the human CNS ffs

yanks run the world, closely followed by cranky germans

[snake]

just roll the dice. quick rejection is a good rejection.

by the way, looked at some titles, do u ppl even speke english m8?

[q-money]

just roll the dice. quick rejection is a good rejection.

some blokes wanted to reject us so bad they even wrote a consensus letter with their mates to the journal we eventually published in saying we were wrong, straight after they rejected the first submission of the paper. fkn crybabies.

look who's laughing now. not the germans because they don't have a sense of humor

[snake]

just another 40 years of this type of bullshit. ****, I hope i die firdt.

one of my current things is going to a website called retractionwatch.com

some genuine lolworthy stories in there, including some masterful SEM doctoring straight out of mspaint

[q-money]

http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/...nphys3343.html

[belchardo]

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-07-0...llenge/6600076

ROBOT FIGHT!!!!!

[plague]

Question:
With the 70th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing and the kerfuffle over the US/Iran nuclear deal I've been thinking.
Is it 'that' difficult to make a nuke?
reason why I'm saying is that with all of the advances in technology over the 70 years since it was unleashed how can these rouge countries still not have the capability?
is it the process? is it the materials needed?
I'm just intrigued as it seems to be that the whole world has come a long long way over that time but we've still managed to keep it out of the hands of the lunatics. how is that possible?

[boz-monaut]

everything you need to make a nuke is difficult to obtain, highly controlled and very, very, very expensive

obtaining fissionable material is extraordinarily difficult and then you have to process it in very complicated ways (e.g. separating isotopes of uranium using very complicated centrifuges)

the actual making of the fission bomb is probably the simplest bit - you just need a critical mass, which you get by exploding bits together

making a fusion bomb requires a fission bomb and a whole bunch more complications (and easier to obtain isotopes)

much easier to just steal one from former Soviet republics

[boz-monaut]

actually if you turn over to SBS now there's a special on Uranium

[plague]

much easier to just steal one from former Soviet republics

well this is another amazing thing that somehow a crazy person hasn't already done this and let rip.

so if Australia decided tomorrow "we want the bomb". if they had access to materials and brains how long would it take us to do it from scratch?
is it a 12 month thing? 2 years 10 years?