The Daily Nerd (March 21st, 2014)

The Daily Nerd (March 21st, 2014) #

How Engineers Are Building a Power Station At the South Pole

If you had to choose the most difficult place in which to build a power station, the South Pole would probably come close to the top of your list. During the winter, the station and the 40 or so people who overwinter there, are entirely isolated. Power comes from three generators burning JP-8 jet fuel which has to be flown in during the summer at considerable cost. But the South Pole is also home to an increasing number of ambitious experiments. The most famous is probably the Icecube Neutrino Observatory, which peers through a cubic kilometre of ice beneath the pole, looking for the tell-tale flashes generated by high energy neutrinos. This has its own set of generators that power the detectors and their associated electronics. But researchers are currently building an even bigger experiment called the Askaryan Radio Array that will search for neutrinos in a volume of ice thousands of times larger than Icecube.

A Startlingly Simple Theory About the Missing Malaysia Airlines Jet

There has been a lot of speculation about Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Terrorism, hijacking, meteors. I cannot believe the analysis on CNN; it’s almost disturbing. I tend to look for a simpler explanation, and I find it with the 13,000-foot runway at Pulau Langkawi. We know the story of MH370: A loaded Boeing 777 departs at midnight from Kuala Lampur, headed to Beijing. A hot night. A heavy aircraft. About an hour out, across the gulf toward Vietnam, the plane goes dark, meaning the transponder and secondary radar tracking go off. Two days later we hear reports that Malaysian military radar (which is a primary radar, meaning the plane is tracked by reflection rather than by transponder interrogation response) has tracked the plane on a southwesterly course back across the Malay Peninsula into the Strait of Malacca.

How Lithium-Ion Batteries Age: Scientists Offer Insight

Aging is a part of life, even for lithium-ion batteries. And battery life is an important consideration for electric-car owners, especially in these early days before there’s sufficient real-world data on actual life of electric-car battery packs over the 10- or 15-year lifespan of a typical vehicle. Just like any other car part, batteries degrade over time, and so does their ability to hold a charge.