research


Cloud seeding ships to combat global warming

This could also be posted to How to Save the World for Free, but it’s relevant to the phone comic I’m working on.

Unmanned ships that sprayed sea water into the atmosphere to boost low lying clouds could produce sufficient cooling effects to counteract global warming due to CO2 rises. They’d cost £1m to £2m and at least 1500 would be needed. If they did work that’s £3billion to mitigate the damage already done and buy us time to find alternative technologies. That’s just over a fortnight of the abomination that is the Iraq occupation, to make such crimes less likely in the future.

So don’t be surprised when Bush and Brown don’t invest in it.


Electromagnetic pulse bullets

I’m scripting a sci-fi phone comic and thought it would be nioce to give the characters bullets that generated a small localised electromagnetic pulse, so they could more effectively fight kill crazy robots without messing with their own cyborg enhancements. Such things don’t exist, but I’m sure a miniature flux compression generator bomb could be made some day.


Vertical Airships

Airship.org was set up in 1987 to promote vertical airships as the future of air transport. Tall airships, they claim, are easier to construct, more efficient load carriers and more nimble in the urban environment than their cigar shaped forebears. The description of them having “interesting aerodynamic characteristics” could be read in a number of ways though.

The Airship.org site has specs for several proposed designs and you can download a model of one of their ships to fly in Microsoft Flight Simulator.


Nuclear CSI

With the right mobile equipment, nuclear detectives could sift through the debris and the radioactive cloud of an attack in this country or elsewhere and quickly glean crucial information, the scientists argued in a 60-page report discussed Feb. 16 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston.

The report, Nuclear Forensics: Role, State of the Art, Program Needs, was written by a joint working group of the AAAS and the American Physical Society.

Using radiochemistry techniques and access to proposed international databases that include actual samples of uranium and plutonium from around the world, the nuclear investigators might be able to tell the president – and the world – where the bomb fuel came from, or at least rule out some suspects.

“Nuclear forensics can make a difference,” May said in an interview.

Fascinating stuff. Nuclear forensics was a key part of The Sum Of All Fears (the book, anyway, I’m trying to forget the film) but, the scientists assert, that sort of expertise has disappeared since the end of the Cold War. More here.


Making foreplay complicated

Italian scientists (why am I not surprised that an Italian would investigate this?) say they have used ultrasound to find the G-spot, though their research also suggests that not every woman has one. I believe I’ve found the G-spot a few times, without the aid of ultrasound, and must say I prefer the traditional way of looking for it.


For further research – 3/1/08

Asides from England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia to follow up on-

King William II “Rufus”. King of England from 1087 to 1100, rumoured to return, like King Arthur, in times of national crisis.

Witches of the New Forest. One coven of whom set up a “cone of power” to repel German invasion during the Second World War.

Herne the Hunter and Brusher Mills.