Tangential - Slashdot User

Submission + - China is launching bombs via railgun (interestingengineering.com)

Submitted by Tangential on Tuesday May 14, 2024 @03:28PM

Tangential writes: US Navy efforts towards rail guns didnâ(TM)t work out spectacularly well, but it appears that the PRC is also researching them . It appears that they are making headway

Chinaâ(TM)s Peopleâ(TM)s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has tested a new smart bomb-launching electromagnetic rail gun. According to reports, the weapon launched the bomb 9 miles (15km) into the stratosphere at Mach 5+.
However, the test did find some issues around projectile stability that sent the bomb off target. The PLAN will now conduct more research and development to rectify the issue.

According to the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the rail gunâ(TM)s smart bomb projectile features a pair of gliding wings for guided descent. These wings enable the bomb to, in theory, follow a gentle curve and hit a target around 3 minutes after launch.
However, something went wrong during the test fire, and the bomb went way off its intended target.

âoeThe projectile did not follow the expected trajectory, and the maximum range and altitude did not meet the design values,â said the Naval Engineering University team led by Lu Junyong in a peer-reviewed paper published by the academic journal Transactions of China Electrotechnical Society.

Luâ(TM)s team discovered that the smart bomb was rotating too fast during its ascent, which appears to have caused it to tilt unpredictably. Using artificial intelligence (AI) technology, Lu and his colleagues identified what they believe to be the cause of the failure.

Submission + - Are we Prepared for Contamination Between Worlds

Submitted by Tangential on Monday February 21, 2022 @06:37PM

Tangential writes: Interesting article on Gizmodo discussing how we could easily contaminate other planets/moons as we explore them. Based on our recently demonstrated vulnerability to locally evolved bacteria and viruses, what will other worlds's pathogens do to us (and what will ours do to them?) What I also find interesting is what a small percentage of SciFi actually addresses this. There are obviously a few SciFi stories that do, but I would guess that for every one that does, there are at least 20 that ignore it.

The year is 2034. Humans have sent a probe to Jupiter’s moon Europa to drill through the icy surface and photograph the ocean beneath. In the few hours before it stops functioning, the probe returns images of shapes that could be some form of life. Scientists quickly organize a followup mission that will collect samples of that spot and bring them back to Earth. But, unknown to anyone, the first probe wasn’t sterile—it carried a hardy bacteria that had survived even the mission’s clean rooms. By the time the samples finally reach Earth years later, they’re dominated by this bacteria, which has happily set up shop in Europa’s dark, salty waters.

Just like that, our first opportunity to study a truly alien ecosystem has been destroyed.

This is a nightmare scenario for NASA and other space agencies, and it’s one they’ve worked intensely to avoid with every mission to another orb. But some researchers from a lesser-known branch of ecology argue that even the current strict standards aren’t rigorous enough, and as more ambitious missions to other planets and moons get ready to launch, the risk of interplanetary contamination becomes more dire. They say we need to better plan for “forward contamination,” in which our technology disseminates Earth microbes, as well as “back contamination,” in which life from elsewhere hitches a ride to Earth. In fact, we already have a playbook to lean on: the discipline of invasion science, the study of how species on our planet invade each other’s ecosystems.

Submission + - Solid state battery breakthrough could double the density of lithium-ion cells (newatlas.com)

Submitted by Tangential on Wednesday November 27, 2019 @01:10PM

Tangential writes: Safer, denser Li-ion batteries are desperately needed these days. Researchers at Australia's Deakin University say they've managed to use common industrial polymers to create solid electrolytes, opening the door to double-density solid state lithium batteries that won't explode or catch fire if they overheat.

The new technology uses a solid polymer material, weakly bonded to the lithium-ion, to replace the volatile liquid solvents typically used as electrolytes in current battery cells. The liquid electrolyte is the part of the system that becomes flammable during the kinds of infamous battery fires Samsung would rather forget.

In addition to making batteries safer, the team believes this solid polymer electrolyte will finally allow batteries to work with a lithium metal anode. That would be big news in the battery world, where the lithium anode has been recently described in Trends in Chemistry as "critical to break the energy-density bottleneck of current Li-ion chemistry" – the bottleneck that's stopping electric vehicles, aircraft and portable electronics from developing at the pace they should be.

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