Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 5,612

July 15 (Reuters) — NASA and Russia’s space agency Roscosmos have signed a long-sought agreement to integrate flights to the International Space Station, allowing Russian cosmonauts to fly on U.S.-made spacecraft in exchange for American astronauts being able to ride on Russia’s Soyuz, the agencies said Friday.

“The agreement is in the interests of Russia and the United States and will promote the development of cooperation within the framework of the ISS program,” Roscosmos said in a statement, adding it will facilitate the “exploration of outer space for peaceful purposes.”

NASA and Roscosmos, the two-decade-old space station’s core partners, have sought for years to renew routine integrated crewed flights as part of the agencies’ long-standing civil alliance, now one of the last links of cooperation between the United States and Russia as tensions flare over the war in Ukraine.

Read more | >

A scientific article just published by four Brazilian and two American scientists reports gains in electric and thermal energy obtained when brewer’s spent grain (barley bagasse), an abundant waste produced by the beer industry, is treated with ultrasound before undergoing anaerobic digestion, a microbiological process involving consumption of organic matter and production of methane.

Pre-treatment generated biogas with 56% methane, 27% more than the proportion obtained without use of ultrasound. After purification in methane, the biogas can be used as vehicle fuel with a very low carbon footprint compared to conventional fossil fuels. Moreover, in cogenerators, the methane can be burned off by the brewery to produce electricity and heat. The final waste can be used as biofertilizer instead of mineral fertilizer. The methodology is described in detail in the article, which is published in the Journal of Cleaner Production.

The innovative process was developed at the Laboratory of Bioengineering and Treatment of Water and Waste (Biotar) in the State University of Campinas’s School of Food Engineering (FEA-UNICAMP). The research group lead, T nia Forster-Carneiro, is principal investigator for a project supported by FAPESP.

Read more | >

Photovoltaics will play a key role in the future energy supply. Conventional solar cells based, for instance, on silicon, a well-known semiconductor material, are already highly developed and in widespread use. However, their production is complex because it requires a high vacuum with high temperatures. It can take up to five years for the energy used for production to be offset by operation.

This is where solar cells based on organic semiconductors can make a difference, as they can be printed in an energy-and cost-saving way. However, there are limitations to the energy conversion that need to be examined in more detail. A research team led by the Professorship of Optics and Photonics of Condensed Matter at Chemnitz University of Technology has investigated which main factors are decisive for the power limitation of organic solar cells.

The lead author of the study is Christopher Wöpke, research associate at the Professorship of Optics and Photonics of Condensed Matter at Chemnitz University of Technology. He was joined in the study by scientists from the universities of Bayreuth, Bern (CH), Durham (UK), Erlangen-Nuremberg and the Advanced Light Source Berkeley Lab (U.S.). Among other things, the team found that transport resistance in particular severely limits the performance of organic solar cells.

Read more | >

A study led by UCLA researchers could help accelerate the use of hydrogen as an environmentally friendly source of energy in transportation and other applications.

The team developed a method for predicting platinum alloys’ potency and stability—two key indicators of how they will perform as catalysts in . Then, using that technique, they designed and produced an alloy that yielded excellent results under conditions approximating real-world use. The findings are published in the journal Nature Catalysis.

“For the sustainability of our planet, we can’t keep living the way we do, and reinventing energy is one major way to change our path,” said corresponding author Yu Huang, a professor of materials science and engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA. “We have fuel cell cars, but we need to make them cheaper. In this study, we came up with an approach to allow researchers to identify the right catalysts much faster.”

Read more | >

This intriguing observation from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows a gravitationally lensed galaxy with the long-winded identification SGAS J143845+145407. Gravitational lensing has resulted in a mirror image of the galaxy near the center of this image, creating a captivating centerpiece. A third distorted image of the galaxy appears as a bridge between them.

Gravitational lensing occurs when the mass of an enormous celestial body – such as a galaxy cluster – curves spacetime and causes the path of light from distant objects to visibly bend around it, as if by a lens. Appropriately, the body causing the light to curve is called a gravitational lens, and the distorted background object is referred to as being “lensed.” Gravitational lensing can result in multiple images of the original galaxy, as seen in this image, or in the background object appearing as a distorted arc or even a ring. Another important consequence of this lensing distortion is magnification, allowing astronomers to observe objects that would otherwise be too far away or be too faint to see.

Read more | >