Lifeboat Foundation

“A combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness” is how an international team of chemists describes the unique odor of old books in a study. Poetic, sure, but what causes it?

Books are made up almost entirely of organic materials: paper, ink, glue, fibers. All these materials react to light, heat, moisture, and even each other over the years, and release a number of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). While the blend of compounds released by any one book is dependent on the exact things that went into making it, there’s only so much variation in materials.

The researchers tested 72 books and found some 15 compounds that came up again and again. They were reliable markers for degradation. These include acetic acid, benzaldehyde, butanol, furfural, octanal, methoxyphenyloxime, and other chemicals with funny-sounding names. A book’s smell is also influenced by its environment and materials it encounters over the course of its life (which is why some books have hints of cigarette smoke, others smell a little like coffee, and still others, cat dander).

“Davemaoite” forms under the high-pressure conditions of deep Earth.

Local providers are putting down 400 km of fiber connection around the river, but Project Taara used WOC to beam high-speed connectivity over it instead.

His team, he adds, has spent years refining the technology’s atmospheric sensing, mirror controls, and motion detection capabilities; Taara’s terminals can now automatically adjust to changes in the environment to maintain precise connections.

Project Taara aims to bridge a connectivity gap between the Republic of the Congo’s Brazzaville and the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Kinshasa. The cities lie just 4.8 kilometers (2.9 miles) apart, but between them is the Congo River —it’s the deepest river in the world (220 meters/720 feet in parts! Pretty terrifying, if you ask me), the second-fastest, and the only one that crosses the equator twice. That makes for some complicated logistics, and as such, internet connectivity in Kinshasa (which is on the river’s south bank) very expensive.

Local internet providers are putting down 400 kilometers of fiber connection around the river, but in a textbook example of leapfrogging technology, Project Taara used WOC to beam high-speed connectivity over the river instead.

If you get a dense quantum gas cloud cold enough, you can see right through it. This phenomenon, called Pauli blocking, happens because of the same effects that give atoms their structure, and now it has been observed for the first time.

“This has been a theoretical prediction for more than three decades,” says Amita Deb at the University of Otago in New Zealand, a member of one of three teams that have now independently seen this. “This is the first time this been proven experimentally.”

Pauli blocking occurs in gases made up of a type of particle called a fermion, a category that includes the protons, neutrons and electrons that make up all atoms. These particles obey a rule called the Pauli exclusion principle, which dictates that no two identical fermions can occupy the same quantum state in a given system.

A bold claim, I know. It won’t surprise you to find out that I want to stick some qualifiers on it. For the purposes of this article, “futurists” means educated industry analysts and hard science fiction authors with a comprehensive knowledge of physics.

Their shareholdings in tech firms and other private companies are soaring | Business.

The Biden administration is expected to announce this week it is purchasing 10 million courses of treatment Pfizer’s covid pill, a multibillion dollar investment in a medication that officials hope will help change the trajectory of the pandemic by staving off many hospitalizations and deaths, according to two people with knowledge of the transaction.

-call me Nostradamus, but I called this.

Officials see Pfizer’s pill, and another by Merck, as potential gamechangers to tame the pandemic.

Continue reading “Biden administration to buy Pfizer antiviral pills for 10 million people, hoping to transform pandemic” »

Alarm bells are ringing in the halls of the Pentagon led by General Mark Milley, senior Pentagon officials are becoming increasingly worried about China’s rapid expansion of its nuclear arsenal.

#Pentagon #China #UnitedStates.

Continue reading “US worried about China’s nuclear arsenal, ‘We have to act now,’ says General Milley | Latest News” »

Aiming to emulate the quantum characteristics of materials more realistically, researchers have figured out a way to create a lattice of light and atoms that can vibrate – bringing sound to an otherwise silent experiment.

When sound was first incorporated into movies in the 1920s, it opened up new possibilities for filmmakers such as music and spoken dialogue. Physicists may be on the verge of a similar revolution, thanks to a new device developed at Stanford University that promises to bring an audio dimension to previously silent quantum science experiments.

In particular, it could bring sound to a common quantum science setup known as an optical lattice, which uses a crisscrossing mesh of laser beams to arrange atoms in an orderly manner resembling a crystal. This tool is commonly used to study the fundamental characteristics of solids and other phases of matter that have repeating geometries. A shortcoming of these lattices, however, is that they are silent.