University of Cambridge gives out their notes/videos for graduate physics classes for free http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/qft.html
https://www.tcd.ie/news_events/articles/physicists-discover-a-new-form-of-light/6815#.VzktN5N976Y http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/4/e1501748.full and as a primer
Can't sleep and clicking around for some books to read that talk about stuff I like, but together. Here's a good article on some of the beginning perspectives of biophysics http://www.biotec.tu-dresden.de/fil.../1977_Purcell_life_at_low_reynolds_number.pdf
Just bought it Will recommend to the guy teaching the class, I'm sure he's the type of guy that would be interested in making the Kessel run in under 12 parsecs
Reclaiming the immune system's assault on tumors June 13, 2016 A microscope photograph showing immune cells (green) attacking tumor cells (red). Credit: Michele De Palma/EPFL One of the major obstacles with treating cancer is that tumors can conscript the body's immune cells and make them work for them. Researchers at EPFL have now found a way to reclaim the corrupted immune cells, turn them into signals for the immune system to attack the tumor, and even prevent metastasis. Macrophages are cells of the immune system that protect the host from invading pathogens. But in cancer, macrophages can be "hijacked" by tumors, and made to support their malignant growth and spread. This is a drawback for a major cancer treatment, immunotherapy, which turns the body's immune system against the tumor. EPFL scientists, working with colleagues at the Roche Innovation Centers in Munich and Basel, have now identified a molecular "switch" that can convert the "hijacked" macrophages into cells that can stimulate the immune system to fight the growth and spread of cancer. The work is published in Nature Cell Biology. "Traitor" macrophages Along with attacking foreign pathogens like bacteria, macrophages also help the body's organs develop and its wounds heal. Their own behavior is fine-tuned by small molecules that they produce, called microRNAs. When a tumor begins to develop, macrophages attempt to block its growth. But often tumors hijack them and convert them into what are known as "tumor-associated macrophages", or TAMs for short. Now corrupted, TAMs use their microRNAs to shield the tumor from the patient's immune system, helping it grow and metastasize. This phenomenon is common across many tumor types. It is one of the major obstacles in treating cancer, and often leads to a poor prognosis for the patient. Reprogramming macrophages Michele De Palma's team at EPFL found how to reclaim TAMs. The researchers genetically modified TAMs to remove their ability to produce microRNAs. As a result, the TAMs were reprogrammed dramatically. Instead of protecting the tumor, the TAMs now signaled the presence of the tumor to the immune system, triggering attacks against it - and did so very efficiently. Using a bioinformatics approach, the researchers found that the most likely culprit was a small family of microRNAs, called Let-7. This offers a more specific target: blocking Let-7 microRNAs may help instruct the TAMs to stimulate anti-tumor immunity. Interestingly, the researchers observed that reprogramming TAMs also stops cancer cells from leaving the primary tumor. This could mean that the approach can also prevent tumor metastasis, the most threatening aspect of cancer. Moreover, the researchers found that the re-educated TAMs could enhance the anti-tumoral efficacy of certain cancer immunotherapies, some of which are already approved for patients. However, more work is needed to translate all these findings to actual therapies, especially since there is currently no way to block the Let-7 microRNAs selectively in TAMs. But De Palma's lab is now working with bioengineers at EPFL to design drugs that can target the Let-7 microRNAs specifically in the TAMs. Therapeutic opportunities Some of the most promising cancer treatments are immunotherapies, which are based on provoking or enhancing the patient's immune response against their tumor. "The most exciting finding was that TAM reprogramming greatly improved the efficacy of immunotherapy," says Michele De Palma. "Our results in experimental models of cancer suggest a new therapeutic strategy based on inhibiting the microRNA machinery - or the Let-7 microRNAs - specifically in the TAMs, which may unleash the power of mainstream immunotherapies, such as immune checkpoint inhibitors". Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-06-reclaiming-immune-assault-tumors.html#jCp
Well shit. Carbon nanotubes too weak to get a space elevator off the ground Andrey Prokhorov/Getty By Jacob Aron For want of an atom, the space elevator failed. Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are famed for being a future wonder material that will enable a swathe of super-strong but light applications from racing bikes to computer components. But now it seems a single out-of-place atom is enough to cut their strength by more than half. That means one of the more outlandish applications for CNT fibres – a sci-fi space elevator – might never happen. The tubes’ strength is a result of their atomic structure, with walls made from just a single layer of carbon atoms locked in a hexagonal grid. Theoretical studies suggest that a single CNT can have a tensile strength of 100 gigapascals (GPa), making it one of the strongest materials around, but efforts to spin multiple nanotubes into apractical large-scale fibre have only produced ropes with strengths of 1 GPa. To find out why, Feng Ding of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and his colleagues simulated CNTs with a single atom is out of place, turning two of the hexagons into a pentagon and heptagon, and creating a kink in the tube. They found this simple change was enough to cut the ideal strength of a CNT to 40 GPa, with the effect being even more severe when they increased the number of misaligned atoms. Fracture sequence The team’s simulations show that the kink acts as a weak point in the tube, easily snapping the normally strong carbon-carbon bonds. Once this happens, the bonds in the adjacent hexagons also break, unzipping the entire tube. The effect on CNTs spun together into fibres is similar – once one CNT breaks, the strain on the others increases, fracturing them in sequence. The results suggest just one misplaced atom is enough to weaken an entire CNT fibre, and since nanotube manufacturing processes are flawed at the moment, you will inevitably end up with a bad tube in your fibre. “Only CNTs with extreme quality are able to retain their ideal strength,” says Ding. “Most mass-produced CNTs are highly defective, and high-quality CNTs are hard to produce in large quantity.” That’s bad news for people who want to build a space elevator, a cable between the Earth and an orbiting satellite that would provide easy access to space. Estimates suggest such a cable would need a tensile strength of 50 GPa, so CNTs were a promising solution, but Ding’s research suggests they won’t work. “Unless great breakthroughs on CNT synthesis can be achieved, using CNTs to build a space elevator would be extremely challenging,” he says. https://www.newscientist.com/articl...-weak-to-get-a-space-elevator-off-the-ground/
Mmm-hm, mmm-hm. I know some of these words. Researchers discover new way to turn electricity into light, using graphene By slowing down light to a speed slower than flowing electrons, researchers create a kind of optical “sonic boom.” David L. Chandler | MIT News Office June 13, 2016 When an airplane begins to move faster than the speed of sound, it creates a shockwave that produces a well-known “boom” of sound. Now, researchers at MIT and elsewhere have discovered a similar process in a sheet of graphene, in which a flow of electric current can, under certain circumstances, exceed the speed of slowed-down light and produce a kind of optical “boom”: an intense, focused beam of light. This entirely new way of converting electricity into visible radiation is highly controllable, fast, and efficient, the researchers say, and could lead to a wide variety of new applications. The work is reported today in the journal Nature Communications, in a paper by two MIT professors — Marin Soljačić, professor of physics; and John Joannopoulos, the Francis Wright Davis Professor of physics — as well as postdoc Ido Kaminer, and six others in Israel, Croatia, and Singapore. The new finding started from an intriguing observation. The researchers found that when light strikes a sheet of graphene, which is a two-dimensional form of the element carbon, it can slow down by a factor of a few hundred. That dramatic slowdown, they noticed, presented an interesting coincidence. The reduced speed of photons (particles of light) moving through the sheet of graphene happened to be very close to the speed of electrons as they moved through the same material. “Graphene has this ability to trap light, in modes we call surface plasmons,” explains Kaminer, who is the paper’s lead author. Plasmons are a kind of virtual particle that represents the oscillations of electrons on the surface. The speed of these plasmons through the graphene is “a few hundred times slower than light in free space,” he says. This effect dovetailed with another of graphene’s exceptional characteristics: Electrons pass through it at very high speeds, up to a million meters per second, or about 1/300 the speed of light in a vacuum. That meant that the two speeds were similar enough that significant interactions might occur between the two kinds of particles, if the material could be tuned to get the velocities to match. That combination of properties — slowing down light and allowing electrons to move very fast — is “one of the unusual properties of graphene,” says Soljačić. That suggested the possibility of using graphene to produce the opposite effect: to produce light instead of trapping it. “Our theoretical work shows that this can lead to a new way of generating light,” he says. Specifically, he explains, “This conversion is made possible because the electronic speed can approach the light speed in graphene, breaking the ‘light barrier.’” Just as breaking the sound barrier generates a shockwave of sound, he says, “In the case of graphene, this leads to the emission of a shockwave of light, trapped in two dimensions.” The phenomenon the team has harnessed is called the Čerenkov effect, first described 80 years ago by Soviet physicist Pavel Čerenkov. Usually associated with astronomical phenomenon and harnessed as a way of detecting ultrafast cosmic particles as they hurtle through the universe, and also to detect particles resulting from high-energy collisions in particle accelerators, the effect had not been considered relevant to Earthbound technology because it only works when objects are moving close to the speed of light. But the slowing of light inside a graphene sheet provided the opportunity to harness this effect in a practical form, the researchers say. There are many different ways of converting electricity into light — from the heated tungsten filaments that Thomas Edison perfected more than a century ago, to fluorescent tubes, to the light-emitting diodes (LEDs) that power many display screens and are gaining favor