Lifeboat Foundation

New research indicates that if even a moderate amount of the water delivered by asteroids to the Moon was sequestered, the lunar poles would contain gigaton deposits (1 billion metric tons) of ice in sheltered craters and beneath its surface.

By modeling over 4 billion years of the Moon’s impact history, researchers were able to track the origin and potential quantity of ice that might be obscured from view beneath the lunar surface.

“We looked at the entire time history of ice deposition on the Moon,” said Kevin Cannon, a planetary scientist at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden and lead author of the new study in the AGU journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Quantum tools in python.

Quantum Toolbox in Python. QuTiP has 12 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub.

Tractebel Overdick has developed a new floating wind foundation concept for 15+ MW wind turbines with a “hydrogen ready” option, and an offshore hydrogen production platform which can utilise the potential of large-scale offshore wind farms at an industrial scale of up to 800 MW.

The new floater design is said to have been optimised to reduce the overall costs of the floating foundation, through all major fabrication, installation, and operational aspects. In the case of the new hydrogen platform, the company has also highlighted that the new design – for which the system configuration and platform layout have been optimised based on the company’s previous design for a 400 MW system – can now lead to an overall cost reduction and competitive levelized cost of hydrogen.

The floating wind foundation, based on triangular arrangement of the main load carrying members, does not require any moving parts or wires, thus reducing risks and allowing for easier transport and installation operations, according to Tractebel Overdick. Moreover, the floater can be fabricated without using large heavy lift cranes or similar infrastructure, which might not be available in remote areas of the world.

Oregon became the first state to legalize therapeutic use of the drug, as new research affirms its benefits for treating depression.

All-sky surveys usually take years. This one took weeks.

Australian scientists tested all 36 receivers on the ASKAP radio telescope for the first time ever, mapping 85% of the sky in 300 hours.

An antimatter laser can turn matter in the black hole into energy.

Invisible object has two companion stars visible to the naked eye.

Continue reading “Astronomers Discover Hidden Black Hole ‘Near’ Earth – Closest Ever Found to Our Solar System” »

Hypersonic flight is conventionally referred to as the ability to fly at speeds significantly faster than the speed of sound and presents an extraordinary set of technical challenges. As an example, when a space capsule re-enters Earth’s atmosphere, it reaches hypersonic speeds—more than five times the speed of sound—and generates temperatures over 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit on its exterior surface. Designing a thermal protection system to keep astronauts and cargo safe requires an understanding at the molecular level of the complicated physics going on in the gas that flows around the vehicle.

Recent research at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign added new knowledge about the physical phenomena that occur as atoms vibrate, rotate, and collide in this extreme environment.

“Due to the relative velocity of the flow surrounding the vehicle, a shock is formed in front of the capsule. When the gas molecules cross the shock, some of their properties change almost instantaneously. Instead, others don’t have enough time to adjust to the abrupt changes, and they don’t reach their equilibrium values before arriving at the surface of the vehicle. The layer between the shock and heat shield is then found in nonequilibrium. There is a lot that we don’t understand yet about the reactions that happen in this type of flow,” said Simone Venturi. He is a graduate student studying with Marco Panesi in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at UIUC.

When Gabrielle Diamond and her boyfriend, Brian Cox, showed up for eviction court on October 15, they were more than a little nervous.

The two had been renting a bedroom in transitional housing for veterans in Kansas City, Missouri, since January, paying $600 per month for their month-to-month lease. Almost as soon as they moved in, Diamond says, the issues started. The building was unclean and attracted mice, and the landlord would make unannounced weekly visits; at one point, the couple were asked to move out temporarily for house repairs without any assistance, financial or otherwise.

Understanding how matter interacts with light—its optical properties—is critical in a myriad of energy and biomedical technologies, such as targeted drug delivery, quantum dots, fuel combustion, and cracking of biomass. But calculating these properties is computationally intensive, and the inverse problem—designing a structure with desired optical properties—is even harder.

Now Berkeley Lab scientists have developed a machine learning model that can be used for both problems—calculating optical properties of a known structure and, inversely, designing a structure with desired optical properties. Their study was published in Cell Reports Physical Science.

“Our model performs bi-directionally with high accuracy and its interpretation qualitatively recovers physics of how metal and dielectric materials interact with light,” said corresponding author Sean Lubner.