Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: energy – Page 81

Conservation laws are central to our understanding of the universe, and now scientists have expanded our understanding of these laws in quantum mechanics.

A conservation law in physics describes the preservation of certain quantities or properties in isolated physical systems over time, such as mass-energy, momentum, and electric charge.

Conservation laws are fundamental to our understanding of the universe because they define the processes that can or cannot occur in nature. For example, the conservation of momentum reveals that within a closed system, the sum of all momenta remains unchanged before and after an event, such as a collision.

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Engineers at Aalto University have developed an improved method for long-distance wireless charging. By enhancing the interaction between transmitting and receiving antennas and leveraging the “radiation suppression” phenomenon, they’ve deepened our theoretical understanding of wireless power transfer beyond the traditional inductive methods, a significant advancement in the field.

Charging over short distances, such as through induction pads, uses magnetic near fields to transfer power with high efficiency, but at longer distances the efficiency dramatically drops. New research shows that this high efficiency can be sustained over long distances by suppressing the radiation resistance of the loop antennas that are sending and receiving power.

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Where reliability matters, as it does in energy, resilience against cyberattacks enhances a company’s reputation. Disruptions damage that reputation.

In 2021, a ransomware attack shut down Colonial Pipeline operations for six days. Gas shortages in the eastern US, economic turmoil, and eye-catching headlines resulted. Interest in cybersecurity for critical infrastructure intensified — and many leaders seemed to learn the wrong lesson.

Energy sector leaders often take cyber vulnerabilities seriously only after a significant breach. Experiencing a loss (or watching someone else’s) makes companies tighten cybersecurity to avoid similar losses. This pattern emphasizes the loss-avoidance aspects of cybersecurity. Yet thinking of cybersecurity solely as loss avoidance misses a key value generator cybersecurity provides: trust.

Companies that get cybersecurity right earn trust. That trust matters in two ways: It supports brand or company reputation, and it allows for forward innovation.

Continue reading “Cybersecurity Builds Trust in Critical Infrastructure” | >

Global warming has severely impacted the supply of fresh water in many parts of the world. Coastal communities have resorted to salination plants while those in the far interior have no option but to extract water from the air. Most of these techniques are energy-intensive or only work under certain conditions. Now, a new technology developed by researchers at ETH Zurich can help humanity access fresh water 24 hours a day and without spending any energy.

The technology might not look so sophisticated at first, and one might just say that it’s just another regular glass pane. But only the researchers who developed it will tell you that this glass pane is coated with special polymers and silver layers that give the glass properties to reflect solar radiation and also emit heat directly into outer space.

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DARPA has contracted Raytheon to develop a practical version of a revolutionary air-breathing rotating detonation engine called Gambit, which would have no moving parts and could lead to lighter missiles with longer ranges at lower cost.

Gas turbines are remarkable power plants that have made possible modern air travel and many weapon systems, but they suffer from a number of disadvantages. They are complex machines that are heavy, have many moving parts that are costly to assemble and maintain, and they require exotic materials and special processing to handle the tremendous temperatures they operate at.

It’s bad enough when such an engine is installed in an aircraft, but when it’s part of a throwaway weapon like a cruise missile, this not only limits the payload, it runs into some serious money.

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The world’s massive human population is leveling off.

Most projections show we’ll hit peak humanity in the 21st century, as people choose to have smaller families and women gain power over their own reproduction. This is great news for the future of our species.

And yet alarms are sounding. While environmentalists have long warned of a planet with too many people, now some economists are warning of a future with too few. For example, economist Dean Spears from the University of Texas has written that an “unprecedented decline” in population will lead to a bleak future of slower economic growth and less innovation.

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Pulsars are known for their regularity and stability. These fast-rotating neutron stars emit radio waves with such consistent pulses that astronomers can use them as a kind of cosmic clock.

But recently a pulsar emitted gamma rays with tremendous energy. The gamma rays were the most energetic photons ever observed, with energies of more than 20 teraelectronvolts, and astronomers are struggling to understand how that’s possible.

The results were published in Nature Astronomy, which describes the burst of gamma rays emanating from the Vela Pulsar.

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Interstellar magnetic fields perturb the trajectories of cosmic rays, making it difficult to identify their sources. A new survey of gamma radiation produced when cosmic rays interact with the interstellar medium should help in this identification.

Scientists know that the diffuse gamma-ray glow that suffuses the Milky Way is mainly produced by the interaction of high-energy cosmic rays with interstellar gas. But questions remain about the properties of these cosmic rays. What, for example, is their energy limit? And how do cosmic rays propagate from their sources? These long-standing mysteries could potentially be solved by observations of the highest-energy diffuse gamma rays. To this end, researchers working on the square kilometer array (KM2A) at the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) experiment in China have reported precise measurements of the energy spectra of diffuse gamma rays over a wide energy range and across a large swath of the Galaxy [1]. Their results will give new insight into the propagation, interaction processes, and origin of the highest-energy cosmic rays in our Galaxy.

Since their discovery in 1912, cosmic rays—mainly comprising high-energy protons—have been observed across an energy range of more than 10 orders of magnitude. But in 1958, scientists found that the cosmic-ray flux decreases rapidly beyond an energy of a few PeV [2]. Researchers have explained this spectral cutoff by hypothesizing that cosmic rays accelerated to up to a few PeV are confined by the Galactic magnetic field for 104–107 years and accumulate in a “cosmic-ray pool” (Fig. 1): these are the cosmic rays whose interactions with interstellar gas are responsible for most of the diffuse gamma rays. Cosmic rays above a few PeV, meanwhile, are thought to escape from our Galaxy, therefore contributing relatively little to the gamma-ray haze.

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