The Eastern Lounge 8 October 2010

The first session of the Eastern Lounge was staged at Tennis Valley on 8 October 2010.

World’s Most Powerful Laser on Target for Awesome Science

World’s Most Powerful Laser on Target for Awesome Science: "


Scientists recently pulled together the pieces of the world’s most powerful laser and, in a first-ever complete dry run, pulled the trigger on a peppercorn-sized pellet of nuclear fuel. The energy crushed the capsule instantly, causing it to spew a shower of neutrons. In short: It worked.

The firing of the National Ignition Facility, or NIF, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, located 40 or so miles east of San Francisco, wasn’t an earnest attempt at a more-energy-out-than-you-put-in “ignition” of fusion, the same process that merges atoms at the sun’s core — and the facility’s ultimate goal. Yet the staff and independent researchers working with the $3.5 billion machine have reason to be optimistic about achieving fusion within two years, even if much of the device’s time is earmarked for defense research and prospects of near-limitless and pollution-free energy aren’t certain.

“In my mind, to have accomplished this shot is an almost unfathomable scientific achievement,” Paul Drake, a physicist at the University of Michigan using NIF as a proving ground for studying supernova physics in the laboratory, told Wired.com. “I’ve had a lifetime of experience of big science facilities, and find myself in awe of [the NIF team] having made this thing work this fast.”

The research facility’s construction began in 1997 and spreads over an area nearly the size of three pro league football fields, most of the space occupied by equipment that revs up 192 laser beams. During the Sept. 29, 2010 firing of the laser, scientists and engineers funneled these beams into a 30-foot-diameter metal sphere at the end of the complex. At the center of this chamber, a tiny plastic pellet filled with heavier forms of hydrogen received a punishing 1 megajoule zap, similar to the instantaneous oomph of a car traveling 100 mph.

According to engineering physicist Edward Moses, who heads up the NIF team, the laser burst was about 75 percent of its full energy capacity. In addition, the cryogenically cooled pellet was filled with deliberately less-than-perfect fuel.

“The last thing we’d ever think about doing is playing cowboy with this thing,” Moses said. Throughout the next year or two leading up to an all-or-nothing firing, the facility will make similar integrated shots about once a month.

Richard Petrasso, a fusion scientist at MIT who works with the machine’s diagnostic equipment, said the tiptoeing is for a good reason.

“The facility is like a new car engine,” Petrasso said. “You don’t hit the pedal all the way down to the ground the first time. You have to tune it to get all of the conditions just right — the laser, the diagnostics and the surface of the capsule.”

About 10 trillion neutrons zoomed out of the capsule during the test shot, signaling the successful fusion of some tritium and deuterium atoms — the “heavy” hydrogen fuels in the pellet. Moses said 1,000 times more neutrons should fly out during the ultimate goal of a fusion chain reaction.

At that point, if the machine can actually do it, Drake said the scientific payoffs will be huge.

“We’re still proving we can do experiments we want, and also for the broader scientific community,” Drake said. “But without hesitation, I’d say NIF is on track for doing some pretty awesome science,” including simulating Jupiter’s oddly magnetic core, the innards of stars and other hot-and-dense environments around the universe.

At the end of the day, however, most of NIF’s operating time isn’t slated for doing fundamental science. Moses said about 10 percent of the machine’s time is dedicated to that now and will go up to 20 percent after 2013. Another 40 percent (by 2013) is hedged for more ignition research, and the remaining 40 percent chunk will be for gathering data about fusion physics for the government. In other words, it will simulate fusion bomb explosions without detonating them.

“Strategic security is also part of the mission,” Moses said. “We want to make sure we can build virtual test sites on computers, but we need good data to ground the models.” If NIF achieves fusion burn, he said it will be the only facility of its kind to safely create the conditions of active weapons.

Beyond NIF’s three-pronged mission, there’s also the promise of developing a safe fusion energy source that releases 30-40 times the energy put in. The only theorized “pollution” would be helium, which is the universe’s most pervasive and inert gas.

“The energy potential is there, for sure,” Petrasso said. “The question is about practical implementation. There are a lot of … issues that have to be dealt with to turn it into a reactor that makes energy.”













