A Darkened Reading

The Transformation of Cattle Feet to Torpedo Oil: A Case Study in Nazi German Wartime Recycling

“…This system achieved "the complete delivery of feet and raw fat" for processing and substantially increased the production of neat's-foot oil. 52 From March 1916 to December 1918, the amounts of cattle feet collected and neat's-foot oil produced steadily climbed (see Table 2). When the war ended, the Navy had significant surpluses of torpedo oil.…”

Free electron lasers driven by plasma accelerators: status and near-term prospects

“…From the conception of plasma photocathodes 10 years ago and the first vision towards a hard plasma-based X-FEL [76], systematic R&D towards plasma-based X-FEL [83] has included innovations such as multi-colour X-FELs and ballistic compression/stretching [84], energy spread control [79], Coherent Spontaneous Emission-based light sources [85], and various other concepts [80] [82]. While a proposal for "Plasma-based hard X-ray FEL with ultrahigh gain and sub-fs capability" at SLAC FACET-II was deemed ahead of its time in 2018, experimental progress on high brightness beam production from PWFA via the plasma photocathode and plasma torch method at SLAC [77,30] and at DESY via the plasma torch method [86], and from hybrid LWFA→PWFA [87,88,89,90], increased confidence in the overall approach [82], and various start-to-end design breakthroughs (A.F. Habib et al, to be published) now put dedicated experimental efforts for nextgeneration electron beam sources for photon science [91] and hard plasma-X-FEL on the agenda.…”