3D Printing and Firearms

3D printing is becoming cheaper and more available to the average person. Blueprints for 3D models can be either created using programs and websites or they can be acquired by downloading them from certain websites. The widespread availability of 3D printers and the blueprints needed for them has lead to a concern that guns and gun parts could be easily and discreetly made by downloading precise blueprints from the internet and printing them out. This would make it easier for the average person to acquire a firearm without a license. Not only would a normal person be able to print parts for the gun itself, but magazines as well. Laws preventing large magazines would be much harder to enforce when people could print magazines holding far more bullets than legal. Something like printing firearm parts would be difficult for the government to prevent as long as 3D printers remain available to the public. This is a link for a CNN article and video on a pistol made from a 3D printer.

3D Printing

3D printers are printers that can print 3D models from designs created on computers instead of 2D. 3D models for the printers can be created by using CAD (computer aided design) programs and websites such as Tinkercad. The first 3D printers were created in the mid 1980's and increased in popularity and decreased in price around 2010. Objects are created by putting the chosen materials down in layers. Many 3D printers still print slowly and the size of the objects that they are able to print is very limited, usually less than a foot in any direction. However, like many technologies, 3D printers are becoming cheaper and more advanced, which is making them easier for the public to purchase. With prices going down, the number of people who are able to use 3D printers is going up, opening new opportunities for people such as artists and hobbyists. 3D printers also allows people to print custom pieces for just about anything, given that the object is not too large and the person printing has the proper measurements. A video can be found below that shows a 3D printer printing.

CIA

The Central Intelligence Agency's
Seal

The Central Intelligence Agency one of the United States' main intelligence-gathering groups. It was formed in 1947 during the presidency of Harry S. Truman, following the OSS. The George Bush Center for Intelligence located in Langley, Virginia is home to the headquarters of the CIA. The current director of the CIA is John Brennan, and the current deputy director is Michael Morell. The CIA plays a large role in the United States' gathering and analyzing of intelligence, counterintelligence and counterespionage, and counterterrorism. The CIA had a major part in gathering intelligence on Soviet technologies during the Cold War. Things like the SR-71 aircraft were developed and designed to move quickly enough and fly high enough to evade surface-to-air missiles and allow pilots to more safely fly over the Soviet Union. CIA operations help to gather intelligence on terrorist organizations and plans, allowing for more terrorist attacks to be prevented and for leaders of terrorist groups to be either captured or killed. One CIA operation resulted in Osama bin Laden being killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan in May of 2011.

The CIA's headquarters in Langley, Virginia

Radios and Edison

Radios are nifty things. They allow the user to choose a particular frequency they want to hear and amplify it. This is the same concept that a tuning fork and a resonance tube can show. When hit, a tuning fork will vibrate at a certain frequency that is dependent on its size. The larger the tuning fork, the lower its frequency. When it is at most positions, the rod in the resonance tube will not amplify the vibrations of a particular tuning fork. However, there are certain spots in the resonance tube where the rod will amplify the vibrations. The sound is amplified because the wave that is being produce by the tuning fork matches the wave that is bouncing off of the rod in the resonance tube. The crests and troughs from the tuning fork match the crests and troughs from the wave that bounced back. If another tuning fork with a higher frequency was struck and placed in front of the resonance tube when the rod was at that distance, it would not be amplified. Each tuning fork will only be amplified at specific distances, and each specific distance will only amplify one tuning fork.

Thomas Edison might generally be seen as someone who worked alone, but he actually worked with many people. At one point, he had 10,000 people working for him. Edison worked on hundreds of inventions. While the light bulb is the invention people associate him with the most, Thomas Edison experimented with chemistry, finding ways to record and play back sound, and he even worked on film. His short film from 1910, A Trip to Mars, shows a scientist traveling to Mars after he discovers a way to reverse gravity. The film even has crude (but somewhat impressive for the time) special effects. To see the film on YouTube, click here.

Model Rockets

Model rockets consist of a few simple parts: the body, the nose cone, the parachute, wadding, tail fins, an engine mount, and the engine itself. Many model rockets are made out of light weight materials such as cardboard, paper, and plastic. The light weight allows rockets to fly hundreds of feet in the air.
The type of a rocket engine can be determined by a letter and a number followed by another number. An example of this is a C6-7 engine. The letter (in this case 'C') shows what class the engine falls under. The rocket's engine provides a degree of impulse (measured in Newton-seconds) based on its class. A class 'B' engine is more powerful than a class 'A' engine, but it is less powerful than a class 'C' engine. The first number (6) represents the average thrust the engine produces. A higher first number in the same class also means that the engine has a shorter burn time. This means that a C6 engine will have a short and powerful burn and a C2 engine will have a longer and weaker burn. The second number (7) is the number of seconds between the end of the engine providing thrust and the deployment of the rocket's parachute. So, knowing all of these things, it can be said that a C6-7 engine is an engine that provides an impulse of 5-10 Ns (C class), has a short and powerful burn, and takes a time of 7 seconds to deploy the parachute.
To prepare the model rocket for launch, the engine is placed into the engine mount with the hole at the bottom. Then, the igniter is put in the hole. An igniter plug seals the hole in order to keep the igniter in place. The rocket is then place on the launch pad and the igniter is attached to the controller. When the controller's safety key is pressed down, the rocket is ready for launch. The launch button is then pressed and the rocket, assuming everything was assembled correctly, soars into the sky. A few seconds later, the parachute will deploy and the rocket will gently drift back to the ground.

