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Circa 2016 o.o!


The theory used to be that hydrocarbons were created in “shocks,” or violent stellar events that cause a lot of turbulence and, with the shock waves, make atoms into ions, which are more likely to combine.

The data from the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory has since proved that theory wrong. Scientists at Herschel studied the components in the Orion Nebula, mapping the amount, temperature and motions for the carbon-hydrogen molecule (CH), the carbon-hydrogen positive ion (CH+) and their parent molecule: the carbon ion (C+).

They found that in Orion, CH+ is emitting light instead of absorbing it, which means that it is warmer than the background gas. This was surprising to scientists because the CH+ molecule is incredibly reactive and needs a high amount of energy to form, so when it interacts with the background hydrogen in the cloud it gets destroyed.

Researchers have also long been chasing lithium-air batteries that could realize a huge jump in energy density. And beyond lithium, there are other entirely different chemistries in development out there. At some point, one of them should click for one application or another.

Lithium-ion or not, an explosion of grid-scale battery installations is coming as prices continue to fall. The nascent art of lithium-ion battery recycling is also sure to mature and expand, improving the sustainability of these batteries by recovering and resetting their chemical building blocks.

Adopt cold-fusion-like skepticism of any of these future-looking statements as you please, but today’s batteries aren’t those of 20 or even 10 years ago. The same thing is bound to be true in another 10 years—even if that progress doesn’t come in a single, giant leap with global fanfare.

A new topic a new challenge for future civilizations.

I won’t write an introduction I will ask couple of questions to make you think about it.

In the forth industrial revolution are we going to change the way we reproduce? Could be the first step for post-human era in 2040?

How can we change the way we deal with economics? Because economy depends on population grow. In a way or another world population will stop at 11 billion so it is necessary to change the economy.

How do simple creatures manage to move to a specific place? Artificial intelligence and a physical model from TU Wien can now explain this.

How is it possible to move in the desired direction without a brain or nervous system? Single-celled organisms apparently manage this feat without any problems: for example, they can swim towards food with the help of small flagellar tails.

How these extremely simply built creatures manage to do this was not entirely clear until now. However, a research team at TU Wien (Vienna) has now been able to simulate this process on the computer: They calculated the physical interaction between a very simple model organism and its environment. This environment is a liquid with a non-uniform chemical composition, it contains food sources that are unevenly distributed.

As the need for urgent climate solutions grows, scientists want to put more research into a technology known as solar geoengineering — the idea of chemically altering the atmosphere to reflect sunlight away from Earth.

It is seen as a potential method of cooling the planet and offsetting climate change. But could such a technology curtail a climate catastrophe — or become the cause of it?

Those against solar geoengineering fear unintended consequences, including irreversible changes to weather patterns, and many climate activists are wary of using the Earth’s atmosphere as a testing ground. Last month in Sweden, an experiment led by Harvard University researchers was cancelled following opposition by environmental and indigenous groups. Researchers had planned on testing a high-altitude balloon that could be used to disperse reflective aerosol particles into the atmosphere.

In this episode of The Stream, we’ll learn more about solar geoengineering and the debate surrounding it.

From a purely scientific frame of reference, many quantum phenomena like non-local correlations between distant entities and wave-particle duality, the wave function collapse and consistent histories, quantum entanglement and teleportation, the uncertainty principle and overall observer-dependence of reality pin down our conscious mind being intrinsic to reality. And this is the one thing the current physicalist paradigm fails to account for. Critical-mass anomalies will ultimately lead to the full paradigm shift in physics. It’s just a matter of time.

With consciousness as primary, everything remains the same and everything changes. Mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology are unchanged. What changes is our interpretation as to what they are describing. They are not describing the unfolding of an objective physical world, but transdimensional evolution of one’s conscious mind. There’s nothing “physical” about our physical reality except that we perceive it that way. By playing the “Game of Life” we evolved to survive not to see quantum mechanical reality. At our classical level of experiential reality we perceive ourselves as physical, at the quantum level we are a probabilistic wave function, which is pure information.

No matter how you slice it, reality is contextual, the notion that immediately dismisses ‘observer-independent’ interpretations of quantum mechanics and endorses the Mental Universe hypothesis. But we have to be careful here not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. I’d like to make a very important point at this juncture of our discussion: Mental and physical are two sides of the same coin made of information. Both should be viewed as the same substance.

University at Buffalo (UB) researchers have developed a novel 3D printed water-purifying graphene aerogel that could be scaled for use at large wastewater treatment plants.

Composed of a styrofoam-like aerogel, latticed graphene and two bio-inspired polymers, the novel material is capable of removing dyes, metals and organic solvents from drinking water with 100% efficiency. Unlike similar nanosheets, the scientists’ design is reusable, doesn’t leave residue and can be 3D printed into larger sizes, thus they now aim to commercialize it for industrial-scale deployment.

“The goal is to safely remove contaminants from water without releasing any problematic chemical residue,” explained study co-author and assistant professor of environmental engineering at UB, Nirupam Aich. “The aerogels we’ve created hold their structure when put into water treatment systems, and they can be applied in diverse water treatment applications.”

Astronomers have long predicted that deep beneath Neptune’s thick blue clouds lies a super-hot body of water that, despite its high temperature, never boils because of its incredibly high-pressure atmosphere. Uranus, another planet in the outer solar system of similar size and composition, is also believed to have a similar water-rich interior. Unfortunately, due to their distances from Earth, it is hard to directly probe these two planets to test our assumption. But scientists have found novel ways of testing their theories about these ice giants from Earth.

As described in a newly-published study from Nature Astronomy, scientists recreated the pressure and temperature of the interiors of Neptune and Uranus in a lab. The aim of the experiments was to test hypotheses about the chemistry of the deep water within these planets. But the study could have additional implications for what we know about potentially habitable planets in other solar systems.

“We were seeking to extend our knowledge of the deep interior of ice giants and determine what water-rock interactions at extreme conditions might exist,” said lead author Taehyun Kim, of Yonsei University in South Korea. “Ice giants and some exoplanets have very deep water layers, unlike terrestrial planets. We proposed the possibility of an atomic-scale mixing of two of the planet-building materials (water and rock) in the interiors of ice giants.”