Images: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. 1) Inside the National Ignition Facility’s 10-meter-diameter target chamber. 2) NIF’s laser bay. 2) The container of the tritium/deuterium fuel pellet, called a “hohlraum.” Video: Wired.com



See Also:

• World’s Most Intense X-Ray Laser Takes First Shots
• Classified Recordings of First Fusion Bomb Test Found in Old Safe …
• March 23, 1989: Cold Fusion Gets Cold Shoulder
• Video Podcast #6: 192 Lasers, Nuclear Weapons and Fusion Power …

Follow us on Twitter @davemosher and @wiredscience, and on Facebook.
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Giant Pterosaurs Could Fly 10,000 Miles Nonstop

PITTSBURGH — Predating jet travel by at least 65 million years wasn’t a problem for the biggest pterosaurs. These prehistoric creatures might have been able to fly up to 10,000 miles nonstop, according to research presented Oct. 10 at the annual meeting of the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology.

The original elite flyers included four species of what biomechanist Michael Habib, of Chatham University in Pittsburgh, calls supergiant pterosaurs: flying reptiles such as Quetzalcoatlus northropi from Texas. Appearing in the fossil record 70 million years ago, they stood about as tall as a modern giraffe and launched into the air spreading membrane wings to a total span of roughly 10 meters [33 feet].

These supergiants “are big by pterosaur standards,” Habib said. “They are truly gruesomely huge by bird and bat standards.”

If current estimates for pterosaur body masses and wing dimensions are realistic, and if the pterosaurs could catch thermals and glide the way a bird can, “it would make them the longest single-trip-distance fliers in the Earth’s history,” Habib said. Birds have logged impressive distances considering their small size, such as Arctic terns that basically migrate pole to pole, but birds don’t do so in one go.



The new pterosaur calculations raise the possibility that the supergiant fossils found on separate continents can’t automatically be considered different species, Habib suggested. “A pterosaur from Big Bend could be mating with a pterosaur from Transylvania,” he said.

Huge distances for nonstop travel may sound extreme, said David Unwin, a pterosaur researcher at the University of Leicester in England, but “we didn’t fall on the floor laughing” hearing of the idea. Unwin said he welcomes the new figures for at last providing some specifics for discussion.

As for merging any currently misunderstood species, though, he’s less sanguine. The pterosaur fossil record is patchy, and big age gaps between specimens suggest that they must be different species, he said.

Also controversial are the basics, such as body mass, that Habib put into his new distance calculations. Habib said he picked estimates yielded by quantitative approaches taken by other researchers. If a pterosaur weighed 200 kilograms [440 pounds] “empty,” plus another 72 kilograms [159 pounds] of fat to fuel a long trip, Habib calculated that the animal could soar 10,000 miles nonstop.

For that calculation, Habib tuned his calculations for wings shaped roughly like modern eagles’. Their wings, he said, represent a compromise between a long narrow shape for gliding and a wide wing for heavy lifting.

And yes, Habib said, pterosaurs that heavy really could haul their substantial rumps into the air. Warm Cretaceous temperatures might have given them more thermals to ride, but to be conservative he made them fly in a modern atmosphere. He assumed that pterosaurs could mostly soar between brief bursts of flapping, and he borrowed analytic methods from bird studies to estimate how far fat supplies would take them. Habib got long distances when assuming a metabolic rate about 85 percent that of modern birds.

Even if the different assumptions about weight or wing shape shrink or extend the distance calculations, the bottom line remains the same, Habib said. “What’s important is that the numbers are all big.”

Image: PLoS One

See Also:

• Claws, Jaws and Spikes: The Science of the Dinosaur Arsenal
• Video: Model Dinosaur Tests Four-Winged Flight
• Pterosaur Runway Shows How Flying Dinos Landed
• Dinosaur Fossil Reveals True Feather Colors
• Feathered Dinosaurs Molted Like Birds
• Early Birds’ Wings Probably Didn’t Flap
• Fancy Feathers Predated Flight in Dinosaur-Bird Hybrid

Google Investing Heavily In $US5b Atlantic Wind Power Line

Google Investing Heavily In $US5b Atlantic Wind Power Line: "

Google is positioned to be a major investor in a proposed transmission line for offshore wind farms on the Atlantic seaboard, a bold plan that could radically reshape the electrical map in the region.

