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Category: particle physics – Page 513

Plastic Eating Plants: Will they Save our Environment?

Circa 2016 o.o

Americans dump 251 million tons of trash annually into landfills. Bike seat ripped? Toss it. Hole in the old garden hose? Get rid of it. Spandex not tucking in your tummy? Loose it and replace it. This linear process of extracting a resource, processing it, selling it than discarding it is creating a mound of trash dangerously equivocal to the ball of trash in Futurama episode 8 season 1.

Why Plastic Sucks

Bike seats, garden hoses and spandex are all comprised of polyurethane, the most common and environmentally destructive plastic. The Newsweek article, Plastic-Eating Fungi That Could Solve Our Garbage Problem, notes that the only way to get rid of polyurethane is incarceration, which releases harmful gases into our ecosystem. If plastic is left abandoned in the landfill or ocean, Ultraviolet light from the sun or waves break down the material into harmful microplastic particles. In the ocean, this broken down plastic first poisons the marine life then the people who consumed it. The process of breaking down such materials in landfills emits methane, a green house gas 23 times more potent than CO2, according to the Modern Farm article, Plastic-Eating Mushrooms Could Save the World. Additionally, per the Newsweek article, David Schwatzman, Proffessor of Biology at Howard University remarks,” Landfills are sources of serious problems.

Low-energy solar particles from beyond Earth found near the Sun

Using data from NASA’s Parker Solar Probe (PSP), a team led by Southwest Research Institute identified low-energy particles lurking near the Sun that likely originated from solar wind interactions well beyond Earth orbit. PSP is venturing closer to the Sun than any previous probe, carrying hardware SwRI helped develop. Scientists are probing the enigmatic features of the Sun to answer many questions, including how to protect space travelers and technology from the radiation associated with solar events.

“Our main goal is to determine the acceleration mechanisms that create and transport dangerous high-energy particles from the solar atmosphere into the solar system, including the near-Earth environment,” said Dr. Mihir Desai, a mission co-investigator on the Integrated Science Investigation of the Sun (IS?IS) instrument suite, a multi-institutional project led by Principal Investigator Prof. Dave McComas of Princeton University… IS?IS consists of two instruments, Energetic Particle Instrument-High (EPI-Hi) and Energetic Particle Instrument-Low (EPI-Lo). “With EPI-Lo, we were able to measure extremely low-energy particles unexpectedly close to the solar environment. We considered many explanations for their presence, but ultimately determined they are the smoking gun pointing to interactions between slow- and fast-moving regions of the solar wind that accelerate high-energy particles from beyond the orbit of Earth.

Researchers demonstrate optical backflow of light

Researchers at Tel Aviv University have for the first time demonstrated the backflow of optical light propagating forward. The phenomenon, theorized more than 50 years ago by quantum physicists, has never before been demonstrated successfully in any experiment—until now.

“This ‘backflow’ phenomenon is quite delicate and requires exquisite control over the state of a particle, so its demonstration was hindered for half a century,” explains Dr. Alon Bahabad of the Department of Physical Electronics at TAU’s School of Electrical Engineering, who led the research for the study.

“This phenomenon reveals an unintuitive behavior of a system comprised of , whether it’s a particle in quantum mechanics or a . Our demonstration could help scientists probe the atmosphere by emitting a laser and inducing a signal propagating backward toward the laser source from a given point in front of the laser source. It’s also relevant for cases in which fine control of light fields is required in small volumes, such as optical microscopy, sensing and optical tweezers for moving ,” Dr. Bahabad says.

Scientists cooled a nanoparticle to the quantum limit

A tiny nanoparticle has been chilled to the max.

Physicists cooled a nanoparticle to the lowest temperature allowed by quantum mechanics. The particle’s motion reached what’s known as the ground state, or lowest possible energy level.

In a typical material, the amount that its atoms jostle around indicates its temperature. But in the case of the nanoparticle, scientists can define an effective temperature based on the motion of the entire nanoparticle, which is made up of about 100 million atoms. That temperature reached twelve-millionths of a kelvin, scientists report January 30 in Science.

How one entrepreneur is tackling humanity’s most pressing problems

Braintree founder Bryan Johnson, MBA’07, invests in bold ventures on the next frontier.

Bryan Johnson is determined to explore the depths of your mind and help save humanity from its direst threats.

“The biggest revolutions that have happened over the past couple of decades have largely been done on silicon—the transistors we build, the computers we have, the internet, our smartphones,” said Johnson, MBA’07. “The next great revolutions will be evolving our cognition and predictably engineering atoms, molecules, organisms and complex systems.”

Glowing green ‘dunes’ in the sky mesmerized skygazers. They turned out to be a new kind of aurora

When mysterious glowing stripes of green lit up Finnish skies in 2018, it didn’t go unnoticed by avid aurora chasers. The pattern of light was unfamiliar and strangely perfect, reaching out toward the horizon like a set of celestial sand dunes.

Sure enough, the light show dubbed by the citizen scientists as “the dunes” turned out to be a new type of aurora. This aurora is formed by the dramatic dance of gravity waves and oxygen atoms, according to new findings published today (Jan. 29) in the journal AGU Advances.

Stratos II: Propulsion Static Test 3 — 15 seconds, early cut-off (12−06−2013)

On 12. June 2013 the third test fire of the DHX-200 “Aurora” hybrid rocket motor took place at the facilities of TNO. The Aurora motor will power the Stratos II rocket and utilizes nitrous oxide as oxidizer and a fuel combination of sorbitol, paraffin wax, and aluminium particles as fuel.
The motor was intended to be fired for 15 seconds after the successful 10 second test earlier this day but was shutdown prematurely at around 6 seconds after the combustion chamber showed local structural failure.
The sequence involves the following steps:

T — 4s : Nitrous Oxide bypass flow initiated
T — 3s : Ignition pulse for pyrotechnic igniter
T 0s : Main valve open
T + 6s : Main valve closed (safety precaution)
T + 15s : Scheduled motor cut-off

Read the full story on: http://projectstratos.nl/2013/06/2011/