Russia to set fire on water without NASA

Senior researcher at the Central Institute of Motor Engineering, Hamlet Khanyan, said in a short interview with Pravda.Ru that space sanctions would cause bigger damage to the United States, rather than to Russia. "Due to rising tensions in the US-Russia relations, NASA speeded up the development of its own manned spacecraft to compete against Russia's Soyuz spaceships. The space agency signed contracts for the construction of a new generation of spacecraft with Boeing and SpaceX. The contracts total $6.8 billion dollars. The new ships are planned to be launched from the territory of the United States (Florida). Will this experience be successful?" "As the saying goes, good luck." I do not think that the Americans will outdo the performance of Russian RD-180 engines. If you have ever watched Russian rockets and US shuttles taking off, you can see the difference. From an American shuttle, when it takes off, there is a large tail left, and the smoke in the tail is very thick, because the combustion of fuel is incomplete, so it falls down. When a Proton rocket takes off, it leaves a thin plasma column in the air that is barely visible, with an intermittent fiery stream of the purple color. This means that our fuel burns completely, and the propulsive effort is stronger. "With the Russian technology, two tons of fuel burn in one...

Read More........→December 13, 2014

How molecules are a lot like birds

. Emory chemist Jay Goodwin was featured in an interview by Ari Daniel of PRI's "Living on Earth." Below is an excerpt from the interview transcript ARI DANIEL: Once in a while, if you’re lucky, you catch a glimpse of something that gives away a secret of the universe. It’s like a window – up into the heavens and deep into ourselves. This is a story about someone who poked his head through just this kind of window, and we find him in Atlanta. It’s a perfect day here – Jay Goodwin walks over to a bench to sit down. And he can’t help but be reminded about a day just like this one, 5 years ago, in western Michigan where he used to live. JAY GOODWIN: I was outside – I think I was going for a walk, just to kind of clear my head a little bit. I turned a corner, and I saw this flock of birds and they took off into the sky and they started to form a shape – sort of an amorphous shape. And it was one that was dynamic, and it was changing – but it had a boundary to it, like looking at a blob of oil in water. DANIEL: It stopped Goodwin in his tracks. Several hundred birds pulsing and dipping and soaring to an invisible beat in the sky. GOODWIN: It wasn’t clear what they were responding to – there weren’t any predator birds in the sky. And you never got the sense that there was anything that was directing it from within. There was...

Read More........→April 05, 2014