Science & TechnologyS


Green Light

Has China just finalised the world's first hyperloop destinations?

Stephen Chen
South China Morning Post
Sun, 23 Apr 2023 09:00 UTC
hyperloop train
© China Aerospace Science and Industry CorporationAs testing continues, a Chinese version of Elon Musk’s vision of hyperloop could travel up to 1,000km/h, top engineers say.
China is likely to build its first hyperloop train line between Shanghai and Hangzhou, according to the nation's top engineering and rail design institutes.

The 150km-long (93-mile) in-vacuum tunnel will allow maglev trains to travel at speeds of up to 1,000km/h (621mph).

The Chinese Academy of Engineering and rail authorities commissioned a "comprehensive assessment on the candidate construction sites for ultra-high speed pipeline maglev system demonstration line", and the two richest cities in the east coast emerged as winners, said scientists involved in the project in a report published in the Chinese-language journal Railway Standard Design on April 17.

The academy is responsible for providing scientific and technological advice to the Chinese government. Top scientists and engineers from the academy are directly involved in the conception, design and construction of the nation's largest infrastructure projects.

The assessment team was led by Zhang Yunjiao, a senior engineer with the state-owned China Railway Engineering Design and Consulting Group in Beijing.
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Mars

UAE fly-by produces first up-close images of Mars's little-known moon Deimos

Castelvecchi, Davide
Nature
Mon, 24 Apr 2023 15:40 UTC
Mars moonlet Deimos
© Emirates Mars MissionThe moonlet Deimos is made of the same type of material as Mars, the latest observations suggest.
Images from the UAE's Hope mission suggest that the moonlet's composition is similar to that of the red planet's surface.

The United Arab Emirates' space probe Hope has taken the first high-resolution images of the farside of Mars's moonlet Deimos. The observations add weight to the theory that Deimos formed together with Mars, rather than as an asteroid that was captured in the planet's orbit, mission scientists say.

Hope, formally known as the Emirates Mars Mission (EMM), performed a fly-by — the first of many — on 10 March. EMM science lead Hessa Al Matroushi recalls the excitement when the first images streamed in, looking down at the 12.4-kilometre-wide moonlet. "Mars was in the background — and that was just mind blowing, honestly," says Al Matroushi, who is at the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. She reported the results at the European Geosciences Union meeting in Vienna on 24 April.

Like Earth's Moon, Deimos is tidally locked to its planet, meaning that any observations from a low Mars orbit or the planet's surface are always of the same side of the moonlet.
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Fireball

Asteroid Phaeton's comet-like tail is not made of dust, solar observatories reveal

Vanessa Thomas, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Phys.org
Tue, 25 Apr 2023 20:46 UTC
asteroid
© NASA/JPL-Caltech/IPACThis illustration depicts asteroid Phaethon being heated by the Sun. The asteroid's surface gets so hot that sodium inside Phaethon's rock likely vaporizes and vents into space, causing it to brighten like a comet and form a tail.
A weird asteroid has just gotten a little weirder.

We have known for a while that asteroid 3200 Phaethon acts like a comet. It brightens and forms a tail when it's near the sun, and it is the source of the annual Geminid meteor shower, even though comets are responsible for most meteor showers. Scientists had blamed Phaethon's comet-like behavior on dust escaping from the asteroid as it's scorched by the sun. However, a new study using two NASA solar observatories reveals that Phaethon's tail is not dusty at all but is actually made of sodium gas.

"Our analysis shows that Phaethon's comet-like activity cannot be explained by any kind of dust," said California Institute of Technology Ph.D. student Qicheng Zhang, who is the lead author of a paper published in the Planetary Science Journal reporting the results.

Comment: As Pierre Lescaudron wrote in Earth Changes and the Human-Cosmic Connection:
Traces of this movement can be found in the late 19th century,when Scientific American published an article stating that Professor Zollner of Leipzig ascribed the 'self-luminosity' of comets to 'electrical excitement.' Zollner proposed that:
...the nuclei of comets, as masses, are subject to gravitation, while the vapors developed from them, which consist of very small particles, yield to the action of the free electricity of the sun
Then, regarding comet tails, the August 11th 1882 issue of English Mechanic and World of Science included the following:
There seems to be a rapidly growing feeling amongst physicists that both the self-light of comets and the phenomena of their tails belong to the order of electrical phenomena.
In 1896, Nature published an article stating:
It has long been imagined that the phenomenon of comet's tails are in some way due to a solar electrical repulsion, and additional light is thrown on this subject by recent physical researches.
[...]

