Dr. Wencai Zhang: “Our goal is to contribute to the supply chain of these critical materials while also making a positive environmental impact. We specifically aim to reduce the environmental consequences that can be associated with produced water.”
How can lithium, one of the most demanded minerals for clean energy products like electric vehicles, be harvested without harming the environment? This is | Technology.
Roadmap: Quantum algorithms and quantum machine learning could assist high-energy physics, ranging from studying neutrino oscillations to reconstructing particle trajectories in colliders.
Why do we take so many selfies? Because we are afraid of dying, say psychologists.
Many of us have phones filled with selfies documenting everything from holidays to duvet days.
But what’s behind the modern fascination with taking photos of ourselves?
Psychologists have come up with a rather morbid answer: fear of dying.
Building a nuclear fusion reactor capable of providing green energy for homes and industry is the goal of many physicists around the world, but many roadblocks stand between our present and this green energy future. While some of those hurdles have been overcome, building robust materials capable of surviving the hellish conditions inside tokamaks is the next frontier.
As engineers construct next-generation fusion reactors, like the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in southern France, labs around the world are working on creating exotic materials capable of containing super-hot plasma while also generating electricity. One of those labs is MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI), which is dedicated to finding ways to make future reactors more robust and reliable.
This is another episode in our series on the great figures in developmental bioelectricity. We interview (~1 hour) Mustafa Djamgoz, who has made pivotal discoveries about the role of bioelectricity in the problem of cancer and its eventual solution.
Mustafa’s book: / beat-cancer.
Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.
Lithium metal exposed to the heat of a fusion reaction chamber’s hot plasma can serve as a coolant to protect the reactor vessel.
Researchers have developed biohybrid robots controlled by fungal mycelia, leveraging the mycelia’s electrical signals to enhance environmental responsiveness. This novel system allows robots to react to stimuli like light.
Imagine aliens finding the golden record only to search earth and find a floating sign in space saying “301 moved permanently”.
TL;DR
The concept of a stellar engine, as discussed on Kurzgesagt’s YouTube channel, proposes using thrusters to move our entire solar system. The Shkadov Thruster, a passive solar sail system, would harness the Sun’s energy to propel the system, but it would be extremely slow, potentially moving 100 light-years in 230 million years. To increase speed, astrophysicist Matthew Caplan designed an active engine using the Bussard ramjet concept, known as the Caplan Thruster, which could move the solar system 50 light-years in a million years. This engine uses the Sun’s materials for fusion propulsion, generating thrust to push the Sun.
Physics stack exchange has recently been debating the question of the subjectivity of entropy.
I recommend Andrew Steane answer.
I’m a computer scientist doing some research that touches on basic concepts in statistical mechanics: macrostate, microstate and entropy. The way I’m currently conceiving of it is that the microstate includes all the information to perfectly the describe the state of a system, the macrostate provides some of the information, allowing you to narrow down the possibilities to a subset of states and a distribution over them, and the entropy roughly says how much information is still missing after you specify the macrostate.
From various places online, including this SE thread, I read that the choice of what to put in the macro-description depends on what state variables one is interested in. That SE answer seems to downplay the significance of this, but from my uninformed outsider perspective it seems like a big deal. I could, for example, make the entropy of any system zero if I choose the state variables to be the position and momentum of every particle (let’s just stick to the classical paradigm for now).
