A Stable Plasma Ring Has Been Created In Open Air For the First Time Ever (futurism.com) 113
New submitter mrcoder83 shares a report from Futurism: Engineers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have been able to create a stable plasma ring without a container. According to the Caltech press release, it's "essentially capturing lightning in a bottle, but without the bottle." This remarkable feat was achieved using only a stream of water and a crystal plate, made from either quartz and lithium niobate. The union of these tools induced a type of contact electrification known as the triboelectric effect. The researchers blasted the crystal plate with an 85-micron-diameter jet of water (narrower than a human hair) from a specially designed nozzle. The water hit the crystal plate with a pressure of 632.7 kilograms of force per centimeter (9,000 pounds per square inch), generating an impact velocity of around 305 meters per second (1,000 feet per second) -- as fast as a bullet from a handgun. Plasma was formed as a result of the creation of an electric charge when the water hit the crystal surface. The flow of electrons from the point of contact ionizes the molecules and atoms in the gas area surrounding the water's surface, forming a donut-shaped glowing plasma that's dozens of microns in diameter. Caltech posted a video of the plasma ring on their YouTube channel.
1950s technology (Score:5, Interesting)
Sounds to me like he's never heard of the plasma speaker.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Millennials have never heard of anything. The 1950s never happened except in fairy tales.
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Oh boy I'm so looking forward to the invention of the steam engine but not before they unveil the Spinning Jenny. Seriously what the fuck are you talking about?
All the "breakthrough" tech coming out in the realm of quantum mechanics and such today was discovered in the 60's. The black projects run by the government are so far beyond the science known in the civilian world it's absurd. It might help if you look up the definition of the term "black project" and find the associated (known) budgets (i.e. missing money.) Take all the scientific funding from every nation combined over the last several decades, now multiply it by about 10. That's the difference betwe
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what do radio waves have to do with their mobile phones picking up static?
Radio waves have a lot more to do with a mobile phone picking up noise than sound...
Plasma speakers can emit some radio noise (or a lot) depending on how well they are made. But that is far from the only possible source of RF noise, especially since you can make plasma speakers that are relatively RF quiet. For stable plasma arcs that aren't being interrupted or even modulated, you can make it much quieter.
Saying they haven't heard of plasma speakers is as insightful as telling someone that discovered a n
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Please be precise about this "incandescent light bulks" operate at thousands of degrees, in Fahrenheit, Celsius, or Kelvin. Their shells are at room temperature. The filaments are much hotter when in operation.
Re:1950s technology (Score:4, Insightful)
But that is far from the only possible source of RF noise
Indeed.
You're hitting crystal plates with a water jet. Oscillating crystals causing electromagnetic noise was pretty much how radio transmitters were born.
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I'm an electrical engineer.
First of all I want to clarify that they mean static noise, not static charge. The first one is the "waterfally" sound you get from your regular AM/FM radio not tuned into a channel. The second one is what happen when you rub a balloon against a cat.
There is no physical difference between a wire and an antenna. If you want to design an antenna you can just cut a wire to an appropriate length (Or any length, it doesn't have to be a good antenna to work as one.)
Every trace on a PCB,
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First of all I want to clarify that they mean static noise, not static charge. The first one is the "waterfally" sound you get from your regular AM/FM radio not tuned into a channel. The second one is what happen when you rub a balloon against a cat.
A hiss, a bang, a squeal, a slash, a scream?
Re: 1950s technology (Score:2)
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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A neat magic trick for parties!
Now, how does this get us any closer to plasma nuclear fusion power . . . ?
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A neat magic trick for parties!
For very small parties, given that these rings are no more than microns across.
Re: PPG (Score:2)
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Now.. (Score:2)
"kilograms of force" (Score:5, Insightful)
The hell kind of weird bastardized units are these writers using? Kilograms are mass. Newtons are force. Do you mean 9.8N, which is about the force of 1kg under 1g (g-force, not grams) of acceleration?
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The water hit the crystal plate with a pressure of 632.7 kilograms of force per centimeter (9,000 pounds per square inch)
Everyone seems to have missed the really important detail.
The strange quantum effect which changes the dimensionality of the effect from 2D to 1D depending on the units used to make the measurement.
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Good spot. I'm a pedantic twat of the first order and I missed it.
Re: "kilograms of force" (Score:1)
I agree. Even the CalTech press release uses non-standard units.
The stream of water is an 85-micron-diameter jet blasting from a specially designed nozzle at 9,000 pounds per square inch that strikes the crystal plate with an impact velocity of around 1,000 feet per second. For reference, that's a stream narrower than a human hair moving about as fast as a bullet fired from a handgun.