The proposed Atlantic Wind Connection, which would cost $US5 billion in all, would run from New Jersey to Norfolk, Virginia, collecting energy from offshore wind farms and redistributing it among mid-Atlantic states. The bold plan has been praised by regulators who say it could service many smaller wind projects dotting the coast, and the mid-Atlantic wind farms it would engender would be less likely to raise aesthetic objections than similar projects in Cape Cod and other areas.

Google has agreed to take a 37.5 per cent stake in the 563km transmission line, along with Good Energies (also 37.5 per cent) and Japanese trading company Marubeni, which has committed to a 15 per cent stake.

Trans-Elect, the transmission line company organising the project, hopes to start construction by 2013. The first phase, a 240km stretch from Delaware to New Jersey, would cost $US1.8 billion and could be completed as early as 2016, when it could start redistributing power from state to state before the offshore wind farm were completed. The entire project wouldn’t be completed until 2021 at earliest.

The plan is an ambitious one, but regulators, investors and environmentalists agree it’s one of the most interesting of its type thus far. “These kinds of audacious ideas might just be what we need to break through the wretched logjam,” said Melinda Pierce, the deputy director for national campaigns at the grassroots environmental group Sierra Club. Hopefully the administrative work that needs to be done can keep up with that audacity. [NYT]

New record size for a genome goes to rare plant

By John Platt Oct 11, 2010 01:21 PM 0

A rare plant called Paris japonica has a genome 50 times longer than that of humans, making it the longest genome ever recorded. The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, announced the discovery last week, and details appear in the September 2010 issue of the Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society.
The Paris japonica genome weighs in at 152.23 picograms (trillionths of a gram), 15 percent larger than the previously biggest known genome, that of related herb, a hybrid trillium known as Trillium × hagae. "It's so large that when stretched out it would be taller than Big Ben," said Ilia Leitch, a research scientist at Kew's Jodrell Laboratory, in a prepared statement. Human DNA would only stretch out to about two meters. The plant has 150 billion base pairs, compared with humans' 3 billion.

More than being a monumental discovery, the genome size shows the vulnerability of this already rare plant. "In plants, research has demonstrated that those with large genomes are at greater risk of extinction, are less adapted to living in polluted soils and are less able to tolerate extreme environmental conditions – all highly relevant in today's changing world," Leitch said.

Part of the problem is that large genomes take longer to reproduce, and plants with more DNA require more time to grow. According to a growing guide at Rareplants.co.uk, Paris japonica can take anywhere from two to four years to sprout above ground after planting.

Paris japonica , a canopy plant, is native to Japan, where it lives in sub-alpine regions. According to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, it has only been observed at seven sites in the wild.

Photo by Ray Drew, courtesy of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

Batteries That Go Ten Times Longer

Batteries That Go Ten Times Longer: "

Lithium-ion batteries are fast becoming the battery of choice for plug-in hybrid and electric vehicles. But they're far from perfect: they don't keep a charge for long (the Nissan Leaf's battery will require a recharge every 100 miles), and they degrade over time.

Enter Contour Energy Systems, a self-described portable power company that this week acquired carbon nanotube li-ion battery technology from MIT. According to Contour, the technology allows li-ion batteries to produce up to a tenfold increase in power--effectively eliminating all concerns about range anxiety.

Contour explains the technology:

Carbon nanotubes--sheets of pure
carbon atoms rolled up into tiny tubes--'self assemble' into
a tightly bound structure that is porous at the nanometer scale
(billionths of a meter). 'These carbon nanotubes contain numerous functional groups on their
surfaces that can store a large number of lithium ions per unit mass,”
says Professor Shao-Horn of Mechanical Engineering and Materials
Science and Engineering at MIT.

As a result, Contour's batteries can produce high power outputs in short bursts as well as low power outputs over longer periods of time. The batteries can deliver 10 times more energy than traditional li-ion batteries, and they don't degrade over time--after 1,000 charge cycles, Contour found no discernible change in performance.

The battery technology won't be found in the upcoming generation of EV's, however. Carbon nanotubes aren't yet produced in large enough quantities for mass production of nanotube-containing li-ion batteries. But that may change once Contour is ready to commercialize its battery -- and once enough of us start needing a charge every 100 miles.

Ariel Schwartz can be reached on Twitter or by email.

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