US Navy's stealthy Zumwalt destroyer is moored at Bath Iron Works

In a Thursday, Oct. 31, 2013 file photo, the Navy's stealthy Zumwalt destroyer is moored at Bath Iron Works, in Bath, Maine. 

The skipper of the technology-laden Zumwalt is Capt. James Kirk, and his futuristic-looking vessel sports cutting-edge technology, new propulsion and powerful armaments, but this ship isn't the Starship Enterprise. 

The technology-laden Zumwalt taking shape at Maine's Bath Iron Works is unlike any other U.S. warship. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty, File)

Captain Kirk's futuristic-looking vessel sports cutting-edge technology, new propulsion and powerful armaments, but this ship isn't the Starship Enterprise.

The skipper of the stealthy USS Zumwalt is Navy Capt. James Kirk, and yes, he's used to the jokes about the name he shares with the TV starship commander played by actor William Shatner.

"I don't take any offense," he told reporters in an interview. "If it's a helpful moniker that brings attention to help us to do what we need to do to get the ship into the fleet and into combat operations, then that's fine."

While it's no starship, the technology-laden Zumwalt taking shape at Maine's Bath Iron Works is unlike any other U.S. warship.

The Navy's largest destroyer will feature a composite deckhouse with hidden radar and sensors and an angular shape that minimizes its radar signature. Its unusual wave-piercing hull will reduce the ship's wake.

It's the first U.S. surface warship to use electric propulsion, and its power plant is capable of producing enough electricity to light up a small city and to power future weapons like the electromagnetic rail gun.



Inside, it's just as unique. The number of sailors needed to stand watch will be reduced through the use of cameras and video monitors that show what's going on outside.

The bridge will indeed look like something from "Star Trek" with two chairs surrounded by nearly 360 degrees of video monitors.

A handful of reporters accompanying Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel on Thursday got a first look at the ship's interior while it's under construction. It's due to be christened in the spring.

The 610-foot (186-meter)-long ship has the highest level of automation on a U.S. surface warship, with systems in place to combat flooding and to put out fires, among other things.

Because of automation and technology, the number of sailors needed to run it will be nearly half the number serving on the current Arleigh Burke-class destroyers.

All this whiz-bam technology comes at a price that sailors couldn't have imagined in the mid-1960s, when the first episodes of "Star Trek" aired on television.

The first-in-class Zumwalt will cost northward of $3.5 billion, a price tag so high that the Navy was forced to reduce the number of ships in the series to just three.

2 Pluto Moons Get New Names: Styx & Kerberus

The International Astronomical Union has officially approved Kerberos and Styx as the new names for two of Pluto's moons. Image released on July 2, 2013.

CREDIT: IAU

It's official! Two tiny moons orbiting the dwarf planet Pluto finally have new names: Styx and Kerberos.

The International Astronomical Union — the organization responsible for naming celestial objects — has approved "Kerberos" and "Styx" as the new monikers for two of Pluto's moons that were previously called P4 and P5 respectively, but fans of TV's "Star Trek" might not be too happy about the new names.

The IAU selected the names based on the results of the Pluto Rocks Internet poll sponsored by SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), but the top vote-getter, Vulcan, ultimately wasn't chosen as a name for one of the tiny moons.

Actor William Shatner — who portrayed the Starship Enterprise captain James T. Kirk in the original "Star Trek" TV series — suggested Vulcan (the home planet of the show's pointy-eared Vulcan people) as a possible candidate, and voters overwhelmingly cast their ballots in favour of it.

In total, nearly 500,000 votes were cast, with about 170,000 of those going to Vulcan alone. In second place was Cerberus with Styx coming in third in the online poll. But for Vulcan, it was not meant to be.

"The IAU gave serious consideration to this name, which happens to be shared by the Roman god of volcanoes," SETI officials wrote in a statement.

"However, because that name has already been used in astronomy, and because the Roman god is not closely associated with Pluto, this proposal was rejected."

IAU rules states that Pluto's moons should be named for mythological characters of the underworld in Greek and Roman mythology. Pluto is known as the ruler of the underworld in ancient mythos.

Cerberus, the three-headed dog in Roman mythology, came in a clear second in the Pluto Rocks ballot with nearly 100,000 votes, but IAU officials decided to tweak the name slightly, instead opting to name the moon Kerberos — Cerberus' equivalent in Greek myth.

The name Styx, the river that separates the living from the dead in ancient myth, garnered about 88,000 votes for a third place finish.

Original 'Star Trek' Galileo Shuttlecraft Restored

Credit: Karl Tate

The Galileo shuttlecraft from TV's "Star Trek" is shown fully restored after a yearlong project led by Trek superfan Adam Schneider of New Jersey.

The restored Galileo was unveiled on June 22, 2013 at Master Shipwrights Inc., in Atlantic Highlands, N.J.

A rear view of the Galileo shuttlecraft after it's restoration.

Galileo shuttlecraft from "Star Trek" taken in 2012 shows its heavily degraded condition.

Star Trek Actor George Takei with Nasa Robonaut

Credit: Johnson Space Center (via Facebook)

George Takei (Star Trek's Sulu) and Robonaut throwing the Vulcan salute during a recent visit to NASA Johnson Space Center.

Star Trek Warp Drives: Slowing Down is a Planet Killer

Fans of science fiction will have one less technology to look forward to in the future.

The ubiquitous warp drive made popular in such shows as Star Trek, could fry any planetary system it stops in.

Faster than light technology (FLT) has been a dream for many sc-fi fans and even scientists who want an easy way to travel the vast distances in space.

