A team mapping radio waves in the Universe has discovered something unusual that releases a giant burst of energy three times an hour, and it’s unlike anything astronomers have seen before. The team who discovered it think it could be a neutron star or a white dwarf—collapsed cores of stars—wi…
Electric bicycle sales have been on a skyward trajectory since early in the pandemic, and new numbers show they are selling more units than electric cars and plug-in hybrids combined. Those figures recently released by the Light Electric Vehicle Association trade group help bolster the case for personal electric vehicles as alternatives to larger cars […].
Those figures recently released by the Light Electric Vehicle Association trade group help bolster the case for personal electric vehicles as alternatives to larger cars and trucks.
According to data released by the LEVA, the US saw nearly 790,000 electric bike imports in 2021. That marks a 70% increase from the 463,000 imports in 2020.
Iron that rusts in water theoretically shouldn’t corrode in contact with an “inert” supercritical fluid of carbon dioxide. But it does.
The reason has eluded materials scientists to now, but a team at Rice University has a theory that could contribute to new strategies to protect iron from the environment.
Materials theorist Boris Yakobson and his colleagues at Rice’s George R. Brown School of Engineering found through atom-level simulations that iron itself plays a role in its own corrosion when exposed to supercritical CO2 (sCO2) and trace amounts of water by promoting the formation of reactive species in the fluid that come back to attack it.
According to our current Cosmological models, the Universe began with a Big Bang roughly 13.8 billion years ago. During the earliest periods, the Universe was permeated by an opaque cloud of hot plasma, preventing atoms from forming. About 380,000 years later, the Universe cooled to a temperature of about-270 °C (−454 °F), which converted much of the energy generated by the Big Bang into light. This afterglow is now visible to astronomers as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), first observed during the 1960s.
One peculiar characteristic about the CMB that attracted a lot of attention was the tiny fluctuations in temperature, which could provide information about the early Universe. In particular, there is a rather large spot in the CMB that is cooler than the surrounding afterglow, known as the CMB Cold Spot. After decades of studying the CMB’s temperature fluctuations, a team of scientists recently confirmed the existence of the largest cold spots in the CMB afterglow – the Eridanus Supervoid – might be the explanation for the CMB Cold Spot that astronomers have been looking for!
The research was conducted by the Dark Energy Survey (DES), an international team of researchers made up of 300 scientists from 25 institutions in seven countries. The research team was led by András Kovacs, an astrophysicist with the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of Laguna in Tenerife, Spain. The results of their study, titled “The DES view of the Eridanus supervoid and the CMB cold spot,” appeared in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on December 17th, 2021.
Learnings For Regenerative Morphogenesis, Astro-Biology And The Evolution Of Minds — Dr. Michael Levin, Tufts University, and Dr. Josh Bongard, University of Vermont.
Xenobots are living micro-robots, built from cells, designed and programmed by a computer (an evolutionary algorithm) and have been demonstrated to date in the laboratory to move towards a target, pick up a payload, heal themselves after being cut, and reproduce via a process called kinematic self-replication.
In addition to all of their future potential that has been mentioned in the press, including Xenobot applications for cleaning up radioactive wastes, collecting micro-plastics in the oceans, and even helping terraform planets, Xenobot research offers a completely new tool kit to help increase our understanding of how complex tissues/organs/body segments are cooperatively formed during the process of morphogenesis, how minds develop, and even offers glimpses of possibilities of what novel life forms we may encounter one day in the cosmos.
This is a bit interesting. As we all know, education has been crushed by the pandemic measures. Jeff Bezos has been operating one free preschool program in Washington State where Amazon is based. Now he is adding three more such programs in Texas.
I assume he picked Texas because Blue Origin is based there and he wishes to focus more on Blue Origin. Elon Musk regularly donates to education in Texas as well, likely because Starship is currently based in Texas.
Houston city council member Karla Cisneros said the partnership will help support the development and success of some of the city’s neediest children and help the future workforce be prepared for jobs. “We are helping women get back to work, and we are giving young children a good shot at a better life,” Cisneros said in the release.
The Bezos Academy opened its first school in Des Moines, Washington in October 2020. The preschool program has three other locations opening in Texas this year, including two in Dallas.
A Lancaster physicist has proposed a radical solution to the question of how a charged particle, such as an electron, responded to its own electromagnetic field.
This question has challenged physicists for over 100 years but mathematical physicist Dr. Jonathan Gratus has suggested an alternative approach — published in the Journal of Physics A — with controversial implications.
It is well established that if a point charge accelerates it produces electromagnetic radiation. This radiation has both energy and momentum, which must come from somewhere. It is usually assumed that they come from the energy and momentum of the charged particle, damping the motion.
Surgeries require a lot of planning, practice, and precision. Doctors cannot afford to get distracted or lose focus when operating on a person. The use of AI in surgery aims to support doctors and supply them with the necessary information and surgical tools without disturbing them at any point.
Mixed reality makes it possible to use technology to assist doctors during surgeries and minimize risks.
Paul Milgram and Fumio Kishino first introduced the term mixed reality in 1994 in their paper titled A Taxonomy of Mixed Reality Visual Displays. MR combines computer vision, cloud computing, graphical processing, etc., to blend the physical and virtual worlds. Many companies have been developing MR applications that can be used in various industries.
The innovative project Green H2-Hub Haren in the Emsland region in northern Germany uses H-Tec Systems electrolysers for sector integration.
The Green H2-Hub Haren project in Haren in Lower Saxony, northern Germany uses two electrolysers from H-Tec Systems. This was announced by project leader CEC Haren GmbH & Co. KG and electrolyser manufacturer H-Tec Systems. The order was placed with H-Tec Systems by the electricity and gas distribution network operator Westnetz. This research and development project is intended to enable the establishment of a decentralized hydrogen facility. At the site, green hydrogen will be produced from wind energy and stored in connection with specific regional applications, primarily for the mobility sector. The H2-Hub targets various hydrogen applications in rural areas – in particular in the field of agriculture – based on the production and use of sustainably generated hydrogen. In addition, the project is intended to significantly increase the city of Haren’s rate of self-sufficiently produced renewable energy. The goal is to implement a model that will also develop and prepare a comprehensive integration of other rural locations and regions in Lower Saxony into the H2 supply infrastructure.
The town of Haren aims to be completely self-sufficient with green energy. New storage systems as part of the H2 Hub enable a significant use of excess electricity from times of peak generation. The 16 wind turbines of the community wind farm Fehndorf-Lindloh are connected to a PEM electrolysis system, as well as an additional battery storage system in combination with a superordinate energy management system. In addition, a hydrogen filling station and a gas network feed-in point will be built. In this way, the project allows the transfer of surplus electricity to other sectors, such as heating or transport.
A key approach of sector integration in connection with renewable energies is to stabilize wind energy through PEM electrolysis with connected storage. The production of hydrogen will be realized with the help of two electrolysis systems from H-Tec Systems. This will enable new potential for the utilization of this energy in the form of power-to-gas or power-to-fuel.
