Portal:Technology and applied sciences

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The Technology and applied sciences Portal

Technology (Gr. technologia (τεχνολογία) < techne (τέχνη) "craft" + logia (λόγος); "saying") Technology is the application of developments in science and engineering to benefit humanity. It may be defined as: "Solutions for real human problems by the development and application of tools, machines, materials, goods, or information in the form of skills, knowledge, processes, blueprints, plans, diagrams, models, formulae, tables, engineering designs, specifications, manuals, or instructions."

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A nuclear weapon is a tool employed to injure, defeat, or destroy an adversary. It derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions of fission or fusion. As a result, even a nuclear weapon with a small yield is significantly more powerful than the largest conventional explosives, and a single weapon is capable of destroying an entire city.

In the history of warfare, nuclear weapons have been used only twice, both during the closing days of World War II. The first event occurred on the morning of August 6, 1945, when the United States dropped a uranium gun-type device code-named "Little Boy" on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The 2nd event occurred 3 days later when the United States dropped a plutonium implosion-type device code-named "Fat Man" on the city of Nagasaki. The use of these weapons, which resulted in the immediate deaths of around 100,000 to 200,000 people and even more over time, was and remains controversial.

Since the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, nuclear weapons have been detonated on over 2,000 occasions for testing and demonstration purposes. The only countries known to have detonated such weapons are (chronologically) the United States,Soviet Union, United Kingdom, France, People's Republic of China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea.

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Credit: United States Air Force

Gas metal arc welding (GMAW), sometimes referred to by its subtypes, metal inert gas (MIG) welding or metal active gas (MAG) welding, is a semi-automatic or automatic arc welding process in which a continuous and consumable wire electrode and a shielding gas are fed through a welding gun. ...Archive/Nominations

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Christopher Columbus Kraft, Jr. (born February 28, 1924) is a retired NASA engineer and manager. After graduating from Virginia Tech University in 1944, Kraft was hired by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the predecessor organization to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). He worked for over a decade in aeronautical research before being asked in 1958 to join the Space Task Group, a small team entrusted with the responsibility of putting America's first man in space. Assigned to the flight operations division, Kraft became NASA's first flight director. He was on duty during such historic missions as America's first spaceflight, first orbital flight and first spacewalk.

At the beginning of the Apollo program Kraft retired as a flight director in order to concentrate on management and mission planning. In 1972 he became director of the Manned Spacecraft Center (later Johnson Space Center), following in the footsteps of his mentor Robert Gilruth. He held the position until his retirement from NASA in 1982. During his retirement, Kraft has consulted for numerous companies including IBM and Rockwell International, and he published an autobiography entitled Flight: My Life in Mission Control.

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Did you know...

...that only one of the 266 1076 Class steam locomotives built for the Great Western Railway was named, and the rest had only numbers?
...that the six Charles Tayleur locomotives ordered by Isambard Kingdom Brunel for the Great Western Railway were unsuccessful?

...that the intensity of a tropical cyclone (pictured) is usually determined by the Dvorak technique using only visible and infrared satellite images?

...that the technique of double-balloon enteroscopy allows any position along the gastrointestinal tract to be visualized in real-time?

...that ANTARES, a neutrino telescope under construction in the Mediterranean Sea, will find neutrinos from outer space by looking downward, into the Earth?

...that KATRIN is an experiment to determine the mass of the neutrino by measuring the energies of electrons given off from the beta decay of tritium?