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Melting rock with millimeter waves to go into large scale testing

Maria Gallucci
Spectrum
Wed, 19 Feb 2020 16:00 UTC
Woskov

Feel the Heat: Paul Woskov of MIT holds water-cooling lines leading to a test chamber, and a sample of rock with a hole made by a beam from a gyrotron.
A vast supply of heat lies beneath our feet. Yet today's drilling methods can barely push through dense rocks and high-pressure conditions to reach it. A new generation of "enhanced" drilling systems aims to obliterate those barriers and unlock unprecedented supplies of geothermal energy.

AltaRock Energy is leading an effort to melt and vaporize rocks with millimeter waves. Instead of grinding away with mechanical drills, scientists use a gyrotron — a specialized high-frequency microwave-beam generator — to open holes in slabs of hard rock. The goal is to penetrate rock at faster speeds, to greater depths, and at a lower cost than conventional drills do.

The Seattle-based company recently received a US $3.9 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). The three-year initiative will enable scientists to demonstrate the technology at increasingly larger scales, from burning through hand-size samples to room-size slabs. Project partners say they hope to start drilling in real-world test sites before the grant period ends in September 2022.

Comment: Regardless of the viability in this kind of deep geothermal energy tapping as well as in its inherent danger, despite their claims that it would all "be confirmed deep below ground" - bearing in mind we heard similar claims by the ruinous fracking industry - the technology itself is rather interesting.

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Dig

Mass grave from 1348 shows Black Death was equally catastrophic to rural England

Esther Addley
The Guardian
Tue, 18 Feb 2020 12:00 UTC
black death
© University of Sheffield/PA
The mass grave near Immingham contains the remains of at least 48 men, women and children.
A mass grave containing the remains of dozens of victims of the Black Death offers chilling new evidence of the speed and scale of the devastation the plague brought to rural England, according to archaeologists.

The grave, discovered in a remote corner of rural Lincolnshire, has been dated to the 14th century, almost certainly to the earliest and deadliest medieval outbreak of the disease in 1348-9.

It contained the bodies of at least 48 men, women and children who were laid in a sandy pit within days of each other. DNA tests on the bodies found the plague pathogen, confirming how they died.

Comment: See also:

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Bizarro Earth

Methane emitted via fossil fuel use in the last 200 years 'vastly underestimated', but pre-history levels have been much higher


University of Rochester
Wed, 19 Feb 2020 19:42 UTC
drill ice cores
© Xavier Faïn / University of Grenoble Alpes
Rochester researchers in Greenland drill for ice cores, which contain air bubbles with small quantities of ancient air trapped inside. By measuring the carbon-14 isotope in air from more than 200 years ago, the researchers found that scientists have been vastly overestimating the amount of fossil methane emitted by natural sources, and have therefore been underestimating the amount of methane humans are emitting into the atmosphere via fossil fuels.
Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas and large contributor to global warming. Methane emissions to the atmosphere have increased by approximately 150 percent over the past three centuries, but it has been difficult for researchers to determine exactly where these emissions originate; heat-trapping gases like methane can be emitted naturally, as well as from human activity.

University of Rochester researchers Benjamin Hmiel, a postdoctoral associate in the lab of Vasilii Petrenko, a professor of earth and environmental sciences, and their collaborators, measured methane levels in ancient air samples and found that scientists have been vastly underestimating the amount of methane humans are emitting into the atmosphere via fossil fuels. In a paper published in Nature, the researchers indicate that reducing fossil fuel use is a key target in curbing climate change.

"Placing stricter methane emission regulations on the fossil fuel industry will have the potential to reduce future global warming to a larger extent than previously thought," Hmiel says.

Comment: Unfortunately, the researchers are also not taking into account unexpected massive methane releases whether by volcanic eruption or comet impact, which would completely overwhelm the insignificant amounts generated by human activity. Further, a massive methane release could have the opposite effect, as there is evidence that methane is implicated in global cooling.

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Comet

What should we do if a 'planet-killer' asteroid takes aim at Earth?

Rafi Letzter
Live Science
Thu, 20 Feb 2020 19:12 UTC
rocket approaching an asteroid
© Christine Daniloff, MIT
An illustration shows a rocket approaching an asteroid that's drifted too close to Earth. A scout probe orbits nearb
If a giant object looks like it's going to slam into Earth, humanity has a few options: Hammer it with a spacecraft hard enough to knock it off course, blast it with nuclear weapons, tug on it with a gravity tractor, or even slow it down using concentrated sunlight.

We'll have to decide whether to visit it with a scout mission first, or launch a full-scale attack immediately.

Those are a lot of decisions to make under existential duress, which is why a team of MIT researchers have come up with a guide, published February in the journal Acta Astronautica, to help future asteroid deflectors.

In movies, an incoming asteroid is usually a very last-minute shock: a big, deadly rock hurtling right toward Earth like a bullet out of the darkness, with only weeks or days between its discovery and its projected impact. That is a real threat, according to an April 2019 presentation by NASA's Office of Planetary Defense that Live Science attended. But NASA believes that it's spotted most of the largest, deadliest objects that have even a small chance of striking Earth — the so-called planet killers. (Of course, there are probably plenty of smaller rocks — still large enough to kill whole cities — that remain undiscovered.)
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Blue Planet

New study finds the Earth formed much faster than previously thought


Science Daily
Sat, 22 Feb 2020 17:55 UTC
proto planet dust disc
© Stock
Illustration of protoplanetary disk.
By measuring iron isotopes, researchers have shown that our planet originally formed much faster than previously thought. This finding provides new insights on both planetary formation and the likelihood of water and life elsewhere in the universe.