for household lighting. But this new plasmon-based approach might eventually be part of more efficient, more compact, faster, and more tunable alternatives for certain applications, the researchers say. Perhaps most significantly, this is a way of efficiently and controllably generating plasmons on a scale that is compatible with current microchip technology. Such graphene-based systems could potentially be key on-chip components for the creation of new, light-based circuits, which are considered a major new direction in the evolution of computing technology toward ever-smaller and more efficient devices. “If you want to do all sorts of signal processing problems on a chip, you want to have a very fast signal, and also to be able to work on very small scales,” Kaminer says. Computer chips have already reduced the scale of electronics to the points that the technology is bumping into some fundamental physical limits, so “you need to go into a different regime of electromagnetism,” he says. Using light instead of flowing electrons as the basis for moving and storing data has the potential to push the operating speeds “six orders of magnitude higher than what is used in electronics,” Kaminer says — in other words, in principle up to a million times faster. One problem faced by researchers trying to develop optically based chips, he says, is that while electricity can be easily confined within wires, light tends to spread out. Inside a layer of graphene, however, under the right conditions, the beams are very well confined. “There’s a lot of excitement about graphene,” says Soljačić, “because it could be easily integrated with other electronics” enabling its potential use as an on-chip light source. So far, the work is theoretical, he says, so the next step will be to create working versions of the system to prove the concept. “I have confidence that it should be doable within one to two years,” he says. The next step would then be to optimize the system for the greatest efficiency. This finding “is a truly innovative concept that has the potential to be the key toward solving the long-standing problem of achieving highly efficient and ultrafast electrical-to-optical signal conversion at the nanoscale,” says Jorge Bravo-Abad, an assistant professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid, in Spain, who was not involved in this work. In addition, Bravo-Abad says, “the novel instance of Čerenkov emission discovered by the authors of this work opens up whole new prospects for the study of the Čerenkov effect in nanoscale systems, without the need of sophisticated experimental set-ups. I look forward to seeing the significant impact and implications that these findings will surely have at the interface between physics and nanotechnology.” The research was supported by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the U.S. Army Research Office, through the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies at MIT. The team included researchers Yichen Shen, Ognjen Ilic, and Josue Lopez at MIT; Yaniv Katan at Technion, in Haifa, Israel; Hrvoje Buljan at the University of Zagreb in Croatia; and Liang Jie Wong at the Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology. http://news.mit.edu/2016/new-way-turn-electricity-light-using-graphene-0613
This doesn't sound good. Laser uranium enrichment technology may create new proliferation risks June 27, 2016 A new laser-based uranium enrichment technology may provide a hard-to-detect pathway to nuclear weapons production, according to a forthcoming paper in the journal Science & Global Security by Ryan Snyder, a physicist with Princeton University's Program on Science and Global Security. One example of this new third-generation laser enrichment technique may be the separation of isotopes by laser excitation (SILEX) process which was originally developed in Australia and licensed in 2012 for commercial-scale deployment in the United States to the Global Laser Enrichment consortium led by General Electric-Hitachi. Research on the relevant laser systems is also currently ongoing in Russia, India and China. The paper explains the basic physics of the new uranium separation concept, which relies on the selective laser excitation and condensation repression of uranium-235 in a gas. It also estimates the key laser performance requirements and possible operating parameters for a single enrichment unit and how a cascade of such units could be arranged into an enrichment plant able to produce weapon-grade highly enriched uranium. Using plausible assumptions, the paper shows how a covert laser enrichment plant sized to make one bomb's worth of weapon-grade material a year could use less space and energy than a similar scale plant based on almost all current centrifuge designs, the most efficient enrichment technology in use today. The results suggest a direct impact on detection methods that use size or energy use as plant footprints. Acquiring the key laser systems appears to be the main technological hurdle to states mastering this new enrichment process. The paper details some of the different lasers that, in principle, could be used for uranium enrichment. Technology export controls on possible laser systems may be hard to implement since some of the lasers have multiple applications in areas such as medicine, telecommunications, and defense. One consequence of this is that commonplace laser research and development activities could allow more countries a latent nuclear weapons capability. Snyder observes that an unexpected window of opportunity to think more carefully about the proliferation potential of the new laser technology has opened up with the April 2016 decision by General Electric-Hitachi to withdraw from the Global Laser Enrichment consortium which has stalled the commercialization effort. "We have a second chance to think about the risks of deploying new laser-based uranium enrichment technologies on a laboratory or industrial scale," said Snyder. "Previously developed technologies that provided pathways to nuclear weapons such as gaseous diffusion and gas centrifuges have spread to other countries, and the same should be expected with laser enrichment if commercial deployment of this new technology is successfully demonstrated." The paper concludes with the suggestion that attention should be focused on regulating laser systems capable of enriching uranium to weapon-grade levels, otherwise such lasers may come to pose proliferation concerns comparable to if not greater than gas centrifuge development or plutonium reprocessing today. The paper, "A Proliferation Assessment of Third Generation Laser Enrichment Technology," will be published in Science & Global Security. Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-06-laser-uranium-enrichment-technology-proliferation.html#jCp
Nothing like the chance for another crack-pot country to obtain a nuke. Should probably cross-post in Shu's One-World Gov't thread.
It'll just be Iran in the lead. Smuggle a few nukes into the major capital cities and boom. Only one left standing.
Physicists just confirmed a pear-shaped nucleus, and it could ruin time travel forever Nooooo. BEC CREW 27 JUN 2016 Physicists have confirmed the existence of a new form of atomic nuclei, and the fact that it’s not symmetrical challenges the fundamental theories of physics that explain our Universe. But that's not as bad as it sounds, because the discovery could help scientists solve one of the biggest mysteries in theoretical physics - where is all the dark matter? - and could also explain why travelling backwards in time might actually be impossible. "We've found these nuclei literally point towards a direction in space. This relates to a direction in time, proving there's a well-defined direction in time and we will always travel from past to present," Marcus Scheck from the University of the West of Scotland told Kenneth MacDonald at BBC News. So let’s back up here, because to understand this new form of atomic nuclei, you have to get to know the old ones first. Until recently, it was established that the nuclei of atoms could be one of just three shapes - spherical, discus, or rugby ball. These shapes are formed by the distribution of electrical charge within a nucleus, and are dictated by the specific combinations of protons and neutrons in a certain type of atom, whether it’s a hydrogen atom, a zinc atom, or a complex isotope created in a lab. The common factor across all three shapes is their symmetry, and this marries nicely with a theory in particle physics known as CP-Symmetry. CP-symmetry is the combination of two symmetries that are thought to exist in the Universe: C-Symmtery and P-Symmetry. C-Symmetry, also known as charge symmetry, states that if you flip an atomic charge to its opposite, the physics of that atom should still be the same. So if we take a hydrogen atom and an anti-hydrogen atom and mess with them, both should respond in identical ways, even though they have opposite charges. P-Symmetry, also known as Parity, states that the the spatial coordinates describing a system can be inverted through the point at the origin, so that x, y, and z are replaced with −x, −y, and −z. "Your left hand and your right hand exhibit P-Symmetry from one another: if you point your thumb up and curl your fingers, your left and right hands mirror one another," Ethan Siegel from It Starts With a Bang explains. CP-Symmetry is a combination of both of these assumptions. "In particle physics, if you have a particle spinning clockwise and decaying upwards, its antiparticle should spin counterclockwise and decay upwards 100 percent of the time if CP is conserved," says Siegel. "If not, CP is violated.” The possibility that the Universe could actually violate both C-Symmetry and CP-Symmetry is one of the conditions that have been proposed to explain themystery of antimatter in the Universe. But proving that would mean the Standard Model of Physics needs a serious rethink. According to the laws of physics, at the time of the Big Bang, equal amounts of matter and antimatter had to have been created, but now, billions of years later, we’re surrounded by heaps of matter (solid, liquid, gas, and plasma), but there appears to be almost no naturally occurring antimatter. "This is a puzzling feature, as the theory of relativistic quantum mechanics suggests we should have equal amounts of the two," mathematician Gianluca Sarri from Queen's University Belfast in the UK writes for The Conversation. "In fact, no current model of physics can explain the discrepancy." Okay, so back to our atomic nuclei shapes. Most of our fundamental theories of physics are based on symmetry, so when physicists at CERN discovered an asymmetrical pear-shaped nucleus in the isotope Radium-224 back in 2013, it was a bit of a shock, because it showed that nuclei could have more mass at one end than the other. Now, three years later, the find has been confirmed by a second study, which has shown that the nucleus of the isotope Barium-144 is also asymmetrical and pear-shaped. "[T]he protons enrich in the bump of the pear and create a specific charge distribution in the nucleus," Scheck told the BBC. "This violates the theory of mirror symmetry and relates to the violation shown in the distribution of matter and antimatter in our Universe." While physicists have suspected that Barium-144 has a pear-shaped nucleus for some time now, Scheck and his team finally figured out how to directly observe that, and it turns out its distortion is even more pronounced than predicted. So what does all of this have to do with time travel? It's a pretty out-there hypothesis, but Scheck says that this uneven distribition of mass and charge causes Barium-144's nucleus to 'point' in a certain direction in spacetime, and this bias could explain why time seems to only want to go from past to present,and not backwards, even if the laws of physics don't care which way it goes. Of course, there's no way of proving that without further evidence, but the discovery is yet another indication that the Universe might not be as symmetrical as the Standard Model of Physics needs it to be, and proving that could usher us into a whole new era of theoretical physics. http://www.sciencealert.com/physici...pe-and-it-could-ruin-our-hopes-of-time-travel
