Saturday, October 9
Tear Drop
The 9/11 Memorial "Tear Drop" sits directly across from NYC, in Bayonne New Jersey, just the other side of the Statue of Liberty, yet we hear nothing about it. This absolutely beautiful, 100 ft.tall monument was gifted to the people of the United States by the people of Russia in 2006, in memory of all those who lost their lives on that fateful day, September 11, 2001.
The breaking in the cracked facade forms the shape of the two towers. The giant suspended tear drop signifies the tears of the entire world that day.
Maybe it's something that needs to be known?
Electric Propulsion System
The IX-6315 "Dawn" Electric Propulsion System is a tiny-sized engine which runs on electricity and xenon gas propellant. It's modeled after the real-world Hall effect thruster.
This engine has a phenomenal fuel efficiency (4200 s Isp), but very low thrust and requires a substantial amount of electricity to operate. Xenon gas is provided by xenon containers like the PB-X50R Xenon Container, PB-X150 Xenon Container or PB-X750 Xenon Container. Electricity can be obtained using solar panels, radioisotope batteries (RTGs), and fuel cells.
Solar panels are recommended in this case, however RTGs are very efficient when traveling to far distances such as Jool and Eeloo. The amount of electricity needed to keep one ion engine running at full thrust is roughly equivalent to half the output of one Gigantor XL Solar Array (however one array will power two engines only near peak sun exposure around Kerbin), 6 Fuel Cells, 12 PB-NUK Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators, or 25 OX-STAT Photovoltaic Panels at peak outcdput.
When pairing with solar panels, it is highly recommended to bring more than it needs (slightly less than 9 Ec/s). Not all panels are at peak output during operations, and maximum available power falls of with the square of the distance from the star.
Batteries can be used to store the electricity since there may be times the solar panels will be blocked from the Sun by objects or the dark side of celestial bodies. For extended burns in the darkness the fuel cells happen to be a good choice. When the power is provided by the fuel cells the majority of the mass flow (about 69.2%) is liquid fuel and oxidizer used by the fuel cell.
Batteries can be used to store the electricity since there may be times the solar panels will be blocked from the Sun by objects or the dark side of celestial bodies. For extended burns in the darkness the fuel cells happen to be a good choice. When the power is provided by the fuel cells the majority of the mass flow (about 69.2%) is liquid fuel and oxidizer used by the fuel cell.
Thus the ion engine powered by the fuel cell may be seen as having much more modest but still impressive effective Isp of 1293 sec. However if the burn doesn't take more than a couple of hours the stack of RTGs providing the same amount of power (and thus thrust) tend to be heavier than the fuel cell array and its fuel tank. The RTGs should be reserved for very long low-thrust burns in the deep space. READ MORE...
A Salt Comparison
Variation in size and shape changes how densely salt crystals pack into a teaspoon. The denser they pack, the more salt a given unit of volume will deliver.
So pay attention to what the recipe calls for—1/4 teaspoon of fine sea salt will have a bigger impact on your dish than the same amount of a larger-grained salt like Diamond Crystal. Using both interchangeably may mean an over- or under-seasoned meal.
When it comes to the question of kosher salt vs. sea salt, at BA, our cooking salt of choice is Diamond Crystal kosher salt: Its light and hollow flakes are easy to grip and crush, readily adhere to protein, and dissolve quickly. It’s also less salty by volume, meaning that it’s harder to oversalt.
When it comes to the question of kosher salt vs. sea salt, at BA, our cooking salt of choice is Diamond Crystal kosher salt: Its light and hollow flakes are easy to grip and crush, readily adhere to protein, and dissolve quickly. It’s also less salty by volume, meaning that it’s harder to oversalt.
But there’s also a strong contingent of chefs and recipe developers who prefer fine sea salt. Ben Mims of the Los Angeles Times turns to fine sea salt to dissolve seamlessly into baked goods; cookbook author Dorie Greenspan prefers it to regular kosher salt for its cleaner taste; and Joe Yonan of The Washington Post likes its reliability: In general, brands don’t differ that drastically.
So if you want fine sea salt to be your cooking salt of choice, go for it—but remember, when recipes call for Diamond Crystal kosher, you’ll have to adjust.
A rough conversion: About 1¼ teaspoon of coarse kosher salt will be about 1 teaspoon of fine sea salt, but be very wary—coarseness varies by brand of salt, and the only way to be absolutely sure is to take out that kitchen scale and make sure the two are equal in weight, especially in more finicky baking projects that require precision. READ MORE...
