Humongous Tunnel Boring Machines

Tremors!.. They're getting louder... OMG, it's getting out - and it's HUGE!!

What dwells beneath, does not dwell so quietly - these enormous machines are notorious for producing shaking and loud noise, but they do the job - excavating tunnels wide enough to fit two trains inside (maximum tunnel diameter 19 meters). They produce a smooth tunnel wall, but woe to any creature that stands in its way (obviously).

Some hard rock facts:

- Modern TBMs have fifteen electric motors, which supply some machines with a record-breaking 6,375 horsepower.

- "The machine tows nearly 800 tons of backup equipment through the tunnel, including trailers for electrical support systems, firefighting supplies and even a lunchroom."

- "The face of the drill contains a small door through which workers can crawl to replace the 15 or so cutters that wear out every day."

- The biggest ever built was used to excavate Gotthard Base Tunnel - 19 meters diameter. It was made by Herrenknecht AG of Schwanau, Germany in 2005. Here is a scaled-down model.

Here is how Herrenknecht company describes it:
"With two 57km-long tunnels, the Gotthard Base Tunnels will be the world's longest railway tunnel. Four Herrenknecht Gripper machines are excavating a total of 75km through the Alps. The identical S-210 and S-211 (diameter of 8.830m each) have been cutting their way through the rock from the south since November 2002 and February 2003 respectively.

These machines easily capture the imagination of movie makers. The whole pulp-style scientific romance "Core" is built around exploring the Earth's innards, and in "Oceans 13" the guys smuggle a 600-ton tunnel boring machine under Vegas.

Here is TBM cabin control center - and the driver



Through Hard Rock, with the help of Heavy Metal -
"Gripper" machines use special plates to push rock around.

Gripper, Double-Gripper, MixShield, Double-Shield - Herrenknecht AG manufacturers a full spectrum of these macho machines.








The Worlds Largest Hard-Rock Tunnel Boring Machine - STRABAG AG- at the Niagara Tunnel Project (current progress: around 8 meters per day)







Excavating close to earthquakes

There were special conditions with the Arrowhead Project, that Herrenknecht AG has been commissioned to undertake - very close proximity to major earthquake fault:

"Nobody has ever excavated so close to the site of earthquakes before. The route of the S-233 and S-234 through the South Californian mountains above San Bernardino is only a few hundred meters away from San Andreas Fault."

"Providing drinking water for the population of Los Angeles, California, is without doubt one of the greatest challenges facing the municipal authorities and local government. The mountain overlooking San Bernardino, through which a tunnel is to be drilled to pipe the water, presents quite unique challenges of its own: the aqueous rock has been heavily fissured by the San Andreas fault, which is located very close to the mountain."

Here is a good animation of how these machines work:

The Joys of Microscope Photography

"Wretched beasties moving about very nimbly"

This is what Anton van Leeuwenhoek said about the creatures he saw in his 1670s microscope. The "Father of Microbiology" made over 400 different types of microscopes and discovered bacteria and spermatozoa, among other things.... among many, many other things. All these "beasties" live in enchanting world and can sometimes look very cute (witness waterbears) - and photographers keep discovering new angles and frontiers of their microcosm.

For a number of years Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition revealed to the world the intricate and highly-sophisticated wonders of the micro-world... With the exclusive permission of Olympus BioScapes, here are a few entries that particularly caught our attention:

The "Fairy Fly" wasp (left) and some iridescent part of the aptly-named "Jewel Beetle".

Left: Live Daphnia... and the portrait of a fly (with a swanky hairdo)







Larva of Brachiolaria looks like a wannabe squid








Peeking inside the wild cucumber (Echinocystis lobata) -








The eye of the honeybee (left). And the flatworm on the right seems to have a face. Pretty morose kind of face







Best Microscope Photos, according to Nikon Small World and National Geographic

Sponsored by Nikon, the annual Small World Contest showcases "the beauty and complexity of life as seen through the light microscope." See all the winners and honorable mentions here, and also presentation on National Geographic.


