Gorgeous BLOCK tube amplifier to go into production

The Block tube amplifier is currently a working prototype, but designer Mateusz Glowka told Gizmag that production models will be ready by the end of June
Call me old fashioned if you will, but there's nothing more pleasing than the soft, natural and warm sound produced by a tube amplifier. The Block amplifier by industrial designer Mateusz Glówka is as much a visual treat as a sonic one. The somewhat harsh geometric lines are offset by the gratifying glow of the half dozen tubes on display outside the stainless steel and aluminum housing and, in a novel twist, the main sound board is attached with hinges so that it can be raised for dusting the electronics. The tube amplifier is a working prototype at the moment, but the designer told Gizmag that he expects production models to be available soon.

Glówka – a graduate of the Industrial Design Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, Poland – told us that he has spent the last few months testing the tube amplifier with some speakers (also his creation) called SoundPunch, featuring a tube amp-friendly Fostex speaker and laminated, 17mm (0.66-inch) thick dimmed glass walls, the latter said to help keep unwanted vibrations to a minimum. The Block prototype was created along with electronics veteran Marian Kopecki, who has "35 years of experience in fields ranging from military microwaves through filtering network interference to electric vehicles."

Two E88CC tubes used for RIAA correction, two 6N6P tubes for the driver and two 6P3S-E tubes for the output stage are positioned on the top of, and outside, the upper housing and connect to the hinged main board within. Other components include TG MAN 67 SE and TS 180/121 output transformers and DS5/200 chokers, a 230V, 50Hz IEC 60320 C14 power input with 630maT slow blowing fuse power protection, a mechanical power switch to reduce stand-by consumption to zero, a 50 kohm ALPS volume control and contactron input selectors.
Internal components known to cause the most signal interference have been placed in closed compartments to isolate them from the audio's path. The 11.8 x 9.8 x 10-inch (300 x 250 x 255 mm) Block weighs just under 40 pounds (18 kg) and is said to take about a minute to warm up.

To the rear are four DC-coupled, 50 kohm RCA line inputs, a 47kohm, DC-coupled RCA input for a turntable and speaker outputs. Output power at 440Hz is reported to be 2 x 3.5W (with total harmonic distortion of one percent) and 2 x 5W (with five percent THD), the frequency response at 3W is 35Hz to 35kHz and the optimum speaker load is 8 ohms.
Glówka told us that the first limited production run will be ready for the end of June and that "the prices are not set yet, but I would think it should cost about a US$1000 per piece."

NASA awards US$269 million to stimulate privately operated spacecraft development

Artists image of the Dragon spacecraft in orbit (Image: SpaceX)
Once the last of NASA's space shuttle fleet shuffle off to retirement in a few months, the space agency will be totally dependent on the Russian Soyuz to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. At a cost of around US$63 million per seat, or more than $753 million a year, NASA is turning to the commercial companies to provide a more economical option. As part of the second round of funding for the agency's Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) initiative that aims to stimulate development of privately operated crew vehicles to low Earth orbit, it will dole out grants totaling $269.3 million to four private companies. One of the recipients is SpaceX, which has been awarded $75 million to develop a launch escape system for its Dragon spacecraft.
Although the Dragon spacecraft was designed from the outset to carry seven astronauts into space and, with the successful flight on December 8th, 2010, the company has already proven the performance of many of the Dragon and Falcon 9 rocket components, a launch escape system that quickly separates the crew module from the rest of the rocket in the case of an emergency, is one of the technologies that needs to be realized before the craft can actually transport humans into low Earth orbit.
Unlike traditional solid rocket tractor escape towers that, due to their extreme weight, need to be jettisoned within minutes of liftoff, SpaceX's integrated escape system design builds the escape engines into the side walls of the Dragon spacecraft. Additionally, since the escape system is integrated into the spacecraft, it can be reused, to help reduce costs.
The company says that not only does such a design eliminate the danger of releasing a heavy rocket tower after launch, it also provides the crew with an emergency escape capability throughout the entire flight. This is an obvious advantage over the Space Shuttle, which has no escape system, and the Apollo moon program that allowed escape only during the first few minutes of flight.
The award involves funds being paid as SpaceX meets a series of specific hardware milestones that will see the company modify the Dragon to accommodate crew. These include:

• the static fire testing of the launch escape system engines
  
• intitial design of abort engine and crew accommodations
  
• prototype evaluations by NASA crew for seats, control panels and cabin

The other companies to be awarded funding are Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC), Blue Origin, and Boeing. SNC's $80 million award will allow the company to further develop its Dream Chaser vertical-takeoff, horizontal landing (VTHL) lifting body spaceplane, while Boeing has been awarded more than $92 million, largely for itsCST-100 capsule. Although Blue Origin failed to meet all its milestones for the first funding round, the company has been awarded $22 million award for its pusher escape system.
The agreements between NASA and the four successful companies will run until May 2012.

Fiber-optic laser-based system brings rifle sights into the 21st century

A lab prototype of ORNL's Reticle Compensating Rifle Barrel Reference Sensor (Image: ORNL/Ron Walli)
At long ranges, snipers must compensate not only for crosswinds and the fact that bullets travel in a curved trajectory, but also allow for even very small barrel disruptions that can cause a shooter to miss their intended target by a wide margin. Contending with such difficulties makes feats such as the 1.53 mile (2.47 km) sniper kills by British Corporal Craig Harrison even more impressive, but a new type of rifle sighting system developed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) could take one of these variables out of the equation. The fiber-optic laser-based sensor system precisely measures the deflection of the barrel relative to the sight and automatically adjusts the crosshairs to match the true position of the barrel.
The ORNL technology places glass optical fibers into the exterior grooves, known as flutes, found on the barrels of modern high-powered rifles. These reduce weight and create added surface area to enable the barrel to cool faster. Such flutes are either produced by the manufacturer or can be retrofit to existing barrels. A laser diode sends a signal beam into the optical fibers which split the beam twice, sending one light beam along the top of the rifle barrel and another along the side. This allows the system to measure both the vertical and horizontal barrel deflection.
Traditional reticles are normally manually adjusted by one-fourth minutes of angle, but through the use of a combination of algorithms, optics and additional sensor inputs, the ORNL's Reticle Compensating Rifle Barrel Reference Sensor can also take into account distance and other factors affecting bullet trajectory to automatically adjust the crosshairs by 1/1,000th of a minute in real time. According to the leader of the development team, Slobodan Rajic, this makes the ONRL system 250 times better than traditional reticles.
But the ONRL team isn't done yet. Rajic and his colleagues are also working on a laser-based bullet tracking system that will provide specific information about the bullet flight path to give shooters even better odds of hitting their target.
Source: ORNL

Laser igniters could spell the end for the humble spark plug

Spark plugs could soon be replaced be laser igniters
Internal combustion engines are likely to remain in widespread use for some time yet, but it's possible that we may be bidding adieu to that most iconic of engine parts, the spark plug. Researchers from Japan's National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) are creating laser igniters that could one day replace spark plugs in automobile engines. Not only would these lasers allow for better performance and fuel economy, but cars using them would also create less harmful emissions.
Located at the top of each engine cylinder, spark plugs send a high-voltage electrical spark across a gap between their two metal electrodes. That spark ignites the compressed air-fuel mixture in the cylinder, causing a controlled mini-explosion that pushes the piston down.
One byproduct of the process are toxic nitrogen oxides (NOx), which pollute the air causing smog and acid rain. Engines would produce less NOx if they burnt more air and less fuel, but they would require the plugs to produce higher-energy sparks in order to do so. While this is technically possible, the voltages involved would burn out the electrodes quite quickly. Laser igniters on the other hand, could ignite leaner mixtures without self-destructing because they don't have electrodes.
The NINS scientists also address another limitation of spark plugs – the fact that they only ignite the area of the air-fuel mixture closest to them (the top), with much of the heat of the explosion being absorbed by the metal cylinder walls before it can reach down to the piston. Lasers, by contrast, could focus their beams into the middle of the column, from which point the explosion would expand more symmetrically – and reportedly up to three times faster than one triggered by a spark plug.
Additionally, engine timing could be improved, as lasers can pulse within nanoseconds, while spark plugs require milliseconds.
In order to cause the desired combustion, a laser would have to be able to focus light to approximately 100 gigawatts per square centimeter with short pulses of more than 10 millijoules each. Previously, that sort of performance could only be achieved by large, inefficient, relatively unstable lasers. The Japanese researchers, however, have created a small, robust and efficient laser that can do the job. They did so by heating ceramic powders, fusing them into optically-transparent solids, then embedding them with metal ions in order to tune their properties.
Made from two bonded yttrium-aluminum-gallium segments, the laser igniter is just 9 millimeters wide and 11 millimeters long. It has two beams, which can produce a faster, more uniform explosion than one by igniting the air-fuel column in two locations at once – the team is even looking at producing a laser with three beams. While it cannot cause combustion with just one pulse, it can do so using several 800-picosecond-long pulses.
So far, the laser-ignition system hasn't been installed in an actual automobile. The scientists are reportedly in negotiations with a large spark plug manufacturer and with global auto components manufacturer DENSO Corporation.
In the meantime, drivers wishing an upgrade from their "old school" spark plugs might be interested in Pulse Plugs, which reportedly boost engine efficiency and performance by storing ignition energy, then discharging it in the form of intense plasma balls.
The NINS research will be presented next month at the Conference on Lasers and Electro Optics, in Baltimore.