http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/29/12057434/avian-dinosaur-wings-discovered-in-amber Spoiler Near-perfect wings from dinosaur times discovered in amber Prehistoric avialan feathers worked a lot like modern birds' By Rich McCormick (Royal Saskatchewan Museum / R.C. McKellar) Share on Facebook (283) Tweet Share (9) Pin (2) A pair of wings found encased in amber suggest that the plumage of modern birds has remained almost unchanged from some of their dinosaur-era ancestors, according to scientists. In a new study published in the Nature Communications journal this week, researchers say that the wings have very similar structures, coloring, and feather layouts as the wings of modern birds, despite the fact they likely belonged to 100-million-year-old avialans called enantiornithes. X-ray scans indicate that the fossilized wings — found in northern Myanmar — likely belonged to juvenile creatures, and contain skin, muscle, and claws, as well as various layers of feathers, arranged in a markedly similar fashion to those of birds. That's not the only similarity: the feathers appear uniformly black inside the amber, actually show up in shades of brown, silver, and white under the microscope. THE SMALLER OF THE TWO WING SAMPLES HAS BEEN NICKNAMED "ANGEL" The smaller of the two samples has been nicknamed "Angel," a nod to the fact it was originally destined to be included in a jewelry piece called "Angel's Wings," before the scientists behind the study procured it from a Myanmar amber market. Burmese amber from the country is famous for containing mummified plant and animal life, with as much as 30 percent featuring "phenomenal biodiversity," according to David Grimaldi at the American Museum of Natural History. But much of that amber comes from unregulated mines in the north of the country, with some of the richest areas for discovery controlled by the separatist Kachin Independence Army, a force in regular conflict with the Myanmar government. DINOSAUR-ERA WINGS PRESERVED IN AMBER While paleontologists now generally agree that at least some dinosaur species did indeed sport feathers, so far they've had base their work on limited samples. Ryan McKellar, co-author of the study, told National Geographic that "the biggest problem we face with feathers in amber is that we usually get small fragments or isolated feathers, and we're never quite sure who produced [them]." The new samples, on the other hand, feature bone, feathers, and soft tissue, allowing paleontologists to see just how similar prehistoric bird wings were to modern examples. "We don't get something like this," McKellar said. "It's mind-blowingly cool."
Terahertz wireless and wifi is coming. Up to 100 times faster than current microwaves and much broader spectrum. Researchers develop key power-splitting component for terahertz waves June 29, 2016 by Kevin Stacey One of the most basic components of any communications network is a power splitter that allows a signal to be sent to multiple users and devices. Researchers from Brown University have now developed just such a device for terahertz …more One of the most basic components of any communications network is a power splitter that allows a signal to be sent to multiple users and devices. Researchers from Brown University have now developed just such a device for terahertz radiation—a range of frequencies that may one day enable data transfer up to 100 times faster than current cellular and Wi-Fi networks. "One of the big thrusts in terahertz technology is wireless communications," said Kimberly Reichel, a post-doctoral researcher in Brown's School of Engineering who led the device's development. "We believe this is the first demonstration of a variable broadbrand power splitter for terahertz, which would be a fundamental device for use in a terahertz network." The device could have numerous applications, including as a component in terahertz routers that would send data packets to multiple computers, just like the routers in current Wi-Fi networks. The new device is described in the Nature journal Scientific Reports. Today's cellular and Wi-Fi networks rely on microwaves, but the amount of data that can travel on microwaves is limited by frequency. Terahertz waves (which span from about 100 to 10,000 GHz on the electromagnetic spectrum) have a higher frequency and therefore the potential to carry much more data. Until recently, however, terahertz hasn't received much attention from scientists and researchers, so many of the basic components for a terahertz communications network simply don't exist. Daniel Mittleman, a professor in Brown's School of Engineering, has been working to develop some of those key components. His lab recently developed the first system for terahertz multiplexing and demultiplexing—a method of sending multiple signals through a single medium and then separating them back out on the other side. Mittleman's lab has also produced a new type of lens for focusing terahertz waves. Each of the components Mittleman has developed makes use of parallel-plate waveguides—metal sheets that can constrain terahertz waves and guide them in particular directions. "We're developing a family of waveguide tools that could be integrated to create the appropriate signal processing that one would need to do networking," said Mittleman, who was a co-author on the new paper along with Reichel and Brown research professor Rajind Mendis. "The power splitter is another member of that family." The new device consists of several waveguides arranged to form a T-junction. Signal going into the leg of the T is split by a triangular septum at the junction, sending a portion of the signal down each of the two arms. The septum's triangular shape minimizes the amount of radiation that reflects back down the leg of the T, reducing signal loss. The septum can be moved right or left in order to vary the amount of power that is sent down either arm. "We can go from an equal 50/50 split up to a 95/5 split, which is quite a range," Reichel said. For this proof-of-concept device, the septum is manipulated manually, but Mittleman says that process could easily be motorized to enable dynamic switching of power output to each channel. That could enable the device to be incorporated in a terahertz router. "It's reasonable to think that we could operate this at sub-millisecond timescales, which would be fast enough to do data packet switching," Mittleman said. "So this is a component that could be used to enable routing in the manner of the microwave routers we use today." The researchers plan to continue to work with the new device. A next step, they said, would be to start testing error rates in data streams sent through the device. "The goal of this work was to demonstrate that you can do variable power switching with a parallel-plate waveguide architecture," Mittleman said. "We wanted to demonstrate the basic physics and then refine the design." Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-06-key-power-splitting-component-terahertz.html#jCp More. http://phys.org/news/2015-09-key-component-terahertz-wireless.html#nRlv
Earth’s Core Is Two Years Younger Than Its Crust Thanks To Relativity 0SHARES Share on Facebook Share on Twitter PHYSICS VADIM SADOVSKI/SHUTTERSTOCK By Alfredo Carpineti 27/04/2016, 10:30 Relativity is one of those fascinating branches of physics whose consequences might seem a bit illogical when compared to everyday life, like the twin paradox. Now, another quirk of relativity has been revealed: due to gravity, Earth’s core is younger than the crust. Ulrik Uggerhøj from Aarhus University in Denmark and his colleagues used both a very simple approach and then a more sophisticated one to work out the effect the accumulated action of gravity has on the different layers of our planet. They found, in the more accurate model, that the crust is about 2.49 years older than the core, reported New Scientist. According to the principles of general relativity, the stronger the gravity field is, the slower time will move. If we had two clocks, one near the center of the Earth and one on the surface, the first one will appear to tick more slowly than the second one. This research shows that the core clock loses 0.3 nanoseconds for each second it passes. Uggerhøj decided to investigate the difference while writing an undergraduate book on physics. He wanted to include a quote by Richard Feynman about the effects of gravity, on how the “the center of the earth should be a day or two younger than the surface.” This number has often been quoted, even by Uggerhøj, but in writing the book he wanted to also include a calculation, and that’s when he noticed the discrepancy. The researchers started with a model in which Earth is a perfect sphere with the same density everywhere. The formulas used, although borrowed from general relativity, are simple enough to be followed by most high school students. They can be seen in the team's paper onarXiv. The simplest scenario indicates that the center is 1.58 years younger the surface. To produce a more precise estimate for the crust-core age difference, the team used a more realistic density distribution. The Earth becomes denser towards the center but not linearly, so geologists have different models to describe the interior of our planet. In their paper the team used the Preliminary Reference Earth Model, a one-dimensional model used to work out where the different layers separate. The realistic model needs a more complex mathematical calculation, but the answer was still easily obtained. The team stated that this is a purely physical calculation and only take into account the elapsed time from Earth's formation. The researchers applied these calculations to the Sun as well. They worked out, based on a realistic model called Model S, that the core of the Sun is 39,000 years younger than its surface. This work also highlights the need to always double check calculations. Uggerhøj states how many physicists, including himself, have just assumed the calculations were correct but somebody, either Feynman or the transcriber, must have switched years for days. The authors believe this is very important from an educational point of view. In the paper, they write: “Realising that even geniuses make mistakes may make the scientist more inclined towards critically examining any postulate on his/her own.”