If they are giving an intuitive comparison after the numbers in any case (which is a good idea for a press release), just st
Re:"kilograms of force" (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yeah, that's the dead giveaway isn't it. Obviously the original figure was 9000 psi and someone tried to "helpfully" convert it into SI units but failed their most basic unit analysis, turning force into mass and, as an AC points out above, square inches into centimeters, ultimately converting a measurement of pressure into a measurement of linear density. What?
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*meta*
I've been lurking on slashdot for around 18 years now, so I have some perspective....
I know it's de rigueur these days to bitch and moan about how awful slashdot is. But to the skeptics I say: parent's comment is exactly why I keep coming back. Thank you for that neat bit of sleuthing ortholattice! /meta
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Unfortunately, many people confuse weight with mass because of the environment in which they were taught. For example, if you go to your doctor, and the doctor asks you for your weight, no-one says I weigh 850 Newtons which is technically the correct scientific answer.
Newton's equation of force = mass x acceleration which tells us that the force due to gravity aka weight is proportional to the mass multiplied by the acceleration due to gravity.
In the metric system:
force is in Newtons
mass is in kilograms
acce
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That's only true on Earth though, What about slashdot readers who are browsing this article on other planets because they have joined the Space Cadet corps?
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Mass is, in fact, measured in kg. It has the same unit as what is used for weight, but outside of the environment of earth, they are not the same thing.
As you said. mass is constant and weight will vary. That doesn't mean I'm not still 85kg if I go to the moon. I will only weigh about 14kg there, but my mass is still the same. Weight is a measurement of force that depends on the environment, and mass is a measurement of inertia, which is considered an intrinsic property of matter. Nonetheless the un
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The kilogram and kilogram-force are different units, even if the latter often gets lazily abbreviated in name to the former. They've been defined as fundamentally different units for over a hundred years, so the deprecated, historic definitions of kilogram are no longer relevant to anyone still alive. And that time line has nothing to do with Newton, as the original weight based definition of the kilogram came well after Newton's death.
Re:"kilograms of force" (Score:4, Interesting)
That is true, yes. It would be more correct for me to say that the *names* of the units are the same than it to just say (as I had) that the units are the same, but for some reason I didn't think of putting it that way when I was responding, above.
As for Newton having nothing to do with how the kilogram came to be defined today, I know that Newton actually used imperial units. The kilogram-force unit is basically just a metric equivalent to the notion of the concept of pounds of force, which would have actually been the primary expression for the notion of force prior to Newton (long before it was understood that force was actually the product of acceleration and mass, and not just the mass). The creation of the SI unit called a Newton deprecated the notion of using a weight/mass unit to describe force entirely, but the reference to the force experienced by a given mass at 1G persisted, and is still frequently used because it is often more intuitively understood by people without a physics background.
So the expression "kilograms of force" always explicitly refers to the kilogram-force unit, but it is redundant to say that so many kilograms-force of force were used to do work XYZ, so the 'force' suffix on the unit is often dropped from the unit name itself. Since the word appears almost immediately afterwards anyways, no ambiguity about the term's usage remains, but when you see "pounds of force" or "kilograms of force", the actual units being measured to are pound-force and kilogram-force.
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On the moon your mass would still be 85kg.
Force (Netwons) = mass (kilograms) x acceleration (metres per second per second)
The moon has 1/6 the acceleration due to gravity than the earth:
On the surface of the earth, acceleration due to gravity is 9.81 m/s/s.
On the surface of the moon. acceleration due to gravity is 1.620 m/s/s.
Therefore your weight is as follows:
On Earth, your weight (force) = 85 x 9.81 = 834 Newtons
On the moon, your weight (force) = 85 x 1.620 = 138 Newtons
One of the reasons you say your "w
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Found the DeVry grad!
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US units are confusing you.
It's not US units that are confusing anyone, it's the tendency of the unenlightened to turn every system of measure into a customary system.
The metric system is great, so it has to be corrupted by things like using weight and mass units interchangeably (to the point that people are genuinely confused about which is which) and making up non-systematic units where it's convenient (tonnes, hectares, etc).
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US units are confusing you.
It's not US units that are confusing anyone,
I don't know about that - try using ounces. Is that weight or volume?
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Oh, US units are definitely not easy to work with, being part of a customary system of measure with arbitrary (or no) base units, arbitrary conversion factors, and identically named units. The ounce isn't even that bad of an example, since an ounce (weight) of water occupies an ounce of volume (under specific conditions). That's similar to a gram of water occupying a milliliter of volume (under specific conditions).
But the US system wasn't causing any confusion in this thread, since it's all in metric units
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> Actually kilograms, i.e. weight, are never a unit of mass.
Welcome to /. , students of Law, Medicine, Literature and US Engineers, but please refrain from talking about units. Leave it to people from more advanced countries on which the SI system is used, mkay?
