STEM Blogs with Ram

  When Top Gun Maverick released in 2022, viewers were astounded by a great scene in the beginning of the movie where the main character breaks Mach 10 in a prototype hypersonic jet. This jet doesn't actually exist in real life, and hypersonic vehicles remain limited to very few testing vehicles today. The current speed record for a crewed, powered aircraft, wasn't actually set by the SR-71 Blackbird as many people assume, but the X-15 in 1967 which reached Mach 6.7. The most important difference between the SR-71 and the X-15 is the propulsion system. The X-15 used a rocket-powered engine and the SR-71 used an after-burning turbojet, but neither of these solutions are cost-effective and efficient enough for hypersonic travel. The answer lies in today's topic, ramjets and their supersonic derivative, scramjets. In the constant race to go faster, aircraft designers have typically been restricted by a major limiting factor, the propulsion system. At first, it was the propelle...

Introduction For the last century, fossil fuels have been depended on globally to meet transportation demands. Unfortunately, emissions from fossil fuels have caused global warming, leading to environmental damage and rising sea levels. The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 27% of CO2 emissions emanate from the transportation sector, compelling countries to seek cleaner fuels for vehicles (United States Environmental Protection Agency). Fossil fuels are essential for the global economy due to their cost-effectiveness. Furthermore, developing countries rely on them to keep their economies afloat. This dependence on fossil fuels means they cannot be phased out quickly. Greater public awareness of the need for cleaner technologies has fueled Tesla’s growth and the rise of battery-powered electric vehicles (BEVs). However, BEVs have competition in the form of hydrogen fuel cells (FCEVs) and biofuels, which include biodiesel and ethanol, for being the next big clean technolo...

When I say the word AI, what is the first thing that comes to your mind? Is it Cortana from Halo or Replicants from Blade Runner? The phrase "robots will take your jobs" is inferred to be a while away, but for many people, that phrase could be much closer to reality than we think. And spoiler alert: it might not be a humanoid robot that takes your place. Recently, there’s been a massive influx of AI-generated content and websites. We’ve all seen the humorous pictures from DALL-E mini (now called Craiyon) that take prompts from the user and create pictures from them, often to wild and hilarious results. These results are often in the uncanny valley, as the AI used in DALL-E mini isn’t quite good enough to make the pictures realistic, causing distorted body parts and the picture to look quite off. But DALL-E mini’s older (and original) brother, DALL-E makes many more realistic pictures with its more established algorithm.  With the hype around DALL-E, a surge of AI content gene...

  Introduction Since the Industrial Revolution, the world has relied on fossil fuels to power increasing energy demands, but the climate crisis is forcing countries to reduce emissions. Nuclear energy might not be renewable energy, but it lasts for a long time and is clean for the environment, releasing very few greenhouse gases while still producing a significant amount of energy for our power grid. So why hasn’t this fuel replaced every other energy source? It’s because of a combination of economic issues that we are yet to fix as well as countries’ split opinions on it. The longer we use fossil fuels, the more harm we cause to the Earth, which means we need to find clean energy sources that can phase them out and nuclear energy could be one. While nuclear energy can’t be a viable energy source on its own, we should try to find out if it can accompany other energy sources to create a sustainable energy grid. The political duality of nuclear energy Despite European countries’ posi...