Technology is an awesome thing.
Without it, you’d not be reading this list right now, and your life would be
much worse because of that. But, while we have some pretty powerful gadgets
available to us compared to just a few decades ago, science has produced
machines whose power dwarfs anything you’re likely to come close to in your
life. Here are the 10 most powerful items of their type in the
world.
10.
Camera
The
awesomely named Dark Energy Camera is the most powerful camera in the world.
It’s being built at Fermilab in Illinois as part of a project to figure out why
the expansion of the universe is getting faster. The 570-megapixel device is 70
times more powerful than a phone camera, which is handy since it’s going to be
viewing things 8 billion light-years farther away. The lenses alone cost US$1.6
million each, and there are five of them. Over the next five years, it will take
pictures of 300 million galaxies from the Cerro Tololo Inter-American
Observatory in Chile, hopefully offering some answers to the mystery that has
stumped astronomers for a decade and a half.
9.
Loudspeaker
The most
powerful speaker ever constructed is the HS-60, an acoustic hailing
device produced
by the Wattre Corporation in the US. From one meter (3.3 ft) away, it produces a
noise level of 182 decibels (dB), slightly above the volume that kills hearing
tissue. For comparison, the loudest recommended level of noise for someone
wearing hearing protection is 140 dB. The HS-60 created 140.2 dB at a distance
of 128 meters (over 400 ft). It’s loud enough that if it was producing a voice
transmission, you’d be able to hear it clearly over three kilometres (two
miles) away.
Unfortunately, it’s not currently
available for purchase, so you’ll have to make do with its slightly
less-powerful cousin, the HS-40. The HS-40 is able to transmit a
voice clearly over half that distance and is used for hailing ships and making
security announcements over large distances.
8.
Laser
The most
powerful laser in the world is housed at the Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory in California. The laser is part of the National Ignition Facility
and was designed to research methods of achieving fusion power. They use 192
lasers, which converge onto one point and produce 60 times more
energy than any
previous laser system.
At its
peak, it produces 500 trillion watts of power, which is 1,000 times more than
the entire US uses at any time. It looks as
sci-fi as it sounds, so much so that scenes from the latest Star Trek
movie were shot
there.
7.
Magnet
The most
powerful magnet in the world was finished in 2012 by scientists at the Los
Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. It was capable of producing 100
Teslas, long seen as the Holy Grail of magnet engineers. The director of the lab
where it was built described it as “our Moon shot,” and it took 15 years of work
to complete.
So how
powerful is 100 Teslas? It’s 2 million times the strength of the Earth’s
magnetic field and over six times more than is needed to levitate a frog. The magnet is expected to help
with a large number of physics experiments, and if you were hoping to play with
it, we’re afraid it’s already fully booked. It’s only able to produce the field
for a short pulse, as the force it produces could be enough to tear itself
apart.
There is
even a way to produce magnetic fields up to 1,000 Teslas - scientists take a
pulse magnet, surround it with explosives, and set both off at the same time.
The magnetic field inside the implosion is condensed, and massive fields can be produced. Of course,
these can only be used once.
6. Diesel
Engine
The most
powerful diesel engine in the world can be found on the Emma Maersk cargo
ship. It’s four stories high - the engine, not the ship - and over 26 meters (about 85 ft) in length. This
diesel engine produces over 100,000 brake horsepower and over 5.5 million foot-pounds
of torque, around 2,500 times more than a tractor. Most impressively, it’s
extremely efficient, losing only around 50 percent of its energy to heat. (That
may sound like a lot, but it’s actually pretty good for a diesel
engine.)
5.
Supercomputers
The
TOP500 project keeps records of the most powerful computers in the world. The
current leader is Tianhe-2, a Chinese supercomputer run by
their National University of Defense Technology. The system operates at 33.86
petaflops per second. That’s 33,000 times faster than a Playstation 4, by
comparison. It runs on a custom operating system named Kylin, meaning “Chinese
unicorn.”
Though
America’s next-closest contender is half as fast as Tianhe-2, the US still
dominates the top 500, accounting for over half of the world’s fastest
supercomputers.
4. X-Ray
Generators
The Z-Machine is officially the world’s most
powerful X-ray generator. Located at the Sandia National Laboratories facility
in New Mexico, the Z-Machine is so powerful (and just generally huge) that it’s
submerged in an enormous tank of water and oil, so adjustments need to be made
by divers in scuba
gear.
How
powerful is it? At its peak, it produces power 80 times more than the electrical
generation capacity of every single power plant. On Earth. Combined. It
discharges in less than 100 billionths of a second, but for that time, it’s
literally the most powerful man-made thing ever. It can also propel a small
piece of metal from 0 to 122,000 kph (76,000 mph) in under one second, which is
faster than the
Earth moves
through space.
3.
Robots
The
strongest robot in the world is an industrial robot named Titan, produced by
German manufacturer KUKA robotics. It’s able to lift a full-sized car to a height of three meters
(about 10 ft), which you will notice greatly exceeds both the strength and reach
of the human masters it will one day help to overthrow.
There
is, of course, no need to worry about that because it’s safely bolted to the
floor of the fac– oh, holy crap. They’ve given it
wheels. It was
nice knowing you, fellow lumps of feeble meat.
2. Solar
Furnace
The
largest and most powerful solar furnace on the planet is located in the Pyrenees
Mountains on the border between France and Spain. It consists of a massive
curved array of 10,000 mirrors, which concentrate sunlight from hundreds of flat
mirrors on the opposite hillside. “Furnace” is the correct choice of word, as it
is able to focus beams to create a temperature of 6,000 °C (5,430 °F), about
half the surface temperature of the Sun.
The high
temperatures produced by the furnace are used for everything from generating
electricity to the creation of carbon nanotubes. It’s also handy for testing
materials designed for coating spaceships to protect them from the heat produced
during re-entry.
1. Gun
The most
powerful gunshot on the planet was created by scientists from the US Navy in
2010 without the use of any explosives. They used a prototype rail gun,
effectively a cannon that accelerates an aluminium shell to enormous
velocities,
using electromagnetic fields. The rail gun is heralded as the weapon of the
future in naval warfare, with predictions that the weapons will be able to fire
at a range of 320 kilometres (200 mi), compared to the 20 kilometres (12 mi) of
contemporary artillery.
Current
prototypes can only last for a few shots, since they produce a lot of heat
during operation. The US has given US$34.5 million to BAE Systems to develop a
more durable version of the weapon, capable of firing up to 10 shots a minute without blowing itself
apart.
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