Video in link. Electricity generated with water, salt and a three-atoms-thick membrane July 13, 2016 A molybdenum 3-atoms-thick selective membrane. Credit: © Steven Duensing / National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Proponents of clean energy will soon have a new source to add to their existing array of solar, wind, and hydropower: osmotic power. Or more specifically, energy generated by a natural phenomenon occurring when fresh water comes into contact with seawater through a membrane. Researchers at EPFL's Laboratory of Nanoscale Biology have developed an osmotic power generation system that delivers never-before-seen yields. Their innovation lies in a three atoms thick membrane used to separate the two fluids. The results of their research have been published in Nature. The concept is fairly simple. A semipermeable membrane separates two fluids with different salt concentrations. Salt ions travel through the membrane until the salt concentrations in the two fluids reach equilibrium. That phenomenon is precisely osmosis. If the system is used with seawater and fresh water, salt ions in the seawater pass through the membrane into the fresh water until both fluids have the same salt concentration. And since an ion is simply an atom with an electrical charge, the movement of the salt ions can be harnessed to generate electricity. A 3 atoms thick, selective membrane that does the job EPFL's system consists of two liquid-filled compartments separated by a thin membrane made of molybdenum disulfide. The membrane has a tiny hole, or nanopore, through which seawater ions pass into the fresh water until the two fluids' salt concentrations are equal. As the ions pass through the nanopore, their electrons are transferred to an electrode - which is what is used to generate an electric current. Thanks to its properties the membrane allows positively-charged ions to pass through, while pushing away most of the negatively-charged ones. That creates voltage between the two liquids as one builds up a positive charge and the other a negative charge. This voltage is what causes the current generated by the transfer of ions to flow. "We had to first fabricate and then investigate the optimal size of the nanopore. If it's too big, negative ions can pass through and the resulting voltage would be too low. If it's too small, not enough ions can pass through and the current would be too weak," said Jiandong Feng, lead author of the research. What sets EPFL's system apart is its membrane. In these types of systems, the current increases with a thinner membrane. And EPFL's membrane is just a few atoms thick. The material it is made of - molybdenum disulfide - is ideal for generating an osmotic current. "This is the first time a two-dimensional material has been used for this type of application," said Aleksandra Radenovic, head of the laboratory of Nanoscale Biology Powering 50'000 energy-saving light bulbs with 1m2 membrane The potential of the new system is huge. According to their calculations, a 1m² membrane with 30% of its surface covered by nanopores should be able to produce 1MW of electricity - or enough to power 50,000 standard energy-saving light bulbs. And since molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) is easily found in nature or can be grown by chemical vapor deposition, the system could feasibly be ramped up for large-scale power generation. The major challenge in scaling-up this process is finding out how to make relatively uniform pores. Until now, researchers have worked on a membrane with a single nanopore, in order to understand precisely what was going on. '' From an engineering perspective, single nanopore system is ideal to further our fundamental understanding of membrane-based processes and provide useful information for industry-level commercialization'', said Jiandong Feng. The researchers were able to run a nanotransistor from the current generated by a single nanopore and thus demonstrated a self-powered nanosystem. Low-power single-layer MoS2 transistors were fabricated in collaboration with Andreas Kis' team at at EPFL, while molecular dynamics simulations were performed by collaborators at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Harnessing the potential of estuaries EPFL's research is part of a growing trend. For the past several years, scientists around the world have been developing systems that leverage osmotic power to create electricity. Pilot projects have sprung up in places such as Norway, the Netherlands, Japan, and the United States to generate energy at estuaries, where rivers flow into the sea. For now, the membranes used in most systems are organic and fragile, and deliver low yields. Some systems use the movement of water, rather than ions, to power turbines that in turn produce electricity. Once the systems become more robust, osmotic power could play a major role in the generation of renewable energy. While solar panels require adequate sunlight and wind turbines adequate wind, osmotic energy can be produced just about any time of day or night - provided there's an estuary nearby. Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-07-electricity-salt-three-atoms-thick-membrane.html#jCp
Fast-charging everlasting battery power from graphene July 19, 2016 by Han Lin Swinburne University researchers have invented a new, flexible energy-storage technology that could soon replace the batteries in our cars, phones and more. Han Lin's new super battery (actually, a supercapacitor) can store as much energy per kilogram as a lithium battery, but charges in minutes, or even seconds, and uses carbon instead of expensive lithium. The majority of batteries used in Australia are lead-acid batteries. These have three main disadvantages: they can take hours to charge, they have a limited lifespan for charging and discharging, and they're bad for the environment, therefore requiring special, expensive disposal processes. Han's supercapacitor charges extremely fast, can be charged and discharged millions of time, and is environmentally friendly. Previously, a major problem with supercapacitors has been their low capacity to store energy. But Han has overcome this problem by using sheets of a form of carbon known as graphene, which has a very large surface area available to store energy. Large scale production of the graphene that would be needed to produce these supercapacitors was once unachievable, but using a 3-D printer, Han is able to produce graphene at a low cost. And because the technology is extremely flexible and thin (as thin as ordinary printing paper) the new super batteries could be potentially be built into clothing, or worn as a watch strap, to achieve a wearable power supply. Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-07-fast-charging-everlasting-battery-power-graphene.html#jCp
The surface area is the same as any flat thing that they use for capacitors. The magic is its resonance
Alive or not thread could drastically benefit from this new brake tech from Volvo. 40 ton truck. Volvo's like "Yeah fuck you, Newton, and your laws too!"
