Science & TechnologyS


Nuke

The nuclear energy advancements of the past four years will blow your mind

Jonah Gottschalk
The Federalist
Fri, 15 Jan 2021 21:02 UTC
nuclear plant
© NuScale PowerAn artist’s rendering shows what NuScale Power’s planned small modular nuclear reactor plant in Idaho would look like.
There are a hundred reasons why nuclear energy can play a massive role in the future of American power and prosperity.

It creates high-paying jobs better than any other energy source. Its fuel sources are abundant. It fuels NASA's most innovative projects. It offers a solution to conservation concerns without devastating the economy. And despite its sensationalist image, it is far safer than fossil fuels, and about the same in safety as solar and wind.

"Nuclear provides 55% of our country's clean energy, and about 20% of our power, and it's one of the most reliable generators that we have on the grid today," says Dr. Rita Baranwal, who this month completed her tenure as assistant secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy in the Trump administration. "Our reactors in the U.S. avoid putting out 470 million metric tons of carbon emissions each year. That number is equivalent to removing 100 million cars off the road."

But the field has been in a hard spot for decades. With high degrees of government regulation and small amounts of government investment, reactors have been shut down across the country, destroying jobs and energy.


Comment: It almost seems as if someone doesn't want cheap, clean energy...


The last four years, however, have seen early signs of what might just be a fission renaissance. After being slashed by President Obama in favor of more image-friendly and less efficient sources, the Trump administration has ramped up American investment in nuclear energy.
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Recycle

NASA's 'Mole' officially fails Mars mission, follows two years of troubleshooting

Evan Gough
Universe Today
Fri, 15 Jan 2021 20:48 UTC
NASA mars mole
It's always a sad day when a mission comes to an end. And it's even sadder when the mission never really got going in the first place.

That's where we're at with NASA's InSight lander. The entire mission isn't over, but the so-called Mole, the instrument designed and built by Germany's DLR, has been pronounced dead.

The Mole is, of course, the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3). It's an instrument designed to measure the heat flowing from the Martian interior to the surface. The entire InSight mission (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport) was focused on discovering more about the interior of Mars.

Comment: See also:

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Microscope 2

Rare 4-stranded DNA has been observed in action for the first time

Nicoletta Lanese
Live Science
Fri, 15 Jan 2021 18:07 UTC
4 strand dna
© Thomas Splettstoesser/Wikimedia CommonsReconstruction of human telomere DNA quadruplex.
Two thin strands wound together in a spiraling helix: This is the iconic shape of a DNA molecule. But sometimes, DNA can form a rare quadruple-helix, and this odd structure may play a role in diseases like cancer.

Not much is known about these four-stranded DNA, known as G-quadruplexes — but now, scientists have developed a new way to detect these odd molecules and observe how they behave in living cells. In a new study, published Jan. 8 in the journal Nature Communications, the team described how certain proteins cause the G-quadruplex to unravel; in the future, their work could lead to new drugs that grab hold of quadruple-helix DNA and disrupt its activity. Drugs could intervene, for instance, when the odd DNA contributes to cancerous tumor growth.

"Evidence has been mounting that G-quadruplexes play an important role in a wide variety of processes vital for life, and in a range of diseases," study author Ben Lewis, from the Department of Chemistry at Imperial College London, said in a statement.

Comment: See also:

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Ice Cube

Melting icebergs key feature of an ice age, scientists find


Cardiff University
Wed, 13 Jan 2021 12:00 UTC
ice berg
Scientists claim to have found the 'missing link' in the process that leads to an ice age on Earth.

Melting icebergs in the Antarctic are the key, say the team from Cardiff University, triggering a series of chain reactions that plunges Earth into a prolonged period of cold temperatures.

The findings have been published today in Nature from an international consortium of scientists from universities around the world.

It has long been known that ice age cycles are paced by periodic changes to Earth's orbit of the sun, which subsequently changes the amount of solar radiation that reaches the Earth's surface.