Nanotube Factory:
"Nanotubes are elongated, hollow cylinders of carbon atoms, just 1/50,000 the width of a human hair... Sometimes, the heated mass of nanotubes grows like a bulb in the spring."
Drug Landscape:
The antibiotic powder mitomycin - "viewed through polarizing filters, the drug gave off colors that reveal its complex crystal structure."

A Chick Embryo

Mathematical Jokes Collection

A PROOF THAT 2 + 2 = 5

To prepare us for the amazing proof that 2+2 makes 5, let's sample some "Classic Jokes about Mathematicians" first...


...Engineer: "How can you POSSIBLY visualize something that occurs in 9-dimensional space?" Mathematician: "Easy, first visualize it in N-dimensional space, then let N go to 9"


...once they locked a mathematician in a cell with plenty of canned food and water but no can opener. Eventually they found his dessicated corpse, which was propped calmly against a wall, among piles of unopened cans and this was inscribed on the floor in blood:
Theorem: If I can't open these cans, I'll die.
Proof: assume the opposite...


...Theorem: All horses have an infinite number of legs.
Proof: Everyone would agree that all horses have an even number of legs. It is also well-known that horses have forelegs in front and two legs in back. 4 + 2 = 6 legs, which is certainly an odd number of legs for a horse to have! Now the only number that is both even and odd is infinity; therefore all horses have an infinite number of legs.


...The biologist : "Look! There's a herd of zebras! And there, in the middle : A white zebra! It's fantastic ! There are white zebra's ! We'll be famous !"
The statistician : "It's not significant. We only know there's one white zebra."
The mathematician : "Actually, we only know there exists a zebra, which is white on one side."
The computer scientist : "Oh, no! An Exception Occured..!"


...The USDA once wanted to make cows produce milk faster, to improve the dairy industry. The foremost mathematician of his time offered to help them with the problem. Upon hearing the problem, he told the delegation that they could come back in the morning and he would have solved the problem. In the morning he handed them a piece of paper with the computations for the new, 300% improved milk cow.
The plans began:
"A Proof of the Attainability of Increased Milk Output from Bovines:
Consider a spherical cow......"


...A mathematician is a person who says that, when 3 people are supposed to be in a room but 5 came out, 2 more have to go in so the room gets empty...


...There was the following scrawled on a math office blackboard in college:
1 + 1 = 3, for large values of 1


...A physics joke: "Energy equals milk chocolate square"

Source: here
------------------

And finally, an indisputable proof that "2 + 2 = 5"

"First and above all he was a logician. At least thirty-five years of the half-century or so of his existence had been devoted exclusively to proving that two and two always equal four, except in unusual cases, where they equal three or five, as the case may be."
-- Jacques Futrelle, "The Problem of Cell 13"

Most mathematicians are familiar with -- or have at least seen references in the literature to -- the equation 2 + 2 = 4. However, the less well known equation 2 + 2 = 5 also has a rich, complex history behind it. Like any other complex quantitiy, this history has a real part and an imaginary part; we shall deal exclusively with the latter here.

Many cultures, in their early mathematical development, discovered the equation 2 + 2 = 5. For example, consider the Bolb tribe, descended from the Incas of South America. The Bolbs counted by tying knots in ropes. They quickly realized that when a 2-knot rope is put together with another 2-knot rope, a 5-knot rope results.

Recent findings indicate that the Pythagorean Brotherhood discovered a proof that 2 + 2 = 5, but the proof never got written up. Contrary to what one might expect, the proof's nonappearance was not caused by a cover-up such as the Pythagoreans attempted with the irrationality of the square root of two. Rather, they simply could not pay for the necessary scribe service. They had lost their grant money due to the protests of an oxen-rights activist who objected to the Brotherhood's method of celebrating the discovery of theorems. Thus it was that only the equation 2 + 2 = 4 was used in Euclid's "Elements," and nothing more was heard of 2 + 2 = 5 for several centuries.

