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John Lemke

Ask Ethan #55: Could a Manned Mission to Mars Abort? - Starts With A Bang! - Medium - 0 views

  • No humans have ever traveled farther away from Earth than the crew of Apollo 13 did, as they circled around the far side of the Moon close to lunar apogee, achieving a maximum distance of 400,171 km above the Earth’s surface on April 15, 1970. But when the first manned spaceflight to another planet occurs, that record will be shattered, and in a mere matter of days.
  • The way we currently reach other worlds with our present technology — or any remote location in the Universe — involves three distinct stages:The initial launch, which overcomes the Earth’s gravitational binding energy and starts our spacecraft off with a reasonably large (on the order of a few km/s) velocity relative to the Earth’s motion around the Sun.On-board course corrections, where very small amounts of thrust accelerate the spacecraft to its optimal trajectory.And gravity assists, where we use the gravitational properties of other planets in orbit around the Sun to change our spacecraft’s velocity, either increasing or decreasing its speed with every encounter.It’s through the combination of these three actions that we can reach any location — if we’re patient and we plan properly — with only our current rocket technology.
    • John Lemke
       
      How we can do it now, if we plan right.
  • The initial launch is a very hard part right now. It takes a tremendous amount of resources to overcome the Earth’s gravitational pull, to accelerate a significant amount of mass to the Earth’s escape velocity, and to raise it all the way up through the Earth’s atmosphere.
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  • The most optimal one for a one-way trip to Mars, for those of you wondering, that minimizes both flight time and the amount of energy needed, involves simply timing your launch right.
    • John Lemke
       
      The cheapest and the fastest. The one way ticket option.
  • When a planet orbits the Sun, there’s a lot of energy in that system, both gravitational energy and kinetic energy. When a third body interacts gravitationally as well, it can either gain some energy by stealing it from the Sun-planet system, or it can lose energy by giving it up to the Sun-planet system. The amount of energy performed by the spacecraft’s thrusters is often only 20% (or less) of the energy either gained-or-lost from the interaction!
    • John Lemke
       
      The transfer of energy involved to change speeds.
John Lemke

Japanese company proposes to build solar power cells on the Moon to provide clean energ... - 0 views

  • the 11,000 mile Lunar equator
  • will beam microwave and laser energy to giant energy conversion facilities on Earth. These beams will travel to semiconductors and inverters which will convert that energy to clean electricity to the grid that will power households, businesses and factories.
  • Shimizu’s plan uses Earthly materials, ceramics, water, glass, concrete, oxygen and solar cells. They would not ship water from Earth, they will make user of the Moon’s own resources and reduce the lunar soil using hydrogen shipped from our planet and then extract the water for use in construction.
John Lemke

Active malware operation let attackers sabotage US energy industry | Ars Technica - 0 views

  • Researchers have uncovered a malware campaign that gave attackers the ability to sabotage the operations of energy grid owners, electricity generation firms, petroleum pipelines, and industrial equipment providers.
  • the hacking group managed to install one of two remote access trojans (RATs) on computers belonging to energy companies located in the US and at least six European countries, according to a
  • Called Dragonfly
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  • "This campaign follows in the footsteps of Stuxnet, which was the first known major malware campaign to target ICS systems," the Symantec report stated. "While Stuxnet was narrowly targeted at the Iranian nuclear program and had sabotage as its primary goal, Dragonfly appears to have a much broader focus with espionage and persistent access as its current objective with sabotage as an optional capability if required."
  • been in operation since at least 2011
  • "The Dragonfly group is technically adept and able to think strategically," the Symantec report stated. "Given the size of some of its targets, the group found a 'soft underbelly' by compromising their suppliers, which are invariably smaller, less protected companies."
John Lemke

World's Largest Solar Array Set to Crank Out 290 Megawatts of Sunshine Power - Scientif... - 0 views

