All rivers follow a gently winding path, regardless of the terrain. Now Physicists at the University of Cambridge have produced a mathematical model that explain a river’s winding, or meandering, habits.

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‘One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’

In this July 20, 1969 photo, astronaut Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin Jr. poses beside a US flag on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission. Aldrin and fellow ‘moonwalker’ Neil Armstrong gathered Friday with other Apollo astronauts as part of the first moon landing’s 40th anniversary celebration.

Hackers wanted; P100-million reward

Courtesy of Philstar.com

The issue on the automation of the 2010 national elections have reverted all ears as it creates noise. Billions of pesos will be spent for a strategy that is not proven to eliminate the problem of elections, and so, a test is about to be done.

Opposition Senator Allan Peter Cayetano said in a press conference that he is filling a resolution for COMELEC (Commission on Elections) to appropriate an amount of 100 million pesos out of the 11 billion pesos fund on the automation of elections as a reward for anyone who can show and convince the people that the automated elections is also susceptible to dirty tactics such as fraud and tampering of election paraphernalia. If this goes through (the resolution), this will be a test to the automation process’s invulnerability and probably will make the fear of people for any untoward act regarding the elections vanish.

This is why the Commission on Elections (Comelec) challenged hackers to try to hack into the voting and counting machines that will be used in next year’s elections, but expressed confidence that they would fail.

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After I featured in this site about The First Elevator That Can Ride to Outer Space, in which according to Michael Laine the real critical test was on making a string strong enough. He said that the cable they made was rock solid. This effort was considered a giant leap forward for scientists who are developing the world’s first space elevator.

But today scientists recently discovered that a new form of carbon ribbon that’s ultra-flexible and super-strong could become the infrastructure for the first working space elevator. Such a structure would usher in a new era in easy space travel.

Long-predicted by science fiction authors, and memorably portrayed in Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Red Mars (where a space elevator crashes to the planet’s surface), a space elevator would pull people out of the atmosphere quickly - without wasting as much energy as rockets do as they escape Earth’s gravity. The elevator would begin at the Earth’s equator and could stretch up to an orbital platform or even a relocated asteroid. People who wanted to travel to space would ride the elevator far out of the atmosphere and catch a ship in orbit.

NASA holds regular competitions to inspire people to come up with materials that would make a space elevator possible, and the team behind the new ribbon material developed it for one of NASA’s competitions. According to the Times Online:

Spurred on by a $4m (2.7m) research prize from Nasa, a team at Cambridge University has created the world’s strongest ribbon: a cylindrical strand of carbon that combines lightweight flexibility with incredible strength and has the potential to stretch vast distances. The development has been seized upon by the space scientists, who believe the technology could allow astronauts to travel into space via a cable thousands of miles long - a space elevator . . .

The Cambridge team is making about 1 gram of the high-tech material per day, enough to stretch to 18 miles in length. “We have Nasa on the phone asking for 144,000 miles of the stuff, but there is a difference between what can be achieved in a lab and on an industrial level,” says Alan Windle, professor of materials science at Cambridge University, who is anxious not to let the work get ahead of itself.

The rest of the Times article is worth checking out - there’s a lot of cool information about space elevators and their potential development over the next few decades.

This is unbelievable for me but this is true. According to Michael Laine the real critical test was on making a string strong enough. He said that the cable they made was rock solid.

This effort was considered a giant leap forward for scientists who are developing the world’s first space elevator.

According to the studies done by the United States based National Aeronautics space administration(NHSA), a space elevator would reduced the costs of sending cargo up into space from US$2,000 per pound down to $400 per pound. This cost reduction would have a great effect based on research, such a telecommunication, energy and pharmaceutical.

Using an outer space elevator instead of rockets would also be safer, easier, and gentler on fragile cargos such as electronics. Having a platform up in space can also provide room for large solar panels, more communication, cameras and hopefully, even people.

A space elevator would need a fixed lined, or cord that stretches from an anchor on Earth to station out in space, the station acts like a counter weight forever held above the planet by the antifungal force from the earth’s rotation.

The cord or shaft will be a carbon nano tube composite ribbon stretching around 99,779 kilometers up into space. The ground floor (anchor) will be a platform anchor in the sea, the elevator itself will be made up of robotic lifters that can climb up and down the ribbon at dizzying speeds without jarring its load, and the top floor will be space platform that also serves as a counter weight that will hold the whole thing upright. Gravity at one end and centripetal acceleration at the other end, will keep the space elevator from falling down on it.

So far so good the physics was the easy part. Science fiction writers had known all along that a space elevator would be possible in theory. The problem was the making of a string using a material strong enough to resist he incredible forces that the space elevator will go through.

But, their problem was solved in the 1990’s.When Carbon were discovered. Carbon nano tubes are many times stronger than steel. And now that carbon nano tubes are out of the lab and commercially manufactured, the few pieces of the space elevator are finally falling into place.