Lockheed for the first time has been testing a digital beam array to locate and track live targets–in this case, commercial and military aircraft coming in and out of the Philadelphia area. “The hard part was how we combined all the data … to form the individual beams,” Scott Smith, program manager for the radar system at Lockheed, tells PM. Commercially available high-speed digital electronics and advanced signal processors have become advanced enough to allow this data processing to occur, and that in turn has enabled digital beamforming to become practical for use outside a lab.
It will be helpful for ATC, but it has obvious military applications:
Digital beamforming radars will likely find their first homes on ships that track missile threats to U.S. fleets. Those threats will come from ballistic launches hundreds of miles away or from high-speed missiles launched from submarines or warplanes. The Russian government has been busy selling sea-skimming, antiship missiles to China that are designed to overwhelm the U.S. fleet’s radars, so the ability to track multiple, fast-moving threats could become vital in the Taiwan Straits. But a digitized phased array radar can handle many incoming signals at once, and should be able to discern real threats from bits of metal or shaped decoy balloons.So somewhere a Chinese admiral is frowning at Lockheed’s news, and a Taiwanese general is smirking.
Expect the usual suspects, any minute, to claim that it is “destabilizing” (a phrase they use any time the US comes up with a better way to defend itself).
They started with two common food preservatives–the same stuff, BHA and BHT, that keeps Wonder Bread fresh for weeks–as a means to carry away free radicals before they can cause harm.
But for the food preservatives to become effective, the scientists needed a way to get them inside cells.
That’s where carbon nanotubes, single layers of carbon atoms curved into tiny cylinders, came in handy. The research team attached the food preservatives to the nanotubes, which, because of their size, provided a perfect vehicle for traversing the body’s arteries and entering cells.
Tour said he began his research with the goal of finding a drug to protect astronauts on long-duration space missions from the radiation to which they are exposed outside Earth’s atmosphere.
But the test results in mice, which were given the drug 30 minutes before a blast of radiation, were so impressive that Tour thought the drug might have much broader potential.
I hope that the real promise is for deep space travel, not for a nuclear war. We need to do everything we can to avoid the latter, but if not, this will help as well.
Using patented microorganisms and transformative bioreactor designs, Coskata ethanol is produced via a unique three-step conversion process that turns virtually any carbon-based feedstock
Using patented microorganisms and transformative bioreactor designs, Coskata ethanol is produced via a unique three-step conversion process that turns virtually any carbon-based feedstock
Using patented microorganisms and transformative bioreactor designs, Coskata ethanol is produced via a unique three-step conversion process that turns virtually any carbon-based feedstock