Comment: There are much more significant drivers of earth's climate, one of those is solar activity, with solar minimums being closely closely correlated with ice ages: Professor Valentina Zharkova: "We entered the 'modern' Grand Solar Minimum on June 8, 2020"


Comment: That melting glaciers impact ocean currents and that they are a key feature in ice ages is significant, but it's clear that the researchers are missing chunks of data and their theories are warped by global warming ideology. Of particular note is that, in recent years, it has been discovered that undersea volcanoes are causing glaciers to melt in Antarctica, and, above ground, the overall temperature in Antarctica has become so cold that living conditions for wildlife are being disrupted. Could this have also been the case in the past?

For insight into the real drivers behind our planet's climate and what our future may have in store, see: And check out SOTT radio's:

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Bizarro Earth

Flashback FAIL: A 30 year-old climate prediction of 'rising sea levels' proves to be a load of bunkum

Anthony Watts
Watts Up With That?
Wed, 03 Oct 2018 20:32 UTC
fail failure graphic
In 1988 there was this prediction via an article in the Canberra Times:
'Sea level is threatening to completely cover' Maldives' 1,196 islands within 30 years —
Well, it's 30 years later, and the Maldives is still there, all 1196 islands. Here's the article:

Comment:

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Attention

Presumed supernova is actually something much rarer


Carnegie Institution for Science
Tue, 12 Jan 2021 18:22 UTC
Giant Star
© Image is courtesy of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.Screenshot of the NASA-produced animation showing a giant star being slowly devoured as it orbits the galaxy’s central black hole.
Pasadena, CA — In a case of cosmic mistaken identity, an international team of astronomers revealed that what they once thought was a supernova is actually periodic flaring from a galaxy where a supermassive black hole gives off bursts of energy every 114 days as it tears off chunks of an orbiting star.

Six years after its initial discovery — reported in The Astronomer's Telegram by Carnegie's Thomas Holoien — the researchers, led by Anna Payne of University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, can now say that the phenomenon they observed, called ASASSN-14ko, is a periodically recurring flare from the center of a galaxy more than 570 million light-years away in the southern constellation Pictor.

Their findings — based on 20 instances of regular outbursts — will be published in The Astrophysical Journal and presented by Payne at the American Astronomical Society's annual meeting.

Active galaxies, such as the host of ASASSN-14ko, have unusually bright and variable centers. These objects produce much more energy than the combined contribution of all their stars. Astrophysicists think this is due to gravitational and frictional forces heating up a swirling disk of gas and dust that accumulates around the central supermassive black hole. The black hole slowly consumes the material, which creates low-level, random changes in the light emitted by the disk.
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Info

'Identical' - twins have small genome differences says new study

Dr. Deborah Devis
Cosmos Magazine
Tue, 12 Jan 2021 18:12 UTC
Monozygotic Twins
© Robert Recker Getty Images
Identical twins have long been touted as an incredible resource for genetics because they're "genetically identical". But new research suggests that might not be quite true.

Identical twins are called monozygotic because they come from a single zygote that has formed from a single sperm and egg. As the cells multiply, they can split into two individuals before they become embryos that have exactly the same genetic material (or so we thought).

Hákon Jónsson of deCODE genetics, Iceland, and colleagues have found that, on average, identical twins differ by about 5.2 developmental mutations. In around 15% of twins, one twin had a high number of these mutations and the other didn't, they report in their paper, published in Nature Genetics.

The team sequenced the genomes of 387 pairs of identical twins and compared their genes with their parents, siblings and offspring, to track the mutations that may have occurred in the womb.

The mutations detected may seem infinitesimal and inconsequential, but the result requires consideration for those undertaking twin studies, especially in cases where one twin has a trait that the other doesn't have.
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Info

Possible new particle discovery in quantum behavior of insulators

Tom Garlinghouse
Princeton University
Mon, 11 Jan 2021 18:49 UTC
In a surprising discovery, Princeton physicists have observed an unexpected quantum behavior in an insulator made from a material called tungsten ditelluride. This phenomenon, known as quantum oscillation, is typically observed in metals rather than insulators, and its discovery offers new insights into our understanding of the quantum world. The findings also hint at the existence of an entirely new type of quantum particle.

The discovery challenges a long-held distinction between metals and insulators, because in the established quantum theory of materials, insulators were not thought to be able to experience quantum oscillations.

