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The Higgs mode associated with the amplitude fluctuation of an order parameter can decay into other low-energy bosonic modes, which renders the Higgs mode usually unstable in condensed matter systems. Here, the authors propose a mechanism to stabilize the Higgs mode in anisotropic quantum magnets. They show that magnetic anisotropy gaps out the Goldstone magnon mode and stabilizes the Higgs mode near a quantum critical point. The results are supported by three independent approaches: a bond-operator method, field theory, and quantum Monte Carlo simulation with analytic continuation.

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August was the second-highest month for sales ever.

Colorado has seen over $1.1 billion in marijuana sales since the COVID-19 pandemic began in this country, according to figures from the state Department of Revenue.

Legal marijuana sales topped $200 million in August for the second month in a row, reaching the second-highest monthly total since recreational sales started in 2014. Counting back to March of this year, when Colorado and the rest of the nation began shutting down over the pandemic, dispensaries have sold over $1.1 billion in marijuana products — and that’s not counting sales in September and October.

Dispensaries sold over $218.6 million worth of marijuana products in August, DOR data shows. Recreational sales accounted for more than $176.5 million (also the second-highest monthly total since 2014), while medical marijuana sales remained strong at just over $42 million.

Continue reading “Colorado Marijuana Sales Top

August was the second-highest month for sales ever.

Colorado has seen over $1.1 billion in marijuana sales since the COVID-19 pandemic began in this country, according to figures from the state Department of Revenue.

Legal marijuana sales topped $200 million in August for the second month in a row, reaching the second-highest monthly total since recreational sales started in 2014. Counting back to March of this year, when Colorado and the rest of the nation began shutting down over the pandemic, dispensaries have sold over $1.1 billion in marijuana products — and that’s not counting sales in September and October.

Dispensaries sold over $218.6 million worth of marijuana products in August, DOR data shows. Recreational sales accounted for more than $176.5 million (also the second-highest monthly total since 2014), while medical marijuana sales remained strong at just over $42 million. Billion Since Pandemic Began” | >

This will be the 13th New Shepard mission and the 7th consecutive flight for this particular vehicle (a record), demonstrating its operational reusability. N…

Blue Origin successfully completed the 13th New Shepard mission on October 13, 2020. New Shepard flew 12 commercial payloads to space on this mission, including the Deorbit, Descent, and Landing Sensor Demonstration with NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate under a Tipping Point partnership. This was the first payload to fly mounted on the exterior of a New Shepard booster rather than inside the capsule, opening the door to a wide range of future high-altitude sensing, sampling, and exposure payloads.

Also on board were tens of thousands of postcards from students around the world from Blue Origin’s nonprofit, Club for the Future, some of which will include a special NASA Artemis stamp.

Continue reading “Replay — New Shepard Mission NS-13 Webcast” | >

The combination of rooftop and utility scale solar met 100 per cent of demand in South Australia for the first time on Sunday, reaching a milestone that will surely be repeated many times over – and for longer periods – in the future.

The milestone was reached at 12.05pm grid time (Australian eastern standard time), with rooftop solar providing 992MW, or 76.3 per cent of state demand, and utility scale solar providing a further 315MW – meaning all three of the state’s big solar farms, Bungala 1m Bungala 2 and Tailem Bend were operating at full capacity.

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Huanghe Hydropower Development has connected a 2.2 GW solar plant to the grid in the desert in China’s remote Qinghai province. The project is backed by 202.8 MW/MWh of storage.

Chinese state-owned utility Huanghe Hydropower Development has finished building the world’s largest solar power project in a desert in the northwestern Chinese province of Qinghai.

Chinese inverter manufacturer Sungrow, which supplied the inverters, said that the 2.2 GW solar plant was built in five phases. It involved an investment of RMB15.04 billion ($2.2 billion) and includes 202.8 MW/MWh of storage capacity. The company announced the storage system as a solar+storage project in mid-May, but at the time it did not reveal that it was to be connected to a giant solar plant.

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I don’t know how long we’ll continue to have to wait.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are collaborating on a new “compact” fusion reactor that could feasibly be built and go online much faster than existing fusion reactor concepts. Does that mean fusion’s Lucy will finally let an industry Charlie Brown kick the football? Maybe.

☢️You love nuclear. So do we. Let’s nerd out over nuclear together.

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The crew of the International Space Station (ISS) has failed to fix the air leak in the Russian Zvezda by using adhesive tape in the module’s section, where a crack is supposedly located, as the pressure continues to decline, according to conversations between the ISS crew and Earth, broadcast by NASA.

On Thursday, the Moscow Mission Control Center instructed Russian cosmonaut Ivan Vagner to use as much tape as possible in Zvezda’s intermediate chamber, where the source of the leak is expected to be located.

On Friday morning, Vagner informed specialists at the Center that the pressure in the compartment had declined by 17 mm Hg down to 715 mm Hg.

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Over the past decade or so, the performance of batteries has skyrocketed and their cost has plummeted. Given that many experts see the electrification of everything as key to decarbonizing our energy systems, this is good news. But for researchers like Chueh, the pace of battery innovation isn’t happening fast enough. The reason is simple: batteries are extremely complex. To build a better battery means ruthlessly optimizing at every step in the production process. It’s all about using less expensive raw materials, better chemistry, more efficient manufacturing techniques. But there are a lot of parameters that can be optimized. And often an improvement in one area—say, energy density—will come at a cost of making gains in another area, like charge rate.

Improving batteries has always been hampered by slow experimentation and discovery processes. Machine learning is speeding it up by orders of magnitude.

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The mission was previously scheduled for 2:40 a.m. ET on October 31. The latest delay allows SpaceX to evaluate an issue with its Falcon 9 rocket engines during a recent test launch. The rocket’s gas generators demonstrated abnormal behavior, NASA said in a statement, though it didn’t specify what went wrong.

SpaceX aborted a scheduled launch of its Falcon 9 rocket on October 2 after a gas generator saw an unexpected rise in pressure.

This isn’t the first time SpaceX has delayed Crew-1, the company’s first official, contracted astronaut mission for NASA. The mission was originally slated to launch as early as September. It was pushed back until Halloween to better coordinate with the schedules of other cosmonauts and astronauts going to and from the ISS.

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Colder, Colder…

The process of sintering, or bonding the metals that make up the flexible circuits, usually happens at 572 degrees Fahrenheit.

“The skin surface cannot withstand such a high temperature, obviously,” Penn State engineer and lead author Hanyu “Larry” Cheng said in a press release. “To get around this limitation, we proposed a sintering aid layer — something that would not hurt the skin and could help the material sinter together at a lower temperature.”

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