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Blog – Page 4850

Scientists are planning a “CAT scan” of a British Columbia volcano to help harness the underground heat that turns rock into magma for renewable energy.

“Canadians are often surprised to know there’s volcanoes in the country,” said Steve Grasby, a geologist with Natural Resources Canada. “But there are active volcanoes.”

Grasby and his colleagues are headed about 24 kilometres west of Whistler, B.C., to Mount Cayley, part of the same mountain chain as well-known volcanic peaks such Mount St. Helens in Washington State.

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Star Scientific invents a catalyst that in the presence of hydrogen and oxygen heats to 700 Celsius. That’s enough heat to drive a steam turbine for power generation.

Star Scientific is a 25-year-old research laboratory north of Sydney, Australia. The company is one of many trying to make existing power plants carbon-free. This includes old coal-fired thermal power stations which remain among the biggest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions on the planet. Star has invented a patented non-polluting catalyst which it calls HERO® which is an acronym for Hydrogen Energy Release Optimizer. It uses hydrogen without producing combustion.

Mars Food Australia, the subsidiary of the global food giant, is using HERO® to help decarbonize its processes. The 18-month pilot project is the first step in developing alternative heat sources for the food industry. Bill Heague who is General Manager of Mars in Australia states, “Thermal energy is crucial to the business of cooking food and this technology has the capability to create limitless heat without any combustion and zero emissions.”

But this is only the beginning because Star has plans to introduce the technology into legacy coal-fired power plants to retrofit existing generators to run on green hydrogen. In an interview with Bloomberg Green, Andrew Horvath, Chairman of Star Scientific states, “We think there are a lot of opportunities in existing steam turbines that have some longevity…Why would you throw them away? They’re already connected to the grid.” He cites the example of Japan where 70% of its existing turbines still have 40 years of life left.

Continue reading “Can We Adapt Old Power Plants to Run on Green Hydrogen?” | >

Brain cells with the same “birthdate” are more likely to wire together into cooperative signaling circuits that carry out many functions, including the storage of memories, a new study finds.

Led by researchers from NYU Grossman School of Medicine, the new study on the brains of mice developing in the womb found that () with the same birthdate showed distinct connectivity and activity throughout the animals’ , whether they were asleep or awake.

Published online August 22 in Nature Neuroscience, the findings suggest that evolution took advantage of the orderly birth of neurons—by gestational day—to form localized microcircuits in the hippocampus, the region that forms memories. Rather than attempting to create each new from scratch, the researchers suggest, the brain may exploit the stepwise formation of neuronal layers to establish neural templates, like “Lego pieces,” that match each new experience to an existing template as it is remembered.

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People have been dreaming of robot butlers for decades, but one of the biggest barriers has been getting machines to understand our instructions. Google has started to close the gap by marrying the latest language AI with state-of-the-art robots.

Human language is often ambiguous. How we talk about things is highly context-dependent, and it typically requires an innate understanding of how the world works to decipher what we’re talking about. So while robots can be trained to carry out actions on our behalf, conveying our intentions to them can be tricky.

If they have any ability to understand language at all, robots are typically designed to respond to short, specific instructions. More opaque directions like “I need something to wash these chips down” are likely to go over their heads, as are complicated multi-step requests like “Can you put this apple back in the fridge and fetch the chocolate?”

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In today’s society, being happy and having an optimistic attitude are social expectations that weigh heavily on how we live and the choices we make.

Some psychologists have pointed out how has evolved into an industry. In turn, this has created what I call a happiness imperative, the social expectation that we should all aspire to happiness.

But this can be an obstacle to happiness. This is why, as a researcher in philosophical , I argue that if we actually want to live better lives, pessimism is the philosophical system that can help us achieve it.

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NASA has dropped a remix of what a black hole sounds like — and it’s exactly what you’d expect. The hole in question sits 200 million light-years away in the Perseus galaxy cluster — an 11 million-light-year-wide set of galaxies packed with hot gas. In the clip, you can hear rumbling and groaning which feels fit for an episode of Stranger Things, but it’s actually pressure waves rippling through the hot gas.

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“We took skin biopsies from patients living with Huntington’s disease and reprogrammed the skin biopsies into neurons. We then compared these neurons with reprogrammed neurons from healthy people. The results are very interesting. We have found several defects that explain some of the disease mechanisms in neurons from patients with Huntington’s disease. Among other things, we observed that neurons from patients with Huntington’s disease show problems in breaking down and recycling a particular kind of protein – which can lead to a lack of energy in these cells”, says Johan Jakobsson, professor of neuroscience at Lund University.

The researchers have also measured the biological age of the cells and observed that the reprogrammed neurons retain their biological age, which is significant if they are to be used for research in the new model system.

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