Friday 26 December 2014

Elon Musk's Hyperloop Could Be Just 10 Years Away

Ilona Mask vision about revolutionary, low-cost and very fast way of travel called "Hipetlup" could become a reality for ten years.

Ilon Mask "Hipelup" presented to the public in August 2013, but even then he said he was too busy to implementing the project of transport of people using the system of tubes and capsules that traveled through them at high speeds.

- If this was on top of my priority list, I probably would have finished it a year or two - said then Mask, adding that the project provides insight so others can improve it and build on their ideas.


Startup company "Hyperloop Transportation Technologies" (HTT) aims to make that, which published a document of 76 pages about their plans. HTT plans to pipe networks through which ranged hypervelocity capsules with passengers making around the world, and the technology that would allow the time for which the car takes six hours shortened to just 35 minutes.

Currently working on the project "more than a hundred great people who work without pay in exchange for shares in the company." As stated, many of them have their own jobs and businesses, but HTT-to devote dozens of hours a week.

- There are people from Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Dartmouth, UCLA, and many have experience in top collectives such as Boeing, Airbus, NASA, SpaceX, Yahoo, Cisco ... - writes the documentation.
 


First would be working network in the US, which should be linked to all major US cities, and then make the project moved to Europe, Africa and Asia. HTT has announced that for the project need between seven and 19 billion dollars, and CEO Dirk Alborn said that it is so broad assessment required due to unforeseen material prices and costs for a period of ten years.

HTT operates under the company's fundraising JumpStartFund, whose Alborn president, and apparently there are already many donors and investors who want to invest money. Alborn acknowledged that the ten-year plan may be ambitious, because they did not take into account the regulation of the legal framework and the "political problems".

- We want to be transparent. For us, the first goal is to build "Hiperlup", we want to see in the United States, and if it made more sense to do it in another territory, it will be so. The goal is to build it. The second goal is to make it cost effective. We have an idea that there are luxury capsules, but the economy class travel cost 20-30 US dollars. Ideally, the ordinary fare would be free, and paid to the commercials - says Alborn.


Mask said that it was necessary for the system between six and eight billion dollars and four years of work for the model for demonstration. According maskov project, "Hiperlup" to passengers transported in capsules of aluminum, which would be "fired" through wind tunnel using a magnet and large fan.

Capsules should floated nearly supersonic speeds from point A to point B on the airbag, which would eliminate friction - like turn on the table for air hockey. The capsules would be maintained pressure, and under this project, the travelers during the trip would feel slightly stronger force, as during take-off or landing, or ride in an amusement park.

- While not invent the right beam, which would really be cool, the only way for super-fast journey is through a pipe in which there were special conditions - said then Mask.
 
 

Wednesday 3 December 2014

Fractional Distillation Of Air

Did you know that the air we breathe isn’t just oxygen, infact it’s made up of a number of different gases such as nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, argon, neon and many others. Each of these gases carry useful properties so separating them from the air around us is extremely beneficial.

The process is called fractional distillation and consists of two steps, the first relies on cooling the air to a very low temperature (i.e. converting it into a liquid), the second involves heating it up thus allowing each gas within the mixture to evaporate at its own boiling point. The key to success here is that every element within air has its own unique boiling temperature. As long as we know these boiling temperatures we know when to collect each gas.

So what are the real world benefits of separating and extracting these gases? Well liquid oxygen is used to power rockets, oxygen gas is used in breathing apparatus, nitrogen is used to make fertilizers, the nitric acid component of nitrogen is used in explosives.

The other gases all have their own uses too, for example argon is used to fill up the empty space in most light bulbs (thanks to its unreactive nature). Carbon dioxide is used in fire extinguishers and is great for putting out fires in burning liquids and electrical fires. There really are too many uses to list but suffice it to say that fractional distillation is an extremely useful process for humans the world over.

Monday 1 December 2014

History Made as 90,000 Earthlings Send Messages to Mars


There’s really a more productive way to spend Black Friday instead of going berserk and storming the stores. A really huge crowd of 90,000 people capable of invading every bigger mall during the yesterday’s run-and-buy frenzy, has made history sending greetings to our reddish neighboring planet. “Today uwingu.com sent almost 90,000 messages to Mars—first time people’s names & messages sent to Mars by radio!” the Uwingu company which crowd funds space projects, said on Twitter. It was a global shout-out event to mark the 50th anniversary of NASA’s Mariner 4 - the first mission to Mars.