Welcome to Sott.net
Wed, 13 Oct 2021
The World for People who Think

Science & Technology
Map

Arrow Down

Glass solar roofing - What's that Musky smell?

Willis Eschenbach
Watts Up with That
Sat, 19 Nov 2016 21:48 UTC
Well, the man who has made billions with a "b" by sponging off of your taxpayer dollars, the man you can always find face-down at the government trough, is at it again.

Musk with Solar Roofing
© Watts Up with That
Elon Musk now says that his whiz-bang glass solar roofing shingles will be, get this, cheaper than a "normal" roof, viz:
Musk told the crowd that he had just returned from a meeting with his new solar engineering team. Tesla's new solar roof product, he proclaimed, will actually cost less to manufacture and install than a traditional roof—even before savings from the power bill. "Electricity," Musk said, "is just a bonus."

If Musk's claims prove true, this could be a real turning point in the evolution of solar power. The rooftop shingles he unveiled just a few weeks ago are something to behold: They're made of textured glass and are virtually indistinguishable from high-end roofing products. They also transform light into power for your home and your electric car.

"So the basic proposition will be: Would you like a roof that looks better than a normal roof, lasts twice as long, costs less and—by the way—generates electricity?" Musk said. "Why would you get anything else?"

Make no mistake: The new shingles will still be a premium product, at least when they first roll out. The terra cotta and slate roofs Tesla mimicked are among the most expensive roofing materials on the market—costing as much as 20 times more than cheap asphalt shingles.

Much of the cost savings Musk is anticipating comes from shipping the materials. Traditional roofing materials are brittle, heavy, and bulky. Shipping costs are high, as is the quantity lost to breakage. The new tempered-glass roof tiles, engineered in Tesla's new automotive and solar glass division, weigh as little as a fifth of current products and are considerably easier to ship, Musk said.
First off, glass is heavy. I'm not buying for one minute that they would be cheaper to ship than asphalt shingles, for example. And I can guarantee you that the "quantity lost to breakage" will be greater than with asphalt shingles. If our cell phones have taught us anything, it is that even the toughest "Gorilla Glass" is still ... well ... glass. So the first conclusion is that for Elon, a "normal" roof is either slate or terra-cotta tile ... hey, he's one of the elite, cut him some slack, he likely hasn't lived in a house with an asphalt shingle roof or an aluminum roof in a while ...

Will Elon's roof be lighter than terracotta? Perhaps ... but at this point we only have his word. But in any case, I greatly doubt that the largest cost of a slate roof is shipping ... digging the slate out of the ground is a major cost.

Next, he's conveniently omitted the cost of the batteries you'd need to make the system work, as well as the inverter. His 14KWhr "BerlinWall" batteries, or whatever they're called, are far from cheap at $5,500 a pop ... even if you can get by with only one battery, it is still more expensive by itself than a 40-year asphalt shingle roof. And if he is worried about breakage when shipping terra-cotta, shipping those babies won't be either cheap or easy.
      Read More...
Dig

Microfossil terrestrial ecosystem: Life in Earth's soils may be older than we think

Jim Barlow
ScienceDaily
Thu, 17 Nov 2016 00:00 UTC
Pilbara Australia
© totajla / Fotolia
Karijini National Park, Australia. The ancient soils from Australia's Pilbara region (west of Karijini National Park) are similar to those found recently by the Mars rover Curiosity.
Advanced imaging and analyses techniques have opened a new window into microfossils of ancient landscapes in Australia, scientists report. Way before trees or lichens evolved, soils on Earth were alive, as revealed by a close examination of microfossils in the desert of northwestern Australia, reports a team of University of Oregon researchers.

These tiny fossils require a microscope to see and probably represent whole organisms. The 3,000 million-year-old Australian rocks have long been thought to be of marine origin. However, "a closer look at the dusty salt minerals of the rocks suggests they had to have experienced evaporation on land," said UO paleontologist Gregory Retallack, lead author on a study in the December issue of the international journal Gondwana Research.

Other mineral and chemical tracers found in the rocks also required weathering in soils of the distant geological past, he said. "Life was not only present but thriving in soils of the early Earth about two thirds of the way back to its formation from the solar nebula," Retallack said. The origin of the solar system -- and Earth -- occurred some 4.6 billion years ago.
      Read More...
Microscope 2

Containment: Store carbon dioxide underground by turning it into rock

American Chemical Society
Science Daily
Fri, 18 Nov 2016 00:00 UTC
Rock sediment
© American Chemical Society
A core sample from a carbon storage project in Washington state showed that carbon dioxide injected deep underground into basalt rock turned into the carbonate mineral ankerite in less than two years.
In November, the Paris Climate Agreement goes into effect to reduce global carbon emissions. To achieve the set targets, experts say capturing and storing carbon must be part of the solution. Several projects throughout the world are trying to make that happen. Now, a study on one of those endeavors, reported in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters, has found that within two years, carbon dioxide (CO2) injected into basalt transformed into solid rock.

