Peaceful nuclear explosions, that sounds like a contradiction in terms, especially in these times of heightened tension and nuclear sabre-rattling. But there was time when back in the 50s, 60s and even up to the late 80s when the explosive power of a nuclear weapon was looked at in a …
Will The Army Get Electric Tanks?
As many will have seen recently and in particular since the rapid rise in petrol and diesel prices, sales of electric cars are booming with year to date sales in 2022 of Battery Electric Vehicles up to 14.4% and if you add plugin hybrids it’s up to 21% in the …
How Do We Know What the Milky Way Really Looks Like?
This is what our galaxy looks like and where we are in it, or so we are told because this is a side on view from what would be about a million light years away. Now clearly we have a problem here because the farthest manmade object capable of taking …
What Happened to the Iconic British Red Telephone Box?
To me and anyone over the age of about 40, telephone boxes or phone booths if your in the US were often our only way of calling someone if you didn’t have a phone in the house and were a common sight in cities, towns and villages, even out in …
The Worlds Most Powerful Electric Motors
If you remember a short while back, we did a video on the world’s most powerful magnets, well I thought I would revisit the rabbit hole which it opened up and this time look at the most powerful electric motors which have benefited from the increased power of new magnets. …
What does the James Webb Use to See the Universe?
The James Webb space telescope is now at its destination orbit at the L2 LaGrange point and has started its calibration and final tuning using a star in the constellation of Ursa Major named HD84406 which will take about 6 months in all to complete and already the first engineering …
The Most Powerful Continuous Magnets Yet Made
To some, magnets are just the things that hold family photos and to-do lists to the fridge door but in reality, magnets and magnetism make the world go around. Magnets are everywhere, every electric motor, generator, loudspeaker, mechanical hard drive, microwave oven and of course equipment like MRI machines which …
What Has NASA Done Ever for Us – The CMOS Image Sensor
Alright, apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, road, the fresh water and public health, what have the romans ever done for us. Much like the Monty Python scene from Life of Brian, some might well say What has NASA ever done for us? NASA is …
Hubble and Webb Space Telescopes, the story so far…
After 40 million man-hours of work, huge cost overruns and delays which have made the length of time from inception to launch longer than the entire moon program including Mercury and Gemini and Apollo, the James Webb space telescope is almost ready to launch. But even at the last minute, …
How AI is Taking over your Phone
If you’ve bought a new smartphone in the last couple of years you may well have noticed that it’s quite a bit smarter and more capable than models of just a few years earlier. Now some might put it down to the CPUs, memory and general computer hardware becoming faster …