Or the old walking / running on custard as done by Brainiac
Soil and sand harden as SPEEDING MISSILES and METEORS SLAM into GROUND – boffins
Physicists have claimed that soil and sand toughen up when struck with hefty force from meteors and missiles hitting the ground at high speed. A lab-based test to simulate such impacts was carried out by boffins at Duke University, after they secured financial backing from the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency. They studied …
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Sunday 12th April 2015 21:42 GMT John H Woods
"Sounds like the old experiment you can do with cornflour" -- 1980s_coder
+1 for ooblek reference, but is it really the same? In that liquid, it's the mechanics of the starch chains moving over each other (sliding or jamming) which is causing the behaviour --- seems to me that what is happening here is a sort of piling up of particles in front of a penetrating object, rather than any change in the inter-particle interactions?
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Sunday 12th April 2015 17:57 GMT Captain DaFt
Re: Research
"When I read about what people have to do to earn money in the field of physics, it makes me glad that so many of them are unemployed."
Yeah, because 'understanding' and 'learning' are such bogus concepts.
Back in the day it was all 'Spirits' and 'Gods' and that worked soooo much better for us, dinnit?
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Monday 13th April 2015 03:09 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Research
"What did Otto think?"
Their grant is to help figure out how to get a nuke into a cave with people hiding in it. It is not something abstract like making an engine go faster.
Hiding under the banner of "oh yeah but maybe research will have useful offshoots" is cowardly and disingenuous.
There are many people who post on these forums that have the skills needed to work on one of these grants, but instead choose to research something more ethical with their skills. These people I admire.
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Monday 13th April 2015 23:32 GMT Swarthy
Re: Research
How are you getting "nuke" out of this article? Yes, they talked about ground-penetrating weapons, but those tend to be thermoberic, not nuclear. Nukes are almost exclusively air-burst, Ground-burst nukes have potential to be too nasty even for the people that would set them off.
And if you think that ground penetrating projectiles have no civilian use, Think about how much easier(and cheaper) that could make bridge building. Or allow for better foundations/footings for buildings, houses.
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Tuesday 14th April 2015 08:26 GMT x 7
Re: Research
" ground-penetrating weapons, but those tend to be thermoberic, not nuclear."
Ground penetrating thermobaric weapons? What gobbledegook is that? Thermobaric weapons depend on the available air to create a shockwave front. They have to be exploded in the open air - or in an existing chamber with an air-space and plenty of oxygen.
As for "Nukes are almost exclusively air-burst, Ground-burst nukes have potential to be too nasty even for the people that would set them off."
Total BS. Virtually all first strike missile nukes would be aimed at reinforced silos in the opposing country - requiring ground burst to even getting near to taking them out. Yes, ground burst is messy due to fallout, but tough shit. Its not as if there would be anyone intending to live there afterwards
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Saturday 18th April 2015 19:57 GMT Swarthy
Re: Research
Yes, thermobaric devices need space, like a cave, bunker, silo, WMD manufacturing plant, etc. The things that tend to be hardened against "Death From Above"™. So you research methods of penetrating the crunchy exterior to incinerate the chewy center.
Also, cooking a target with a TB bomb is much less likely to piss off the whole world than even the smallest of nuclear bombs. Nukes are like the ad hominim attack in an online debate: as soon as you use 'em, no-one will be on your side.
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Friday 17th April 2015 08:12 GMT x 7
Re: Research
What am I implying? That the penetration rounds are for destroying hidden WMD manufacturing capability. Its the machinery that counts - but if the operators get killed along the way, all the better. Its easy to train people, its not so easy to replace the equipment.
If you can eliminate the centrifuges, you eliminate the risk of nuclear escalation. And the Iranian centrifuges are now all deeply buried - as a result of the Israeli surface attacks of a few years ago - hence the need for a penetration round
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Tuesday 14th April 2015 15:00 GMT Mark_S
Re: Research
"When it comes to Learning about how best to detonate nuclear weapons in enclosed spaces filled with people, then yeah, i'd prefer people not to understand. There are better things they could use their IQs studying"
What is the purpose of an army?
