Robot controlled by living brain......

Yep, I said a living brain controlling a robot. Get ready, this is b movie creepie! lol




complete article here

New research shows Warp Drives would suck!

hey here is an interesting article sent in by Tim Sayell from Discovery online.

• According to new calculations by Italian physicists, a warp drive could easily create a black hole that would incinerate any passengers on a space craft and then suck Earth into the same black hole!

As we all know...normal physics shows that FTL is impossible. As speed increases so does mass and therefore the more energy you need to move even a small amount faster. As you approach light speed your mass becomes infinite and therefore the amount of energy you need to move faster also becomes infinity. I have said (tongue firmly in cheek) that the stars themselves prove ftl is impossible. Why? Because if you go an infinite speed you need infinite energy, which means all the power in the universe plus a little bit more. Since the stars are still burning..... but anyway..

The first exception to the ftl rule is a wormhole. If a ship were to cross the wormhole threshold, it would still be going sub light, but it would still arrive at the other end before any light that had to travel the distance outside the wormhole.

The second itself is the idea of a warp engine that physicist Michael Alcubierre envisioned.

• Alcubierre warp drive would create a bubble of energy behind the ship and a lack of energy in front of the ship, like a giant cosmic wave a space ship could surf. That particular section of space can travel faster than the speed of light in the surrounding space, and anything on or in that bubble will accelerate with it. (here is the original article BMU ran on the Alcubierre drive)

The problems start when you consider the amount of energy it would take to create the "bubble" that would contain the ftl. Plus you would need even more energy to "push" the bubble along. The problems really start when the energy to hold everything in check runs out. Just like antimatter, when the dark matter needed comes into contact with normal matter the ship inside is destroyed by temperatures well in excess of that near the core of a supernova. Plus as the bubble collapses it could very well create a black hole that would not bode well for ships or planets nearby.

Read complete article here

Teenager hit by 30k mph meteorite!

I mean, what are the chances?! Well according to this article in the UK Telegraph a million to one.

Gerrit Blank was on his way to school when he saw "ball of light" heading straight towards him from the sky. He felt a searing pain in his hand, was thrown several feet and almost deafened by the blast as a pea sized rock blasted out a hole in the pavement. Estimates have the speed of the small meteorite at apx. 30 thousand miles per hour. It made a 1 foot crater and a nasty three-inch long scar on his hand.

According to the article, what makes this strike unusual is:

• The only other known example of a human being surviving a meteor strike happened in Alabama, USA, in November 1954 when a grapefruit-sized fragment crashed through the roof of a house, bounced off furniture and landed on a sleeping woman.

2009 Campbell Award Finalists

From the Science Fiction Award Watch is this year's finalists for the John W. Campbell Memorial award.

• City at the End of Time, Greg Bear (published by Del Rey)
• Valley of Day-Glo, Nick Di Chario (Robert J. Sawyer Books)
• Little Brother, Cory Doctorow (Tor)
• Song of Time, Ian MacLeod (PS Publishing)
• The Philosopher’s Apprentice, James Morrow (William Morrow)
• Anathem, Neal Stephenson (William Morrow)

Red giant Betelgeuse may go supernova?!

Shaun Saunders sends in a VERY interesting article from Fox news online. It seems that the red giant Betelgeuse (the bright red star in the left shoulder of Orion) may soon explode in a supernova - this according to data released by UC Berkley.

The indications are pretty startling all in themselves. Betelgeuse's enormous size would have once reached all the way out to the orbit of Jupiter if placed in the center of the solar system has begun to shrink, as much as 15% already. Scientists will watch the star over the next few years to see if the shrinking continues. It may also rebound. This type of behavior is thought to precede the final cataclysmic explosion as the star "exhausts one fuel" and switches to more denser materials to fuse. Star's need to keep the fusion process going to hold up their massive atmospheres. Stars (especially super - massives like Betelgeuse) are thought to begin this size fluctuations as they fuse all their hydrogen and switch over to helium and finally the process ends with iron. At this point the fusion process can not hold up the star's outer atmosphere and it collapses onto the core releasing more energy in a few moments that an entire galaxy.

Should the supernova event happen, Earth would be in for a spectacular show. Betelgeuse is 600 light-years away, and so may have already exploded.

Now this reminds me of Shaun's story Last Light (available in his book Navigating in the New World) which concerns a race destroyed by a gama radiation blast from a super nova. (when the explosion starts, huge amounts of gama radiation are channeled in beams from the north and south pole of the star. Should a planet be in the path of this beam, said planet would "cook" very much as if in a microwave. Though to be completely fair, GRBs are extremely rare events. Check this article out for more info on GRBs)

complete Fox news online article