Around A.D. 1200 Leonardo of Pisa (Fibonacci) discovered that a few weeks after putting 2 male rabbits plus 2 female rabbits in the same cage, he ended up with considerably more than 4 rabbits. Fearing that too strong a challenge to the value 4 given in Euclid would meet with opposition, Leonardo conservatively stated, "2 + 2 is more like 5 than 4." Even this cautious rendition of his data was roundly condemned and earned Leonardo the nickname "Blockhead." By the way, his practice of underestimating the number of rabbits persisted; his celebrated model of rabbit populations had each birth consisting of only two babies, a gross underestimate if ever there was one.

Some 400 years later, the thread was picked up once more, this time by the French mathematicians. Descartes announced, "I think 2 + 2 = 5; therefore it does." However, others objected that his argument was somewhat less than totally rigorous. Apparently, Fermat had a more rigorous proof which was to appear as part of a book, but it and other material were cut by the editor so that the book could be printed with wider margins.

Between the fact that no definitive proof of 2 + 2 = 5 was available and the excitement of the development of calculus, by 1700 mathematicians had again lost interest in the equation. In fact, the only known 18th-century reference to 2 + 2 = 5 is due to the philosopher Bishop Berkeley who, upon discovering it in an old manuscript, wryly commented, "Well, now I know where all the departed quantities went to -- the right-hand side of this equation." That witticism so impressed California intellectuals that they named a university town after him.

But in the early to middle 1800's, 2 + 2 began to take on great significance. Riemann developed an arithmetic in which 2 + 2 = 5, paralleling the Euclidean 2 + 2 = 4 arithmetic. Moreover, during this period Gauss produced an arithmetic in which 2 + 2 = 3. Naturally, there ensued decades of great confusion as to the actual value of 2 + 2. Because of changing opinions on this topic, Kempe's proof in 1880 of the 4-color theorem was deemed 11 years later to yield, instead, the 5-color theorem. Dedekind entered the debate with an article entitled "Was ist und was soll 2 + 2?"

Frege thought he had settled the question while preparing a condensed version of his "Begriffsschrift." This condensation, entitled "Die Kleine Begriffsschrift (The Short Schrift)," contained what he considered to be a definitive proof of 2 + 2 = 5. But then Frege received a letter from Bertrand Russell, reminding him that in "Grundbeefen der Mathematik" Frege had proved that 2 + 2 = 4. This contradiction so discouraged Frege that he abandoned mathematics altogether and went into university administration.

Faced with this profound and bewildering foundational question of the value of 2 + 2, mathematicians followed the reasonable course of action: they just ignored the whole thing. And so everyone reverted to 2 + 2 = 4 with nothing being done with its rival equation during the 20th century. There had been rumors that Bourbaki was planning to devote a volume to 2 + 2 = 5 (the first forty pages taken up by the symbolic expression for the number five), but those rumor remained unconfirmed. Recently, though, there have been reported computer-assisted proofs that 2 + 2 = 5, typically involving computers belonging to utility companies. Perhaps the 21st century will see yet another revival of this historic equation.

Tesla Power in Your Backyard

Get your energy buzz in the morning

We wrote about the full scale high-voltage and Tesla experiments going on in Russia, producing 100 meter lightnings and other spectacular effects in the surrounding forest. These effects proved to be too fascinating to pass by, as many inspiring scientists in various countries are building small scale replicas of Tesla and other high-voltage equipment in their backyards and garages. We've been sent a number of images, electrifying enough to scare some fire departments - proving that this backyard activity is popular not just with curious engineers who want to get a quick "buzz" but also with photographers.

These "furry" sparks can extend to 8 feet and carry around half a million volts.

Russian "Master" sends his chair "back to the future"

With kind permission of Master we show here his experiment with DIY Tesla set. His impressive results include a 5 meter long high-voltage discharge, which converted a normal chair into an "electric" one, and a demonstration of fluorescent tubes glowing purely from the rig's surrounding electro-magnetic field. Other friends of Master also tried a lesser-scale set-up, made from the dozens of used tin coffee cans.




