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Category: energy – Page 157

Water scarcity is a major problem for much of the world’s population, but with the right equipment drinking water can be wrung out of thin air. Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have now demonstrated a low-cost gel film that can pull many liters of water per day out of even very dry air.

The gel is made up of two main ingredients that are cheap and common – cellulose, which comes from the cell walls of plants, and konjac gum, a widely used food additive. Those two components work together to make a gel film that can absorb water from the air and then release it on demand, without requiring much energy.

First, the porous structure of the gum attracts water to condense out of the air around it. The cellulose meanwhile is designed to respond to a gentle heat by turning hydrophobic, releasing the captured water.

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THE #QUANTUM #PHYSICISTS Sandu Popescu, Yakir Aharonov and Daniel Rohrlich have been troubled by the same scenario for three decades.

It started when they wrote about a surprising #wave #phenomenon called #superoscillation in 1990. “We were never able to really tell what exactly was bothering us,” said Popescu, a professor at the University of Bristol. “Since then, every year we come back and we see it from a different angle.”

Finally, in December 2020, the trio published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences explaining what the problem is: In #quantumsystems, superoscillation appears to violate the law of conservation of #energy. This law, which states that the energy of an isolated system never changes, is more than a bedrock physical principle. It’s now understood to be an expression of the fundamental symmetries of the universe—a “very important part of the edifice of physics,” said Chiara Marletto, a physicist at the University of Oxford.

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#quantumphysics #university #Research #Lawofphysics

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Just as electromagnetic energy is quantized into propagating photons, acoustic energy propagates in quanta called phonons. The science of photon behaviour – called quantum electrodynamics – is an important branch of modern physics because it provides a relativistic description of the interaction of light with matter. Scientists have used the theory in a variety of applications such as atomic clocks and quantum computation. In recent years, scientists have begun applying some of the same concepts to phonons in a field called quantum acoustodynamics. Last year, for example, two groups independently used laser-based measurements to entangle the oscillations of membranes in cavities.

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Astronomers are flummoxed by a mysterious celestial object that appears to be releasing massive bursts of energy at regular 18 minute intervals.

Like a lighthouse, the beacon is sending out radiation three times an hour at such an intensity that it’s one of the brightest points in the sky — and, researchers say, it could turn out to be an entirely new class of celestial object.

A team, led by astrophysicist Natasha Hurley-Walker from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, had a closer look at the object after it was discovered by Curtin University student Tyrone O’Doherty, who used the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope in outback Western Australia.

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We should really be looking to nuclear power FAR more than we have been. Until fusion finally comes of age anyway. It’s one of the most annoyingly counterproductive issue with many environmentalists I tend to have.

Extreme temperatures and ongoing drought could cause the power grid to buckle across vast areas of the country this summer, potentially leading to electricity shortages and blackouts, a US power grid regulator said Wednesday.

NERC, a regulating authority that oversees the health of the nation’s electrical infrastructure, says in its 2022 Summer Reliability Assessment that extreme temperatures and ongoing drought could cause the power grid to buckle. High temperatures, the agency warns, will cause the demand for electricity to rise. Meanwhile, drought conditions will lower the amount of power available to meet that demand.

“Industry prepares its equipment and operators for challenging summer conditions. Persistent, extreme drought and its accompanying weather patterns, however, are out of the ordinary and tend to create extra stresses on electricity supply and demand,” said Mark Olson, NERC’s manager of Reliability Assessments.

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The relentless evolution of the coronavirus, which has spawned new variants to fuel fresh surges of disease every four to six months, could in the not-distant future propel the virus to overtake measles as the most contagious of all known infections.

Increasing infectiousness does not necessarily make the virus deadlier, but it could make it harder to control, and leave communities vulnerable to the repeated waves of illness that have defined the pandemic.

The variants now dominating around the world may be five to 10 times more infectious than the original virus that sparked the pandemic in China in late 2019, health experts believe. Lately each variant has outpaced its parent — omicron, with its massive evolutionary jump, was about three times more infectious than delta. Its subvariants — BA.2 and BA.2.12.1, which are driving the latest surge in the Bay Area — are each more infectious still, by 20% to 30%.

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Australian mining company Fortescue is looking to reduce the carbon footprint of its operations by allowing a specially designed electric “Infinity Train” to roll down a hill to recharge its massive batteries — without ever relying on an external charging system.

“The Infinity Train has the capacity to be the world’s most efficient battery electric locomotive,” Fortescue CEO Elizabeth Gaines said in a statement. “The regeneration of electricity on the downhill loaded sections will remove the need for the installation of renewable energy generation and recharging infrastructure, making it a capital efficient solution for eliminating diesel and emissions from our rail operations.”

It’s a cleverly designed system: since the train is far lighter on the way up, it will generate enough energy fully loaded with iron ore on the way down to make it back up to the mine. In other words, it might sound like a perpetual motion machine — which is impossible, of course — but in reality it’s just an ingenious exploit of conventional physics.

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