Lab studies on basalt have shown that the rock, which formed from lava millions of years ago and is found throughout the world, can rapidly convert CO2 into stable carbonate minerals. This evidence suggests that if CO2 could be locked into this solid form, it would be stowed away for good, unable to escape into the atmosphere.

But what happens in the lab doesn't always reflect what happens in the field. One field project in Iceland injected CO2 pre-dissolved in water into a basalt formation, where it was successfully stored. And starting in 2009, researchers with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the Montana-based undertook a pilot project in eastern Washington to inject 1,000 tons of pressurized liquid CO2 into a basalt formation.

After drilling a well in the Columbia River Basalt formation and testing its properties, the team injected CO2 into it in 2013. Core samples were extracted from the well two years later, and Pete McGrail and colleagues confirmed that the CO2 had indeed converted into the carbonate mineral ankerite, as the lab experiments had predicted. And because basalts are widely found in North America and throughout the world, the researchers suggest that the formations could help permanently sequester carbon on a large scale.
      Read More...
Satellite

Great valley discovered on Mercury, the shrinking of a one-plate planet

American Geophysical Union
ScienceDaily
Wed, 16 Nov 2016 00:00 UTC
Mercury elevation model
© NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
A high-resolution digital elevation model derived from stereo images obtained by NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft has revealed Mercury's great valley shown here in this 3D perspective view.
Scientists have discovered a new large valley on Mercury that may be the first evidence of buckling of the planet's outer silicate shell in response to global contraction. The researchers discovered the valley using a new high-resolution topographic map of part of Mercury's southern hemisphere created by stereo images from NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft. The findings were reported in a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

The most likely explanation for Mercury's Great Valley is buckling of the planet's lithosphere -- its crust and upper mantle -- in response to global contraction, according to the study's authors. Earth's lithosphere is broken up into many tectonic plates, but Mercury's lithosphere consists of just one plate. Cooling of Mercury's interior caused the planet's single plate to contract and bend. Where contractional forces are greatest, crustal rocks are thrust upward while an emerging valley floor sags downward.
      Read More...
Network

China launches world's longest super-secure quantum communication line


RT
Sun, 20 Nov 2016 16:16 UTC
quantum communication line
© Jose Miguel Gomez / Reuters
China has launched a quantum communication line 712 kilometers in length that is meant to safely transmit sensitive information. It is expected to be extended to 2,000 kilometers soon.

The line connecting Hefei, the capital of Anhui Province, and Shanghai, a coastal trade hub, has 11 trusted nodes along its length, Xinhua news agency reported on Sunday.

It transmitted a secure video conference between the two cities in one of its first test communications.

The line, already three years in the making and yet to be finished, will ultimately connect Shanghai to China's capital, Beijing, and run through another major city, Jinan, with a total of 32 relay points. The entire project was expected to be finished in November, but the completion date has been moved back until at least the end of the year.
      Read More...
Galaxy

EM Drive violates Newton's Third Law, but works anyway according to peer-reviewed paper

Fiona McDonald
Science Alert
Sun, 20 Nov 2016 04:08 UTC
EM drive
After months of speculation and leaked documents, NASA's long-awaited EM Drive paper has finally been peer-reviewed and published. And it shows that the 'impossible' propulsion system really does appear to work. The NASA Eagleworks Laboratory team even put forward a hypothesis for how the EM Drive could produce thrust - something that seems impossible according to our current understanding of the laws of physics.

In case you've missed the hype, the EM Drive, or Electromagnetic Drive, is a propulsion system first proposed by British inventor Roger Shawyer back in 1999.

Instead of using heavy, inefficient rocket fuel, it bounces microwaves back and forth inside a cone-shaped metal cavity to generate thrust. According to Shawyer's calculations, the EM Drive could be so efficient that it could power us to Mars in just 70 days. But, there's a not-small problem with the system. It defies Newton's third law, which states that everything must have an equal and opposite reaction.

According to the law, for a system to produce thrust, it has to push something out the other way. The EM Drive doesn't do this.

Yet in test after test it continues to work. Last year, NASA's Eagleworks Laboratory team got their hands on an EM Drive to try to figure out once and for all what was going on.

And now we finally have those results.

The new peer-reviewed paper is titled "Measurement of Impulsive Thrust from a Closed Radio-Frequency Cavity in Vacuum", and has been published online as an open access 'article in advance' in the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA)'s Journal of Propulsion and Power. It'll appear in the December print edition.
      Read More...
Pi

Parallel Worlds exist and interact with our world, Physicists say


InspireActAchieve
Fri, 18 Nov 2016 00:00 UTC
New theory says parallel worlds exist and interact with our world!
Multiverse_1
© Unknown
Quantum mechanics, though firmly tested, is so weird and anti-intuitive that famed physicist Richard Feynman once remarked, "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics." Attempts to explain some of the bizarre consequences of quantum theory have led to some mind-bending ideas, such as the Copenhagen interpretation and the many-worlds interpretation.