Tesla Down Under

You can observe bigger Tesla installations in action on Peter Terren's site Tesla Down Under. With his permission, here are some of the most spectacular images from his hair-raising experiments. Note, that Peter basically works with the equipment on his own, with a little help from his interested kids - so it's really quite impressive that he came up with such an extensive catalog of electrical phenomena found on his site.


The encircling power arcs are achieved by connecting motorized 6 foot aluminum tube to the top of the Tesla coil. A variation of this setup, called "The Eye of Sauron" produces a breathtaking effect, when rotated (long-exposure photo). "Sauron's Aura" is even more striking - the Tesla coil is mounted 11 foot (3.3 m) in the air and the rotating rod is attached to a long beam.

Peter also conducts some very odd looking experiments with "swimming pool sparks" (do not try to imitate this, as you definitely have to know what you are doing). Peter says, "The salt water pool is very conductive like a big ground so there is absolutely no sensation. People associate water and electricity with danger. Like dropping the hairdryer in the bathtub. But the danger only occurs if the water forms a path to you then ground ie if you touch the taps, bath drain or wet grounded floor. The chain mail glove has a copper braid attached otherwise it would be a problem if I had my hand right out of the water."

Faraday cage (or Dalek cage, as a homage to Dr. Who) will get you so close to 6 foot sparks, that it just might "electrify" you for the rest of the day. Peter calls this "Honey... there is some electrical interference", and adds that the mobile phone works just fine.






His site also provides a wealth of information on how to build and enjoy your own Tesla coil. What else does he do in his garage and around it? How about moving small objects by the ionic wind, crushing cans, shrinking coins, exploding stuff for fun and BBQ-ing hot dogs with high-voltage. Just the sort of activity we'd like to do after a stressful day in the office.
When not in the shack, Peter invades his wife's kitchen to abuse the microwave oven. Here is a very special microwave CD Burner.

Tools for Your Shop

There is a company, located in Wisconsin backwoods, near Wisconsin Dells - "Resonance Research", which is the world's largest manufacturer of Tesla coils, Van de Graaff generators, and various other high voltage machines. They can set you up for some high energy experimentation. (photos by permission)

Model M-150 Resonance Tesla Transformer in action.

Most Powerful Supercomputers: Brains and Beauty

"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."
- Popular Mechanics (1949)

In Isaac Asimov's classic story, "The Last Question," a supercomputer is, again and again, asked how to deal with the eventual heat death of universe. After upgrade upon upgrade, it finally has an answer -- but, alas, no one is left to hear it, because the universe has ended. So it simply states its answer out loud: "Let there be light." Put another way, imagine that sometime in the future someone asks the smart-machine-to-end-all-smart-machines: "Is there a God," and said machine answers, "There is now."

Early Supercomputers

What exactly qualifies as the earliest example of a "computer" is a matter of debate: some say the abacus while others point to the Antikythera mechanism, and still others push the calendar up to the 1800s with Charles Babbage's difference engine. Whatever their origins, though, with the advent of the digital revolution, computers have truly become super.
One of the first early super computers has to be Konrad Zuse's series of machines. Created in 1930s and 40s, they were one of the very first computers to be programmable as well as multi-function. Soon after, the Brits, needing some serious number-crunching during the war, built the aptly named Colossus -- which was smashed to bits in the name of secrecy when its job was done. Not that America also wasn't up to the task: the U.S. had its own long line of increasingly sophisticated, and powerful, devices. First there was the Model K, then the ABC, followed by the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, and then came ENIAC.
ENIAC was considered state of the art, a true electronic brain capable of astounding feats of calculation. Now, alas, we can do the same things that ENIAC could with a cheap throwaway calculator. But in 1943, ENIAC was the tops.

After ENIAC came EDVAC, a change of much more than a few letters. Created by the brilliant John von Neumann, this series of computers was a monumental leap forward in computational ability, flexibility, and speed. On a side note, as early 1945 or so, computers gave us the term "bug" for a problem with a machine. Coined by Grace Hopper, because -- quite literally -- a moth got caught in the circuitry.


