Sunday, November 23, 2008
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Ninja world
I made this picture because I was bord. I wish I was an actual ninja on CP but theres an annoying glitch in the system :(. It is really annoying. So heres the picture!
So bye!
:)!
So bye!
:)!
Sunday, November 9, 2008
The manhatten project
The Manhattan Project was the project to develop the first nuclear weapon (atomic bomb) during World War II by the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Formally designated as the Manhattan Engineer District (MED), it refers specifically to the period of the project from 1941–1946 under the control of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, under the administration of General Leslie R. Groves. The scientific research was directed by American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.[1]
The project's roots lay in scientists' fears since the 1930s that Nazi Germany was also investigating nuclear weapons of its own. Born out of a small research program in 1939, the Manhattan Project eventually employed more than 130,000 people and cost nearly $2 billion USD ($24 billion in 2008 dollars based on CPI). It resulted in the creation of multiple production and research sites that operated in secret.[2]
The three primary research and production sites of the project were the plutonium-production facility at what is now the Hanford Site, the uranium-enrichment facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the weapons research and design laboratory, now known as Los Alamos National Laboratory. Project research took place at over thirty sites across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The MED maintained control over U.S. weapons production until the formation of the Atomic Energy Commission in January 1947.
The first decades of the twentieth century led to radical changes in the understanding of the physics of the atom, including the discovery of the nucleus, the idea of radiation, and the fact that the splitting of atomic nuclei could lead to massive release of energy (nuclear fission).
By 1932 the atom was thought to consist of a small, dense nucleus containing most of the atom's mass in the form of protons and neutrons and surrounded by a shell of electrons. Study on the phenomenon of radioactivity began with the discovery of uranium ores by Henri Becquerel in 1896 and was followed by the work of Pierre and Marie Curie on radium. Their research seemed to promise that atoms, previously thought to be ultimately stable and indivisible, actually had the potential of containing and releasing immense amounts of energy. In 1919 Ernest Rutherford achieved the first artificial nuclear disintegrations by bombarding nitrogen with alpha particles emitted from a radioactive source, thus becoming the first person in history to intentionally "split the atom". It had become clear from the Curies' work that there was a tremendous amount of energy locked up in radioactive decay — far more than chemistry could account for. But even in the early 1930s such illustrious physicists as Ernest Rutherford and Albert Einstein could see no way of artificially releasing that energy any faster than nature naturally allowed it to leave. "Radium engines" in the 1930s were the stuff of science fiction, such as was being written at the time by Edgar Rice Burroughs. H.G. Wells included air-dropped "atomic bombs" in his 1914 novel The World Set Free. Though Wells' "atomic bombs" bore little resemblance to actual nuclear weapons — they were simply regular bombs that never stopped exploding — Leó Szilárd later commented that this story influenced his later research into this subject.
Progress in controlling and understanding nuclear fission accelerated in the 1930s when further manipulation of the nuclei of atoms became possible. In 1932 Sir John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton were first to "split the atom" (cause a nuclear reaction) by using artificially accelerated particles. In 1934 Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie discovered that artificial radioactivity could be induced in stable elements by bombarding them with alpha particles. The same year Enrico Fermi reported similar results when bombarding uranium with neutrons (discovered in 1932), but he did not immediately appreciate the consequences of his results.
In December 1938 the Germans Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann published experimental results about bombarding uranium with neutrons. They showed that it produced an isotope of barium. Shortly after, their Austrian co-worker Lise Meitner (a political refugee in Sweden at the time) and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch correctly interpreted the results as the splitting of the uranium nucleus after the absorption of a neutron—nuclear fission, which released a large amount of energy and additional neutrons. A direct experimental evidence of the nuclear fission was performed by Frisch, following a fundamental idea suggested to him by George Placzek[3].
In 1933 Hungarian physicist Leó Szilárd had proposed that if any neutron-driven process released more neutrons than those required to start it, an expanding nuclear chain reaction might result. Chain reactions were familiar as a phenomenon from chemistry (where they typically caused explosions and other runaway reactions), but Szilárd was proposing them for a nuclear reaction, for the first time. However, Szilárd had proposed to look for such reactions in the lighter atoms, and nothing of the sort was found. Upon experimentation shortly after the uranium fission discovery, Szilárd found that the fission of uranium released two or more neutrons on average, and immediately realized that a nuclear chain reaction by this mechanism was possible in theory. Szilárd kept this secret at first because he feared its use as a weapon by fascist governments. He convinced others to do so, but identical results were soon published by the Joliot-Curie group, to his great dismay.
