des_irl - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Benefits? (Score 1) 88

by des_irl on Monday December 05, 2011 @03:39PM (#38270130) Attached to: Ask Greg Leyh of <em>The Lightning Foundry</em> What Charges Him Up?

Traditionally giant lightning generators are used to develop lightning protection.

Is that what this project is aiming for, because it seems strange that a person would have to use a crowd-funding model to fund research into a health and safety issue, that one would assume the likes of G.E. or Philips or some other multi-national would be able to do much more comprehensibly?

Comment Benefits? (Score 1) 88

by des_irl on Monday December 05, 2011 @02:02PM (#38268424) Attached to: Ask Greg Leyh of <em>The Lightning Foundry</em> What Charges Him Up?

Could you explain a bit more about the possible benefits that mankind could gain from these experiments? Just for us lay-persons who don't really understand high energy physics and its associated terminolgy!

Comment Do they even know what they're aiming at?? (Score 2) 275

by des_irl on Monday January 10, 2011 @11:07AM (#34823274) Attached to: Anonymous Organizes Global Protests For WikiLeaks

hi there, Long time reader, first time poster... what the hell are Anon doing? Last night they took down the website of one of our political parties (Fine Gael), the replacement cover notice stating something about freedom and press and internet.. or something like that... But the party they targeted isn't even a member of the running government!! They are currently running quite high in the polls and will do better in the upcoming elections that the current party (Fianna Fail) "running" the place... A party that is VERY corrupt and who only technically has a mandate to be in government! Well done lads! (sarcasm)

Submission + - Star gazer is a go!!

Submitted by des_irl on Thursday February 11, 2010 @03:37PM

des_irl writes: Nasa's newest star gazer, the SDO Solar Observatory blasted off today at 15:23 GMT (10:23 Local time) on its Atlas 5 rocket, from Cape Canaveral in Florida. The Solar Dynamics Observatory will take unparalleled pictures and readings from the sun's corona atmosphere and even inside the core (or dynamo) of the Sun.
The Nasa website has some great info on the mission and here is a link with a video of the launch.

Submission + - L.H.C. Results start to come in (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by des_irl on Thursday February 11, 2010 @03:21PM

des_irl writes: The first round of results from the Large Hadron Collider are being published and the results aren't quite what Scientists expected. The colliding beams produced more particles then current models predict. Which, when you think about it was one of the reasons for the experiment in the first place! Current models not proving everything accurately, and all! Good reading though. Oh and surprisingly, the LHC website doesn't have the news up on it! I guess the scientists have better things to do then write web pages!!

Colliding Particles Can Make Black Holes After All 269

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday January 24, 2010 @01:56PM from the act-now-while-supplies-last dept.

cremeglace writes with this excerpt from ScienceNOW: "You've heard the controversy. Particle physicists predict the world's new highest-energy atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, might create tiny black holes, which they say would be a fantastic discovery. Some doomsayers fear those black holes might gobble up the Earth — physicists say that's impossible — and have petitioned the United Nations to stop the $5.5 billion LHC. Curiously, though, nobody had ever shown that the prevailing theory of gravity, Einstein's theory of general relativity, actually predicts that a black hole can be made this way. Now a computer model shows conclusively for the first time that a particle collision really can make a black hole." That said, they estimate the required energy for creating a black hole this way to be roughly "a quintillion times higher than the LHC's maximum"; though if one of the theories requiring compact extra dimensions is true, the energy could be lower.

Astrium Hopes To Test Grabbing Solar Energy From Orbit 144

Posted by timothy on Thursday January 21, 2010 @02:48PM from the don't-stand-underneath-when-they-fly-by dept.

goldaryn writes "Word from the BBC today is that Europe's biggest space company is seeking partners to help get a satellite-based solar power trial into orbit: 'EADS Astrium says the satellite system would collect the Sun's energy and transmit it to Earth via an infrared laser, to provide electricity. Space solar power has been talked about for more than 30 years as an attractive concept because it would be 'clean, inexhaustible, and available 24 hours a day.' However, there have always been question marks over its cost, efficiency and safety. But Astrium believes the technology is close to proving its maturity.'"

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