Bigger and smarter machines

The 60s, and the age of the transistor, gave us bigger and smarter machines. Lead by master builders like IBM, these machines became behemoths of blinking lights and whirling tape reels, able to handle the chaos of weather prediction as well as tax records with the greatest -- for the most part -- of ease.










Human chess players rendered obsolete in 6 games

But supercomputers seriously came into their own when they challenged ... well, okay, their "handlers" allowed them to challenge … man at his own game: namely chess.

The first human vs. machine challenge is also up for debate as more than likely a few early programmers tried their hands at defeating their own creations and even pitting computers against computers. Transistors, though, quickly became superior to squishy human brains. In 1981 Cray Blitz took the crown from Joe Sentef, and then in 1988 Deep Thought managed to share the glory with Tony Miles -- though some suspect the machine felt a tiny bit sorry for Tony and so allowed him to join it in the winner's circle. This suspicion is probably incorrect, however, as Garry Kasparov, who felt no such sympathy, actually beat the machine in two games. But In 1997, Deep Blue avenged its mechanical sibling and stomped Kasparov in six games. Ouch! What really hurts is that humans now regularly lose to their computational betters. The question today is whether they'll even let us fleshy beings sit at the same table with them, let alone deem us worthy to play with them.

MareNostrum - a perfect combination of beauty as well as brains

What's really interesting about the new generation of super machines is not that they're smart -- which they most definitely are -- but how, well, sexy they've gotten.
Just take a look at MareNostrum, which is a perfect combination of beauty as well as brains. Sure, the monster machine that lives in a deconsecrated chapel in Barceolona, might be only (ahem) the 8th most powerful of its super-smart digital kin, but it's certainly a star in the looks department: a series of imposing monoliths set inside a climate-controlled glass room, a perfect juxtaposition between its 21st century mind and the ancient architecture of the chapel. It's been used for everything from climate modeling to helping decipher the human genome -- all the while looking fantastic as it works.

Inside: human cutting-edge technoogy meets the deep reverence of spiritual architecture -







The fastest supercomputer is to be built for... games and movies

The future of gaming and cinema seems to be the "AMD Fusion Render Cloud".

"AMD has a long track record in the supercomputing world. Seven out of 10 of the world's fastest machines, including the fastest two computers on the planet, are powered by AMD hardware," said CEO Dirk Meyer. "Today, AMD is pleased to announce a new kind of supercomputer unlike any other ever built. It is being designed to break the one petaflop barrier, and to process a million compute threads across more than 1,000 graphics processors."
HD cloud computing concept: "Imagine playing the most visually intensive first-person shooter game at the highest image quality settings on your cellphone without ever having to download and install the software, or use up valuable storage space or battery life with compute-intensive tasks."
Here is a detailed view of the robot used in the new AMD Cinema 2.0 demo

Apocalyptic Scientific Experiments

It may not be surgically clean or painless, but it can be very fast

We love science and the scientific method - without it we'd be still thinking that lightning was Zeus hurling thunderbolts, the sun was an enormous campfire, and the earth itself was balancing on huge turtles (a cosmology that still holds a certain charm to certain people). We'd be ignorant troglodytes who would not know what hit us, if the world suddenly came to an end.

We have scientists to tell us that we should learn to love - and fear - the Finality, the coming End of All Things, that is darn nigh inevitable, though hopefully removed by a few quadrillion years. But rest assured, science can speed up things considerably in this direction, and here is a short how-to list.

1. Nuclear Fun-Was-Had-By-All. "Now we are all sons of bitches."

The poster child for the fear that science and engineering can give us – beyond Shelley’s fictitious Frankenstien, of course -- was born on July 16, 1945, in New Mexico. Not one to miss something so obvious, its daddy, the one and only J. Robert Oppenheimer (‘Oppy’ to his pals) thought “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” from the Bhagavad Gita – but Kenneth Bainbridge, the Test Director, said it even better: "Now we are all sons of bitches."
Sure, the Trinity Atomic Bomb Test -- the event that began the so-called atomic age, leading to our now-constant terror that one day the missiles may start to fly and the bombs begin to fall -- was the first, but since then there have been all kinds of new, if not as flashy, scientific investigations that could be ten times more destructive, or even could ultimately gobble up our Universe...