Warp drives also solves the problem of relativity where the brave interstellar travelers can explore galaxies without their families back on Earth ageing a hundred years.

While Star Trek's warp drive is still purely a product of Hollywood imagination there are some concepts in physics that explore FTL.

One of those concepts is the Alcubierre warp drive proposed by Mexican theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994.

Basically the Alcubierre warp drive proposes that a ship would be propelled to faster than light speeds by creating a bubble of negative energy around it. Spacetime is compressed in front of the bubble and expanded behind it.

The ship would ride the bubble cruising at faster than light speeds while inside the bubble no faster than light prohibition is broken.

As enticing as the Alcubierre warp drive is or any other means for travelling faster than light, there is still the problem of stopping and stopping an FTL ship is going to wreak havoc on anyone unlucky enough to be in the ship's way.

According to Brendan McMonigal, Prof Geraint Lewis and Prof Philip O'Byrne of the University of Sydney, Alcubierre didn't take into consideration that many types of cosmic particles that the warp drive spaceship would encounter on its travels.

The research team found that these particles can get swept up in the warp bubble and after the ship decelerates from superluminal speed, the particles can get released in energetic outbursts strong enough to destroy anyone at the destination in front of the ship.

"Any people at the destination," the team's paper concludes, "would be gamma ray and high energy particle blasted into oblivion due to the extreme blueshifts for forward region particles."

One piece of good news that the team did find out is that while the warp drive is beyond human technology at the moment the theory behind the Alcubierre drive makes this possible in the future.

"Einstein's General Relativity tells us that gravity is the result of warped spacetime," McMonigal told the Register. "This means that simply by being in the gravitational field of the Earth as we are now, we are experiencing warped spacetime.

"What the warp drive equations tell us is what distribution of "stuff" we would need to create the spacetime deformation which would result in a ship travelling to a distant location in a short amount of time. In fact, the question of how we would generate this distribution is the main barrier to this technology."

In other words the drive is possible but researchers will have to figure how to stop the destination of the ship from disintegrating upon arrival.

NASA: "Star Trek" crew met the real Shuttle Enterprise

From left to right they are: NASA Administrator Dr. James D. Fletcher; DeForest Kelley, who portrayed Dr. "Bones" McCoy on the series; George Takei (Mr. Sulu); James Doohan (Chief Engineer Montgomery "Scotty" Scott); Nichelle Nichols (Lt. Uhura); Leonard Nimoy (Mr. Spock); series creator Gene Rodenberry; an unnamed NASA official; and, Walter Koenig (Ensign Pavel Chekov).

When NASA rolled out its Space Shuttle Enterprise in 1976 it was met by not only NASA dignitaries, but also some of the cast from the "Star Trek" television series.

According to NASA, there was a good reason for the Star Trek folks to be there.

That's because Enterprise, the first Space Shuttle, was originally to be named Constitution (in honor of the U.S. Constitution's Bicentennial that year).

However, Star Trek viewers started a write-in campaign urging the White House to select the name Enterprise. The rest is history.

USS Enterprise: Over to Manual

Just in case Scottie is on a break!

Star Trek style: Home Electronics Control Centre

Blu-Ray Laser Phaser!

Transparent Aluminum: Can we see a use for it?

Transparent Aluminium first 'appeared' in a Star Trek movie, now it has been made for real by the FLASH Lab in Germany. (Image: Everett Collection/Rex Features)

Transparent aluminium, a sci-fi material brought to 20th century Earth by the crew of The Enterprise in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, turns out to exist after all - if you can see in X-rays. X-ray vision has long been the fantasy of small boys and strange men but this is an entirely different, and more legitimate concept.

What's the Recipe?

To create this exotic state of matter, researchers at the FLASH facility in Hamburg, Germany, took a thin piece of aluminium foil and blasted it with an X-ray laser that can generate about 10 million gigawatts of power per square centimetre.

Knock out Electrons

At standard temperature and pressure, solid aluminium is a lattice of ions, with a sea of free electrons in between. The FLASH beam had enough energy to knock an electron out of each ion and set it free, while the photon got absorbed in the process.

No Replacement

Normally in a solid metal, another electron will instantly take the place of the missing one. Flash is so powerful that it can rip an electron out of every atom before others have a chance to replace them. With one electron removed, the remaining electrons around each ion settle into a different configuration, becoming too tightly bound for the laser to remove.

That means the X-ray photons can't be easily absorbed, and they fly straight through the material, making the previously opaque aluminium transparent to X-rays.

Self destructive

This state doesn't last long, though. Within fractions of a nanosecond, the energy pumped into the electrons is delivered to the ions, and the ions fly apart violently. "As soon as you make it, the stuff blows up," says Justin Wark of the University of Oxford.

What does the future hold?

The team hopes to study the properties of this hot, dense matter using new, more powerful lasers such as the Linac Coherent Light Source at Stanford, California. These lasers produce higher-energy X-rays that could probe the structure of the new material and measure its properties – perhaps providing some insight into the heart of Jupiter and the other giant planets.

Keep Watching! we will be seeing more of Transparent Aluminum in the future!

Star Trek Convention 2009!

It's been more than 20 years since William "Captain Kirk" Shatner told a roomful of Trekkies to "get a life" on Saturday Night Live, but Star Trek conventions are still going strong.

Leonard Nimoy and Shatner himself will be among more than 70 special guests at the official convention in the Las Vegas Hilton Hotel this summer.

Most guest celebrities will take fans' questions while on stage, but the convention Web site has a warning: Asking for hugs, telling stars you love them, giving gifts and telling long personal stories while other Trekkies patiently wait to ask a question is "quite self-centered" and unacceptable in this universe.