The BABEL Tower

Author(s):  
André Caminoa

The idea of reaching the heavens has captivated humans throughout the ages. Rockets have proved extremely inefficient in overcoming this challenge and constructing a “Centrifugally Extended Carbon Nano-Tube Tether Space Elevator” (CECNTTSE) presents unsolved technological challenges. The authors conclude that to efficiently achieve the goal of unrestricted movement away from Earth’s gravitational pull; both the current state of the art and the proposed method for a Space Elevator should be reinvented. Therefore, the authors propose the “Buoyant Advanced Building Elevator Lightweight” (BABEL) Tower, a new concept of “a floating tower” capable of reaching up to the Karman Line and beyond. While providing the structural support to a sub-orbital elevator and offering a better launching platform for space vehicles, with built-in rocket engines, directed specifically to LEO but also beyond. Using a (hybrid) LTA and electromagnetically driven elevator car, this super-tall tower could lift tremendous amounts of cargo (and passengers) while avoiding problems associated with space elevators, and could be more feasible in a shorter time. This concept combines characteristics of the Skylon Tower (of London) and the Burj Khalifa (of Dubai) into a flared tensegrity structure with buoyant platforms, “linked” every 2.5 km and tethered to the ground. This anchor-mooring system will support a beam-stalk like buoyant shaft. The estimated aspect ratio (2.5:100) for each wing of its “Y-shaped footprint” will be 2500 meters wide at sea level. The platforms and the shaft “must be built” following a modular principle. Its buoyancy will be generated using a perfect vacuum inside its cells, thus becoming; lighter than air, free from the scarce availability of helium, and safe from hydrogen’s reactiveness. Because its foundations would have to resist the up-thrusting forces that the buoyant structure will produce (instead of the compressive forces caused by weight), the engineering of this buoyant tower is structurally comparable to a maritime spar platform for deep-water oil-extraction. This concept will have a high potential efficiency in reducing the cost per kilogram to be in transit to orbital insertion. In providing an infrastructure of planetary scale, this tower could provide the requisite platforms for other uses such as astronomical observation, clean solar energy distribution (by laser beaming), space tourism, telecommunications, research laboratories, aerosols dispersion, carbon and methane sequestration, airship hub terminals, etc.

TAPPI Journal ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (11) ◽  
pp. 37-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
LIISA KOTANEN ◽  
MIKA KÖRKKÖ ◽  
ARI ÄMMÄLÄ ◽  
JOUKO NIINIMÄKI

The use of recovered paper as a raw material for paper production is by far the most economical and ecological strategy for the disposal of waste paper. However, paper production from recovered paper furnish generates a great amount of residues, and the higher the demand requirements for the end product, the higher the amount of rejected material. The reason for this is that the selectivity of the deinking process is limited; therefore, some valuable components are also lost in reject streams. The rejection of usable components affects the economics of recycled paper production. As the cost of waste disposal continues to increase, this issue is becoming more and more severe. This paper summarizes the current state of the resource efficiency in recycled pulp production and provides information on the volumes of rejected streams and the usable material within them. Various means to use these reject streams are also discussed, including the main findings of a recent thesis by the main author. This review summarizes current internal and external use of reject streams generated in the deinking operations.


2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (11) ◽  
pp. 5899
Author(s):  
Ewa Wrona ◽  
Maciej Borowiec ◽  
Piotr Potemski

CAR-T (chimeric antigen receptor T) cells have emerged as a milestone in the treatment of patients with refractory B-cell neoplasms. However, despite having unprecedented efficacy against hematological malignancies, the treatment is far from flawless. Its greatest drawbacks arise from a challenging and expensive production process, strict patient eligibility criteria and serious toxicity profile. One possible solution, supported by robust research, is the replacement of T lymphocytes with NK cells for CAR expression. NK cells seem to be an attractive vehicle for CAR expression as they can be derived from multiple sources and safely infused regardless of donor–patient matching, which greatly reduces the cost of the treatment. CAR-NK cells are known to be effective against hematological malignancies, and a growing number of preclinical findings indicate that they have activity against non-hematological neoplasms. Here, we present a thorough overview of the current state of knowledge regarding the use of CAR-NK cells in treating various solid tumors.


Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (9) ◽  
pp. 1105
Author(s):  
Antonio D. Martinez-Perez ◽  
Francisco Aznar ◽  
Guillermo Royo ◽  
Santiago Celma

In the current state of the art, WiFi-alike standards require achieving a high Image Rejection Ratio (IRR) while having low power consumption. Thus, quadrature structures based on passive ring mixers offer an attractive and widely used solution, as they can achieve a high IRR while being a passive block. However, it is not easy for the designer to know when a simple quadrature scheme is enough and when they should aim for a double quadrature structure approach, as the latter can improve the performance at the cost of requiring more area and complexity. This study focuses on the IRR, which crucially depends on the symmetry between the I and Q branches. Non-idealities (component mismatches, parasitics, etc.) will degrade the ideal balance by affecting the mixer and/or following/previous stages. This paper analyses the effect of imbalances, providing the constraints for obtaining a 40 dB IRR in the case of a conversion from a one-hundred-megahertz signal to the five-gigahertz range (upconversion) and vice versa (downconversion) for simple and double quadrature schemes. All simulations were carried out with complete device models from 65 nm standard CMOS technology and also a post-layout Monte Carlo analysis was included for mismatch analysis. The final section includes guidelines to help designers choose the most adequate scheme for each case.