Recognizing that many bad guys have armies, should your country have one too, at least for self defense?
If no, please abolish your army so that I can bring mine to your country and appoint myslef emporer.
If yes, what exactly is the problem with armies trying to develop ways to perform their function more effectively?
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Sunday 12th April 2015 18:42 GMT elDog
Re: Research
And there is a ton of money shoveled to projects like this - I've worked on a few over the years. The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) has probably funded 10's of billion$ on seemingly stupid ideas. Some of them (like the internet) actually have been demonstrably useful. Many of them may appear to be more Darwin Award category but I'd rather the money was spent there than on weaponry.
This particular experiment seems a bit grade-school level but I'm thinking that all the major powers have already looked at the physics of hardening. Probably back to those days when all we had were earthenware berms.
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Sunday 12th April 2015 18:38 GMT Richard Jones 1
Re: Research
Well I guess that several towns, residents and developers 'out East' are really glad that this physics research was not bothered with sooner. They are the ones who had their buildings collapse due to slow differential settlement that caused the building to tip then topple over. They probably did some fairly high impact soil compaction tests and thought that it would be fine. But buildings do not hit the ground fast, they accumulate weight over time and many soils can flow under these situations. I do not know what splendid research you would like money to be wasted on, but it is a shame that some of these alleged unemployed physics type were not able to do more useful research, e.g. on thorium power generation.
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Sunday 12th April 2015 19:06 GMT Richard Jones 1
Re: Research
I take soil liquefaction to be the result of vibration, e.g. earth quakes when the soil can almost appear to boil and once buried items can 'float' to the surface. However, this was not what I was talking about, rather the atypical, unpredictable behaviour of some soils, (but which ones and why?) when under 'duress'.
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Sunday 12th April 2015 21:38 GMT Dave 126
Re: Research
>When I read about what people have to do to earn money in the field of physics, it makes me glad that so many of them are unemployed.
Yeah okay, physicists never got poor by chasing DoD funding, you're right. Bunker-penetrating warheads - always handy! And yeah, many scientists and engineers could be put to work improving the lot of humanity instead of making better weapons. But hey, there's overlap: Sooner or later our planet will be struck by a meteorite that will cause serious damage to our species.
It will be quite nice to know a couple of days in advance roughly how fucked we will be when it hits.
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Monday 13th April 2015 10:36 GMT Paul Kinsler
Re: Am I really missing something?
"Or is this pretty basic schoolboy physics?"
Yes, you are missing something: mainly that your schoolboy demo didn't involve a careful experimental design and setup, comprehensive results/image taking, and proper analysis of the results. And that your "thick liquid" is under no compulsion to behave like the granular materials tested here.
Why on earth do you think a rewrite of a press release and a simple analogy aimed at the wider public constitutes the entirely of this research work? Let alone what will make up the content of the PRL?
Why not visit http://journals.aps.org/prl/ and look at a couple of the articles there that are open access, and test your schoolboy physics against those? It might give you an idea of the level of technical detail this kind of press-release science jornalism leaves out . And don't forget, since PRL has a page limit, the writeup there is often somewhat abbreviated.
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Monday 13th April 2015 13:25 GMT Paul Kinsler
Re: What! No Video...
There are videos, which are very nice - but without access to the journal you're probably stuck.
The group's website is http://behringer.phy.duke.edu/ ... it has some vids but not those for this article as far as I can see. There are some other articles of theirs on arXiv - see e.g.
http://arxiv.org/find/cond-mat/1/au:+Behringer_R/0/1/0/all/0/1
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Monday 13th April 2015 13:48 GMT Paul Kinsler
Re: What! No Video...
I forgot to say - the videos show exactly the "the network of force chains buried in the beads" referred to in the article - there are annoyingly tinysnapshots on the journal article's abstract page (url below), but they appear to be too tiny to see much.
http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.144502
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