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Nuke

Russia conducting trials on 'perpetual' nuclear sub reactor


RT
Tue, 07 Aug 2018 16:28 UTC
russian submarine
© Sarah Christine Noergaard / AFP
A Rosatom subsidiary said it has developed and successfully tested a "perpetual reactor" capable of powering Russia's newest nuclear submarines during their entire lifetime - without having to be refueled.

The new nuclear reactor will be able to run during the whole lifecycle of a next-generation submarine, Afrikantov Design Bureau, a Rosatom subsidiary, said in an annual report. It said the company upgraded and tested newer design of the so-called 'active zone' - a heart of every reactor - allowing it to generate more power than its predecessors.

While being enormously efficient in terms of generated energy, a submarine-mounted nuclear reactor has to be refueled after several years in service. Normally, refueling means a lengthy and costly procedure which involves replacement of exhausted nuclear fuel as well as fix-ups, renovation and sometimes an upgrade of the entire vessel.

Now, with the new invention coming into use, Russian submarines will no longer need to undergo refueling and a reactor overhaul. Admiral Vladimir Popov, previously a Northern Fleet commander, suggested the "perpetual reactor" will see a rapid increase in the Navy's capabilities, according to RIA Novosti.

Comment: This is what happens when you have an industry concerned with results, not profits. The Russian military creates technology to work. The U.S. military contractors, by contrast, make sure to use the most expensive parts, from various manufacturers (even if they're not totally compatible), in order to jack up costs to the limit, so their no-bid contracts from the government will net them huge profits. (They also just bribe the government to get such contracts.) And they can't even produce decent tech as a result. Just like at the Bradley Fighting Vehicle and the F-35...

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Christmas Tree

The mysterious relationship between the boab tree of Australia and the Baobab tree of Africa

Ben Collins
ABC
Tue, 07 Aug 2018 09:05 UTC
boab tree
© Kevin Smith
Boabs are a striking tree that grow in many parts of the Kimberley and a small area of the Top End.
They are striking, fat-trunked trees unique to parts of the Kimberley and a small section of the Top End, but two scientists studying how they came from Africa or Madagascar have widely different explanations.

If you've ever seen a boab tree you don't need to be a botanist to realise something strange is going on.

Their trunks are swollen and wrinkly - as if someone has planted an elephant which has sprouted into a tree.

They are so unlike any other Australian tree that you can't help but wonder where they came from.

But if you see an African or Madagascan baobab then it's immediately apparent there has got to be a connection there.

Comment: Clues to the mystery will lie in the recent DNA discoveries of human evolution which discredit the Out Of Africa hypothesis, as well as in the documented, dramatic sea level rise and the epic climate shifts our planet underwent many thousands of years ago:

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Info

Unknown mineral discovered inside meteorite

Andrew LaSane
Outer Places
Mon, 06 Aug 2018 19:17 UTC
Kryptonite
© Public Domain
A new mineral has been discovered in a meteorite in Eastern Russia, and scientists are sure that it is never been found on our planet before.

Named "uakitite" after the Uakit region of Siberia where the meteorite was discovered by gold hunters two years ago, the mineral was found by a group that mistook the yellow rock for a rare metal. According to researchers, 98 percent of the Uakit meteorite is an iron alloy called kamacite, which so far has only been found in other meteorites. The other two percent is comprised of minerals that form in space. When the scientists looked at the rock under a microscope, they found tiny uakitite grains 25 times smaller than a grain of rice.

"Unfortunately, we failed to obtain all physical and optical properties of uakitite because of the very small sizes of the grains," wrote lead researcher and geologist at the Institute of Geology and Mineralogy, Victor Sharygin, in an article [PDF] presented during the Annual Meeting of the Meteoritical Society in Moscow.
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Jet2

Russia's Su-35 is the plane the US Air Force should fear

Sebastien Roblin
The National Interest
Mon, 06 Aug 2018 11:10 UTC
The Sukhoi Su-35 Flanker-E is the top Russian air-superiority fighter in service today, and represents the pinnacle of fourth-generation jet fighter design. It will remain so until Russia succeeds in bringing its fifth-generation PAK-FA stealth fighter into production.

SU-35S Russian plane
© Creative Commons
Distinguished by its unrivaled maneuverability, most of the Su-35's electronics and weapons capabilities have caught up with those of Western equivalents, like the F-15 Eagle. But while it may be a deadly adversary to F-15s, Eurofighters and Rafales, the big question mark remains how effectively it can contend with fifth-generation stealth fighters such as the F-22 and F-35.

Comment: See also:

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Microscope 2

Pigs lungs grown in lab using own cells and successfully re-transplanted


Futurism
Wed, 01 Aug 2018 12:00 UTC
piggy
LUNGS-ON-DEMAND

In the U.S. alone, more than 1,400 people are waiting for a lung transplant - there simply aren't enough donor lungs available to meet the need. Soon, though, patients might have a new source for brand new lungs: the lab.

On Wednesday, researchers from University of Texas Medical Branch published a new paper in the journal Science Translational Medicine. In it, they detail their latest milestone along the path to creating lab-grown lungs for humans: they can now successfully transplant these bioengineered lungs into pigs.

THIS LITTLE PIGGY GETS A NEW LUNG

To grow the lungs, the researchers first created four lung scaffolds. To do this, they removed all of the cells and blood from pig lungs using a mix of sugar and detergent. This left them with just the proteins of each lung - essentially, its skeleton.