Heating Houses and Engines

Hot water (red) flows to the convector,
and the cold water (blue) flows back
to the heater to be heated up again

Today, heating houses is mostly done by heating a fluid and then transporting it to each room. Hot water heating works by heating water with a burner and moving it to convectors that are in the house. The heat from the water moves throughout the room. When the water loses enough of its heat, it is transported back to the hot water heater to be heated up again. Hot air heaters work in a similar way. Air is heated by a burner and distibuted throughout the house. 
Another type of heater codenses and evaporates gas. When the liquid is evaporated, it gets colder because it is under less pressure. The gas is then sent outside. The air outside heats up the cold gas, which then flows back inside to be condensed. When it is condensed, the heat from the outside that heated up the gas is tranferred in to the house and the liquid is evaporated in order to be heated by the outside again.

Two-stroke engines and four-stroke engines work in the same basic way. The engine intakes fuel, a spark plug ignites the fuel, exhaust from the combustion is released, and the process repeats itself. In a two-stroke engine, fuel enters and is pushed to the top by the piston moving down. Then the fuel is compressed by the piston moving back up. The spark plug ignites the fuel and the combustion of the fuel pushes the piston down, allowing the exhaust from the fuel to be released.The piston in a four-stroke engine moves up or down four times in one cycle. The low pressure caused by the piston moving down the first time results in the fuel valve opening and fuel entering the cylinder. The piston then moves up and compresses the fuel. A spark plug ignites the fuel and the combustion causes the piston to be pushed down for the second time. The piston then moves up for the second time and the exhaust from the combustion is pushed out when the exhaust valve opens.

Fiber Optic Cables and the AT&T GNOC

What better way to look at how things work than to dive right into the internet and what makes it run smoothly. The internet is a massive collection of networks from all around the world. Even though these networks are separated by extremely large distances of land and ocean, information and data can still be transmitted extremely quickly and efficiently. This is because of fiber optic cables that are able to span very great lengths in order to connect continents. Light is able to travel very quickly through the pieces of thin 

The glass (the colored strips) allows
light to travel at extremely high speeds,
 and is protected by durable layers.

 glass that are at the core of fiber optic cables. Unfortunately, even though it is efficient, the small strips of glass are still small strips of glass, so they are  fragile. These strips of glass carry a lot of data between major countries and continents, so they can not afford to break. The glass is protected by materials durable enough to withstand the natural stress that is put on it by the ocean. However, if one of these fiber optic cables were to encounter a problem, people using the internet would probably not notice any major change in the speed at which they are sending and receiving data. One of the strong points of how the internet works is that there is always another way for information to travel. No single cable (or group of cables) can be considered the sole reason for everything working properly.There are so many different connections between places that even if the most direct connection is, for whatever reason, not working, there is always another path for information to take. While it is very helpful that all of the internet cannot be affected by one failure, it is still up to large companies such as AT&T to keep everything running as smoothly as possible.

The AT&T Global Network Operations Center in Bedminster, New Jersey keeps the flow of data and information running quickly and cleanly every day. Because the internet, calling, and texting are used by so many people, everything must work properly all of the time. Many precautions are taken in order to insure

Dozens of monitors display graphs that show what is
working properly and what might fail

that there are as few failures as possible. Everything is monitored. Information and numbers gathered from one day is compared to averages and days like it to spot patterns that are unusual during a normal day. Global, national, and regional maps indicate when a component of the network is not working as well as it should. News channels and weather channels are monitored in order to prepare for and respond to natural disasters such as storms, hurricanes, and earthquakes. Data is monitored so that hackers and overflows of information can be dealt with. Even very small problems are spotted and fixed immediately, before they can grow and and become major problems, doing a lot of damage to connections and networks. Keeping such a large system running requires a large amount of people in different fields. Thousands of people hold the connections throughout the world together, whether it is someone monitoring data for signs of a failure, or someone sent to fix a cell tower. People spend large amounts of time and resources ensuring that the thing that connects everyone does not fall apart.