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A British study found that protection from either of the two most commonly used COVID-19 vaccines against the Delta variant weakens within three months. It also found that those who get infected after receiving two shots of either the Pfizer-BioNTech or the AstraZeneca vaccine may be of greater risk to others than under previous variants of the coronavirus Based on more than three million nose and throat swabs taken across Britain, the Oxford University study found that 90 days after a second shot of the Pfizer or Astrazeneca vaccine, their efficacy in preventing infections had slipped to 75% and 61% respectively.

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Researchers are studying adding carbon capture technologies to vehicles so that the CO2 can be sequestered or recycled into renewable hydrocarbon fuels.

According to senior researcher of the study; “This technology really doesn’t have any major hurdles to making it work,”

When people talk about how to eliminate vehicles’ carbon dioxide (CO2) emission, often the conversation often focuses on electrifying cars, trucks and buses. Yet cargo and tanker ships, which are responsible for 3% of all CO2 emissions, are rarely a part of the discussion.

Now a Northwestern University research team offers a practical way to make ships CO2 neutral—or even CO2 negative—with CO2-capturing solid oxide fuel cells. After “burning” traditional carbon-based fuels, the fuel cell generates concentrated CO2 that can be stored on-board the ship. From there, the CO2 can either be sequestered or recycled into a renewable hydrocarbon fuel.

Continue reading “The case for onboard carbon dioxide capture on long-range vehicles” | >

Over the last few decades, various forms of solar power stations have been proposed from around the world but they remained theoretical because of major technical challenges.

At Bishan, Chinese researchers would first need to prove that wireless power transfer worked over a long distance.

Civilian and military researchers will look at applications for the technology amid concerns about radiation and the potential for beams misfired from space.

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NASA has confirmed that SpaceX’s next Falcon 9 launch is now scheduled to occur no earlier than 3:37 am EDT (07:37 UTC) on Saturday, August 28th.

Known as CRS-23, the cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station (ISS) is noteworthy for two major reasons. Most importantly, CRS-23 will mark SpaceX’s first-ever reuse of an upgraded Cargo Dragon 2 spacecraft. Simultaneously, that reuse milestone will coincide with another when SpaceX smashes its internal record for orbital spacecraft turnaround later this month.

Second, much to the surprise of virtually everyone watching from the sidelines, SpaceX’s last launch occurred on June 30th – in the first half of 2021. One step removed from the mission’s technical specifics, CRS-23 will, in other words, also be SpaceX’s first launch in almost two months – a gap not seen in two years.

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Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers have explored high-pressure behavior of shock-compressed tantalum at the Omega Laser Facility at the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE). The work showed tantalum did not follow the predicted phase changes at high pressure and instead maintained the body-centered cubic (BCC) phase until melt.

The results of the work are featured in a Physical Review Letters paper and focuses on how researchers studied the melting behavior of at multi-megabar pressures on the nanosecond timescale.

“This work provides an improved physical intuition for how materials melt and respond at such extreme conditions,” said Rick Kraus, lead author of the paper. “These techniques and improved knowledge base are now being applied to understanding how the iron cores of rocky planets solidify and also to more programmatically relevant materials as well.”

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The Breit-Wheeler process which produces matter and antimatter from photon collisions is experimentally investigated through the observation of 6085 exclusive electron-positron pairs in ultraperipheral Au+Au collisions at √sNN=200 GeV. The measurements reveal a large fourth-order angular modulation of cos4Δϕ=(16.8±2.5)% and smooth invariant mass distribution absent of vector mesons (ϕ, ω, and ρ) at the experimental limit of ≤0.2% of the observed yields. The differential cross section as a function of e+e− pair transverse momentum P⊥ peaks at low value with √⟨P2⊥⟩=38.1±0.9 MeV and displays a significant centrality dependence. These features are consistent with QED calculations for the collision of linearly polarized photons quantized from the extremely strong electromagnetic fields generated by the highly charged Au nuclei at ultrarelativistic speed. The experimental results have implications for vacuum birefringence and for mapping the magnetic field which is important for emergent QCD phenomena.

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