Quantum Phenomenon
© Image designed by Kai Fu for the Wu Lab, Princeton UniversityA team led by Princeton physicists discovered a surprising quantum phenomenon in an atomically thin insulator made of tungsten ditelluride. The results suggest the formation of completely new types of quantum phases previously hidden in insulators.
"If our interpretations are correct, we are seeing a fundamentally new form of quantum matter," said Sanfeng Wu, assistant professor of physics at Princeton University and the senior author of a recent paper in Nature detailing this new discovery. "We are now imagining a wholly new quantum world hidden in insulators. It's possible that we simply missed identifying them over the last several decades."

The observation of quantum oscillations has long been considered a hallmark of the difference between metals and insulators. In metals, electrons are highly mobile, and resistivity — the resistance to electrical conduction — is weak. Nearly a century ago, researchers observed that a magnetic field, coupled with very low temperatures, can cause electrons to shift from a "classical" state to a quantum state, causing oscillations in the metal's resistivity. In insulators, by contrast, electrons cannot move and the materials have very high resistivity, so quantum oscillations of this sort are not expected to occur, no matter the strength of magnetic field applied.
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Robot

World's fastest optical neuromorphic processor developed by scientist


Swinburne University of Technology
Thu, 07 Jan 2021 17:42 UTC
Fastest Chip Scientist
© Swinburne University of Technology(L-R): Dr Bill Corcoran (Monash University), Professor Moss and Professor Mitchell, the research team that recorded the world's fastest internet speed from a single optical chip.

In summary
  • A Swinburne-led team has demonstrated the world's fastest and most powerful optical neuromorphic processor for artificial intelligence
  • The neuromorphic processor operates faster than 10 trillion operations per second and is capable of processing ultra-large scale data
  • This breakthrough has been published in the prestigious journal Nature and represents an enormous leap forward for neural networks and neuromorphic processing
An international team of researchers led by Swinburne University of Technology has demonstrated the world's fastest and most powerful optical neuromorphic processor for artificial intelligence (AI), which operates faster than 10 trillion operations per second (TeraOPs/s) and is capable of processing ultra-large scale data. Published in the prestigious journal Nature, this breakthrough represents an enormous leap forward for neural networks and neuromorphic processing in general.

Artificial neural networks, a key form of AI, can 'learn' and perform complex operations with wide applications to computer vision, natural language processing, facial recognition, speech translation, playing strategy games, medical diagnosis and many other areas. Inspired by the biological structure of the brain's visual cortex system, artificial neural networks extract key features of raw data to predict properties and behaviour with unprecedented accuracy and simplicity.

Led by Swinburne's Professor David Moss, Dr Xingyuan (Mike) Xu (Swinburne, Monash University) and Distinguished Professor Arnan Mitchell from RMIT University, the team achieved an exceptional feat in optical neural networks: dramatically accelerating their computing speed and processing power.
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Better Earth

Microbes that feed on hydrogen found living beneath glaciers - but where's the hydrogen coming from?

Montana State University
SciTechDaily
Fri, 08 Jan 2021 12:00 UTC
Dunham
© MSUMontana State University graduate student Eric Dunham.
Using years' worth of data collected from ice-covered habitats all over the world, a Montana State University team has discovered new insights into the processes that support microbial life underneath ice sheets and glaciers, and the role those organisms play in perpetuating life through ice ages and, perhaps, in seemingly inhospitable environments on other planets.

Doctoral candidate Eric Dunham of MSU's Department of Microbiology and Immunology in the College of Agriculture, along with mentor Eric Boyd, published their findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in December 2020. The work examines the ways water and microbes interact with the bedrock beneath glaciers, using samples of sediment taken from glacial sites in Canada and Iceland.

"We kept finding organisms in these systems that were supported by hydrogen gas," said Boyd of the inspiration for the project. "It initially didn't make sense, because we couldn't figure out where that hydrogen gas was coming from under these glaciers."

Comment: It appears that there are few areas on our planet that aren't teaming with life: And check out SOTT radio's: The Truth Perspective: Are Cells the Intelligent Designers? Why Creationists and Darwinists Are Both Wrong

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