Behind the Scenes at a U.S. Factory Building New Nuclear Bombs
“Within every American nuclear weapon sits a bowling-ball-size sphere of the strangest element on the planet. This sphere, called a plutonium pit, is the bomb’s central core. It’s surrounded by conventional explosives. When those explosives blow, the plutonium is compressed, and its atoms begin to split, releasing radiation and heating the material around it. The reaction ignites the sequence of events that makes nuclear weapons nuclear. In early nuclear bombs, like the ones the U.S. dropped on Japan in World War II, the fission of plutonium or uranium and the fatal energy released were the end of the story. In modern weapons, plutonium fission ignites a second, more powerful stage in which hydrogen atoms undergo nuclear fusion, releasing even more energy. The U.S. hasn’t made these pits in a significant way since the late 1980s. But that is changing. The country is modernizing its nuclear arsenal, making upgrades to old weapons and building new ones. The effort includes updated missiles, a new weapon design, alterations to existing designs and new pits. To accomplish the last item, the National Nuclear Security Administration has enacted a controversial plan to produce 50 new pits a year at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and 30 pits a year at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the birthplace of the bomb. The first pits will be designed for a weapon called W87-1, which will tip the new intercontinental ballistic missile, called Sentinel. After that the complex will produce pits for other bomb designs.” (Scientific American)
New ways to pay for research could boost scientific progress
“How might science be done on an alien planet? It would be remarkable if the little green men had invented universities, funding committees, a tenure system and all the other accoutrements of modern academic life. This thought experiment, dreamed up by Michael Nielsen, a physicist, and Kanjun Qiu, an entrepreneur, was not merely a flight of fancy. It was part of an essay published last year pointing out that the way modern science is organised is not the only way it could be done, and perhaps not even the best way. Experimenting with different sorts of institutions, or novel ways to hand out research money, might help fix what the authors say is a “discovery ecosystem in a state of near stasis.” Dr Nielsen and Ms Qiu are among a band of researchers concerned that scientific progress is slowing. A paper published in 2020 by economists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (mit) and Stanford University concluded that American research productivity was falling, with more effort required to produce smaller gains in knowledge. A second paper, published in January this year, argued that the “disruptiveness” of both scientific papers and patents, as measured by citation patterns, fell by over 90% for papers, and more than 80% for patents, between 1945 and 2010” (The Economist)
A weekly dispatch featuring exclusive interviews with deep tech founders & a roundup of the most important deep tech news.
- Delhi Plans to Unleash Cloud Seeding in Its Battle Against Deadly Smog
- SETI Institute receives $200M from estate of Franklin Antonio, co-founder of Qualcomm
- Laser Fusion Start-Ups Ignite the Quest for Boundless Energy
- U.K. Becomes First Country to Approve a CRISPR Disease Treatment
- Researchers identify ‘switch’ to activate cancer cell death
- New Breed of Supercomputer Aims for the Two Quintillion Mark
- AI outperforms conventional weather forecasting for the first time: Google study
- Joby Aviation flies eVTOL in New York City for the first time, ahead of air taxi operations
- ExxonMobil Aims To Be Top Lithium Supplier For Electric Vehicles, Drills 1st Lithium Well
- Vay begins remotely operated drives in Las Vegas without a human present
- Autonomous lab discovers best-in-class quantum dot in hours. It would have taken humans years
- Scientists propose a new method of creating laser pulses more than 1,000 times as powerful as those currently in existence
- Scientists 3D-print hair follicles in lab-grown skin
- We can now sample water to find the DNA of every species living there
- All aquatic species in river mouths are contaminated by microplastics, says new report
- Researchers improve water splitting reaction for green hydrogen gas production
- Researchers establish green pharmaceutical production from wood waste
- 3D generative AI platform Atlas emerges from stealth with $6M to accelerate virtual worldbuilding
- SPAC delays $350M merger with stratospheric balloon startup World View – again
- Menlo Ventures closes on $1.35B in new capital, targets investments in AI startups
- 13 Projects Receive $44M For Innovations In Enhanced Geothermal Systems
- Antora Energy receives $4M grant to scale thermophotovoltaic technology
- Energy Department offers $3.5B for battery manufacturing
- Deep Sky, a Montreal-based carbon removal project developer, raised a $57.5M Series A
- NTx, a life sciences company building biomanufacturing platforms, raised a $47.5M Series B
- Silicon photonics startup SiLC raised $25M
- Switch Maritime, a startup developing fuel cell and battery electric zero-carbon ferries, raises $10M Series A
- Carbon conversion startup OCOchem raised a $5M seed round
- Quoherent, a startup developing room-temperature edge-capable quantum processors, raised a $4.7M seed round
- No-code robotics software startup Augmentus raised a $5M Series A
- Nanomedicine startup ViaNautis raised a $25M Series A
- Aether Biomedical, a biotech company creating bionic prosthetics, raised a $5.8M Series A
- Bioengineered corneal implant startup KeraLink International raised a $2.5M seed
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