The precursor of our planet, the proto-Earth, formed within a time span of approximately five million years, shows a new study from the Centre for Star and Planet Formation (StarPlan) at the Globe Institute at the University of Copenhagen.

On an astronomical scale, this is extremely fast, the researchers explain.

If you compare the solar system's estimated 4.6 billion years of existence with a 24-hour period, the new results indicate that the proto-Earth formed in what corresponds to about a minute and a half.
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Ice Cube

Freshly frozen bird dating back 46,000 years discovered in Siberian permafrost

Hannah Sparks
New York Post
Fri, 21 Feb 2020 10:27 UTC
lark siberia
© Love Dalén
When miners first unearthed a bird from permafrost in Siberia, it was so well-preserved that they might have thought the poor creature had perished just the day before.

But radiocarbon dating and genetic analysis later revealed that the frozen specimen was actually a 46,000-year-old horned lark.

The bird was discovered by fossil ivory hunters near the village of Belaya Gora in northeastern Siberia. They then brought it to scientists Nicolas Dussex, Love Dalén and their team of experts at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, who confirmed the bird's classification.

Their research was published in the journal Communications Biology on Friday.

Comment: See also: Also check out SOTT radio's:

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Arrow Down

Miami Beach impact crater totally ignored by main stream science


Cosmic Tusk
Fri, 21 Feb 2020 22:07 UTC
If you seek an indication that something is terribly wrong with science look no further. In 2012 brave citizen of Miami Cory Boehne noted that just south of the Port of Miami ship channel, less than two miles from downtown Miami Beach in 30′ of water, was the unmistakable signature of a cosmic collision: A multi-ringed impact complex crater with a central peak.
Impact Crater_1
© NOAA
Cool. At best it is an easily accessible opportunity for complex crater research. So much easier than Greenland or the Moon.

Or, at worst, a chance to demonstrate geological forces other than impact are crafty, and conspire to produce "pseudo-craters" in order to fool pajama scientists like the Tusk.

So what do you think was the response from the scientific "community" to these compelling images? Crickets. Not a word.

Despite what appears to be a sincere attempt to bring some attention to the amazing find, and another wonderful effort by astronomer Charles P.T. O'Dale, as far as I can tell, the community of academic and research scientists in Florida and elsewhere could not get up the gas money to take a boat out there.

See if you can find a single published paper.

Yet again we learn the lesson: The closer the subject hits to home, the more verboten it becomes.
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Brain

Scientists scanned brains of lifelong bullies and discovered their brains are smaller than normal

Jon Christian
Futurism
Wed, 19 Feb 2020 19:06 UTC
closed fist
© Image via Pexels/Victor Tangermann
An international team of neuroscientists scanned the brains of lifelong bullies and found something grim: Bullies' brains appear to be physically smaller than other brains.

"Our findings support the idea that, for the small proportion of individuals with life-course-persistent antisocial behaviour, there may be differences in their brain structure that make it difficult for them to develop social skills that prevent them from engaging in antisocial behaviour," said lead author Christina Carlisi, a researcher at the University College London.

For the study, published in prestigious journal The Lancet, the team used an MRI machine to examine the brains of 652 participants.
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Magnify

Researchers turn McDonald's deep fryer oil into high-end 3D printing resin


University of Toronto
Thu, 30 Jan 2020 00:01 UTC
Rajshree Biswas
© Don Campbell
Rajshree Biswas, a PhD student in the lab of U of T Scarborough Professor Andre Simpson, shows off biodegradable plastic butterflies made using a 3D printer and resin derived from McDonald's waste cooking oil.
Researchers at the University of Toronto Scarborough have, for the first time, turned waste cooking oil - from the deep fryers of a local McDonald's - into a high-resolution, biodegradable 3D printing resin.

Using waste cooking oil for 3D printing has significant potential. Not only is it cheaper to make, the plastics made from it break down naturally unlike conventional 3D printing resins.

"The reasons plastics are a problem is because nature hasn't evolved to handle human-made chemicals," says Andre Simpson, a professor at U of T Scarborough's department of physical and environmental sciences who developed the resin in his lab.
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Chalkboard

Gotcha! Physicists trap, photograph individual atoms in groundbreaking experiment


PhysOrg
Thu, 20 Feb 2020 16:54 UTC
single atom cloud isolated LASER
© University of Otago
LASER-cooled atom cloud viewed through microscope camera.
In a first for quantum physics, University of Otago researchers have "held" individual atoms in place and observed previously unseen complex atomic interactions.

A myriad of equipment including lasers, mirrors, a vacuum chamber, and microscopes assembled in Otago's Department of Physics, plus a lot of time, energy, and expertise, have provided the ingredients to investigate this quantum process, which until now was only understood through statistical averaging from experiments involving large numbers of atoms.

The experiment improves on current knowledge by offering a previously unseen view into the microscopic world, surprising researchers with the results.
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