I’ve updated my Link Checker (site crawler) located at http://www.xcitestudios.com/tools/linkchecker to allow downloading of the data it finds as CSV files. So all redirect URL’s, 404’s and meta data for all pages can be downloaded.
The links are at the bottom of the page after the initial output of data.
Artificially generated black holes could provide us with the power to make inter-solar travel a possibility. New research shows how strapping a black hole to your starship might just give you the juice to get to Alpha Centauri.
Louis Crane and Shawn Westmoreland of Kansas State University propose a way to use black holes as fuel that is entirely within the bounds of physics and technology as we know them, but would take phenomenal amount of engineering.
The crux of their idea involves using using a laser to form a micro black hole, which could be used as an energy source. This would be a Schwarzschild, or non-rotating, black hole which outputs Hawking Radiation, and the smaller the black hole, the more energetic.
Of course, making a black hole isn’t the world’s most easy undertaking. It takes a huge amount of power to build one in the first place. To make one of these mini black holes, Crane and Westmoreland propose a 370km2 solar panel, at an orbit one million km from the surface of the sun, which, if perfectly efficient, would gather enough energy per year to make one black hole. This power would be fed to a spherically converging gamma laser, with a lasing mass of around 10^9 tonnes. However, after you make a few black holes, you can use them as a power source to make more.
According to the authors, a black hole to be used in space travel needs to meet five criteria:
Fortunately, black holes have a sweet spot in terms of size, power and lifespan which is almost ideal. If you take a trip to Alpha Centauri, with an acceleration of 1g to the half way point, and then decelerate at 1g for the remainder of the journey, the trip takes a relativistic 3.5 years. A black hole that would survive the entire trip would have a radius of 0.9 attometers, would have a mass of 606,000 tonnes, and a power output of 160 petawatts. The lifespan of the black hole could be extended by feeding it mass, too.
For longer trips, you could use larger but weaker holes, and smaller and more powerful ones for short trips.
Getting the black hole to act as a power source also requires a bit of work. One potential method involves placing the hole at the focal point of a parabolic reflector attached to the ship, creating forward thrust. A slightly easier, but less efficient method would involve simply absorbing all the gamma radiation heading towards the fore of the ship, and let the rest shoot out the back to push you onwards.
Of course, there are potential problems with Crane and Westmoreland’s ideas. According to Govind Menon, Professor of Physics at Troy University, most views on extracting energy from black holes involve using ones that rotate. “With non-rotating black holes, this is a very difficult thing…we typically look for energy almost exclusively from rotating black holes. Schwarzschild black holes do not radiate in an astrophysical, gamma ray burst point of view. It is not clear if Hawking radiation alone can power starships.” Menon adds that extracting energy from black holes is highly problematic. “Given [this type] of black hole, it is not clear to me how someone would go about extracting energy.”
Another issue is what to do with the black hole when it reaches the end of its life span, as they tend to explode. “Such an explosion is powerful by terrestrial standards, but not by astronomical standards”, say Crane and Westmoreland, so it’s merely a matter of dropping the black hole around 1 AU away from anything too important, and letting it detonate.
With a set of four machines: black hole generator, black hole drive, power plant, and a self perpetuating black hole powered black hole generator, the potential is enormous. As Crane and Westmoreland say:
A civilization equipped with our four machine tool set would be almost unimaginably energy rich. It could settle the galaxy at will.
Article available on ArXiv
Found via Next Big Future
I’ve just finished writing version one of my link checker tool and have now launched it on my site. The tool will parse a given URL, extract all links on that page that point to the same domain and follow them, and keep doing that until it’s finished. It will then show you the results of the crawl (page details), along with any 404’s and redirects it encountered on the way.
Of course there are limits (which I don’t intend to expose), and you’ll know if you hit them as the app will fail. They’re pretty high though and I will leave them that way so long as the tool isn’t abused. Every use is tracked so if you abuse it, I’ll know! In the mean time, I hope some of you find it useful. And if you fancy helping me out by checking out the Google Ads, that’d be appreciated 
)
Today is officially the launch of Windows 7 to the general public, people are no doubt throwing their Windows 7 parties everywhere, it’s a day of rejoicing and celebrations, a day to remember those that came before it and hastily forget them again, etc. etc.
The Japanese have decided the only way to celebrate the launch of Windows 7 is to, create a burger (this is a line you’d expect to begin with “The Americans”.) Like many a fast food burger before it, this is heart attack in a bun, and yet I can’t help but wonder if it tastes good. In all fairness though, this is Burger King in Japan so it’s pretty American.
According to a post at NewScientist, bird flu (avian flu) is actually an STD – at least, it is in ducks. While not completely confirmed yet, it is believed to be the case. Although unlike humans, the more promiscuous the duck, the less likely it is to become infected (wha?); apparently “…It’s all to do with penis size and the complexity of the females’ vagina…”
When the researchers compared data on the prevalence of low-pathogenic bird flu strains in different duck species with what is known about the anatomy of duc
k reproductive parts and mating behaviour, they found that ducks with the smallest penises and tamest sex lives had the highest flu levels.
