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Category: space – Page 409

System provides cooling with no electricity

The new system is described today in a paper in the journal Science Advances, by MIT graduate student Arny Leroy, professor of mechanical engineering and department head Evelyn Wang, and seven others at MIT and at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile.

Such a system could be used, for example, as a way to keep vegetables and fruit from spoiling, potentially doubling the time the produce could remain fresh, in remote places where reliable power for refrigeration is not available, Leroy explains.

2022 story:

https://news.mit.edu/2022/passive-cooling-off-grid-0920

Imagine a device that can sit outside under blazing sunlight on a clear day, and without using any power cool things down by more than 23 degrees Fahrenheit (13 degrees Celsius). It almost sounds like magic, but a new system designed by researchers at MIT and in Chile can do exactly that.

The device, which has no moving parts, works by a process called radiative cooling. It blocks incoming sunlight to keep from heating it up, and at the same time efficiently radiates infrared light — which is essentially heat — that passes straight out into the sky and into space, cooling the device significantly below the ambient air temperature.

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Quantum Field Theory Pries Open Mathematical Puzzle

The “rank” of a graph is the number of loops it has; for each rank of graphs, there exists a moduli space. The size of this space grows quickly — if you fix the lengths of the graph’s edges, there are three graphs of rank 2, 15 of rank 3,111 of rank 4, and 2,314,204,852 of rank 10. On the moduli space, these lengths can vary, introducing even more complexity.

The shape of the moduli space for graphs of a given rank is determined by relationships between the graphs. As you walk around the space, nearby graphs should be similar, and should morph smoothly into one another. But these relationships are complicated, leaving the moduli space with mathematically unsettling features, such as regions where three walls of the moduli space pass through one another.

Mathematicians can study the structure of a space or shape using objects called cohomology classes, which can help reveal how a space is put together. For instance, consider one of mathematicians’ favorite shapes, the doughnut. On the doughnut, cohomology classes are simply loops.

Why We May Not Be Alone on Earth w/ Janusz Petkowski

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What if we’re not alone on Earth? Why We May Not Be Alone on Earth…

The shadow biosphere is a hypothetical microbial biosphere of Earth that would use radically different biochemical and molecular processes from that of currently known life.

00:00:00 Intro.
00:00:26 Bio.
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00:02:33 The Shadow Biosphere.
00:06:32 Multiple Abiogenesis.
00:13:20 Panspermic Shadow Biosphere.
00:16:40 How to find the Shadow Biosphere.
00:23:23 We don’t know the rules of Earth Life.
00:32:56 Mars life, could it be here?

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COgITOR, The Liquid Cybernetic System Inspired By Cells

The COgITOR project is aimed at formulating a new concept of artificial cybernetic system, taking its name from Descartes’s maxim “Cogito, ergo sum” and drawing inspiration from the new frontier of robotics that aims to reduce, if not completely cancel, system rigidity.

The goal of COgITOR, in fact, is to create a liquid cybernetic system inspired by the cellular world and suited to the exploration of extreme environments or other planets. It will be spherical in shape, covered by a sensitive skin, similar to a touch screen, allowing interaction with the environment, and will be fitted with a power generation system based on thermal gradients.

COgITOR is a project funded by the European Union as part of the Horizon2020 research programme, with a budget of approximately 3.5 million euros for the next 4 years. The project has been conceived – and is coordinated – by Alessandro Chiolerio, a researcher from the IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology), who has had experience working at the Max Planck Institute for Microstructure Physics in Germany and at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the United States. The consortium includes Prof. Andrew Adamatzky (University of Bristol), Dr. Artur Braun (EMPA, Dübendorf), Dr. Carsten Jost (Plasmachem GmbH, Berlin) and Dr. Chiara Zocchi (Ciaotech Srl, Milano).

Tracing The Origin Of life

The origin of life is one of the great questions of mankind. One of the prerequisites for the emergence of life is the abiotic – not by living beings caused chemical – production and polymerization of amino acids, the building blocks of life.

“Two scenarios are being discussed for the emergence of life on Earth: On the one hand, the first-time creation of such amino acid chains on Earth, and on the other hand, the influx from space,” explains Tilmann Märk of the University of Innsbruck. “For the latter, such amino acid chains would have to be generated in the very unfavorable and inhospitable conditions in space.”

A team of researchers led by Michel Farizon of the University of Lyon and Tilmann Märk of the University of Innsbruck has now made a significant discovery in the field of abiotic peptide chain formation from amino acids for the smallest occurring amino acid, glycine, a molecule that has been observed several times extraterrestrially in recent years.

Enabling Martian Habitability With Silica Aerogel Via the Solid-state Greenhouse Effect

The low temperatures and high ultraviolet (UV) radiation levels at the surface of Mars today currently preclude the survival of life anywhere except perhaps in limited subsurface niches.

Several ideas for making the Martian surface more habitable have been put forward previously, but they all involve massive environmental modification that will be well beyond human capability for the foreseeable future. Here we present a new approach to this problem. We show that widespread regions of the surface of Mars could be made habitable to photosynthetic life in the future via a solid-state analogue to Earth’s atmospheric greenhouse effect.

Specifically, we demonstrate via experiments and modelling that under Martian environmental conditions, a 2 to 3-cm thick layer of silica (SiO2) aerogel will simultaneously transmit sufficient visible light for photosynthesis, block hazardous ultraviolet radiation, and raise temperatures underneath permanently to above the melting point of water, without the need for any internal heat source. Placing silica aerogel shields over sufficiently ice-rich regions of the Martian surface could therefore allow photosynthetic life to survive there with minimal subsequent intervention.

Space dust as Earth’s sun shield

On a cold winter day, the warmth of the sun is welcome. Yet as humanity emits more and more greenhouse gases, the Earth’s atmosphere traps more and more of the sun’s energy and steadily increases the Earth’s temperature. One strategy for reversing this trend is to intercept a fraction of sunlight before it reaches our planet. For decades, scientists have considered using screens, objects or dust particles to block just enough of the sun’s radiation—between 1 or 2%—to mitigate the effects of global warming.

A University of Utah-led study explored the potential of using dust to shield sunlight. They analyzed different properties of dust particles, quantities of dust and the orbits that would be best suited for shading Earth. The authors found that launching dust from Earth to a way station at the “Lagrange Point” between Earth and the sun (L1) would be most effective but would require astronomical cost and effort. An alternative is to use moondust. The authors argue that launching from the moon instead could be a cheap and effective way to shade the Earth.

The team of astronomers applied a technique used to study around distant stars, their usual research focus. Planet formation is a messy process that kicks up lots of astronomical dust that can form rings around the host star. These rings intercept light from the central star and re-radiate it in a way that we can detect it on Earth. One way to discover stars that are forming is to look for these dusty rings.

We’ve Just Seen an ‘Exceptional’ Once-in-a-Millennium Space Explosion

A record-breaking gamma-ray burst detected in October 2022 has now been described as a one-in-a-thousand years event.

It’s called GRB 221009A, and with up to 18 teraelectronvolts of energy packed in its emissions of light, it’s considered the most powerful gamma-ray burst on record.

We’ve been waiting to learn more about this incredible explosion, and now the analyses have started to arrive on preprint server arXiv, with a trio of papers submitted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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