Mass _is_ measured in kg. Kilogram is a unit of mass.
There is an ancillary unit of force (just like the liter is used for volume) which is explained here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilogram-force .
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Cut them some slack, they worked on this for over a lightyear!
Re:632.7 kilograms of force (Score:4, Funny)
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I don't know which is worst -- kilograms as force, the unsquared centimeter, or the extra THREE MAGICAL SIGFIGS -- but the trifecta makes me want to go on a nerderous rampage.
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But what the hell is it good for? Why do i want a plasma ring?
This is /.
Think of the goatse opportunities.
Anyhow, the key point here, I think, is the word stable. Applications tend to follow. Few inventions were made for a purpose; the purposes are added later. I'm sure one of your ancestors said "What the hell is it good for? Why do I want a wooden ring?" after the wheel was invented, before there were any rolling applications taking advantage of it.
What sort of quartz - (Score:3)
.. is "either quartz", and did anyone else find their youtube video a little short of details?
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Holy shit basic grammar (Score:3)
Either/or, Neither/nor.
Come the fuck on. Try being less lazy than using a simple spelling check.
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Indeed. I didn't understand that sentence at all. Either quarz and lithium??? WTF??
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Unfortunately not on Americans. Maybe it's the lower education levels that suck.
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Now the must move elsewhere to continue work (Score:1, Troll)
Re:Now the must move elsewhere to continue work (Score:5, Insightful)
If you had told me half a century ago that there could be any land that might eclipse the US in terms of technology and progress, I would have called you insane. Remember? The time when the US built those huge rockets to go where nobody has gone before?
20 years ago I would probably have said something along the lines of "Yeah, Japan. but they can't compete in raw production power"
Today, I'd probably ask if there is actually still any research and development done in the US, and whether there is actually any US-owned corporation left, or whether the Chinese are finally done taking over.
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Hmm, check your facts. The US space program used many German scientists and engineers recruited after the 2nd World War. The most famous German being Wernher von Braun the architect of the Saturn V.
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You might also remember that a lot more happened in the 60s that made the US the top of the world science hub. But let's stay with the moonshot, while the engineering was important, the whole mission hung on WAY more than the ability to make a large rocket go up. There's logistics, process management, raw manpower and on top of all an economy to power the whole deal. Frankly, making a rocket go up was certainly the most visible of the whole endeavor, but in the end only the tip of the iceberg.
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Nice beginning (Score:2)
Wake me up when some students can create a stable plasma penis in the air, then I believe they can handle the tech.
Maniacal claim (Score:2)
...it’s “essentially capturing lightning in a bottle, but without the bottle.”
and
...forming a donut-shaped glowing plasma that’s dozens of microns in diameter.
then I can't help it, but I have to LOL!
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...forming a donut-shaped glowing plasma that’s dozens of microns in diameter.
Dozens I tell you! My penile length is dozens of millimeters, you should be impressed.
Measurements! (Score:5, Informative)
"generating an impact velocity of around 305 meters per second (1,000 feet per second)"
Ok, the actual science was done measuring meters per second, the press release rounds it to a nice round number of 1000f/s for American audience, and then that rounded number is converted to a quite exact figure of 305m/s.
In the actual paper [caltech.edu], the experiment was done with a wide range of velocities. Over 200 m/s was required velocity to generate the effect.
u haz grammer (Score:3)
made from either quartz and lithium niobate
1) Either quartz or niobate? 2) Quartz and niobate? 3) Either quartz and niobate or _____?
Ball Lightning (Score:2)
Ball Lightning is a stable plasma structure. Paul Koloc thought that they were a field-reversed configuration [wikipedia.org] and created these is his garage on his Plasmak machine. I saw it myself. Paul was a plasma physicist, not a nut job.
Since his death (he was near eighty) his website went down. I found this article https://www.wired.com/2009/02/... [wired.com] .
As the article notes it received very little funding.
WTF /. (Score:4, Interesting)
I submitted this FOUR DAYS AGO, with links to the Caltech aticle!
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People around here aren't smart enough to read Caltech press releases anymore. They need simpler, more error-ridden summaries.
The comments from the youtube peanut gallery on the video are even worse. I miss intelligent discourse.
kilograms as a unit of force... (Score:4, Insightful)
They're not. Get over it.
SI has a perfectly good unit of force (the newton). It will be really great when SI advocates actually start using SI, rather than bastardizing it with things like "kilograms of force"....
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they meant kilogram-equivalents of force, which is valid, you can even buy pressure gauges using those.
3 simple steps (Score:2)
Step 2: ?
Step 3: Profit!
"you could use it for energy storage" (Score:3)
Oh yes,i barely can wait for a galaxy note phone with a plasma ring as it's battery.
Nothing possibly could go wrong.
Slashdot... (Score:1)