Stephen Hawking's Time Machine

In an article in the Daily Mail this week, British cosmologist Stephen Hawking outlined not one, but three, theoretically realistic ideas for traveling through time, one of which he says is even practical.
The Fourth Dimension
First, though, you have to get your head around the notion that time is a dimension, just like width, height and length.
Hawking uses the example of driving in your car: You go forward. That's one direction. You turn left or right, that's a second. You journey up a mountain road, that's a third. The fourth dimension is time.
"Time travel movies often feature a vast, energy-hungry machine. The machine creates a path through the fourth dimension, a tunnel through time. A time traveler, a brave, perhaps foolhardy individual, prepared for who knows what, steps into the time tunnel and emerges who knows when. The concept may be far-fetched, and the reality may be very different from this, but the idea itself is not so crazy," Hawking writes.
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The laws of physics actually accommodate the notion of time travel, through portals known as wormholes.
"The truth is wormholes are all around us, only they're too small to see. They occur in nooks and crannies in space and time," Hawking writes. "Nothing is flat or solid. If you look closely enough at anything you'll find holes and wrinkles in it. It's a basic physical principle, and it even applies to time. Even something as smooth as a pool ball has tiny crevices, wrinkles and voids.
Quantum Foam and Tiny Wormholes
"Down at the smallest of scales, smaller even than molecules, smaller than atoms, we get to a place called the quantum foam. This is where wormholes exist. Tiny tunnels or shortcuts through space and time constantly form, disappear, and reform within this quantum world. And they actually link two separate places and two different times."
The tunnels, unfortunately, are far too small for people to pass through -- just a billion-trillion-trillionths of a centimeter -- but physicists believe it may be possible to catch a wormhole and make it big enough for people, or spaceships, to enter, Hawking writes.
"Theoretically, a time tunnel or wormhole could do even more than take us to other planets. If both ends were in the same place, and separated by time instead of distance, a ship could fly in and come out still near Earth, but in the distant past. Maybe dinosaurs would witness the ship coming in for a landing," Hawking writes.
Ultimately, scientists may find that only travel into the future is possible, as the laws of nature may make travel to the past impossible so the relationship between cause and effect is maintained. For example, if you could travel in the past and do something that prevents yourself from being born, how could you exist in the future to travel back in time?
WIDE ANGLE: Is time travel possible?
Time as a Flowing River
What if we could travel faster than light? How would be do it? Introducing the warpship.
Hawking suspects radiation feedback would collapse any wormholes scientists managed to expand to useable sizes, rendering them useless for actual travel. But there's another way -- navigating the variable rivers of time.
"Time flows like a river and it seems as if each of us is carried relentlessly along by time's current. But time is like a river in another way. It flows at different speeds in different places and that is the key to traveling into the future," Hawking writes.
Albert Einstein first proposed this idea 100 years ago that there should be places where time slows down, and others where time speeds up, notes Hawking. "He was absolutely right."
The proof, says Hawking, lies in the Global Positioning System satellite network, which in addition to helping us navigate on Earth, reveals that time runs faster in space.
"Inside each spacecraft is a very precise clock. But despite being so accurate, they all gain around a third of a billionth of a second every day. The system has to correct for the drift, otherwise that tiny difference would upset the whole system, causing every GPS device on Earth to go out by about six miles a day," Hawking writes.
The clocks aren't faulty -- it's the pull of Earth that's to blame.
"Einstein realized that matter drags on time and slows it down like the slow part of a river. The heavier the object, the more it drags on time," Hawking writes. "And this startling reality is what opens the door to the possibility of time travel to the future."
Black Holes and Flying at the Speed of Light
