Robot SHOOTS into the air with hot gas from its soft round behind Harvard uni boffins have 3D printed a robot with a soft butt able to belch hot gases, thus unleashing a remorseless and invincible-ish hopping trouser-cough machine. An article titled A 3D-printed, functionally graded soft robot powered by combustion describes the bot in the 10 July issue of Science. The new design offers a …
Which I'm immediately going to use in polite company.
Way to go, El Reg - you have been on the front page of the Google News web thingee several times in the last few days. I'm really surprised that the mano-bots chez google haven't scrubbed some of your naughty bits, though.
so this is a natural progression from this recent work at MIT. Well done.
The late 50s want their toys back.
In the late 50s early 60s there was there was Project Orion. The general idea was to lift a spaceship into space using rapid repeat explosions with the energy being expended against a pusher plate. Models using normal high explosive charges were tested and the concept was shown to be workable.
The full project never got off the ground, even though it could lift the full load of a couple of to-days very large container ships into orbit in one go, because the explosives were to be small atomic bombs and we all know the amount of noise generated at places like Greenham Common when anything with atomic in its name was mentioned (that outlook carries on to today and is seen in the opposition to nuclear power plants).
I thought the Orion project was shelved because it also could function as a first strike in a nuclear war. The whole "we're just going to set off ~100 nukes, don't worry" would cover an actual attack, and a vehicle that you could use as a repeatable EMP generator.
In general putting a nuclear weapon into orbit is considered an act of war.
As for "phnaaa phnaaa, silly anti nuke protesters" it's not them who raise the objections to nukes being used. It's those hard headed military types, since they have a better idea of the actual readiness and capability of the nuclear troops (poor and crappy) and thus the chance of something untoward happening when anyone tries to actually utilise them.
There are at least a dozen accidents with nuclear weapons* that are on public record, a number of which have had the weapons fail to go off due to "unknown reasons". Weapons being armed when they shouldn't be, arming sequences "failing" (it failed to go off, which was a good thing, but it's still a failure of a weapon), a variety of grunt mistakes (nukes loaded instead of conventional).
Oh, and there's always the fun stories of the military security tests, where they attempt to steal nuclear weapons. Well, I say attempt, they've yet to actually fail to nick one. Even when they give the base a notification that, during the next month, we're going to try and nick a nuke.
*there are more where nukes are involved, but are just a side effect. So a nuclear armed sub sinking isn't counted, just things like nukes being dropped onto towns.
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