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For those not paying attention, Tesla has been unable to build cars in China for a few weeks as China shuts down due to a zero Covid policy. Here’s a short video about life in China:

China’s financial hub Shanghai has started easing its lockdown in some areas on Monday, despite reporting a record high of more than 25,000 new Covid-19 infections, as authorities sought to get the city moving again after more than two weeks.

Pressure has been building on authorities in the country’s most populous city, and one of its wealthiest, from residents growing increasingly frustrated as the curbs dragged on, leaving some struggling to find enough food and medicine. Footage circulating online showed people screaming from their balconies, with the person filming claiming it was because people had grown tired of China’s strict lockdown rules.

Continue reading “Residents in locked down Shanghai scream from their balconies: ‘This cannot last’” | >

Scientists are finally getting closer to figuring out the puzzle of the structure of neutron stars and revealing the nature of their ultra-dense interiors.

In theories of stellar evolution, neutron stars are considered one of the end states of stars, along with white dwarfs and black holes. As a star evolves it will enter stages of expansion as hydrogen is fused into helium and so on through the periodic table of elements. Depending on the mass of the star, a limit will be reached whereby nuclear fusion can no longer take place and the star is no longer able to overcome the immense gravitational force which it has been holding back for all these years. As a result, the star implodes, ejecting its outer layers as a planetary nova or a supernova, leaving only a mere remnant of its former self behind – or so the story goes.

For massive stars, the implosion is so great that it crushes its stellar matter to such high densities that the oppositely charged electrons and protons are forced so close together that they fuse to become neutrons, hence creating a neutron star. This neutron star is so dense that a single teaspoonful could weigh a billion tonnes! For stars massive enough, it is further theorised that the gravitational collapse would be so great that it would instead crush the neutron star down to the size of an infinitesimal point, creating a black hole.

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Plastic and molten salt batteries may be the key to grid-scale energy storage.

Electricity is a marvelous thing. It can power every manner of machine and digital device, but it is ephemeral. It has to be used as soon as it is created or it is lost forever. The trick to making it serve the needs of humanity is to store it, and to do that, you need a battery.

There are hundreds of ways to make a battery — the Romans did it with copper and iron in a lemon juice bath. But not all of those storage techniques are practical in the real world. Some are too heavy, others too bulky. Many are too costly or use materials that are too scare. Nickel has long been a major component of today’s lithium-ion batteries, but upheavals in some countries masterminded by criminal leaders have caused it to triple in price recently.

Some batteries are good for powering vehicles. Others are better suited to long term grid-scale storage. This report will focus on two new battery technologies that show promise for storing electricity now so it can be used to power homes and businesses later.

Continue reading “Grid-Scale Storage Solutions — Plastic & Freeze/Thaw Battery Edition” | >

In a discovery that could speed research into next-generation electronics and LED devices, a University of Michigan research team has developed the first reliable, scalable method for growing single layers of hexagonal boron nitride on graphene.

The process, which can produce large sheets of high-quality hBN with the widely used molecular-beam epitaxy process, is detailed in a study in Advanced Materials.

Graphene-hBN structures can power LEDs that generate deep-UV light, which is impossible in today’s LEDs, said Zetian Mi, U-M professor of and and a corresponding author of the study. Deep-UV LEDs could drive smaller size and greater efficiency in a variety of devices including lasers and air purifiers.

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Mushrooms could be communicating in a structure that resembles human language, suggests a study published in the Royal Society Open Science.

Professor Andrew Adamatzky analysed the electrical signals in fungi and found patterns that have a structural similarity to English and Swedish languages at the University of the West of England’s Unconventional Computing Laboratory. The hope is to better understand how information is transferred and processed in mycelium networks, and to one day create fungi-based computing devices.

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