The keys to time travel are black holes, objects so dense that not even light can escape their gravitational grip.
"A black hole ... has a dramatic effect on time, slowing it down far more than anything else in the galaxy. That makes it a natural time machine," Hawking writes.
Here's how it might work:
Imagine a spaceship orbiting the super-massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, 26,000 light years away. From Earth, it would look like the ship is making one orbit every 16 minutes, Hawking writes.
"But for the brave people on board, close to this massive object, time would be slowed down," Hawking writes. "For every 16-minute orbit, they'd only experience eight minutes of time."
If they circled for five years, local time, 10 years would have passed back on Earth.
This scenario doesn't produce the paradoxes inherent in wormhole travel, but it's still pretty impractical, Hawking acknowledges.
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But there's one more possibility: traveling super fast.
"This is due to another strange fact about the universe," writes Hawking -- the cosmic speed limit: 186,000 miles per second, or the speed of light.
"Nothing can exceed that speed. It's one of the best established principles in science," writes Hawking, but "believe it or not, traveling at near the speed of light transports you to the future."
"Imagine a track that goes right around Earth, a track for a super-fast train. Onboard are passengers with a one-way ticket to the future. The train begins to accelerate, faster and faster. Soon it's circling the Earth over and over again.
"To approach the speed of light means circling the Earth seven times a second. But no matter how much power the train has, it can never quite reach the speed of light, since the laws of physics forbid it.
"Instead, let's say it gets close," writes Hawking. "Something extraordinary happens: Time starts flowing slowly on board relative to the rest of the world, just like near the black hole, only more so. Everything on the train is in slow motion."
Speed of Light Protection
This happens to protect the cosmic speed limit, Hawking said. Here's why:
Say there's a child running forward up the train. "Her forward speed is added to the speed of the train, so couldn't she break the speed limit simply by accident? The answer is no," writes Hawking. "The laws of nature prevent the possibility by slowing down time onboard. Now she can't run fast enough to break the limit. Time will always slow down just enough to protect the speed limit."
This is the essence of why time travel into the future is possible.
"Imagine that the train left the station on January 1, 2050. It circles Earth over and over again for 100 years before finally coming to a halt on New Year's Day, 2150. The passengers will have only lived one week because time is slowed down that much inside the train. When they got out they'd find a very different world from the one they'd left. In one week they'd have travelled 100 years into the future," Hawking writes.
Right now, the fastest motion on Earth is taking place in the circular tunnels of the world's largest particle accelerator at CERN, in Geneva.
"When the power is turned on (particles) accelerate from zero to 60,000 mph in a fraction of a second. Increase the power and the particles go faster and faster, until they're whizzing around the tunnel 11,000 times a second, which is almost the speed of light. But just like the train, they never quite reach that ultimate speed. They can only get to 99.99 per cent of the limit. When that happens, they too start to travel in time. We know this because of some extremely short-lived particles, called pimesons. Ordinarily, they disintegrate after just 25 billionths of a second. But when they are accelerated to near-light speed they last 30 times longer."
To accelerate humans to that speed, we'll need to be in space, concludes Hawking, noting that so far, the fastest that people have traveled is 25,000 mph aboard Apollo 10.
"To travel in time we'll have to go more than 2,000 times faster (than Apollo 10).  And to do that we'd need a much bigger ship, a truly enormous machinebig enough to carry a huge amount of fuel, enough to accelerate it to nearly the speed of light. Getting to just beneath the cosmic speed limit would require six whole years at full power.
"We could, in theory, travel extraordinary distances within one lifetime," Hawking writes. "A trip to the edge of the galaxy would take just 80 years."
Image: An artist's impression as to how it might look as you enter the mouth of a wormhole (source).