Two birds with one stone. This one could be huge. Breakthrough solar cell captures carbon dioxide and sunlight, produces burnable fuel July 28, 2016 Simulated sunlight powers a solar cell that converts atmospheric carbon dioxide directly into syngas. Credit: University of Illinois at Chicago/Jenny Fontaine Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have engineered a potentially game-changing solar cell that cheaply and efficiently converts atmospheric carbon dioxide directly into usable hydrocarbon fuel, using only sunlight for energy. The finding is reported in the July 29 issue of Science and was funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy. A provisional patent application has been filed. Unlike conventional solar cells, which convert sunlight into electricity that must be stored in heavy batteries, the new device essentially does the work of plants, converting atmospheric carbon dioxide into fuel, solving two crucial problems at once. A solar farm of such "artificial leaves" could remove significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere and produce energy-dense fuel efficiently. "The new solar cell is not photovoltaic—it's photosynthetic," says Amin Salehi-Khojin, assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at UIC and senior author on the study. "Instead of producing energy in an unsustainable one-way route from fossil fuels to greenhouse gas, we can now reverse the process and recycle atmospheric carbon into fuel using sunlight," he said. While plants produce fuel in the form of sugar, the artificial leaf delivers syngas, or synthesis gas, a mixture of hydrogen gas and carbon monoxide. Syngas can be burned directly, or converted into diesel or other hydrocarbon fuels. The ability to turn CO2 into fuel at a cost comparable to a gallon of gasoline would render fossil fuels obsolete. Chemical reactions that convert CO2 into burnable forms of carbon are called reduction reactions, the opposite of oxidation or combustion. Engineers have been exploring different catalysts to drive CO2 reduction, but so far such reactions have been inefficient and rely on expensive precious metals such as silver, Salehi-Khojin said. "What we needed was a new family of chemicals with extraordinary properties," he said. Salehi-Khojin and his coworkers focused on a family of nano-structured compounds called transition metal dichalcogenides—or TMDCs—as catalysts, pairing them with an unconventional ionic liquid as the electrolyte inside a two-compartment, three-electrode electrochemical cell. The best of several catalysts they studied turned out to be nanoflake tungsten diselenide. Amin Salehi-Khojin, UIC assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering (left), and postdoctoral researcher Mohammad Asadi with their breakthrough solar cell that converts atmospheric carbon dioxide directly into syngas. …more "The new catalyst is more active; more able to break carbon dioxide's chemical bonds," said UIC postdoctoral researcher Mohammad Asadi, first author on the Science paper. In fact, he said, the new catalyst is 1,000 times faster than noble-metal catalysts—and about 20 times cheaper. Other researchers have used TMDC catalysts to produce hydrogen by other means, but not by reduction of CO2. The catalyst couldn't survive the reaction. "The active sites of the catalyst get poisoned and oxidized," Salehi-Khojin said. The breakthrough, he said, was to use an ionic fluid called ethyl-methyl-imidazolium tetrafluoroborate, mixed 50-50 with water. "The combination of water and the ionic liquid makes a co-catalyst that preserves the catalyst's active sites under the harsh reduction reaction conditions," Salehi-Khojin said. The UIC artificial leaf consists of two silicon triple-junction photovoltaic cells of 18 square centimeters to harvest light; the tungsten diselenide and ionic liquid co-catalyst system on the cathode side; and cobalt oxide in potassium phosphate electrolyte on the anode side. When light of 100 watts per square meter - about the average intensity reaching the Earth's surface - energizes the cell, hydrogen and carbon monoxide gas bubble up from the cathode, while free oxygen and hydrogen ions are produced at the anode. "The hydrogen ions diffuse through a membrane to the cathode side, to participate in the carbon dioxide reduction reaction," said Asadi. The technology should be adaptable not only to large-scale use, like solar farms, but also to small-scale applications, Salehi-Khojin said. In the future, he said, it may prove useful on Mars, whose atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide, if the planet is also found to have water. "This work has benefitted from the significant history of NSF support for basic research that feeds directly into valuable technologies and engineering achievements," said NSF program director Robert McCabe. "The results nicely meld experimental and computational studies to obtain new insight into the unique electronic properties of transition metal dichalcogenides," McCabe said. "The research team has combined this mechanistic insight with some clever electrochemical engineering to make significant progress in one of the grand-challenge areas of catalysis as related to energy conversion and the environment." Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-07-breakthrough-solar-cell-captures-carbon.html#jCp
If only we could find a way to store energy like that. We could almost turn off every single fossil fuel generator overnight.
Researchers identify how a single gene can protect against causes of neurodegenerative diseases August 2, 2016 Credit: University of Glasgow New research has identified how cells protect themselves against 'protein clumps' known to be the cause of neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Huntington's disease. The study, which is published today in Cell and was conducted by the University of Glasgow in collaboration with the MRC Protein Phosphorylation and Ubiquitylation Unit at the University of Dundee, offers an insight into the role of a gene called UBQLN2 and how it helps to remove toxic protein clumps from the body and protect it from disease. Using biochemistry, cell biology and sophisticated mouse models, the researchers discovered that the main function of UBQLN2 is to help the cell to remove dangerous protein clumps – a role which it performs by first detangling clumps, then shredding them to prevent future tangles. Protein clumps occur as part of the natural aging process, but are normally detangled and disposed of as a result of the gene UBQLN2. However when this gene mutates, or becomes faulty, it can no longer help the cell to remove these toxic protein clumps, which leads to neurodegenerative disease. Dr Thimo Kurz, from the Institute of Molecular, Cell and Systems Biology, said: "The function of UBQNL2 is connected to many neurodegenerative disorders, such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and Huntington's disease. "These patients often have very clear clumps in their brain cells. Using mice that mimic human Huntington's disease, we found that when UBQLN2 is mutated, it could no longer help nerve cells to remove protein clumps in the brains of these mice." Previous work has shown that when the UBQLN2 gene is faulty, it leads to a neurodegenerative disease called Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis with Frontotemporal Dementia (ALS/FTD or motor-neuron disease with dementia). However until this study it was not fully understood why mutation of this gene caused disease. Now that scientists understand exactly how UBQLN2 works and what it does, they are also able to understand why its mutation appears to be so detrimental to the body. Indeed they hope that their findings will pave the way for new research into novel treatment options for patients with neurodegenerative diseases. Dr Roland Hjerpe said: "The significance of this discovery goes beyond the role of UBQLN2 in motor-neuron disease with dementia. "Our study has revealed a new mechanism by which nerve cells cope with protein clumps in general, which has implications for most neurodegenerative diseases and can open up avenues for new therapeutic interventions to treat these conditions in the future."
IBM lab-on-a-chip breakthrough aims to help physicians detect cancer August 2, 2016 A view of IBM's lab-on-a-chip mounted in a microfluidic jig. IBM scientists have developed a new lab-on-a-chip technology that can, for the first time, separate biological particles at the nanoscale and could help enable physicians to …more IBM scientists have developed a new lab-on-a-chip technology that can, for the first time, separate biological particles at the nanoscale and could enable physicians to detect diseases such as cancer before symptoms appear. As reported today in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, the IBM team's results show size-based separation of bioparticles down to 20 nanometers (nm) in diameter, a scale that gives access to important particles such as DNA, viruses and exosomes. Once separated, these particles can potentially be analyzed by physicians to reveal signs of disease even before patients experience any physical symptoms and when the outcome from treatment is most positive. Until now, the smallest bioparticle that could be separated by size with on-chip technologies was about 50 times or larger, for example, separation of circulating tumor cells from other biological components. IBM is collaborating with a team from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai to continue development of this lab-on-a-chip technology and plans to test it on prostate cancer, the most common cancer in men in the U.S. In the era of precision medicine, exosomes are increasingly being viewed as useful biomarkers for the diagnosis and prognosis of malignant tumors. Exosomes are released in easily accessible bodily fluids such as blood, saliva or urine. They represent a precious biomedical tool as they can be used in the context of less invasive liquid biopsies to reveal the origin and nature of a cancer. The IBM team targeted exosomes with their device as existing technologies face challenges for separating and purifying exosomes in liquid biopsies. Exosomes range in size from 20-140nm and contain information about the health of the originating cell that they are shed from. A determination of the size, surface proteins and nucleic acid cargo carried by exosomes can give essential information about the presence and state of developing cancer and other diseases. IBM's results show they could separate and detect particles as small as 20 nm from smaller particles, that exosomes of size 100 nm and larger could be separated from smaller exosomes, and that separation can take place in spite of diffusion, a hallmark of particle dynamics at these small scales. With Mt. Sinai, the team plans to confirm their device is able to pick up exosomes with cancer-specific biomarkers from patient liquid biopsies. "The ability to sort and enrich biomarkers at the nanoscale in chip-based technologies opens the door to understanding diseases such as cancer as well as viruses like the flu or Zika," said Gustavo Stolovitzky, Program Director of Translational Systems Biology and Nanobiotechnology at IBM Research. "Our lab-on-a-chip device could offer a simple, noninvasive and affordable option to potentially detect and monitor a disease even at its earliest stages, long before physical symptoms manifest. This extra amount of time allows physicians to make more informed decisions and when the prognosis for treatment options is most positive." With the ability to sort bioparticles at the nanoscale, Mt. Sinai hopes that IBM's technology can provide a new method to eavesdrop on the messages carried by exosomes for cell-to-cell communications. This can elucidate important questions about the biology of diseases as well as pave the way to noninvasive and eventually affordable point-of-care diagnostic tools. Monitoring this intercellular conversation more regularly could allow medical experts to track an individual's state of health or progression of a disease. "When we are ahead of the disease we usually can address it well; but if the disease is ahead of us, the journey is usually much more difficult. One of the important developments that we are attempting in this collaboration is to have the basic grounds to identify exosome signatures that can be there very early on before symptoms appear or before a disease becomes worse," said Dr. Carlos Cordon-Cardo, Professor and Chairman for the Mount Sinai Health System Department of Pathology. "By bringing together Mount Sinai's domain expertise in cancer and pathology with IBM's systems biology experience and its latest nanoscale separation technology, the hope is to look for specific, sensitive biomarkers in exosomes that represent a new frontier to offering clues that might hold the answer to whether a person has cancer or how to treat it." Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-08-ibm-lab-on-a-chip-breakthrough-aims-physicians.html#jCp
Watson correctly diagnoses woman after doctors were stumped After treatment for a woman suffering from leukemia proved ineffective, a team of Japanese doctors turned to IBM’s Watson for help, which was able to successfully determine that she actually suffered from a different, rare form of leukemia than the doctors had originally believed. Watson managed to make its diagnosis after doctors from the University of Tokyo’s Institute of Medical Science was fed it the patient’s genetic data, which was then compared to information from 20 million oncological studies. This analysis found a different diagnosis for the type of leukemia from which the patient suffered, and it suggested a different form of treatment, which proved far more effective than the original methods doctors had been using up to that point. What’s next, robot doctors? Watson’s success demonstrates the huge potential of data analysis and artificial intelligence, which extends far beyond predicting networking needs or following stock market trends. With enough genetic data an the right algorithms, tools like Watson could be used for everything from diagnosing rare illnesses to prescribing perfectly correct dosages of medicine based on each patient’s personal genetic makeup. Of course, creating the massive DNA repository that would be necessary for this kind of analysis comes with a number of problems, especially when it comes to privacy. While the data could offer a number of medical benefits, it would have intimate knowledge of every person in the database, from their physical features to their ethnic background and more. Another issue is the fact that Watson can only look at existing information on disease, meaning that rarer ailments with few clinical studies would be harder to detect simply because there is not enough data available. The technology is certainly there for the eventual creation of an AI version of House, but there are still plenty of hurdles that will need to be overcome before that day arrives, both in public perception and in governmental regulation. http://siliconangle.com/blog/2016/08/05/watson-correctly-diagnoses-woman-after-doctors-were-stumped/
I think this terrifies me http://curatedai.com/ (A literary magazine written by machines, for people, is all it is...)