Now there's a new theory on the block, called the "many interacting worlds" hypothesis (MIW), and the idea is just as profound as it sounds. The theory suggests not only that parallel worlds exist, but that they interact with our world on the quantum level and are thus detectable. Though still speculative, the theory may help to finally explain some of the bizarre consequences inherent in quantum mechanics, reports RT.com.

Comment: See also:

      Read More...
Chalkboard

Mathematician claims one in 500 chance of extinction next year

Alexandra Sims
The Independent, UK
Sat, 19 Nov 2016 16:17 UTC
Earth
© NASA
The calculation is based on the Doomsday Argument.
The human race faces a one in 500 chance of extinction in the next year, an expert mathematician has claimed.

Dr Fergus Simpson, a mathematician at the University of Barcelona's Institute of Cosmos Sciences, said there was a 0.2 per cent chance of a "global catastrophe" occurring in any given year over the course of the 21st Century.

The calculation is based on the Doomsday Argument, which it is claimed can predict the number of future members of the human species given an estimate of the total number of humans born so far.

"Our key conclusion is that the annual risk of global catastrophe currently exceeds 0.2 per cent," Dr Simpson wrote in an academic paper called Apocalypse Now? Reviving the Doomsday Argument, accessed through Cornell University's online library.

"In a year when Leicester City FC were crowned Premier League champions, we are reminded that events of this rarity can prove challenging to anticipate, yet they should not be ignored," he added.

According to Dr Simpson's calculations, around 100 billion people have already been born and a similar number will be born in the future before the human race expires.

He estimated there was a 13 per cent chance humanity would fail to see out the 21st Century.

This is a more optimistic conclusion than previous studies, with British Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees suggesting there was a 50 per cent probability of human extinction by the year 2100 in his 2003 book Our Final Hour.
      Read More...
Microscope 1

Beyond the DNA: Scientists complete comprehensive map of the human epigenome


Science Daily
Thu, 17 Nov 2016 00:00 UTC
methylated DNA molecule
© Christoph Bock/CeMM
This is a methylated DNA molecule. DNA methylation plays an important role for epigenetic gene regulation in development and cancer.
Scientists have established comprehensive maps of the human epigenome, shedding light on how the body regulates which genes are active in which cells. Over the last five years, a worldwide consortium of scientists has established epigenetic maps of 2,100 cell types. Within this coordinated effort, the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine contributed detailed DNA methylation maps of the developing blood, opening up new perspectives for the understanding and treatment of leukemia and immune diseases.

One of the great mysteries in biology is how the many different cell types that make up our bodies are derived from a single cell and from one DNA sequence, or genome. We have learned a lot from studying the human genome, but have only partially unveiled the processes underlying cell determination. The identity of each cell type is largely defined by an instructive layer of molecular annotations on top of the genome -- the epigenome -- which acts as a blueprint unique to each cell type and developmental stage.

Unlike the genome the epigenome changes as cells develop and in response to changes in the environment. Defects in the factors that read, write, and erase the epigenetic blueprint are involved in many diseases. The comprehensive analysis of the epigenomes of healthy and abnormal cells will facilitate new ways to diagnose and treat various diseases, and ultimately lead to improved health outcomes.
      Read More...
Info

New Zealand's 'unusual' earthquake raises complex questions

Ake Fagereng
Eos
Fri, 18 Nov 2016 21:23 UTC
New Zealand 7.8 earthquake map
© Google Earth/ GNS Science
The 2016 Kaikoura earthquake was a magnitude 7.8 (Mw) earthquake in the South Island of New Zealand that occurred two minutes after midnight on 14 November 2016 NZDT (11:02 on 13 November UTC).

A devastating earthquake has hit New Zealand, but this unusual event, with long duration slip on several faults, will also provide an astounding data set for understanding a complex tectonic region.

New Zealand was rocked by a magnitude 7.8 earthquake on Monday 14th November. This event had unusual aspects of slip distribution, duration, and kinematics, from which we will learn a lot about earthquake mechanics as data are collected. The event that started ~100 km north of Christchurch with displacements less than 1 m, propagated northward, creating the largest surface displacements (so far observed) near the northern termination of the earthquake rupture, at the northeast tip of the South Island.

At this early stage, based on preliminary data released by the New Zealand monitoring partnership GeoNet, I find three properties of the earthquake particularly intriguing:

1. Slip distribution.

The large surface displacement at the northern end of the rupture explains why aftershocks are concentrated in the north, and why areas north of the rupture, such as Wellington, experienced more damage than Christchurch, which is closer to but south of the epicenter.

The earthquake adds insight to the discussion of whether an earthquake knows its size when it nucleates - this earthquake started small, and only reached large slip late in its propagation. The USGS estimates the greatest displacements were over 100 km from the epicenter.

Therefore, as suggested in recent findings by Meier et al., there seems to have been no way to expect the large size of this earthquake from its small early slip. The question remains, why did the earthquake start small and get larger?

Comment: See also:

      Read More...
Amazon Smile
Revolt! T-shirts