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Category: energy – Page 192

Astronomers trace powerful gamma rays to a never-before-seen stellar phenomenon

But a team including Zhang has a suggestion for what might have caused it: the merger of a neutron star not with another neutron star, as is common for short gamma ray bursts, but with a white dwarf. White dwarfs are larger than neutron stars, but not nearly as big as the massive stars that cause supernovae, which would account for the length and intensity of the unusual burst.

Since there are lots of white dwarf-neutron star binaries and events like this are rare enough that it’s the first to be observed in half a century of looking, he suggests it needs some qualifications: first, the white dwarf needs to be “close to the upper mass limit,” and afterwards the two need to merge into a rapidly-spinning magnetar, which would “inject additional energy into the kilonova.”

Ethereum’s energy switch saves as much electricity as entire Ireland uses

The success of The Merge concept may now serve as a roadmap to enable a switch from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake in Bitcoin.

Ethereum, the world’s second-largest crypto asset by market cap, has drastically changed its energy usage, saving a country-size proportion of power consumption.

This radical update most likely reduced the power consumption of the crypto network by 99.84 percent to 9.99 percent, according to a paper published by peer-reviewed data-science journal Patterns on Tuesday.

US-based startup claims its VTOL will have Mach 0.66 cruise speed and over 11,000 miles of range

The company claims the aerial vehicle can top any regular airliner.

The five-seater VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) Ranger, developed by Aura Aerospace, claims to fly farther than any typical airliner and boasts roof-to-roof vertical takeoff and landing capability.

Aura’s plan for doing this is quite straightforward. An octocopter system with eight 70-inch (178-cm) two-blade props hanging fore and aft of the enormous main wing is used to achieve vertical takeoff and landing. A pair of turbofan jet engines start-up to give forward power once the vehicle is in the air and the wing has folded out to its full 75-ft (23-meter) width. This system brings you onto and off of the landing pad.

X-rays reveal elusive chemistry for better electric vehicle batteries

Researchers around the world are on a mission to relieve a bottleneck in the clean energy revolution: batteries. From electric vehicles to renewable grid-scale energy storage, batteries are at the heart of society’s most crucial green innovations—but they need to pack more energy to make these technologies widespread and practical.

Now, a team of scientists led by chemists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has unraveled the complex chemical mechanisms of a component that is crucial for boosting energy density: the interphase. Their work published today in Nature Nanotechnology.

Scientists find an ancient source of life-supporting oxygen

Although oxygen is now the most abundant element in our oceans and our atmosphere, comprising about 88.8 percent and 23.1 percent of the mass of the two, respectively, this wasn’t always the case. In actuality, the abundance of oxygen on Earth arose only 2.4 billion years ago thanks to the advent of photosynthesis, the process through which some of the first life-forms transformed sunlight into energy. It was only coincidence, scientists say, that one of the products of this process was oxygen. But it also would go on to completely transform the planet, creating the conditions for increasingly complex forms of life.

For all the importance of this so-called “Great Oxidation Event,” scientists have always wondered about the presence of oxygen on the planet prior to the emergence of photosynthesis.

De Tomaso unveils ‘world’s first’ carbon neutral synthetic-fuel-driven hypercar

The vehicle has a 900kg dry weight and 900hp (662kW) output.

Italian performance brand De Tomaso has released the P900, a track-only V12-powered hypercar with a 900kg dry weight and 900hp (662kW) output, according to a report.

The carmaker will produce only 18 units globally of these bad boys and price them at a whopping US $3 million each which will ensure their drivers know they have a truly unique car. Each car will be further customized to the customer’s choices.

“At De Tomaso, we pay an enormous amount of attention to the driving experience, in part a large majority of this complex matrix can be attributed to the sounds and vibrations, in essence, the feeling of a naturally aspirated engine firing on all cylinders,” said CEO Norman Choi according to a press release.

Microwave thruster makes for clean-burning jet

Year 2020 face_with_colon_three Propellant free thruster.

I usually approach papers on the subject of alternative thrusters with a certain degree of cynicism. But we’ve finally been given a study on microwave thrusters that doesn’t rely on impossible physics. Instead, it used a plain old plasma thruster.

Plasma thrusters have generally been thought of as a means of propulsion in space, but now one has been designed to operate under atmospheric conditions. According to the researchers involved, it’s an air plasma thruster that has the potential to produce the same thrust as a commercial jet engine.

Combustible air?

A jet engine is just a form of internal combustion engine: combine fuel and air and compress the living hell out of the mixture. The resulting ignition rapidly heats the gas (most of which is nitrogen and doesn’t burn), forcing it to expand explosively. The rapid expansion can be used to power fans that generate thrust or used directly to provide thrust. But, the key point is that the gas needs to be rapidly heated to very high temperatures so that it can expand. The fuel of a jet engine is just the energy source for heat.

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