Very interesting, researches probably already know.
You awake in the middle of the night from a nightmare.
In the nightmare, you are standing in a room that is completely full, floor to ceiling, of balloons. There are red ones, purple ones, yellow ones and green ones.
You’ve been told to burst only the green and purple balloons. Bursting the red or yellow ones will have disastrous consequences.
A team of engineers has figured out how to take a single drop of rain and use it to generate a powerful flash of electricity.
The City University of Hong Kong researchers behind the device, which they’re calling a droplet-based electricity generator (DEG), say that a single rain droplet can briefly generate 140 volts. That was enough to briefly power 100 small lightbulbs and, while it’s not yet practical enough for everyday use, it’s a promising step toward a new form of renewable electricity.
Neuroscientists-can-now-design-false-memories-and-plant-them-into-animal-brains.
Jake Anderson, The Mind Unleashed Waking Times
Scientists have known for some time that specific circuits in the brain react to experiences and encode those same experiences into our minds as memories. These memories are central to our identity and the narrative we construct about ourselves and the world around us.
In past experiments, neuroscientists have been able to partially transfer memories between rodents but they have never wholesale manufactured false memories—until now.
Featured Image Source: David Stokes
SpaceX aims to launch NASA Astronauts to the International Space Station for the first time this year aboard their updated Dragon spacecraft, known as Crew Dragon. The spacecraft successfully conducted the most important safety test last month during an uncrewed In-Flight Abort (IFA) mission which tested the craft’s launch escape system capabilities. During the IFA test, engineers mimicked a real flight to space except that they purposely caused their Falcon 9 rocket to “malfunction” by shutting down its 9 Merlin 1D engines in order to trigger Dragon’s launch escape countdown. Falcon 9 aerodynamically exploded mid-air, as Dragon successfully ignited its 8 SuperDraco engines to escape the danger.
Fuel cells turn chemicals into electricity. Now, a U of T Engineering team has adapted technology from fuel cells to do the reverse: harness electricity to make valuable chemicals from waste carbon (CO2).
“For decades, talented researchers have been developing systems that convert electricity into hydrogen and back again,” says Professor Ted Sargent (ECE), one of the senior authors of a paper published today in Science. “Our innovation builds on that legacy, but by using carbon-based molecules, we can plug directly into existing hydrocarbon infrastructure.”
In a hydrogen fuel cell, hydrogen and oxygen come together on the surface of a catalyst. The chemical reaction releases electrons, which are captured by specialized materials within the fuel cell and pumped into a circuit.