Did you ever wonder how Exxon ended up with such a lousy name? They did a world-wide search for the best name they could find that was available everywhere. IIRC someone in one country owned the name Esso, so they couldn't use that name in that country.

Linus had some *very* good lawyers. And substantial financial support.

Basically because P and Z aren't commonly available in food, so you'd need to build them each time you used them. Not an energetically favorable approach. (This also tends to act to confine the altered organizims into places where the lab supplies the needed supplements.)

Funny, my thought was "And the pig got up and walked away."

( http://www.monologues.co.uk/Co... )

Sorry, but for a moderator you don't want to absorb the neutrons, you want to slow them down. So scratch the boron.

You've got a point, but that's only done to produce bigger explosions, which is not what you want on a vehicle engine. Particularly since the working fusion reaction has to be set off by a fission explosion. (Boeing is talking about Lasers, but, at least effectively, we don't have that working.)

Sorry, I was speaking loosely several posts up the thread. We actually *DO* have fusion reactors. They're too heavy to carry on a ship, and they require more power than they produce. And they've got many othe problems. So I summarized it as "We don't have fusion reactors", but I should have remembered where I was posting.

Mmmph. Ok, I need to rethink that. But some liquid Helium *is* a superconductor of heat (I'm not sure that true of all allotropes). So perhaps there are others.

I don't even believe the intent is real. This looks like a truly stupid idea, even if you could get the technology to work. (If you've got a nice fusion reaction for your engine, why mess everything up by irradiating U238 with neutrons. It's make enough plutonium to be refined into something dangerous, but not enough to use directly.)

Sorry, but this doesn't sound as workable a the Orion project to me. And it seems to be a different concept.

P.S.: Our fusion weapons use fission as an ignition system, not the other way around. You can, of course, then use the fusion to create a larger fission explosion, but that's not the way to build a working engine.

If you want to absorb neutrons you use parafin, not u238. U238 is quite picky about the neutron energies it will absorb, and the rest pass right through. Hydrogen (as in parafin) is a lot more willing to accept different energies. So if you wanted to use neutrons from a fusion reaction to energize U238 you'd probably need to run it through a moderator...probably either graphite (think Chernobyl) or heavy water.

That doesn't sound like a good airplane engine to me.

Elemental tritium would certainly not be spread over any crash site, not unless it was carefully packaged. Otherwise it would head directly for space.

Secondary radiation, however, is a different matter. And someone said that the fusion was only a source of neutorns to enhance fission. (That seems like a pretty wierd idea, since we don't currently have fusion working.)

You (and possibly the article) are making an improper distinction. Anyone who breaks into my computer or my putatively secure communications is a bad guy, whether they work for some government or other or not. And it doesn't matter which government. And, no, even if they had a warrant that wouldn't mean they weren't a bad guy, it would just mean they might not be operating illegally.

Carbon nanotubes can be either conductors, insulators, or both (depending on direction).

If you're going into 3-D construction, what you need are superconductors of heat to embed into the chip with connections to outside. (Yeah, reducing internal resistance also helps.) Interestingly, most superconductors of electricity are also superconductors of heat...so what you need are high temperature superconductors, where high temperature means something around 100C. I've seen claims that graphene is a superconductor (in some configurations), but I don't believe them. Perhaps black phosphorus is. Or something else.

Don't expect to see any of this within 10 years.

Of coure private companies should be allowed to investigate their failures. They just shouldn't have an exclusive right to do so. They pay for their investigation, the government pays for it's investigation, any other involved parties pay for their investigation. The data isn't kept secret. (Not being secret doesn't mean that what it means will be obvious, hence the plausibility of multiple investigations.)