Making Your Own Gunpowder for Fun and Fireworks

...all the ingredients for gunpowder are readily available side by side, no questions asked, in any garden center or home-improvement store. Charcoal is sold for grilling, and sulfur comes in bags that say “sulfur” in big letters (nice old ladies use it for dusting roses). But the key secret I never figured out back then is that most brands of stump remover are little more than pure saltpeter.


... I always ground the ingredients separately with a mortar and pestle and then mixed them gently without further grinding. This results in a powder that burns energetically but slowly: perfect, it turns out, for making sparkler cones. _PopSci

Making your own fireworks might be fun. Displaying your pyrotechnic skills would certainly impress family members, friends, and co-workers. If you decide to give it a try, be careful.

There may be other reasons for some people to learn to make gunpowder. Sales of guns and ammunition have been on the upswing in the US ever since it became apparent that Senator Obama was likely to become US President. That trend continues, and many gun aficiandos have complained about high prices and limited availability for many types of firearm and ammunition. Mr. Obama favours a stricter control of firearms, and holds the "bitter clingers to their guns" in high disdain.

The day may come in the US when a person will need to know how to fabricate his own weapons, and cook up his own gunpowder. Well, probably not. But if it ever happens, knowing how to build weapons and cook gunpowder and primer material might be a valuable commercial skill.

WARNING! Creating and igniting pyrotechnic mixtures of any kind, including gunpowder, is inherently dangerous and is illegal in some places. Harmless experimentation, especially by kids, can be taken very seriously by the authorities, so an adult must always be present and take full responsibility.
_PopSci

How to make smokeless gunpowder

US Navy's Free Electron Super-Laser Energy Weapon ++

H/T BrianWang
The US Navy plans to equip its nuclear ships with powerful, tunable, free electron lasers which can serve as powerful energy weapons as well as serve several other functions. The Chinese military is developing a lethal "carrier killer" missile, meant to neutralise the power of the US aircraft carrier groups which may intervene in a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The US Navy wants to neutralise this threat in turn, as well as accomplishing many other weapons and non-weapons capabilities with the new, powerful laser.

All lasers require some kind of medium to turn light into high-energy beams--solid state lasers use crystals, while chemical lasers use (you guessed it) a stew of unfriendly chemicals. Both of those versions have their pros and cons, but neither is extraordinarily versatile; they generally power their lasers up to a certain wavelength and that’s that.

Free electron lasers, on the other hand, use a stream of supercharged electrons to power the laser at varying wavelengths. This versatility is why the Navy has referred to FELs as the Holy Grail of laser tech and why it has embarked on a $163 million quest to develop a working weapons system, $26 million of which is currently facilitating a development program at Boeing that’s due for delivery in 2012. _PopSci

Sure, everyone wants a “death ray,” as the Navy’s chief of research, Rear Admiral Nevin Carr, put it yesterday. But the program manager at the Office of Naval Research for the Free Electron Laser, Quentin Saulter, tells Danger Room that the Navy is looking at “multiple uses, not a single use” for its “Holy Grail” of lasers. And that might lighten the laser’s energy burden.

What would the laser do when it’s not trying to blast a missile out of the sky? “It can be used as a sensor,” Saulter says in an interview during the Office of Naval Research’s science and technology conference in Virginia. “It can be used as a tracker… It can enable kinetic kill systems to be more precise. It can be used for location, time-of-flight location, information exchange, can be used for communications, it can be used for target designation, it can be used for disruption.” _Wired_via_BrianWang

The US is involved in something of a new "arms race" with China, similar to an earlier arms race with the now-defunct USSR. But the US military will not be able to out-spend China the way it did the Soviets. And keeping a technological lead over the Chinese will be difficult when US corporations and labs are teeming with corporate and overseas spies -- and when US corporations themselves are vying with each other to transfer advanced technology to the Chinese, and to build huge new state of the art tech fabs and factories on the Chinese mainland.

The Chinese, in other words, will have the blueprints to the new weapons long before they are built. While Chinese infrastructure may be lagging in many areas of high technology, eventually they will be able to build and/or counteract whatever US labs invent and develop. That is something the US military must keep in mind when it spends big money on advanced weapons.

Homemade High Voltage Coilgun: When Timeout Is Not Enough

Raising a bright and willful child is not always easy. For the times when a timeout does not convince the little tyke to conform to the plan, a shock from a high voltage coil will often do the trick. And if not? A rubber-tipped metallic projectile fired from this homemade coilgun will almost certainly induce compliance. Particularly if you emphasise that the rubber tip can always be removed. ;-)

Oh, about the unconventional child-rearing practises above? Just kidding. I have always been more of a Montessori custodian myself.

From Makezine via Popsci