“This is intriguing and a bit counter-intuitive because a long phallus prolongs copulation, and forced copulations characteristic to species with a large phallus should further promote virus transfer,” says Hegyi.
I can’t help but feel humans got the short stick (pun intended) when it comes to STD’s!
Image from failking.com.
It turns out that if you peel the popular adhesive tape off its roll in a vacuum chamber, it emits X-rays. The researchers even made an X-ray image of one of their fingers.
Actually, more than 50 years ago, some Russian scientists reported evidence of X-rays from peeling sticky tape off glass. But the new work demonstrates that you can get a lot of X-rays, a study co-author says.
The scientists even demonstrated that the X-rays were bright enough to take an X-ray of a finger.
Escobar, a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, reports the work with UCLA colleagues in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature. He suggests that with some refinements, the process might be harnessed for making inexpensive X-ray machines for paramedics or for places where electricity is expensive or hard to get. After all, you could peel tape or do something similar in such machines with just human power, like cranking.
In the new work, a machine peeled ordinary Scotch tape off a roll in a vacuum chamber at about 1.2 inches per second. Rapid pulses of X-rays, each about a billionth of a second long, emerged from very close to where the tape was coming off the roll.
That’s where electrons jumped from the roll to the sticky underside of the tape that was being pulled away, a journey of about two-thousandths of an inch, Escobar said. When those electrons struck the sticky side they slowed down, and that slowing made them emit X-rays.
Holger Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya from the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto are both in agreement that one possible explanation for the constant failings of the large hadron collider (LHC) is that it is being intentionally sabotaged by people from the future. Sound weird? Well it is, but at the same time, they’re basing their theories on current science fact about quantum physics and time travel. And the reason this is OK (unlike travelling back in time to kill your grandfather) and wouldn’t result in a paradox is apparently accepted.
However they also suggest maybe God (yes, scientics are saying God) may be preventing it as he does not want us to discover the Higg’s Boson particle either.
One reader on io9 made a comment that if you read the below quotes as though you’re the voice over from the movie Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, they take on a much more amusing tone – and he’s right, they suddenly sound “right.”
It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail message. In an unpublished essay, Dr. Nielson said of the theory, “Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.” It is their guess, he went on, “that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.
…
While it is a paradox to go back in time and kill your grandfather, physicists agree there is no paradox if you go back in time and save him from being hit by a bus. In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus. Although just why the Higgs would be a catastrophe is not clear. If we knew, presumably, we wouldn’t be trying to make one.
After last year’s Back To Earth mini-series, is Red Dwarf coming back for good? The series’ Robert Llewellyn told fans this weekend that scripts for a tenth season of the SF comedy have already been commissioned.
Series 10 of Red Dwarf announcement just been made at DJ 09. To clarify the scripts have been commissioned, wont be filming til 2010
Within a few hours, he was clarifying that last clarification:
Llewellyn made the announcement at this weekend’s Dimension Jump ‘09 Red Dwarf fan convention, twittering it to the internet soon after:
Want to re-state that UKTV, aka Dave have commissioned Doug Naylor to write scripts, still a long way to go before it’s all official
So… there isn’t officially a tenth season yet, but Dave is considering the idea seriously enough to pay for scripts. Guess we should wait and see how good DVD sales for Back To Earth are in the US first…
As of yet, the cause of death has not been mentioned, but Stephen Gately of Boyzone fame has died at the age of 33 while on holiday in Menorca. The Irish pop star and actor was on holiday with his civil partner, Andrew Cowles, when he died yesterday, according to the bands website. It said the four remaining members of the band would be flying out to the Spanish island today.
I’m a huge fan of the old bands from the 90’s, I was so happy when Take That reunited and I loved Boyzone too (if anyone who know’s me is even remotely suprised considering the songs on my phone, shame on you!)
It’s a shame to see a good artist die and it will severly reduce the impact of Boyzone – although as long as they don’t do the Pussycat dolls things of a replacement every few months, I’m sure they’ll go on.
According to Gizmodo, Project Natal is going to be overcharged to start with (anyone not expecting that one?) I’ll no doubt end up forking the money over though if it works as well as the previews say it will – it’s a truly great idea for gaming.
How much is Project Natal going to cost? Microsoft’s still working it out, but Robbie Bach says at the very green roundtable I’m sitting at that it’ll follow a price curve “like anything else,” meaning, in English, it’ll start at a more expensive point and get cheaper as it goes on. In other words, Microsoft’s thinking about it more as a 32X-type add-on versus some tack-on motion controller.
View Original Article – Gizmodo
