Posts Tagged: "The Avengers"

Superhero Tech: Iron Man’s suit features futuristic nuclear fusion tech

Perhaps the most important component to any Iron Man suit is the arc reactor core, which provides the energy required to power the suit’s repulsors and other equipment. Although there is no true real world equivalent to the arc reactor, it’s been speculated based on cinematic depictions of the unit that it functions as a multi-isotope radio decay cell for nuclear energy generation using a palladium core. It’s also assumed that the reactor could not be a hot-fusion reactor as it sits within Tony Stark’s chest and would char him from the inside out… Last August, reports on a breakthrough in nuclear fusion reactor design from researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) could indicate that commercially viable tokamak reactors could be running within five to ten years. MIT’s reactor design, based on essentially the same physics behind ITER and other tokamaks, incorporates the use of superconductors composed of rare-earth barium copper oxide (REBCO) superconducting tapes, which have become commercially available only in recent years. The new superconducting materials enable stronger magnetic fields for even more plasma control, allowing smaller reactors to increase fusion power by a factor of 10. This would allow MIT to build a reactor half the size of ITER which would produce about the same amount of energy at a much lower cost. One working ARC reactor, which is what MIT calls its nuclear reactor design, could produce 200 megawatts (MW) of power delivered to the electric grid from a 50 MW input.

Game of Thrones, Interstellar and Drake among 2015’s most pirated digital media

Digital piracy was alive and well in 2015. Not surprisingly, the incredibly popular HBO television series Game of Thrones was the most pirated TV show with 14.4 million downloads, far outpacing its TV viewership of 8.1 million American viewers. Game of Thrones also has the distinction of breaking the all-time record for most simultaneous peer shares via torrent with 258,131 peers engaging in simultaneous shares.

The Walt Disney Company – An Innovative and Creative Pioneer

A strong sense of innovation runs through the entire operations of the Walt Disney Company and the many forms of entertainment media developed by the corporation. For decades, Disney has benefitted from the work of its Imagineering teams, groups of designers and engineers who develop rides and many other features for Disney’s 11 theme parks located worldwide as well as cruise ships, water parks and hotels. Disney’s amusement parks have long had a particular focus on the subject of innovation as can be seen in the many attractions of the Tomorrowland and Epcot theme lands over the years, from the Carousel of Progress to the high tech interactive facility known as Innoventions.
Surprising to some may be that the effects of the Supreme Court ruling in Alice v. CLS Bank has negatively impacted the patent holdings of Disney as a series of patents protecting lip-sync animation technologies were declared invalid in September by a U.S. district judge in California, which found that the patents only protected an abstract set of rules.