The spy thread appears to be gone in the crash. Computer espionage at its finest. Attached at the bottom is a direct link to the actual report summery. I understand zero of it but still read all 23 pages. ProjectSuaron: Kaspersky Lab researchers describe espionage platform August 10, 2016 by Nancy Owano ProjectSauron is a sobering discovery of a type of malware that has been around for years and is regarded as a top level cyber-espionage platform. Security experts find that the ProjectSauron is using an advanced piece of malware, said Daily Mail, called Remsec. The snoopers have been doing their thing since 2011. A Kaspersky Lab report dated Tuesday (Version 1.02) carries a full discussion of what is going on. Back story: In September last year, Kaspersky Lab's Anti-Targeted Attack Platform discovered anomalous network traffic in a government organization network. Looking into this, they discovered "a strange executable program library loaded into the memory of the domain controller server. The library was registered as a Windows password filter and had access to sensitive data such as administrative passwords in cleartext. Additional research revealed signs of activity of a previously unknown threat actor, responsible for largescale attacks against key governmental entities." Symantec, meanwhile, said there were selected targets in Russia, China, Sweden, and Belgium. Symantec found evidence of infections in 36 computers across seven separate organizations. The group's targets were in places that included Russia, China, Sweden, and Belgium. Kaspersky Lab said they found more than 30 infected organizations providing such functions as government, scientific research, telecommunications, military and finance. The malware focus is intelligence-gathering. Stealthy is a fitting description, and the snooping has been going on since 2011. The name of the malware is dubbed 'ProjectSauron' and the name, said the Kaspersky Lab report, reflects the fact that the code authors refer to 'Sauron' in the configuration files. Kaspersky said "Usually APT [Advanced Persistent Threat] campaigns have a geographical nexus, aimed at extracting information within a specific region or from a given industry... Interestingly, ProjectSauron seems to be dedicated to just a couple of countries, focused on collecting high value intelligence by compromising almost all key entities it could possibly reach within the target area." Symantec noted observations on Remsec. "Remsec contains a number of stealth features that help it to avoid detection. Several of its components are in the form of executable blobs (Binary Large Objects), which are more difficult for traditional antivirus software to detect, according to Symantec. The security watchers there said that "'In addition to this, much of the malware's functionality is deployed over the network, meaning it resides only in a computer's memory and is never stored on disk." Symantec posted its blog about this on August 7, saying targets have been mainly organizations and individuals that would be of interest to a nation state's intelligence services. Symantec in its blog said that Remsec "opens a back door on an infected computer, can log keystrokes, and steal files." Who are the perpetrators? Difficult to answer. Kaspersky Lab said that "Attribution is hard and reliable attribution is rarely possible in cyberspace. Even with confidence in various indicators and apparent attacker mistakes, there is a greater likelihood that these can all be smoke and mirrors created by an attacker with a greater vantage point and vast resources. When dealing with the most advanced threat actors, as is the case with ProjectSauron, attribution becomes an unsolvable problem." https://securelist.com/files/2016/07/The-ProjectSauron-APT_research_KL.pdf
Alcator C-Mod tokamak nuclear fusion reactor sets world record on final day of operation October 14, 2016 The interior of the fusion experiment Alcator C-Mod at MIT recently broke the plasma pressure record for a magnetic fusion device. The interior of the donut-shaped device confines plasma hotter than the interior of the sun, using high …more On Friday, Sept. 30, at 9:25 p.m. EDT, scientists and engineers at MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center made a leap forward in the pursuit of clean energy. The team set a new world record for plasma pressure in the Institute's Alcator C-Mod tokamak nuclear fusion reactor. Plasma pressure is the key ingredient to producing energy from nuclear fusion, and MIT's new result achieves over 2 atmospheres of pressure for the first time. Alcator leader and senior research scientist Earl Marmar will present the results at the International Atomic Energy Agency Fusion Energy Conference, in Kyoto, Japan, on Oct. 17. Nuclear fusion has the potential to produce nearly unlimited supplies of clean, safe, carbon-free energy. Fusion is the same process that powers the sun, and it can be realized in reactors that simulate the conditions of ultrahot miniature "stars" of plasma—superheated gas—that are contained within a magnetic field. For over 50 years it has been known that to make fusion viable on the Earth's surface, the plasma must be very hot (more than 50 million degrees), it must be stable under intense pressure, and it must be contained in a fixed volume. Successful fusion also requires that the product of three factors—a plasma's particle density, its confinement time, and its temperature—reaches a certain value. Above this value (the so-called "triple product"), the energy released in a reactor exceeds the energy required to keep the reaction going. Pressure, which is the product of density and temperature, accounts for about two-thirds of the challenge. The amount of power produced increases with the square of the pressure—so doubling the pressure leads to a fourfold increase in energy production. During the 23 years Alcator C-Mod has been in operation at MIT, it has repeatedly advanced the record for plasma pressure in a magnetic confinement device. The previous record of 1.77 atmospheres was set in 2005 (also at Alcator C-Mod). While setting the new record of 2.05 atmospheres, a 15 percent improvement, the temperature inside Alcator C-Mod reached over 35 million degrees Celsius, or approximately twice as hot as the center of the sun. The plasma produced 300 trillion fusion reactions per second and had a central magnetic field strength of 5.7 tesla. It carried 1.4 million amps of electrical current and was heated with over 4 million watts of power. The reaction occurred in a volume of approximately 1 cubic meter (not much larger than a coat closet) and the plasma lasted for two full seconds. Other fusion experiments conducted in reactors similar to Alcator have reached these temperatures, but at pressures closer to 1 atmosphere; MIT's results exceeded the next highest pressure achieved in non-Alcator devices by approximately 70 percent. While Alcator C-Mod's contributions to the advancement of fusion energy have been significant, it is a science research facility. In 2012 the DOE decided to cease funding to Alcator due to budget pressures from the construction of ITER. Following that decision, the U.S. Congress restored funding to Alcator C-Mod for a three-year period, which ended on Sept. 30. "This is a remarkable achievement that highlights the highly successful Alcator C-Mod program at MIT," says Dale Meade, former deputy director at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, who was not directly involved in the experiments. "The record plasma pressure validates the high-magnetic-field approach as an attractive path to practical fusion energy." "This result confirms that the high pressures required for a burning plasma can be best achieved with high-magnetic-field tokamaks such as Alcator C-Mod," says Riccardo Betti, the Robert L. McCrory Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Physics and Astronomy at the University of Rochester. The Alcator C-Mod team celebrates the record setting plasma discharge on Alcator C-Mod the evening of its last planned day