Rhenium

I've been putting together a spreadsheet of the elements, and I came across this little tidbit in Wikipedia:

(Rhenium) is among the ten most expensive metals on Earth, at times exceeding US$ 11,000 per kilogram. About 35 kilograms of Rhenium are required in the construction of a commercial jet engine.

$385,000 worth of Rhenium to build a single jet engine!?!? Well, that would go a long way towards explaining why the things are so bleeding expensive. I would think that this would make their scrap value much higher than it is.

From The Expert Network:

Analysis: Rhenium is a critical metal, one without which it would be impossible to produce modern military jet engines, the most efficient jet engines for civilian aircraft, and rocket engines for military use and space exploration.

This is because when it is used in concentrations of 2 to 6% to make superalloys those alloys can be used to make jet and rocket engine components to contain and direct the superheated exhaust of jet and rocket engines without melting or losing their strength.

The higher the temperature at which a jet or rocket engine operates the more efficient and powerful it is.

Sorry about the picture. I got tired of looking at poor quality, fuzzy, smeared black and whites, and settled for this diagram of a Kawasaki gas turbine.

German Plane Landing Attempt

I had this in my list of videos on regular Pergelator, but it got deleted due to some vast media conspiracy, so I dug around and found another version and posted it here. Enjoy it while you can.

Gone Daddy Gone

Via Dustbury
I liked the first part of this video when the bugs are little, but I did not enjoy the last part with the human sized bugs. Gave me the creeps.

Tim

Mmm, mmm, good

Found on SondraKiStan, USA

Cuthbert Lift

I am poking around on the internet using some clues I found on my Dad's old computer, and I stumble across this guy who is trying to build a better elevator. He is using some of my ideas. Actually he probably thought of it all on his own, like many other people, but this Cuthbert guy has actually built a prototype of an elevator that might actually work. Here's a longish video:

Strange Horizons fundraising drive

Something I had never heard about, but I like the idea so much I gave them $25 without even reading any of their stuff. Strange Horizons:

"We're a nonprofit online speculative fiction magazine that pays professional rates for fiction; we're run by a staff of volunteers; we've published new material every week, freely available online, for nearly 8 years (and almost all of it is still available in our archives), including fiction, poetry, articles, reviews, art, and columns; we're funded entirely by donations, in a sort of public-radio-like model; in the US, donations to us are tax-deductible. Stuff we publish gets picked up regularly for Year's Best reprint volumes. Last year a story we published was on the Nebula ballot and another was on the Hugo ballot. Also, our Editor-in-chief, Susan Marie Groppie, was nominated for the World Fantasy Award."

From Boing Boing.