  • Agua Caliente, the largest photovoltaic solar power facility in the world, was completed last week in Arizona.
  • ive million solar panels that span the equivalent of two Central Parks in the desert between Yuma and Phoenix. It generates 290 megawatts of power—enough electricity to fuel 230,000 homes in neighboring California at peak capacity.
  • The project, which cost a total of $1.8 billion to construct, received a million-dollar loan from the Loan Programs Office. Under its “SunShot” initiative (so-named in the spirit of president John F. Kennedy’s “moon shot” program), the DoE provides guaranteed loans to unproved ventures in solar power in the hopes of promoting innovation and making the technology more cost-effective.* Although Agua Caliente (owned by U.S. energy giant NRG Energy and partner MidAmerican Solar) is now the largest photovoltaic solar facility in the world, it probably will not hold that distinction for long. Other massive solar panel facilities, such as Antelope Valley Solar Ranch One in California’s Mojave Desert, are rapidly springing up across the Southwest.
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  • The energy contained in just one hour of sunlight could power the world for a year, if only it could be harnessed.
John Lemke

Lights out: The dark future of electric power - opinion - 12 May 2014 - New Scientist - 0 views

  • We tend to think of such events as occasional, inconvenient blips. But in fact they are becoming increasingly common, and will only get more frequent and severe. This is because our electricity systems are more fragile than is commonly supposed, and are getting frailer. Unless we act, blackouts will become a regular, extremely disruptive part of everyday life.
  • The vulnerability of such systems is demonstrated by the Italian blackout of 2003. The event began when a falling tree broke a power line in Switzerland; when a second tree took out another Swiss power line, connectors towards Italy tripped and several Italian power plants failed as a result. Virtually the whole country was left without power. It says something when a nation can be brought to a halt by two trees falling outside its borders.
  • We predict that blackouts will occur with greater frequency and greater severity due to trends in both electricity supply and demand. Supply will become increasingly precarious because of the depletion of fossil fuels, neglected infrastructure and the shift toward less reliable renewable energy. Demand, meanwhile, will grow because of rising populations and affluence.
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  • Between 1940 and 2001, average US household electricity use rose 1300 per cent, driven largely by growing demand for air conditioning. And such demand is forecast to grow by 22 per cent in the next two decades.
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    While not a green energy story, it is relevant.  The reality is that our demand for power is growing quicker than the volume of power we can produce.
John Lemke

Corn-waste biofuels might be worse than gasoline in the short term | Plugged In, Scient... - 0 views

  • Biofuels made using corn waste could release 7 percent more greenhouse gases in the early years compared to conventional gasoline. As a result, this type of cellulosic ethanol could be inelligible to meet quotas under the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA).
  • In the longer-term, the study says that these types of biofuels will result in a net emissions decrease. However, the short term increase is enough to keep this type of biofuel from complying with regulations in the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA).
John Lemke

Beyond The Dawn - 0 views

shared by John Lemke on 09 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Twitter Directory and Search, Find Twitter Followers : WeFollow wefollow.com - Find Twitter celebrities, actors, TV personalities, or new Twitter friends in your area. WeFollow is a directory of Twitter users organized by interests. Find likeminded friends today! davehennmusic davehennmusic Just added myself to the http://wefollow.com twitter directory under: #chicago_il #music #indie #songwriting #chicago #musician about 2 hours ago Reply Retweet Follow Unfollow Favorite Suicide Silence | Indienation.fm indienation.fm - At the RockStar Energy Mayhem Festival it was my great pleasure to sit down with Mark Heylmun the guitarist from Suicide Silence. If you have yet to hear their music, Suicide Silence performs an ex...
  • Suicide Silence | Indienation.fm indienation.fm - At the RockStar Energy Mayhem Festival it was my great pleasure to sit down with Mark Heylmun the guitarist from Suicide Silence. If you have yet to hear their music, Suicide Silence performs an ex...
John Lemke

Cambridge team breaks superconductor world record | University of Cambridge - 0 views

  • three tonnes of force inside a golf ball-sized sample of material that is normally as brittle as fine china.
  • Superconductors are materials that carry electrical current with little or no resistance when cooled below a certain temperature. While conventional superconductors need to be cooled close to absolute zero (zero degrees on the Kelvin scale, or –273 °C) before they superconduct, high temperature superconductors do so above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen (–196 °C), which makes them relatively easy to cool and cheaper to operate.
  • Superconductors are currently used in scientific and medical applications, such as MRI scanners, and in the future could be used to protect the national grid and increase energy efficiency, due to the amount of electrical current they can carry without losing energy.
John Lemke