So, comets don't seem to be dirty snowballs after all. From the data presented above, they are glowing chunks of rock. On the other side, asteroids don't seem to be the non-glowing chunks of rocks posited by mainstream science. For example asteroids P/2013 P5 recently puzzled the whole scientific community when it started exhibiting a million miles long glowing tail. To rationalize this oddity official science claimed the asteroid was spinning so fast that it was ejecting tons of dust, while acknowledging that finally the difference between 'comets' and 'asteroids' might not be so clear-cut.1

The fundamental difference between asteroids and comets is not their chemical composition, i.e. dirty, fluffy icy comets vs. rocky asteroids. Rather, as has long been put forward by plasma theorists, what differentiates 'comets' from 'asteroids' is their electric activity.

When the electric potential difference between an asteroid and the surrounding plasma is not too high, the asteroid exhibits a dark discharge mode2 or no discharge at all. But when the potential difference is high enough, the asteroid switches to a glowing discharge mode.3 At this point the asteroid is a comet. From this perspective, a comet is simply a glowing asteroid and an asteroid is a non-glowing comet. Thus the very same body can, successively, be a comet, then an asteroid, then a comet, etc., depending on variation in the ambient electric field it is subjected to.4

Note that a comet can also exhibit the third plasma discharge mode, namely lightning or 'arc discharge mode', which is probably what happened when Comet Shoemaker-Levy entered the vicinity of Jupiter in July 1994:
The following article from Mr Lescaudron sheds more light on the topic: The Seven Destructive Earth Passes of Comet Venus

See also: Mercury's magnificent comet-like tail caught on camera

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Info

Grambank shows the diversity of the world's languages


Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
Wed, 19 Apr 2023 18:49 UTC
An international team has created a new database that documents patterns of grammatical variation in over 2400 of the world's languages.
Worlds Languages
What shapes the structure of languages? In a new study, an international team of researchers reports that grammatical structure is highly flexible across languages, shaped by common ancestry, constraints on cognition and usage, and language contact. The study used the Grambank database, which contains data on grammatical structures in over 2400 languages. The project was initiated by the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, in collaboration with a team of over a hundred linguists from around the world.

Linguists have long been interested in language variation. What are common or universal patterns across languages? What limits the possible variation between them? Grambank, the world's largest and most comprehensive database of language structure, enables researchers to answer some of these questions.

Grambank was constructed in an international collaboration between the Max Planck institutes in Leipzig and Nijmegen, the Australian National University, the University of Auckland, Harvard University, Yale University, the University of Turku, Kiel University, Uppsala University, SOAS, the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme, and over a hundred scholars from around the world. Grambank's coverage spans 215 different language families and 101 isolates from all inhabited continents. "The design of the feature questionnaire initially required numerous revisions in order to encompass many of the diverse solutions that languages have evolved to code grammatical properties", says Hedvig Skirgård, who coordinated much of the coding and is the lead author of the study.
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Blue Planet

Photosynthesis doesn't work exactly like we thought it did, accidental discovery reveals

Harry Baker
Live Science
Mon, 24 Apr 2023 00:17 UTC
forest light
© ShutterstockPhotosynthesis is one of the most important chemical processes on Earth.
One of the most well-studied chemical processes in nature, photosynthesis, may not work quite how we thought it did, scientists have accidentally discovered.

Photosynthesis is the process by which plants, algae and some bacteria convert carbon dioxide and water into oxygen and sugars to use as energy. To do this, the organisms use sunlight to oxidize, or take electrons from, water; and reduce, or give electrons to, carbon dioxide molecules. These chemical reactions require photosystems — protein complexes that contain chlorophyll, a pigment that absorbs light and gives plant leaves and algae their green color — to transfer electrons between different molecules.

In the new study, published March 22 in the journal Nature , researchers used a new technique, known as ultrafast transient absorption spectroscopy, to study how photosynthesis works at a timescale of one quadrillionth of a second (0.000000000000001 second) for the first time. The team was initially trying to figure out how quinones — ring-shaped molecules that can steal electrons during chemical processes — impact photosynthesis. But instead, the researchers found that electrons could be released from photosystems much earlier during photosynthesis than scientists previously believed was possible.
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Blue Planet

19,000 previously unknown undersea volcanoes revealed by satellite data

Bob Yirka
Phys.org
Fri, 21 Apr 2023 12:00 UTC
undersea volcanoes
© Earth and Space Science (2023). DOI: 10.1029/2022EA002331Two seamounts from the Kim-Wessel catalog before and after being centered (20 Eotvos contours). Light blue colored points indicate the original location of the seamounts. Red points are the new centers chosen based on the maximum VGG value.
A team of oceanographers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, working with a colleague from Chungnam National University and another from the University of Hawaii, has mapped 19,000 previously unknown undersea volcanoes in the world's oceans using radar satellite data. In their paper published in the journal Earth and Space Science, the group describes how they used radar satellite data to measure seawater mounding to find and map undersea volcanoes and explains why it is important that it be done.