2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (07) ◽  
pp. 1860013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Swair Shah ◽  
Baokun He ◽  
Crystal Maung ◽  
Haim Schweitzer

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a classical dimensionality reduction technique that computes a low rank representation of the data. Recent studies have shown how to compute this low rank representation from most of the data, excluding a small amount of outlier data. We show how to convert this problem into graph search, and describe an algorithm that solves this problem optimally by applying a variant of the A* algorithm to search for the outliers. The results obtained by our algorithm are optimal in terms of accuracy, and are shown to be more accurate than results obtained by the current state-of-the- art algorithms which are shown not to be optimal. This comes at the cost of running time, which is typically slower than the current state of the art. We also describe a related variant of the A* algorithm that runs much faster than the optimal variant and produces a solution that is guaranteed to be near the optimal. This variant is shown experimentally to be more accurate than the current state-of-the-art and has a comparable running time.


Author(s):  
V. Sautkina

The following article is devoted to the study of current state of national education and healthcare systems. The cost of services in these areas constantly increases, there for even developed countries are forced to make significant efforts in order to maintain earlier achieved results. Due to this reason countries entered into the period of constant reforms with the purpose of maintaining that high level of health and educational services for all segments of population with a constant reduction of its volume of financing. The legal aspects of these changes are requiring manifestation of the will of politicians in order to overcome the opposition of parties which are defending their interests. As an example, the main opponents of the healthcare reforms proposed by Barak Obama in the USA are Republicans who are concerned about a significant increase of a state control over the entire national insurance system. The author comes to the conclusion that only joint actions of the government and every segment of population might actually improve the quality of medical and educational services.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (7-2020) ◽  
pp. 19-32
Author(s):  
Olga E. Konovalova ◽  
◽  
Nikolai M. Kuznetsov ◽  

The article tells the story of the creation of the Nizhne-Tulomskaya hydroelectric power station (HPP). The main energy parameters of the hydroelectric power station, the layoutof the main structures of the station, and archival photos of the construction time are given. Data on the production and consumption of electricity for own needs, the cost of 1 kW·h during the great Patriotic war are shown. It is told about the reconstruction and current state of the station.


2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-93
Author(s):  
A. V. Nebylov ◽  
V. V. Perliouk ◽  
T. S. Leontieva

The paper presents the problem of ensuring support of the flight of a group of small spacecraft (microsatellites) taking into account the small mutual distances between them. The purpose of using the orbital constellation specified is to create a radio communication system to control remote objects like unmanned aerial vehicles and ground robots located in hard-to-reach areas of the Earth from the Central ground station. To reduce the cost of microsatellite design, it was decided to rigidly fix the receiving and transmitting antennas on their housings and use the spatial orientation of the entire apparatus for antenna guidance. This seriously complicated the tasks of navigation and orientation of microsatellites in a formation and required the development of a new method for determining the orientation of a single microsatellite. The essence of the method is to process the image obtained by means of a video camera mounted on a nearby microsatellite. We used methods of computer vision. The results of mathematical modeling simulation, as well as the results of full-scale bench experiment confirming the efficiency of the proposed method are presented.


2014 ◽  
Vol 26 (12) ◽  
pp. 2669-2691 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terence D. Sanger

Human movement differs from robot control because of its flexibility in unknown environments, robustness to perturbation, and tolerance of unknown parameters and unpredictable variability. We propose a new theory, risk-aware control, in which movement is governed by estimates of risk based on uncertainty about the current state and knowledge of the cost of errors. We demonstrate the existence of a feedback control law that implements risk-aware control and show that this control law can be directly implemented by populations of spiking neurons. Simulated examples of risk-aware control for time-varying cost functions as well as learning of unknown dynamics in a stochastic risky environment are provided.


Legal Studies ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 387-416
Author(s):  
Carl F Stychin

In 1995, the highest courts in two Commonwealth jurisdictions - Canada and Australia - squarely faced the issue of the liability of builders of defective and, in the case of the Canadian Supreme Court, dangerous premises in tort.’ The determination in both cases that the builders were liable to the remote purchasers for the cost of repair, based on a duty of care owed to them, can be contrasted to the current state of tort law in this country dealing with defective and dangerous premises. In fact, the articulation of the reasons why a duty of care was imposed in these cases - as reflecting considerations both of principle and policy - provides a more compelling analysis than has been seen to date in the British law of negligence.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (86) ◽  
pp. 130-137
Author(s):  
M.V. Kivarina ◽  
◽  
N.N. Yurina ◽  
◽  
◽  
...  

This article presents the results of the analysis of the current state of crop production in Russia, as well as the dynamics of the main indicators of the industry. Crop production occupies a position of primary importance in the agro-industrial complex of the country, since the cost of agricultural products in actual prices amounted to 5348.8 billion rubles in 2018 (according to preliminary data of 2019 – 5907.9 billion rubles), including crop production – 2756.1 billion rubles (3160.0 billion rubles – in 2019) or 51.5% (53.5% in 2019); the index of crop production – 98.5% (in 2019 – 106.1%). The gross grain harvest in 2018 amounted to 113.3 million tons; in the structure of grain production, the largest share belongs to wheat – 63.69% or 72.1 million tons, then barley – 15.00% (16.99 million tons), corn – 10.08% (11.4 million tons), oats – 4.17% (4.7 million tons), rye – 1.69% (1.9 million tons), rice – 0.92% (1.0 million tons), buckwheat – 0.82% (0.9 million tons) and other crops – 7.79% (8.8 million tons). The most favorable situation was with such technical crops as soy and rapeseed. In 2018, record harvests of soybeans and rapeseed were collected – 4026.8 and 1988.7 thousand tons, respectively. The volume of vegetable production in all categories of farms for the period 2014-2018 increased from 12821.02 to 13685.23 thousand tons; the yield and marketability of products also increased. The number of vegetables and melons per population was 76.18 % in 2018.


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