Voyager 1 spots new region at the edge of the Solar System | Ars Technica - 0 views

  • The researchers suspect they've reached a region of the solar-interstellar boundary that nobody had predicted. In this area, the magnetic field lines of the Sun link up with those of the interstellar field. Scientists are calling this linkage a "highway" for particles to travel along. It lets solar wind particles escape more readily, causing the drop in their intensity. And it opens the door for low-energy cosmic rays to slip in to our Solar System, which is why Voyager 1 is seeing so many of them. According the researchers at the press conference that announced these results, most steady-state models of the Solar System failed to predict anything like this. A few models did have a feature like this, but it was only a transient one that appeared at certain times of the solar cycle.
John Lemke

Lawsuit Claims Accidental Google Search Led To Years Of Government Investigation And Ha... - 0 views

  • Jeffrey Kantor, who was fired by Appian Corporation, sued a host of government officials, including Attorney General Eric Holder, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Secretary of State John Kerry in Federal Court, alleging civil rights violations, disclosure of private information and retaliation… He also sued Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Rand Beers, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, EPA Administrator Regina McCarthy and U.S. Office of Personnel Management Director Katherine Archuleta.
  • "In October of 2009, Kantor used the search engine Google to try to find, 'How do I build a radio-controlled airplane,'" he states in his complaint. "He ran this search a couple weeks before the birthday of his son with the thought of building one together as a birthday present. After typing, 'how do I build a radio controlled', Google auto-completed his search to, 'how do I build a radio controlled bomb.'" From that point on, Kantor alleges coworkers, supervisors and government investigators all began "group stalking" him. Investigators used the good cop/bad cop approach, with the "bad cop" allegedly deploying anti-Semitic remarks frequently. In addition, his coworkers at Appian (a government contractor) would make remarks about regular people committing murder-suicides (whenever Kantor expressed anger) or how normal people just dropped dead of hypertension (whenever Kantor remained calm while being harassed)
  • Kantor also claims he was intensely surveilled by the government from that point forward.
    • John Lemke
       
      Our story begins with auto-complete and, once suspected, always monitored. has an interesting loophole. 
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  • the law says that the timeline is based on when the citizen had a reasonable chance to discover the violation. Since the PRISM program was only declassified in July of 2013, these earlier violations should not be time-barred.
  • All in all, the filing doesn't build a very credible case and comes across more as a paranoiac narrative than a coherent detailing of possible government harassment and surveillance. Here are just a few of the highlights.
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    Wait till you see how many and who are involved.
John Lemke

South Korean Scientists Use E. Coli to Make Gasoline - Korea Real Time - WSJ - 0 views

  • Using genetically modified E. coli to generate biofuel isn’t new. U.K. scientists said in April they have developed a process under which the bacterium turns biomass into an oil that is almost identical to conventional diesel–a development that followed similar research by U.S. biotechnology firm LS9 in 2010. But the breakthrough this time is important because the reprogrammed E. coli can produce gasoline, a high-premium oil product that’s more expensive than diesel if the biofuel becomes commercially viable, according to Prof. Lee Sang-yup at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. His team’s study was published in the international science journal Nature on Monday.
  • The significance of this breakthrough is that you don’t have to go through another process to crack the oil created by E. coli to produce gasoline. We have succeeded in converting glucose or waste biomass directly into gasoline,
  • only a few drops of the fuel per hour—making just 580 milligrams of gasoline from one liter of glucose culture.
John Lemke

This Internet of Things radio is the size of an ant | Ars Technica - 0 views

  • The radios are fitted onto tiny silicon chips, and cost only pennies to make thanks to their diminutive size. They are designed to compute, execute, and relay demands, and they are very energy efficient to the point of being self-sufficient. This is due to the fact that they can harvest power from the incoming electromagnetic signal so they do not require batteries, meaning there is no particular lifetime associated with the devices.
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