Comment: This is certainly more promising than projects like the gene tampering project CRISPR which has been plagued with problems, and for the most extreme cases, technology like this may prove to be life saving. But for the majority of cases it could be that alternatives like stem cell therapy would be just as effective:

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Cow Skull

Russian scientists discover region's largest mammoth tusk yet in Ural mountains

Laura Forsyth
Mirror
Fri, 03 Aug 2018 16:28 UTC
largest mammoth tusk russia
© CEN/NTV
Paleontologists are celebrating after discovering the largest mammoth tusk ever found in Russia
Paleontologists are celebrating after discovering the largest mammoth tusk ever found in Russia.

Part of the tusk of a steppe mammoth was found during an an expedition in the Ural Mountains in the Prikamye region of central Russia's Perm Krai region.

Paleontologists initially thought they had found just a small section of tusk - but when it was fully excavated it measured 3.15 metres (10ft 4ins) long and 22 centimetres (8.7 ins) in diameter.

Comment: What kind of world was able to support such massive creatures?

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Brain

What really happens when you die?

Wayne Delfino
Medium
Mon, 13 Nov 2017 22:11 UTC
Chilling new research says your brain knows you're dead
brain
There were times reading the University of Western Ontario's study, published this January in the Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences, when I couldn't tell if it's all a big scary attempt to terrify us or if it's an earnest, scientific and intellectual inquiry into what happens to our memories when we die. The findings - which say our brains are working as much as 10 minutes after we pass - are mind blowing enough to argue that it's both.

As you know, the topic of what happens at the end has gotten a lot of attention in recent years. Authors have written books about it. Hollywood has made movies. The 2014 film Heaven Is For Real, about a 4-year old boy who told his parents he visited heaven while having surgery, was a huge box office success.

Comment:

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Magnify

Observation of the birth of a nanoplasma

David Ehrenstein
Physics
Thu, 02 Aug 2018 00:00 UTC
Nanoplasma
© Y. Kumagai/Tohoku University
A femtosecond-sensitive technique reveals the first steps in the creation of the nanoplasma that forms when a powerful x-ray pulse hits a nanoparticle.

The high-energy and high-intensity pulses available from x-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) are leading to new studies of the structure of nanoscale objects such as proteins. But researchers also need to understand the interactions between x rays and matter in order to properly interpret such experiments. Now Yoshiaki Kumagai, of Tohoku University in Japan, and colleagues have revealed the earliest steps in the creation of a so-called nanoplasma, which appears when a powerful x-ray pulse hits a cluster of a few thousand atoms.

The process of creating a nanoplasma has not been clear because of the difficulty of measuring such rapid events, but Kumagai and colleagues used their recently developed technique that has femtosecond (fs) time resolution. They blasted a cluster of roughly 5000 xenon atoms with an x-ray pulse followed by a near-infrared (NIR) pulse capable of ionizing additional atoms, with a controllable delay in between.
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Chalkboard

Physicists tie laser light waves into knots

Rafi Letzter
LiveScience
Fri, 03 Aug 2018 15:40 UTC
A team of physicists has tied light into figure-8 and torus knots.

The researchers, according to a paper published July 30 in the journal Nature Physics, figured out how to make the waves of two laser beams of light interfere with one another, and ultimately loop around each other in ways you might be more likely to associate with shoelaces or the knots on a sailboat.
laser light knots torus
© University of Bristol
a,b, Depiction of the various entities attributed to an optical trefoil knot corresponding to experimental (a) and theoretical results (b). In this display, the knotted trajectories of the C-lines are shown in red and the Seifert surface defined by regions with an azimuth of ± π/2 are displayed in pale red. The transverse polarization profile of the optical knot is shown for different propagation distances as cross-sectional images. c,d, A similar experimental surface reconstruction is performed for other torus structures, including a Hopf link (c) and a cinquefoil knot (d). The polarization profile in the focal plane of these optical structures is shown at the bottom right corner of the surfaces. All three-dimensional images are accompanied by a top-view image in which crossings have been made more noticeable. The aspect ratios of the plots were chosen to better depict the main features of the knots’ structure and do not necessarily scale to the real dimensions of the knots. Additional details surrounding the knots’ dimensions can be found in the Methods.
But knots don't have to be made of string, the researchers explained in an accompanying statement. Instead, a knot is a mathematical term for any shape in space that loops around itself in particular ways. And by exploiting the complex shapes light waves form as they vibrate in two directions (up and down, and side to side) along their paths, and the ways those waves interact with one another, they were able to cause electromagnetic light fields to knot in the air.

The knots in question, the researchers wrote in their paper, were visible enough in images of the light wave data for them to identify the figure eights and toruses. They also confirmed their findings using formal knot theory mathematics.
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Fireball

The annual Perseids: Astronomers prepare for Earth to 'plow' into fiery meteor shower


RT
Sat, 04 Aug 2018 13:29 UTC
Meteor
© Dado Ruvic
A meteor streaks across the sky above medieval tombstones in Radmilje, Bosnia and Herzegovina, on 12 August, 2016.
A glowing shower of meteorites is set to light up the night skies this August as hundreds of burning space rocks wipe out in Earth's atmosphere, much to the delight of stargazers across the globe.

The Perseids is a prolific shower of fiery space particles that has streaked over our planet annually for generations as Earth encounters debris falling off the Swift-Tuttle comet, which was first discovered back in 1862.

The gleaming debris is generally first seen in mid-July in the northern hemisphere but enters a particularly sweet period of viewing for amateur stargazers between August 11-13, 2018. According to NASA, the peak period happens around a moonless night when the sky is darker than normal.

"Unlike most meteor showers, which have a short peak of high meteor rates, the Perseids have a very broad peak, as Earth takes more than three weeks to plow through the wide trail of cometary dust," said Jane Houston Jones, of the US space agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
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