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We are sending this month’s FE eNews out midway
through since a very special and rare opportunity is
happening this coming week with our first Story #1. As
you know, IRI focuses on program areas of energy, propulsion, and
bioenergetics. To me, it is unusual to find another group taking
this same gauntlet and running with it. However, the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has done just that,
along with the Society for Scientific Exploration (SSE), with a
five (5) day conference from Jan. 18-22, 2022, FREE and online
too. Normally, this "Advanced
Propulsion & Energy" program is
held in person only in Boston MA and the previous years are not
easily accessible. Plus this year, the event is being run by a
retired Lockheed Skunkworks engineer, Charles Chase, so the
quality of the presenters is up there. Not only is Dr. Thibado’s
graphene electricity spearheading the lineup on Saturday at 11 AM
EST but on Thursday at 4:15 PM EST, you can see NASA’s Dr. Harold
(Sonny) White talking about his passion for warp drive.
Our Story #4 below also focuses on Dr. White’s
work with DARPA for the same research and development. To me,
these are top billing for energy and propulsion headliners! Hope
you can pick a few lectures, mark your calendars, and tune in
with your pocket phone and alarm reminder for the APE-IV. Zoom is
nicely available on smartphones, so get ready with
Zoom.us/download first and then everything else is automatic when
you click on the Zoom link in the APE Program.
Speaking of Lockheed Skunkworks, our Story #2
describes the silent supersonic jet X-59 that is on its way soon,
thank to NASA funding. To undergo some final tests in Texas, you
may see and not hear a very unusual elongated jet speeding
overhead in the near future.
Story #3 is about the University of Mons in
Belgium where they have developed an interesting reversible
fabric that cools a person by radiating heat from the outer
surface or warms that same smiling person by turning it inside
out. By absorbing heat from the person’s skin and then conducting
to a high emissivity outer surface, this is a fascinating passive
refrigerator for increasingly warm climates.
Story #5 is a big surprise since many of us
thought that magnetic confinement would remain about 25 years in
the future forever. Instead, we hear that Tokamak Energy, a
private company funded by the US DOE, claims that it now has
achieved twice the efficiency of its superconducting magnets. Therefore,
the news is that Tokamak
Energy Has Just Made a Breakthrough in Nuclear Fusion (interestingengineering.com) and
hope that means energy from actual nuclear fusion is close at
hand.
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1) MIT and SSE Featuring Advanced Propulsion and
Energy – APE 2022
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Integrity Research Institute Press Release January
2022
The Fourth Advanced Propulsion and
Energy Meeting - APE 22 hosted by UnLAB at MIT, is scheduled this
Tuesday, January 18 through Saturday, January 22. The online program
is free and open to the public, with Zoom links at the bottom of
each page of the Agenda. Presentations are scheduled from 10:00
to 5:00 PM EST (eastern time zone) with the Zoom meeting starting
at 9:30 AM.
Saturday
(1/22) is a Society for Scientific Exploration (SSE)
Symposium hosted by Professor Garret Moddel (UC Boulder)
and Professor Dan Sheehan (UC San Diego). Prof. Paul Thibado (U
of Arkansas) will be presenting at 11 AM EST his research on
continuous electricity generation from fluctuating graphene,
which took him ten years to discover how to charge capacitors
with this free energy from the quantum vacuum. Also, Dr. Dan
Sheehan will be discussing the many ways the 2nd Law of
Thermodynamics is being challenged.
"We
need to take strong action now," states Charles Chase,
Director and Co-Founder of the UnLab at MIT. "The planet is
on a rapid course to be less habitable for us and the current
biome. We believe there are ideas, technologies, and new science
that can change the course. Given the right conditions, the
concerted efforts of a few can alter everything". He further
stated, "We try to create an environment to explore such
ideas with real and varied discussions and the freedom to
speculate and be an explorer. Discussing disparate fields
can bring about breakthroughs in understanding, and most
importantly, refine our "questions. We wish to further
the work by forming collaborations needed to answer these key
questions.
Here are
some of the themes being presented each day:
· Tuesday, 1/18: Time for
action, the power of coherence
· Wednesday, 1/19: Fundamental
nature of light
· Thursday, 1/20:
"Vacuum" fluctuation forces and energy
· Friday 1/21/2022:
Gravitational forces and transduction
In
conjunction with the SSE, papers based on all the talks given
during the week will be considered for a special issue of the
peer-reviewed Journal of Scientific Exploration.
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2) NASA's Silent Supersonic Jet X-59
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InterestingEngineering.com January 2022
Lockheed
Martin's Skunk Works-built QueSST is anticipating an eventful
2022. The experimental X-59 Quiet Supersonic Technology aircraft
Skunk Works is building for NASA, is currently on its way to the
company's plant in Fort Worth, Texas to undergo structural testing
ahead of a planned first flight next year.
According to The Drive, the plan is to truck the X-59
to its Texas plant for structural tests before bringing it back to
the U.S. Air Force's Plant 42 in Palmdale, California where it was
under construction since 2018. It will undergo its first round of
flight testing at the site known for hosting the F-35 Joint Strike
Fighter assembly line.
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3) "Janus Textile" Keeps You Warm or
Reverses to Cool
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Physics World, January 2022
Researchers
in Belgium have unveiled the design for a fabric that could keep a
person warm when worn one way, while cooling them down if worn
inside out. Through simulations, Muluneh Abebe and colleagues at the University of Mons
showed how the infrared-emitting properties of their “Janus
textile” could allow it to be comfortably worn across a temperature
range of 13°C. Although large-scale manufacturing of the material
is not yet feasible, the researchers hope their results will
inspire further research into similar fabrics. In previous studies,
researchers have shown that some materials can absorb infrared
radiation from the wearer’s skin, and then allow it to escape from
a highly emissive outer surface. The effect of this is to cool the
wearer in warm environments.
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4) Paging Zefram Cochrane: Humans Have Figured Out a
Way to Make a Warp Bubble
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TechRepublic.com
January 2022
A team of
scientists working with DARPA, including warp drive pioneer Dr.
Harold G "Sonny" White, may have just taken us one step
closer to that reality with the announcement that they've discovered
a space-warping bubble, the fundamental thing needed for the
faster-than-light travel of the Star Trek universe. This is a
pretty complicated notion that involves a ton of math, but at its
most basic level, a warp bubble is a bit of space that's contracted
in the front and expanded in the back. The contraction/expansion
theoretically pushes the bubble, and its contents, forward at speeds
surpassing the speed of light without ever violating the laws of
physics: You're not technically traveling faster than
light, you're surfing a bubble of condensed space.
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