Video: Minesweeping Tank-Bot Shreds Land Mines, Rolling Through Explosions With Ease
Digger D-3 laughs in the face of unexploded ordnance
By Rebecca Boyle
Technology is helping de-miners find unexploded land mines in new and cool ways, like the metal detectors augmented with smartphones we learned about this spring. And now, there are mine-chomping tank robots that eat mines for breakfast.
The Digger D-3 is the latest creation of Digger DTR, a Swiss non-governmental organization dedicated to designing mine-clearing devices. It has a spinning tiller of death called a flail, made of tungsten hammers that pound 10 inches into the ground. It also has a rolling tiller that can clear vegetation. The remote-controlled tank was brought to light by IEEE Spectrum’s robotics blog.
The D-3 is fully armored to withstand land mines and ordnance up to 81mm in diameter, Digger says. It has a four-cylinder, 4.5 L John Deere diesel engine, which can crank out 173 hp at 2400 RPM. The remote-controlled robot is as adept at clearing shrubbery as it is at chomping mines, so it’s ideal for minefields with dense vegetation or in mountainous areas, Digger says.
The video below shows its predecessor, the D-2, surviving mine explosions in Sudan. The new model is designed to be easily repaired and modified, enabling it to be used in remote locations with limited resources and plenty of land mines.
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-07/easily-repaired-minesweeping-tank-bot-shreds-land-mines
...E eis ondas nunca vistas:
Scientists Discover Two Never-Before-Seen Kinds of Water Waves
By Clay Dillow
Of all the things in the physical world we think we know a lot about, water is definitely among them. Nonetheless, by precisely shaking a shallow container of water, researchers have now observed two new types of waves that have never been observed before in water--and one that has never been observed in any other media either.
To conjure the waves, the researchers used what is known as a Hele-Shaw cell mounted on a small shake table. A Hele-Shaw cells is a container consisting of two parallel transparent plates separated by a small gap, much like an ant farm (see images above and .gifs below). In this case, the gap between them was 1.5 millimeters, or less than 6 hundredths of an inch.
...Mais uma para os que pensam que os Cientistas "já sabem tudo", o calor do interior da Terra, só 50% é que se sabe a origem!
The Best Measurement Yet of Earth's Radioactivity Shows Half the Earth's Heat Comes from Nuclear Decay
By Clay Dillow
Scientists measuring the subatomic particles flowing from Earth’s interior have taken the most precise measurement ever gathered of the home planet’s radioactivity. It turns out nearly half of the Earth’s total heat output comes form decaying radioactive elements like thorium and uranium in the Earth’s crust. But that’s an answer that begets more questions.
Previously, there were varying theories on just how much of the Earth’s heat came from radioactive decay, with many--accurately, it would seem--placing that value at about half of the roughly 40 terawatts of heat produced by the Earth. That heat drives convection currents in the outer core and give us our magnetic field, among other natural processes (tectonics come to mind).
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-07/best-measurement-yet-earths-radioactivity-shows-half-earths-heat-comes-decay
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