Toggle light / dark theme

Blockchain may one day eliminate inefficiencies and lack of transparency in supply chains. While slow in coming, this revolution would benefit not only customers and brands, but the invisible” workers who power global trade.

#Blockchain #SystemShock #BloomberQuicktake.

——-
Like this video? Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/Bloomberg?sub_confirmation=1
Become a Quicktake Member for exclusive perks: https://www.youtube.com/bloomberg/join.

QuickTake Originals is Bloomberg’s official premium video channel. We bring you insights and analysis from business, science, and technology experts who are shaping our future. We’re home to Hello World, Giant Leap, Storylines, and the series powering CityLab, Bloomberg Businessweek, Bloomberg Green, and much more.

Subscribe for business news, but not as you’ve known it: exclusive interviews, fascinating profiles, data-driven analysis, and the latest in tech innovation from around the world.

Visit our partner channel QuickTake News for breaking global news and insight in an instant.

It plays a significant role in our lives.

From enabling us to walk around and not bump into things to developing highly advanced directed energy weapons, the electromagnetic spectrum is vitally important to many aspects of our modern lives. But, life as we know it would also not be possible if electromagnetic radiation, notably visible light, did not exist.

For most of human history we have only known (but not fully understood) a very small portion of the spectrum — namely visible light and “heat” in the form of infrared light. But, since the scientific enlightenment our knowledge of the spectrum, and applications using it, have literally revolutionized the way we live and perceive the world and the cosmos around us.

Electrolysis is a key component of the cost of green hydrogen, and a Korean team says it’s made a huge breakthrough with an anion exchange membrane that’s not only much cheaper than current proton exchange tech, but offers some 20 percent better performance.

Electrolysis is the process of splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, and when powered by renewable energy, it’s shaping up to be a key step in the production of green hydrogen. Green hydrogen is set to play a substantial role in the race to zero emissions, offering a high energy density that makes it an attractive option in several hard-to-decarbonize activities where batteries just don’t make sense.

Typically, electrolyzers use proton exchange membranes (PEMs), in which an anode and a cathode in an electrolyte material are separated by a membrane designed to allow positively-charged hydrogen ions to pass through as they’re attracted by the cathode. Here they combine with electrons to form hydrogen gas, which is collected, and oxygen is released at the anode.

Imagine if we could use strong electromagnetic fields to manipulate the local properties of spacetime—this could have important ramifications in terms of science and engineering.

Electromagnetism has always been a subtle phenomenon. In the 19th century, scholars thought that electromagnetic waves must propagate in some sort of elusive medium, which was called aether. Later, the aether hypothesis was abandoned, and to this day, the classical theory of electromagnetism does not provide us with a clear answer to the question in which medium electric and magnetic fields propagate in vacuum. On the other hand, the theory of gravitation is rather well understood. General relativity explains that energy and mass tell the spacetime how to curve and spacetime tells masses how to move. Many eminent mathematical physicists have tried to understand electromagnetism directly as a consequence of general relativity. The brilliant mathematician Hermann Weyl had especially interesting theories in this regard. The Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla thought that electromagnetism contains essentially everything in our universe.

Quantum computers could cause unprecedented disruption in both good and bad ways, from cracking the encryption that secures our data to solving some of chemistry’s most intractable puzzles. New research has given us more clarity about when that might happen.

Modern encryption schemes rely on fiendishly difficult math problems that would take even the largest supercomputers centuries to crack. But the unique capabilities of a quantum computer mean that at sufficient size and power these problems become simple, rendering today’s encryption useless.

That’s a big problem for cybersecurity, and it also poses a major challenge for cryptocurrencies, which use cryptographic keys to secure transactions. If someone could crack the underlying encryption scheme used by Bitcoin, for instance, they would be able to falsify these keys and alter transactions to steal coins or carry out other fraudulent activity.

In January 1999, scientists observed mysterious motions within a solar flare.

Unlike typical flares that showed bright energy erupting outwards from the Sun, this solar flare also displayed a downward flow of motion, as if material was falling back towards the Sun. Described as “downward-moving dark voids,” astronomers wondered what exactly they were seeing.