That such mechanisms might have implications for civilian power or military weapons was perceived by numerous scientists in many countries, around the same time. While these developments in science were occurring, many political changes were happening in Europe. Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany in January 1933. His anti-Semitic ideology caused all Jewish civil servants, including many physicists, to be fired from their posts. Consequently many European physicists who later made key discoveries went into exile in the United Kingdom and the United States. After Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939 and World War II began, many scientists in the United States and the United Kingdom became anxious about what Germany might do with nuclear technology. Albert Einstein in particular wrote several letters to Franklin Roosevelt urging him to establish nuclear capability before the Germans.[4] These letters, especially one called the Einstein-Szilárd letter (written in August 1939, but not personally received by Roosevelt until October 1939), were also factors in the acceleration of the project.
The project's roots lay in scientists' fears since the 1930s that Nazi Germany was also investigating nuclear weapons of its own. Born out of a small research program in 1939, the Manhattan Project eventually employed more than 130,000 people and cost nearly $2 billion USD ($24 billion in 2008 dollars based on CPI). It resulted in the creation of multiple production and research sites that operated in secret.[2]
The three primary research and production sites of the project were the plutonium-production facility at what is now the Hanford Site, the uranium-enrichment facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the weapons research and design laboratory, now known as Los Alamos National Laboratory. Project research took place at over thirty sites across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The MED maintained control over U.S. weapons production until the formation of the Atomic Energy Commission in January 1947.
The first decades of the twentieth century led to radical changes in the understanding of the physics of the atom, including the discovery of the nucleus, the idea of radiation, and the fact that the splitting of atomic nuclei could lead to massive release of energy (nuclear fission).
By 1932 the atom was thought to consist of a small, dense nucleus containing most of the atom's mass in the form of protons and neutrons and surrounded by a shell of electrons. Study on the phenomenon of radioactivity began with the discovery of uranium ores by Henri Becquerel in 1896 and was followed by the work of Pierre and Marie Curie on radium. Their research seemed to promise that atoms, previously thought to be ultimately stable and indivisible, actually had the potential of containing and releasing immense amounts of energy. In 1919 Ernest Rutherford achieved the first artificial nuclear disintegrations by bombarding nitrogen with alpha particles emitted from a radioactive source, thus becoming the first person in history to intentionally "split the atom". It had become clear from the Curies' work that there was a tremendous amount of energy locked up in radioactive decay — far more than chemistry could account for. But even in the early 1930s such illustrious physicists as Ernest Rutherford and Albert Einstein could see no way of artificially releasing that energy any faster than nature naturally allowed it to leave. "Radium engines" in the 1930s were the stuff of science fiction, such as was being written at the time by Edgar Rice Burroughs. H.G. Wells included air-dropped "atomic bombs" in his 1914 novel The World Set Free. Though Wells' "atomic bombs" bore little resemblance to actual nuclear weapons — they were simply regular bombs that never stopped exploding — Leó Szilárd later commented that this story influenced his later research into this subject.
Progress in controlling and understanding nuclear fission accelerated in the 1930s when further manipulation of the nuclei of atoms became possible. In 1932 Sir John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton were first to "split the atom" (cause a nuclear reaction) by using artificially accelerated particles. In 1934 Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie discovered that artificial radioactivity could be induced in stable elements by bombarding them with alpha particles. The same year Enrico Fermi reported similar results when bombarding uranium with neutrons (discovered in 1932), but he did not immediately appreciate the consequences of his results.
In December 1938 the Germans Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann published experimental results about bombarding uranium with neutrons. They showed that it produced an isotope of barium. Shortly after, their Austrian co-worker Lise Meitner (a political refugee in Sweden at the time) and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch correctly interpreted the results as the splitting of the uranium nucleus after the absorption of a neutron—nuclear fission, which released a large amount of energy and additional neutrons. A direct experimental evidence of the nuclear fission was performed by Frisch, following a fundamental idea suggested to him by George Placzek[3].