A rough conversion: About 1¼ teaspoon of coarse kosher salt will be about 1 teaspoon of fine sea salt, but be very wary—coarseness varies by brand of salt, and the only way to be absolutely sure is to take out that kitchen scale and make sure the two are equal in weight, especially in more finicky baking projects that require precision. READ MORE...
A Strange Moon
Iapetus, the second moon ever discovered around Saturn back in 1671, has three bizarre properties that science still struggles to explain. It orbits out of Saturn's plane and has a two-toned appearance, an equatorial bulge, and a giant ridge. How did it form and develop these strange properties? 350 years later, we still don't know.
After having no superior tools to our naked eyes to explore the universe, the 17th century ushered in a revolution with the adoption of the telescope. With larger apertures and the power to gather more light at once, objects beyond the limits of human visibility — both in terms of resolution and faintness — suddenly transformed from being unobservable to being observable at will. Almost immediately, new objects and features became apparent, including the four major moons of Jupiter, the phases of Venus, the rings of Saturn with many features inside, and much more.
Then in 1671, Italian astronomer Giovanni Cassini was observing Saturn, already known to possess a giant moon, Titan, and discovered another moon: Iapetus. While Cassini would go on to make many other discoveries about Saturn, including numerous other moons, Iapetus was one of the strangest things anyone had ever seen in the sky. Cassini discovered Iapetus on the western side of Saturn, but when he looked for it later in its orbit, on Saturn’s eastern side, it wasn’t there. The moon remained missing for decades until, with a significantly upgraded telescope, Cassini finally saw it, a full two magnitudes fainter than it appears on Saturn’s western side, in 1705. As remarkable as that was, it was just the start toward understanding the mystery of Iapetus: our solar system’s strangest moon.
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| Compared to Earth, or even Earth’s moon, Saturn’s moon Iapetus appears small and insignificant. However, it remains one of only a small number of solar system bodies over 1,000 kilometers in diameter, Saturn’s 3rd largest moon, and perhaps the least understood moon in our solar system. (Credit: Tom.Reding and Ppong.it, Wikimedia Commons) |
Compared to Earth, or even Earth’s moon, Saturn’s moon Iapetus appears small and insignificant. However, it remains one of only a small number of solar system bodies over 1,000 kilometers in diameter, Saturn’s 3rd largest moon, and perhaps the least understood moon in our solar system. (Credit: Tom.Reding and Ppong.it, Wikimedia Commons)
Today, we have the luxury of hundreds of years of scientific advances at our disposal, and technologies about which Cassini could have only dreamed. Modern telescope have hundreds of times the light-gathering power of the greatest telescopes of his day, with views that take us into wavelengths that the human eye cannot observe, with numerous observatories located in space, and with a few of them — like the Voyager 1 spacecraft or NASA’s Cassini mission — actually traveling to and imaging these distant worlds in situ. TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS STRANGE MOON, CLICK HERE...
Today, we have the luxury of hundreds of years of scientific advances at our disposal, and technologies about which Cassini could have only dreamed. Modern telescope have hundreds of times the light-gathering power of the greatest telescopes of his day, with views that take us into wavelengths that the human eye cannot observe, with numerous observatories located in space, and with a few of them — like the Voyager 1 spacecraft or NASA’s Cassini mission — actually traveling to and imaging these distant worlds in situ. TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS STRANGE MOON, CLICK HERE...
Friday, October 8
Disrupting Battery History
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| The Addionics Tream |
And here is where Biton saw a huge opportunity “as trillions of dollars will continue to be invested in creating better batteries.”
Addionics aims to capitalize on this opportunity by introducing a relatively small change into how batteries are designed.
Unlike other companies that focus on improving battery chemistry, Addionics is focused on the physics of a specific part of the battery, the electric current collector.
The current collector serves as the substrate of a battery’s electrodes. These small metal sheets, not dissimilar to aluminum foil, are layered around the “active material” – lithium ion, for example.
Think of an electric battery like a sandwich, Biton suggests. “The bread is the electricity collector, and the cheese is the active material.”
Most electric car battery “sandwiches” have the “cheese” only on the top. Addionics layers the “cheese” throughout, along with layers of porous and spongy “bread.”
“Using nanotechnology, we can find space that’s not well utilized and make it more efficient,” Biton says. READ MORE...
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