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Engineers at MIT have developed a new battery design using common materials – aluminum, sulfur and salt. Not only is the battery low-cost, but it’s resistant to fire and failures, and can be charged very fast, which could make it useful for powering a home or charging electric vehicles.

Lithium-ion batteries have dominated the field for the last few decades, thanks to their reliability and high energy density. However, lithium is becoming scarcer and more expensive, and the cells can be hazardous, exploding or bursting into flames if damaged or improperly used. Cheaper, safer alternatives are needed, especially as the world transitions towards renewable energy and electric vehicles.

So the MIT team set out to design a new type of battery out of readily available, inexpensive materials. After a search and some trial and error, they settled on aluminum for one electrode and sulfur for the other, topped off with an electrolyte of molten chloro-aluminate salt. Not only are all of these ingredients cheap and common, but they’re not flammable, so there’s no risk of fire or explosion.

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When some materials are cooled to a certain temperature, they lose electric resistance, becoming superconductors.

In this state, an electric charge can course through the material indefinitely, making superconductors a valuable resource for transmitting high volumes of electricity and other applications. Superconductors ferry electricity between Long Island and Manhattan. They’re used in medical imaging devices such as MRI machines, in particle accelerators and in magnets such as those used in maglev trains. Even unexpected materials, such as certain ceramic materials, can become superconductors when cooled sufficiently.

But scientists previously have not understood what occurs in a material to make it a superconductor. Specifically, how high-temperature superconductivity, which occurs in some materials, works hasn’t been previously understood. A 1966 theory examining a different type of superconductors posited that electrons which spin in opposite directions bind together to form what’s called a Cooper pair and allow electric current to pass through the material freely.

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Including Charlie Kam, Dr. Aubrey deGrey, Valery Chuprin, Jose Cordeiro, Gennady Stolyarov, Joseph Kowalsky & Richard Daley.

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“Our task is to make nature, the blind force of nature, into an instrument of universal resuscitation and to become a union of immortal beings.”

Continue reading “Open Mic Night, including Dr. Aubrey deGrey, Gennady Stolyarov, Jose Cordeiro & Joseph Kowalsky” | >

Tomorrow, Friday, August 26, is International Dog Day and this year Teck is celebrating with Spot, the robot dog developed by Boston Robotics that is supporting safety inspections and data collection at its Elkview mine operations.

Spot is an artificial intelligence (AI) assisted robot designed as man’s best friend.

Spot is a four-legged sensor device that navigates terrain with unprecedented mobility – getting into places that are frequently unsafe or challenging for people, allowing the mine to automate routine inspection tasks and data capture safely, accurately, and frequently.

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Circa 2021 face_with_colon_three

Researchers have found a new way to convert methane into rocket fuel on Mars — adding crucial flexibility to future astronaut missions to the Red Planet, according to a recent blog post on the University of California, Irvine’s (UCI’s) official website.

RELATED: LIFE ON MARS: SCIENTISTS ARE A LITTLE CLOSER TO SOLVING THE METHANE MYSTERY ON MARS

Scientists create new way to convert methane into rocket fuel on Mars

Continue reading “Scientists Just Created New Way to Make Rocket Fuel From Methane on Mars” | >

face_with_colon_three circa 2017.

The Daedalus Project

Project Icarus is an extremely fascinating initiative which aims to bring humanity closer to the stars. The latest theory proposed by scientists there is related to the development of system which could allow the harvesting of helium-3 gas from Uranus to fuel a possible interstellar mission. Uranus, then, seems to be a very resourceful planet, considering scientists believe it’s covered in oceans of diamonds.

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Physicists from TU Delft, ETH Zürich and the University of Tübingen have built a quantum scale heat pump made from particles of light. This device brings scientists closer to the quantum limit of measuring radio frequency signals, which may be useful in the hunt for dark matter. Their work will be published as an open-access article in Science Advances on Aug. 26.

If you bring two objects of different temperature together, such as putting a warm bottle of white wine into a cold chill pack, heat usually flows in one direction, from hot (the wine) to cold (the chill pack). And if you wait long enough, the two will both reach the same temperature, a process known in physics as reaching equilibrium: a balance between the heat flow one way and the other.

If you are willing to do some work, you can break this balance and cause heat to flow in the “wrong” way. This is the principle used in your refrigerator to keep your food cold, and in efficient heat pumps that can steal heat from the outside to warm your house. In their publication, Gary Steele and his co-authors demonstrate a quantum analog of a heat pump, causing the elementary quantum particles of light, known as , to move “against the flow” from a hot object to a cold one.

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