In 1933 Hungarian physicist Leó Szilárd had proposed that if any neutron-driven process released more neutrons than those required to start it, an expanding nuclear chain reaction might result. Chain reactions were familiar as a phenomenon from chemistry (where they typically caused explosions and other runaway reactions), but Szilárd was proposing them for a nuclear reaction, for the first time. However, Szilárd had proposed to look for such reactions in the lighter atoms, and nothing of the sort was found. Upon experimentation shortly after the uranium fission discovery, Szilárd found that the fission of uranium released two or more neutrons on average, and immediately realized that a nuclear chain reaction by this mechanism was possible in theory. Szilárd kept this secret at first because he feared its use as a weapon by fascist governments. He convinced others to do so, but identical results were soon published by the Joliot-Curie group, to his great dismay.
That such mechanisms might have implications for civilian power or military weapons was perceived by numerous scientists in many countries, around the same time. While these developments in science were occurring, many political changes were happening in Europe. Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany in January 1933. His anti-Semitic ideology caused all Jewish civil servants, including many physicists, to be fired from their posts. Consequently many European physicists who later made key discoveries went into exile in the United Kingdom and the United States. After Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939 and World War II began, many scientists in the United States and the United Kingdom became anxious about what Germany might do with nuclear technology. Albert Einstein in particular wrote several letters to Franklin Roosevelt urging him to establish nuclear capability before the Germans.[4] These letters, especially one called the Einstein-Szilárd letter (written in August 1939, but not personally received by Roosevelt until October 1939), were also factors in the acceleration of the project.
Monday, November 3, 2008
Jacques Picard Pioneer of the Deep, Dies
GENEVA — Jacques Piccard, a scientist and underwater explorer who plunged deeper beneath the ocean than any other man, died Saturday 1 November 2008, his son's company said. He was 86.
Piccard died at his Lake Geneva home in Switzerland, the company Solar Impulse said.
Exploration ran in the Piccard family. Jacques' physicist father, Auguste, was the first man to take a balloon into the stratosphere and his son, Bertrand, was the first man to fly a balloon nonstop around the world.
Jacques Piccard helped his father invent the bathyscaphe, a vessel that allows humans to descend to great depths.
On Jan. 23, 1960, he and U.S. Navy Lt. Don Walsh took the vessel into the Pacific's Mariana Trench and dove to a depth of 35,800 feet — nearly seven miles below sea level. It remains the deepest dive ever carried out.
"By far the most interesting find was the fish that came floating by our porthole," Piccard said of the dive. "We were astounded to find higher marine life forms down there at all."
Solar Impulse said the discovery of living organisms at such a depth played a key role in the prohibition of nuclear waste dumping in ocean trenches.
After the dive, Piccard continued to research the deep seas and worked for NASA.
He also built four mid-depth submarines — or mesoscaphes — including the first tourist submarine. During the Swiss National Exhibition in 1964, he took 33,000 passengers into the depths of Lake Geneva. He continued taking high school children into the lake well into his 70s.
Born in Brussels in 1922, Piccard was nine years old when his father took his balloon into the stratosphere.
He studied in Switzerland and worked as a university teacher of economics, but abandoned his teaching to help his father design the bathyscaphe.
Auguste Piccard's great bathyscaphe, the Trieste, made several descents in the Atlantic Ocean, but its greatest moment came after it was acquired and redesigned by the U.S. Navy.
In April 1999, when Bertrand Piccard completed a round-the-world balloon trip with Briton Brian Jones, his team drew on Jacques' experiences of traveling in the waters of the Gulf Stream to work out how best to use the jet stream to speed the balloon around the world.
They also made use of some of the ideas used by grandfather Auguste in his pioneering flights, including the notion of only partially inflating the balloon at takeoff to allow for the expansion of the gases at higher altitudes, and the use of an airtight capsule.
Bertrand continues to work on pioneering projects. His Solar Impulse project aims to fly a solar-powered airplane around the world.
Jacques "passed on to me a sense of curiosity, a desire to mistrust dogmas and common assumptions, a belief in free will, and confidence in the face of the unknown," Bertrand Piccard said in a statement Saturday.
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