They still live on Earth, but David Oh and hundreds of scientists and engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have adopted such strange sleeping patterns that they might as well be living on Mars. You see, ever since the rover Curiosity landed on Mars, they've all switched to living on "Mars time."
Here's what the Oh family learned from living as if they were on the Red Planet:
A Mars day, called a sol, is 39 minutes and 35 seconds longer than a 24-hour day on Earth. That small difference adds up fast, so that noon becomes midnight after 2 1/2 weeks. As scientists wind up sleeping during the day and working through the night, their lives pull away from those of their families.
Not the Oh clan. For the first month, all five have stuck together, an idea championed by David's wife, Bryn.
"This project for six years has been so much a part of his life," she said at the family's tidy two-story home in La Cañada Flintridge. "This was a way that I thought that we could be a part of it."
Amina Khan of The Los Angeles Times has the story: Link
Comments (0)
So lets try and build a "Mini Sun" on the "Earth". What do you do if it is a complete success, and you can not put it out? Can we just call these fellas at the NIF "Gort"?
...I really need to read the article before commenting...
speaking of surviving the Hardon Collider, did they actual do collisions? I thought it was postponed because of some helium leak?
It's crazy!
Anyway, why should we worry? Pistol Shrimp fire that kind of heat off all the time.
http://tinyurl.com/7a3xpj
or alternatively
Who can recreate the best black mesa.
LHC already has that one guy so i think they're in the lead.
In addition there is no harmful radioactive bi-products or pollution produced from the process.
You guys should be excited!! This is a big deal, if they can ever get a fusion reactor to work. If they can get a net gain from the energy they put into the process, then the worlds energy needs would be solved overnight.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cglaHHuotz0
The wonderful thing about fusion is that you're basically able to choose the products of the reaction, based on what you decide to fuse, unlike fission which is guarenteed to produce dangerous radioactive particles. Fusion is 100% safe, unless you count the extremely high operating temperatures and high-energy neutrons (theoretically used to create tritium).
And even though the primary fuels are rare isotopes of hydrogen, there's enough deutrium to sustain all the fusion reactors we could possibly need for longer than the sun will live. And tritium, as I mentioned above, can actually be bred as a byproduct of the fusion reaction. Frickin' sweet!
And no, it's not like the sun or Spiderman 2 in the sense that we won't be seeing a sustained ball of fusing matter. In the case of inertial confinement reactors, reactions last a fraction of a second, multiple times per second. Think rapid pulses of energy.