2. A Subatomic Nightmare, or the Bubble of Doom

Naturally this is an exaggeration, but it’s still fun – in a shudder-inducing kind of way – to think about all these wildly hypothetical doomsdays. Putting aside the already overly publicized fears over the Large Hadron Collider creating a mini black hole that immediately falls to the core of the earth – eventually consuming the entire globe – some researchers have expressed concern that some day we may create, or unleash, a subatomic nightmare.

The hunt for the so-called God particle (also called a Higgs boson), for instance, has made some folks nervous: one wrong move, one missing plus or minus sign, and we could do something as esoteric and disastrous as discovering that we exist in a metastable vacuum (or "false vacuum") – when one of our particle accelerators creates ("nucleates") a bubble of lower energy vacuum, which would then "approach at nearly the speed of light and destroy the Earth instantaneously, without any forewarning."
"Vacuum decay is the ultimate ecological catastrophe; in the new vacuum there are new constants of nature; after vacuum decay, not only is life as we know it impossible, so is chemistry as we know it. However, one could always draw stoic comfort from the possibility that perhaps in the course of time the new vacuum would sustain, if not life as we know it, at least some structures capable of knowing joy. This possibility has now been eliminated." - S. Coleman.
Some models describe the bubble as pretty much Universal, or bigger than our Universe, in which case we - just like these troglodytes - certainly would not know what hit us.

3. "Grey Goo" replaces everything, wants more

A new threat to everyone on the planet is the idea of developing nanotechnology. If you've been napping for the last decade or so, nanotech is basically machines the size of large molecules: machines that can create (pretty much) anything on a atomic level. The question – and the concern – is what might happen if a batch of these microscopic devices gets loose. The common description of this Armageddon is "grey goo."

The little machines would dissemble the entire world, and everything and everyone on it, until all that would be left is a spinning ball of, you guessed it, goo.
Somewhere down there are nanobots, busy having breakfast. Some Dr. Doom scenarios mention that once the Earth is consumed, the army of nanobots could be directed toward the Sun, and the Sun would dispose of them (or it could be the other way around - you never know 'till you try).

4. Rogue Genetic Tweaks

Another concern for some folks is that, for the first time, we’ve begun to seriously tinker with genetics. We’ve always fooled with animals (just look at a Chihuahua) but now we can REALLY fool with one. It doesn’t take a scientist to imagine – and worry about – what happens when we tinker with something like ebola or, perhaps even worse, create something that affects the reproduction of food staples like corn or wheat. Spreading from one farm to another, carried perhaps on the wind, this rogue genetic tweak could kill billions via starvation.
And then there’s us. What happens if the tweak – carried by a virus or bacteria – screws not with our food but where we’re the most sensitive: reproduction? Unable to procreate we’d be extinct in as few as a hundred years.

5. One lonely AI seeks human company... is anybody there?

While it’s become a staple of bad science fiction, some scientists see it as a natural progression: whether we like it or not, one day we will create a form of artificial intelligence that will surpass and replace us. Even putting aside the idea that our creations might be hostile... (see this old pulp image, for example).
...the fact that they could be better than us at everything means that it would simply be a matter of time before they go out into the universe – and leave us poor throwbacks behind.

Apocalyptic scenarios a la carte

We could continue to enumerate the frightening possibilities (here is a good site that lists a lot of them), and you could always go see the "2012" movie - see it the only proper way, in January 2013 - but when it comes to scientific progress, it seems to be flexible enough to produce new, gruesome and unavoidable ways to end it all, just when we're not looking (although it always works out fine in the end)

You've got to love this frightful aspect of science. It's thrilling to know that the world of observation, hypothesis, prediction and experiment can be at the same time so lethal and absurd. It threatens with doom, and yet always provides the happy ending.
And, if some enthusiastic scientists inadvertently send our world spiraling into a cosmological in-sink-erator... one thing left to us would be the hope that there is Somebody Out There... Somebody who will wake up and realize that it was all a dream.