of operation. The leader of the group, senior research scientist Earl Marmar, (front, blue shirt), performed the …more Alcator C-Mod is the world's only compact, high-magnetic-field fusion reactor with advanced shaping in a design called a tokamak (a transliteration of a Russian word for "toroidal chamber"), which confines the superheated plasma in a donut-shaped chamber. C-Mod's high-intensity magnetic field—up to 8 tesla, or 160,000 times the Earth's magnetic field—allows the device to create the dense, hot plasmas and keep them stable at more than 80 million degrees. Its magnetic field is more than double what is typically used in other designs, which quadruples its ability to contain the plasma pressure. C-Mod is third in the line of high-magnetic-field tokamaks, first advocated by MIT physics professor Bruno Coppi, to be built and operated at MIT. Ron Parker, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science, led its design phase. Professor Ian Hutchinson of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering led its construction and the first 10 years of operation through 2003. Unless a new device is announced and constructed, the pressure record just set in C-Mod will likely stand for the next 15 years. ITER, a tokamak currently under construction in France, will be approximately 800 times larger in volume than Alcator C-Mod, but it will operate at a lower magnetic field. ITER is expected to reach 2.6 atmospheres when in full operation by 2032, according to a recent Department of Energy report. Alcator C-Mod is also similar in size and cost to nontokamak magnetic fusion options being pursued by private fusion companies, though it can achieve pressures 50 times higher. "Compact, high-field tokamaks provide another exciting opportunity for accelerating fusion energy development, so that it's available soon enough to make a difference to problems like climate change and the future of clean energy—goals I think we all share," says Dennis Whyte, the Hitachi America Professor of Engineering, director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center, and head of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT. These experiments were planned by the MIT team and collaborators from other laboratories in the U.S.—including the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and General Atomics—and conducted on the Alcator C-Mod's last day of operation. The Alcator C-Mod facility, which officially closed after 23 years of operation on Sept. 23, leaves a profound legacy of collaboration. The facility has contributed to more than 150 PhD theses and dozens of interinstitutional research projects. To understand how Alcator C-Mod's design principles could be applied to power generation, MIT's fusion group is working on adapting newly available high-field, high-temperature superconductors that will be capable of producing magnetic fields of even greater strength without consuming electricity or generating heat. These superconductors are a central ingredient of a conceptual pilot plant called the Affordable Robust Compact (ARC) reactor, which could generate up to 250 million watts of electricity. Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-10-alcator-c-mod-tokamak-nuclear-fusion.html#jCp
You're welcome for the high temp superconductors MIT Spoiler maybe. I dunno which material they're using Spoiler probably not the one i worked on
Did straight up FEM and maxwells equations specifically for energy outputs when in its superconducting state
ALPHA observes light spectrum of antimatter for first time December 19, 2016 Alpha Experiment in 2016. Credit: CERN In a paper published today in the journal Nature, the ALPHA collaboration reports the first ever measurement on the optical spectrum of an antimatter atom. This achievement features technological developments that open up a completely new era in high-precision antimatter research. It is the result of over 20 years of work by the CERN antimatter community. "Using a laser to observe a transition in antihydrogen and comparing it to hydrogen to see if they obey the same laws of physics has always been a key goal of antimatter research," said Jeffrey Hangst, Spokesperson of the ALPHA collaboration. Atoms consist of electrons orbiting a nucleus. When the electrons move from one orbit to another they absorb or emit light at specific wavelengths, forming the atom's spectrum. Each element has a unique spectrum. As a result, spectroscopy is a commonly used tool in many areas of physics, astronomy and chemistry. It helps to characterise atoms and molecules and their internal states. For example, in astrophysics, analysing the light spectrum of remote stars allows scientists to determine their composition. With its single proton and single electron, hydrogen is the most abundant, simple and well-understood atom in the Universe. Its spectrum has been measured to very high precision. Antihydrogen atoms, on the other hand are poorly understood. Because the universe appears to consist entirely of matter, the constituents of antihydrogen atoms – antiprotons and positrons – have to be produced and assembled into atoms before the antihydrogen spectrum can be measured. It's a painstaking process, but well worth the effort since any measurable difference between the spectra of hydrogen and antihydrogen would break basic principles of physics and possibly help understand the puzzle of the matter-antimatter imbalance in the universe. Today's ALPHA result is the first observation of a spectral line in an antihydrogen atom, allowing the light spectrum of matter and antimatter to be compared for the first time. Within experimental limits, the result shows no difference compared to the equivalent spectral line in hydrogen. This is consistent with the Standard Model of particle physics, the theory that best describes particles and the forces at work between them, which predicts that hydrogen and antihydrogen should have identical spectroscopic characteristics. The ALPHA collaboration expects to improve the precision of its measurements in the future. Measuring the antihydrogen spectrum with high-precision offers an extraordinary new tool to test whether matter behaves differently from antimatter and thus to further test the robustness of the Standard Model. ALPHA is a unique experiment at CERN's Antiproton Decelerator facility, able to produce antihydrogen atoms and hold them in a specially-designed magnetic trap, manipulating antiatoms a few at a time. Trapping antihydrogen atoms allows them to be studied using lasers or other radiation sources. "Moving and trapping antiprotons or positrons is easy because they are charged particles," said Hangst. "But when you combine the two you get neutral antihydrogen, which is far more difficult to trap, so we have designed a very special magnetic trap that relies on the fact that antihydrogen is a little bit magnetic." Antihydrogen is made by mixing plasmas of about 90,000 antiprotons from the Antiproton Decelerator with positrons, resulting in the production of about 25,000 antihydrogen atoms per attempt. Antihydrogen atoms can be trapped if they are moving slowly enough when they are created. Using a new technique in which the collaboration stacks anti-atoms resulting from two successive mixing cycles, it is possible to trap on average 14 anti-atoms per trial, compared to just 1.2 with earlier methods. By illuminating the trapped atoms with a laser beam at a precisely tuned frequency, scientists can observe the interaction of the beam with the internal states of antihydrogen. The measurement was done by observing the so-called 1S-2S transition. The 2S state in atomic hydrogen is long-lived, leading to a narrow natural line width, so it is particularly suitable for precision measurement. The current result, along with recent limits on the ratio of the antiproton-electron mass established by the ASACUSA collaboration, and antiproton charge-to-mass ratio determined by the BASE collaboration, demonstrate that tests of fundamental symmetries with antimatter at CERN are maturing rapidly.
