http://crowlspace.blogdrive.com/ Crowlspace Wed, 17 Jan 2007 22:40:03 PST http://www.blogdrive.com Copyright 2007. Family & Home Science & Nature Religion & Beliefs http://crowlspace.blogdrive.com/archive/85.html Wed, 17 Jan 2007 12:39:10 GMT Photosynthesis powers our biosphere and without it we'd be rather short of breath, but oxygenic photosynthesis is a tiny subset of what life has tried. In bacteria there are many different photoreactive molecules and several different photosynthetic processes - some use water as the reductant (hydrogen source), some use hydrogen neat, and some use hydrogen sulphide. Also the photosynthesis we know and love in familiar plants is quite fond of two rather narrow frequencies of visible light, but it's possible for biomolecules to grab several photons of light to get their power-boost from... (more) http://crowlspace.blogdrive.com/comments?id=85 http://crowlspace.blogdrive.com/archive/84.html Sat, 13 Jan 2007 05:30:02 GMT Adrian Mann is an awesome digital artist who has visualised some of the classics of spaceflight studies of the last 35 years... This is Rocket Science ...some notable creations are Starship Daedalus Starship Daedalus ...which is very cool. And another 'blast from the past' is Project Orion Project Orion And the ultimate starship design, the interstellar ramjet Bussard Ramjet But there's some near-term designs from the 1960s, aka the Nerva nuclear thermal rocket and its associated Mars Mission Project NERVA A PROFAC (Propellant Factory) from the early 1970s (studied by ELDO, the... (more) http://crowlspace.blogdrive.com/comments?id=84 http://crowlspace.blogdrive.com/archive/83.html Sat, 13 Jan 2007 01:16:24 GMT Hitachi have developed a brain-reading device which uses near-IR light to watch blood-flow in the brain - a proven proxy for simple, strong thoughts. Hitachi's Brain-Scanning Remote In essence you'd wear a near-IR pick-up as a head-band and it would allow you to think simple commands on a remote control. They're hoping to market to disabled people, but I can see the idea spreading and being refined to give us 'thought recorders' and the like. The US DARPA worked on sub-vocal communicators for a while which sensed the impulses to the vocal-cords which occur when we're "talking in our heads"... (more) http://crowlspace.blogdrive.com/comments?id=83 http://crowlspace.blogdrive.com/archive/82.html Fri, 12 Jan 2007 10:02:04 GMT Space.com has a news article covering the claim that we'll soon be able to "eavesdrop" on ETs... Eavesdropping on ET soon ...which would be fantastic if it happens and disquieting if it never happens. But detection may not be easy. Even the Square Kilometre Array will be hard-pressed to pick a signal from more than a few hundred light years away unless it's a tight beam, so if ET is thinly spread out They will be drowned out by the Galaxy's natural radio 'noise'. To make ET more prevalent, the argument goes, we might assume they'll go on to colonise the Galaxy. Galactic colonisation and... (more) http://crowlspace.blogdrive.com/comments?id=82 http://crowlspace.blogdrive.com/archive/81.html Thu, 11 Jan 2007 10:33:08 GMT Massive radio telescope arrays are soon to be built around the world - notably, for me as an Aussie, the Square Kilometre Array, and other systems around the globe. Such incredibly sensitive radio telescope clusters will allow direct detection of electromagnetic leakage (RADAR, TV, and radio) from star systems within 30 light years or more for tight beams... Eavesdropping on Radio Broadcasts from Galactic Civilizations with Upcoming Observatories for Redshifted 21cm Radiation ...so before long we might be able to say if there's Anyone nearby with technology akin to our own. Perhaps they all... (more) http://crowlspace.blogdrive.com/comments?id=81 http://crowlspace.blogdrive.com/archive/80.html Wed, 10 Jan 2007 21:08:49 GMT The Integral Fast Reactor is so named because it handles all its fuel reprocessing on-site which does tell us much more about just what it does. Here's a link to a very good Wikipedia article Integral Fast Reactor The external links are worth checking out too. I was put on to the design by a write up in Scientific American... Smarter Use of Nuclear Waste ...(PDF warning) the title being the obvious selling point. An Integral Fast Reactor uses fast neutrons to make more fuel out of natural uranium mixes. Regular reactors extract fissionable U235 to 'enrich' the more reluctant U238. What... (more) http://crowlspace.blogdrive.com/comments?id=80 http://crowlspace.blogdrive.com/archive/79.html Wed, 10 Jan 2007 21:05:37 GMT Don't know if you've seen this rendering work by Rhys Taylor of Orion before, but I'm gob-smacked... http://rhysy.plexersoft.com/orion/index.html ...and his fictional Orion-powered space-fleets around Callisto... http://rhysy.plexersoft.com/Deep%20Space%20Force%20Gallery/ ...plus a 3-D animation of an Orion launch... http://www.nuclearspace.com/gallery_orion_movie.htm ...quite impressive really. Quite dire in other respects - nuclear Cold-War space-fleets have an Apocalyptic feel. Another link is an interview with Steve Howe discussing his nuclear ... (more) http://crowlspace.blogdrive.com/comments?id=79 http://crowlspace.blogdrive.com/archive/78.html Sun, 07 Jan 2007 21:57:53 GMT One big topic of perennial interest is interstellar travel and all its sundry issues. I've fiddled with a few equations for relativistic rockets and produced some interesting results - at least to me. For example, the regular equation for motion under continuous, unvarying acceleration is usually written like so... s = Vo.t + 1/2.a.t^2 ...where s is displacement (distance), t is acceleration time, Vo the initial velocity (can be 0 or even negative.) For a complete journey where you accelerate and deccelerate (which is negative acceleration, really) from one location to another, the equation... (more) http://crowlspace.blogdrive.com/comments?id=78 http://crowlspace.blogdrive.com/archive/77.html Fri, 05 Jan 2007 11:51:44 GMT Hi All Well it's been a while. Working full-time and four kids make regular blogging a tad irregular. Just recently I bought a copy of Project Daedalus, the star-probe project of the British Interplanetary Society which went from 1973 to 1978, and has influenced space ethusiasts ever since. In summary the probe massed around 54-52,000 tons; used two stages and electron-beam fusion of deuterium-helium3 pellets to boost to 0.122c, and was famously targeted at Barnard's Star because Kemp thought it had planets. Turns out he had been looking at slight shifts in the telescope's drive system, a... (more) http://crowlspace.blogdrive.com/comments?id=77 http://crowlspace.blogdrive.com/archive/75.html Thu, 31 Mar 2005 00:30:52 GMT HOPE is the Human Outer Planet Expolration design study that is a first step towards defining what is needed to get humans to Jupiter and beyond. A slow ion-propelled freighter will carry the necessary cargo for a base to be set up on Jupiter's moon Callisto. Then a human-carrying vehicle will do a "fast" 850 day transfer - a minimum energy Hohmann is ~ 1000 days. Callisto has been chosen for a base because it's outside Jupiter's radiation belts, so an orbitting passenger vehicle won't be fried. However Ganymede is only just within the Belts and the radiation is quite low, especially for a... (more) http://crowlspace.blogdrive.com/comments?id=75