Lifeboat Foundation

Tech billionaires are funding research into controversial methods for cooling the planet.

By Corbin Hiar & E&E News

In creating five new isotopes, an international research team working at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) at Michigan State University has brought the stars closer to Earth.

The isotopes —known as thulium-182, thulium-183, ytterbium-186, ytterbium-187 and lutetium-190—are reported in the journal Physical Review Letters.

These represent the first batch of new isotopes made at FRIB, a user facility for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, or DOE-SC, supporting the mission of the DOE-SC Office of Nuclear Physics. The new isotopes show that FRIB is nearing the creation of nuclear specimens that currently only exist when ultradense celestial bodies known as neutron stars crash into each other.

A new study, resorting to computational models, predicts that a subduction zone currently below the Gibraltar Strait will propagate further inside the Atlantic and contribute to forming an Atlantic subduction system—an Atlantic ring of fire. This will happen ‘soon’ in geological terms—in approximately 20 million years.

Oceans seem eternal to our lifespan, but they are not here for long: they are born, grow, and one day close. This process, which takes a few hundred million years, is called Wilson Cycle. The Atlantic, for example, was born when Pangea broke up around 180 million years ago and will one day close. And the Mediterranean is what remains from a big ocean—the Tethys– that once existed between Africa and Eurasia.

For an ocean like the Atlantic to stop growing and start closing, new subduction zones—places where one tectonic plate sinks below another—have to form. But subduction zones are hard to form, as they require plates to break and bend, and plates are very strong. A way out of this “paradox” is to consider that subduction zones can migrate from a dying ocean in which they already exist—the Mediterranean—into pristine oceans—such as the Atlantic. This process was dubbed subduction invasion.

In an experiment akin to stop-motion photography, scientists have isolated the energetic movement of an electron while “freezing” the motion of the much larger atom it orbits in a sample of liquid water.

The findings, reported in the journal Science, provide a new window into the electronic structure of molecules in the liquid phase on a timescale previously unattainable with X-rays. The new technique reveals the immediate electronic response when a target is hit with an X-ray, an important step in understanding the effects of radiation exposure on objects and people.

“The chemical reactions induced by radiation that we want to study are the result of the electronic response of the target that happens on the attosecond timescale,” said Linda Young, a senior author of the research and Distinguished Fellow at Argonne National Laboratory.

The interior of black holes remains a conundrum for science. In 1916, German physicist Karl Schwarzschild outlined a solution to Albert Einstein’s equations of general relativity, in which the center of a black hole consists of a so-called singularity, a point at which space and time no longer exist. Here, the theory goes, all physical laws, including Einstein’s general theory of relativity, no longer apply; the principle of causality is suspended.

This constitutes a great nuisance for science—after all, it means that no information can escape from a black hole beyond the so-called event horizon. This could be a reason why Schwarzschild’s solution did not attract much attention outside the theoretical realm—that is, until the first candidate for a black hole was discovered in 1971, followed by the discovery of the black hole in the center of our Milky Way in the 2000s, and finally the first image of a black hole, captured by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration in 2019.

In 2001, Pawel Mazur and Emil Mottola proposed a different solution to Einstein’s field equations that led to objects that they called gravitational condensate stars, or gravastars. Contrary to black holes, gravastars have several advantages from a theoretical astrophysics perspective.

Auger electron spectroscopy (AES) is an incredibly useful technique for probing material samples—but current assumptions about the process ignore some of the key time-dependent effects it involves. So far, this has resulted in overly-simplified calculations, which have ultimately prevented the technique from reaching its full potential.

In a study published in The European Physical Journal Plus Alberto Noccera at the University of British Columbia, Canada, together with Adrian Feiguin at Northeastern University, United States, developed a new computational approach which offers a more precise theoretical description of the AES process, while taking its time dependence into account. Their method could help researchers to improve their quality of material analysis across a wide array of fields: including chemistry, environmental science, and microelectronics.

In the Auger process, an inner-shell electron is initially kicked out of its atom, often through an impact with an energetic light pulse. Afterward, the vacancy it leaves behind is filled by an outer-shell electron.

The proton, that little positively-charged nugget inside an atom, is fractions of a quadrillionth of a meter smaller than anyone thought, according to new research appearing Nov. 7 in Nature.

In work they hope solves the contentious “proton radius puzzle” that has been roiling some corners of physics in the last decade, a team of scientists including Duke physicist Haiyan Gao have addressed the question of the proton’s radius in a new way and discovered that it is 0.831 femtometers across, which is about 4 percent smaller than the best previous measurement using electrons from accelerators. (Read the paper!)

A single femtometer is 0.000000000000039370 inches imperial, if that helps, or think of it as a millionth part of a billionth part of a meter. And the new radius is just 80 percent of that.

Gotham City’s Dark Knight boasts an impressive collection of technological marvels, but the superhero scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have cutting-edge capabilities of their own.

A recent battery manufacturing project—affectionately called BatMan —has developed a novel laser patterning process to alter the microstructure of battery electrode materials. Funded by DOE’s Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office, this project brings together expert minds from NREL, Clarios, Amplitude Laser Group, and Liminal Insights. This revolutionized manufacturing process could unlock significant improvements to electrified transportation, leading the charge toward a brighter and more sustainable future.

“BatMan builds on NREL’s expertise using laser ablation, advanced computational models, and materials characterization to address key challenges in battery manufacturing,” said Bertrand Tremolet de Villers, project co-lead and senior scientist in NREL’s Thin Film and Manufacturing Sciences group. “This new, high-throughput laser patterning process—demonstrated at scale with state-of-the-art roll-to-roll manufacturing techniques—uses laser pulses to quickly and precisely modify and optimize electrode structures, offering a massive leap in battery capabilities with minimal added manufacturing cost.”

A team of scientists had the opportunity to study the brain waves of a dying person — and found an increase in activity associated with memory and dreams.