Comment: See also: Volcanoes, Earthquakes And The 3,600 Year Comet Cycle

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Airplane

Boeing engineers break world record for paper airplane design: Unit flew nearly 290 ft

Andy Corbley
CNN
Fri, 14 Apr 2023 19:00 UTC
distance record paper airplane boeing
© Dominic AlbericoAfter nearly 500 hours of origami folding and studying aerodynamics, the final paper plane design was put to the test on December 2, 2022, where the record was achieved by Dillon Ruble's third throw.
It's a bird... It's a plane... It's a paper airplane!

The world record for the farthest flight by paper airplane has been broken by three aerospace engineers with a paper aircraft that flew a grand total of 289 feet, 9 inches (88 meters), nearly the length of an American football field.

They beat the previous record of 252 feet, 7 inches (77 meters) achieved on April 2022 by a trio in South Korea. Prior to that, the record had not been broken in over a decade.

"It really put things on the map and it's a really proud moment for family and friends," said Dillon Ruble, a systems engineer at Boeing and now paper airplane record holder, in a release. "It's a good tie in to aerospace and thinking along the lines of designing and creating prototypes."
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Rocket

SpaceX's first Starship orbital launch attempt ends in dramatic "unexpected rapid disassembly"

Chris Young
Interesting Engineering
Thu, 20 Apr 2023 21:51 UTC
elon musk sarship explosion
© SpaceXStarship moments before the "rapid unscheduled disassembly."
With Starship's first flight test finished, Musk wrote on Twitter, "congrats SpaceX team on an exciting test launch of Starship! Learned a lot for next test launch in a few months."

Does Starship flight test fireball mean failure?

Shortly after the Starship mission ended, a debate started online on whether the first flight of the massive rocket could be deemed a success or not.

SpaceX is known to take a fail fast, learn fast approach. With that context in mind, Starship's first launch was most definitely a success. As a point of reference, a series of Starship high-altitude prototype tests starting in 2019 also resulted in what SpaceX has often referred to as "unscheduled rapid disassemblies," or explosions.
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Cow

Don't blame the cows: New study finds methane isn't warming the Earth

Douglas Fox
Science News
Tue, 18 Apr 2023 14:33 UTC
cows grazing methane cattle farming
© George Pachantouris/Moment/Getty Images
The gas absorbs both longwave and shortwave radiation, with competing effects on climate

Methane is a greenhouse gas with dual personalities. It heats Earth's atmosphere 28 times as potently as carbon dioxide, gram for gram. But its absorption of the sun's radiation high in the atmosphere also alters cloud patterns — casting a bit of shadow on its warming effect.

So rather than adding even more thermal energy to the atmosphere, as previously thought, methane's solar absorption sets off a cascade of events that reduces its overall warming effect by about 30 percent, researchers report March 16 in Nature Geoscience.

"These are really interesting and important results," says Rachael Byrom, a climate scientist at the CICERO Center for International Climate Research in Oslo who wasn't involved in the new study. Nonetheless, she says, "methane still remains a really key gas that we need to target in emissions reductions."

Comment:

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Question

NASA's enigmatic green lasers spotted by Japanese astronomer

Isaac Schultz
Gizmodo
Mon, 17 Apr 2023 23:58 UTC
ICESat-2
© NASA
Japanese museum curator and astronomer Daichi Fujii spotted something irregular last September in several motion-sensing cameras he had set up: three brilliant green lights that streaked across the sky.

After studying the footage and comparing it to orbital data, Fujii found the responsible party: NASA's Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite 2, or ICESat-2, which had flown over Japan that night.

According to Tony Martino, an instrument scientist for the satellite, it's the first time the team has seen footage of the instrument's lasers pulsing through the sky.

"ICESat-2 appeared to be almost directly overhead of [Fujii], with the beam hitting the low clouds at an angle," Martino said in a NASA release. "To see the laser, you have to be in the exact right place, at the right time, and you have to have the right conditions."

https://

ICESat-2 launched in 2018 and is used to measure the height of Earth's surfaces. It is basically a space-based lidar scanner, similar to those used by archaeologists to discover ancient sites lost to natural features like forest growth.

The video footage was captured on September 16, 2022. It shows three streaks of light zip across the sky against a backdrop of scattered clouds. Upon further scrutiny, Fujii realized the green streaks pulsed in time with a light that briefly appeared between the clouds (just above the center of the video frame, if you want to spot it yourself).
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