Innovative refrigerator developed using multistage sound wave engine December 12, 2016 Double loop travelling wave thermoacoustic refrigerator (TWTR) developed by Shinya Hasegawa, Department of Prime Mover Engineering, Tokai University, Hiratsuka, Japan. Credit: Tokai University Shinya Hasegawa and colleagues at Tokai University have developed a refrigerator (107 C) powered only by waste heat that generated sound waves in an innovative multistage traveling wave thermoacoustic engine. The refrigerator produced the gas oscillations and refrigeration at a temperature lower than the boiling point of water and achieved a minimum cold temperature of -107.4 C when the hot temperature was 270 C. The findings are published in the journal of Applied Thermal Engineering, November 2016. The operation of thermoacoustic (TA) engines is based on the heating, cooling and oscillation of acoustic (sound) waves created by the thermal expansion and contraction of gases such as helium enclosed dedicated cavities. The potential of TA engines for generating clean and renewable energy was demonstrated in seminal reports published in the late 1990s and early 2000s by researchers in the USA. Notably, these reports into the modern implementations of TA engines have led to increased worldwide research on the development of high efficiency TA engines to convert heat into useful power. Two of the main hurdles to the proliferation of this technology are (1) high efficiency systems operable at less than 300 C as compared to the 400 to 600 C range at the moment; and (2) robust design so that the systems could be used in a wide range of environments such as fishing boats and heavy industries. Hasegawa and colleagues have designed a high efficiency multistage-type thermoacoustic (MS-TA) engine, without moving parts, that operates at less than 300 C; the temperature of more than 80% of industrial waste heat. The design of the MS-TA engine was based on finite element numerical analysis conducted by Hasegawa and his group. Background and aims "TA engines do not have moving parts, are easy to maintain, potentially high efficiency, and low cost," says Shinya Hasegawa, an associate professor at the Department of Prime Mover Engineering, Tokai University, Hiratsuka, Japan. "My goals in this research are to develop TA engines that operates at less than 300 C with more that 30% efficiency, and also to demonstrate a refrigerator operating at -200 C at these low temperatures." Double loop travelling wave thermoacoustic refrigerator (TWTR) The TWTR consists of three etched stainless steel mesh regenerators installed at optimal positions ("close to the sweet spot") within the prime mover loop and one fixed in the refrigerator loop. This configuration was designed to trigger thermoacoustic oscillations at lower temperatures and yield a refrigerator temperature of less than -100 C. The diameters of the regenerators ranged between 0.2 to 0.3 mm and their lengths were 30 to 120 mm, depending on location. Furthermore, the TWTR had heat exchangers in the form of parallel plates of copper (1.0 mm thick and 27.0 in length) with a 2.0 mm gap. The thermoacoustic energy conversion of this design is determined by two factors: the ratio of the diameter of the flow channel and thermal penetration depth, and the phase difference between the pressure and cross-sectional mean velocity. The overall performance of the TWTR system is expressed in terms of the coefficient of performance (COP) and given by the ratio of the cooling power to the total input heating power, that is, the sum of the heating power of each engine. Results The COP increased as the temperature of the heat exchangers in the primer loop was increased and the maximum value of COP was 0.029 at 260 C, and the corresponding cooling power was 35.6 W. Furthermore, the researchers obtained gas oscillations at 85 °C —that is lower than the boiling point of water—thereby opening up possibilities for applications of this technology for refrigeration and power generation using low temperature waste heat in factories and automobile engines. Also, refrigeration (−42.3 C) was achieved at reached 90 C. Importantly, the efficiency of the Tokai University TA engine was 18% at minus 107 C. "The installment of multiple regenerators in vicinity of the 'sweet spot' of the prime mover loop is a major advance in traveling-wave TA engines," says Hasegawa. "This configuration reduces the temperature for TA oscillations and improves cooling performance." Following the successful development of the prototype system reported ion this paper, the next step in this research at Tokai University is the development of practical TA engines with emphasis on contributing to environmental problems. Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-12-refrigerator-multistage.html#jCp
Everything you want to know about Fusion. Follow links in the article for details on any particular aspect. What's the Real Potential of Fusion Energy? By Stewart Prager, Princeton University and Michael C. Zarnstorff, Princeton University |December 16, 2016 11:11am ET The plasma inside a fusion reactor. Credit: Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. For centuries, humans have dreamed of harnessing the power of the sun to energize our lives here on Earth. But we want to go beyond collecting solar energy, and one day generate our own from a mini-sun. If we're able to solve an extremely complex set of scientific and engineering problems, fusion energy promises a green, safe, unlimited source of energy. From just one kilogram of deuterium extracted from water per day could come enough electricity to power hundreds of thousands of homes. Since the 1950s, scientific and engineering research has generated enormous progress toward forcing hydrogen atoms to fuse together in a self-sustaining reaction – as well as a small but demonstrable amount of fusion energy. Skeptics and proponents alike note the two most important remaining challenges: maintaining the reactions over long periods of time and devising a material structure to harness the fusion power for electricity. As fusion researchers at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, we know that realistically, the first commercial fusion power plant is still at least 25 years away. But the potential for its outsize benefits to arrive in the second half of this century means we must keep working. Major demonstrations of fusion's feasibility can be accomplished earlier – and must, so that fusion power can be incorporated into planning for our energy future. Unlike other forms of electrical generation, such as solar, natural gas and nuclear fission, fusion cannot be developed in miniature and then be simply scaled up. The experimental steps are large and take time to build. But the problem of abundant, clean energy will be a major calling for humankind for the next century and beyond. It would be foolhardy not to exploit fully this most promising of energy sources. Why fusion power? Adding heat to two isotopes of water can result in fusion. Credit: American Security Project, CC BY-ND In fusion, two nuclei of the hydrogen atom (deuterium and tritium isotopes) fuse together. This is relatively difficult to do: Both nuclei are positively charged, and therefore repel each other. Only if they are moving extremely fast when they collide will they smash together, fuse and thereby release the energy we’re after. This happens naturally in the sun. Here on Earth, we use powerful magnets to contain an extremely hot gas of electrically charged deuterium and tritium nuclei and electrons. This hot, charged gas is called a plasma. The plasma is so hot – more than 100 million degrees Celsius – that the positively charged nuclei move fast enough to overcome their electrical repulsion and fuse. When the nuclei fuse, they form two energetic particles – an alpha particle (the nucleus of the helium atom) and a neutron. Heating the plasma to such a high temperature takes a large amount of energy – which must be put into the reactor before fusion can begin. But once it gets going, fusion has the potential to generate enough energy to maintain its own heat, allowing us to draw off excess heat to turn into usable electricity. Fuel for fusion power is abundant in nature. Deuterium is plentiful in water, and the reactor itself can make tritium from lithium. And it is available to all nations, mostly independent of local natural resources. Fusion power is clean. It emits no greenhouse gases, and produces only helium and a neutron. It is safe. There is no possibility for a runaway reaction, like a nuclear-fission "meltdown." Rather, if there is any malfunction, the plasma cools, and the fusion reactions cease. All these attributes have motivated research for decades, and have become even more attractive over time. But the positives are matched by the significant scientific challenge of fusion. Progress to date The progress in fusion can be measured in two ways. The first is the tremendous advance in basic understanding of high-temperature plasmas. Scientists had to develop a new field of physics – plasma physics – to conceive of methods to confine the plasma in strong magnetic fields, and then evolve the abilities to heat, stabilize, control turbulence in and measure the properties of the superhot plasma. Related technology has also progressed enormously. We have pushed the frontiers in magnets, and electromagnetic wave sources and particle beams to contain and heat the plasma. We have also developed techniques so that materials can withstand the intense heat of the plasma in current experiments. It is easy to convey the practical metrics that track fusion's march to commercialization. Chief among them is the fusion power that has been generated in the laboratory: Fusion power generation escalated from milliwatts for microseconds in the 1970s to 10 megawatts of fusion power (at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory) and 16 megawatts for one second (at the Joint European Torus in England) in the 1990s. A new chapter in research Now the international scientific community is working in unity to construct a massive fusion research facility in France. Called ITER (Latin for "the way"), this plant will generate about 500 megawatts of thermal fusion power for about eight minutes at a time. If this power were converted to electricity, it could power about 150,000 homes. As an experiment, it will allow us to test key science and engineering issues in preparation for fusion power plants that will function continuously. ITER employs the design known as the "tokamak," originally a Russian acronym. It involves a doughnut-shaped plasma, confined in a very strong magnetic field, which is partly created by electrical current that flows in the plasma itself. Though it is designed as a research project, and not intended to be a net producer of electric energy, ITER will produce 10 times more fusion energy than the 50 megawatts needed to heat the plasma. This is a huge scientific step, creating the first "burning plasma," in which most of the energy used to heat the plasma comes from the fusion reaction itself. ITER is supported by governments representing half the world’s population: China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the U.S. It is a strong international statement about the need for, and promise of, fusion energy. The road forward From here, the remaining path toward fusion power has two components. First, we must continue research on the tokamak. This means advancing physics and engineering so that we can sustain the plasma in a steady state for months at a time. We will need to develop materials that can withstand an amount of heat equal to one-fifth the heat flux on the surface of the sun for long periods. And we must develop materials that will blanket the reactor core to absorb the neutrons and breed tritium. The second component on the path to fusion is to develop ideas that enhance fusion's attractiveness. Four such ideas are: The W-7X stellarator configuration. Credit: Max-Planck Institute of Plasmaphysics, CC BY 1) Using computers, optimize fusion reactor designs within the constraints of physics and engineering. Beyond what humans can calculate, these optimized designs produce twisted doughnut shapes that are highly stable and can operate automatically for months on end. They are called "stellarators" in the fusion business. 2) Developing new high-temperature superconducting magnets that can be stronger and smaller than today’s best. That will allow us to build smaller, and likely cheaper, fusion reactors. 3) Using liquid metal, rather than a solid, as the material surrounding the plasma. Liquid metals do not break, offering a possible solution to the immense challenge how a surrounding material might behave when it contacts the plasma. 4) Building systems that contain doughnut-shaped plasmas with no hole in the center, forming a plasma shaped almost like a sphere. Some of these approaches could also function with a weaker magnetic field. These "compact tori" and "low-field" approaches also offer the possibility of reduced size and cost. Government-sponsored research programs around the world are at work on the elements of both components – and will result in findings that benefit all approaches to fusion energy (as well as our understanding of plasmas in the cosmos and industry). In the past 10 to 15 years, privately funded companies have also joined the effort, particularly in search of compact tori and low-field breakthroughs. Progress is coming and it will bring abundant, clean, safe energy with it. Stewart Prager, Professor of Astrophysical Science, former director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Princeton University and Michael C. Zarnstorff, Deputy Director for Research, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Princeton University Disclosure statement Stewart Prager receives funding, and has received funding in the past, for physics research related to fusion energy from the Department of Energy. Michael C. Zarnstorff receives funding from the US Department of Energy. He is affiliated with Princeton University, and is a member of the American Physical Society and the IEEE. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google +. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Space.com.