Leonard Susskind's The Theoretical Minimum series is worth the buy if you have an interest in physics and some calculus training. He has a website that posts his Stanford lectures too
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/10/too-much-good-thing-killing-midwestern-lakes http://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(17)31120-0
http://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(17)31385-2 Spoiler In conclusion, we have demonstrated that, in the setting of full ART suppression of HIV, dCA reduces cell-associated viral RNA systemically, significantly delays viral rebound upon treatment interruption, and reduces viral rebound levels by several orders of magnitude. This is the first time pharmacological inhibition of viral rebound after treatment interruption has been shown in an in vivo model of HIV infection. These results strongly support the rationale for the inclusion of specific HIV transcriptional inhibitors in eradication strategies.
It's only a matter of time before can stop it. But something else will pop up in it's place. Cliffs for the layman
An extremely fine-tuned organization of when and how groups of genes are activated, is characterized A proof-of-concept for curing AIDS in vivo
It may be bones and hormones produced by them that drives hunger and onsets obesity http://www.labmanager.com/news/2017/11/your-bones-affect-your-appetite-and-your-metabolism-
lolno. (I know you were joking) We used to love to look at CT Scanograms and its like GIANT PERSON little pelvis
Natural gas (or other methane source) in, and H2 and solid carbon out cheaper than solar. Researchers develop potentially low-cost, low-emissions technology that can convert methane without forming CO2 November 21, 2017 by Sonia Fernandez Hydrogen Production with a Ni-Bi molten catalyst Credit: Brian Long As we work to toward more sustainable ways of powering our lifestyles, there is a quest to bridge the gap between the carbon dioxide-emitting fossil fuels we rely on for our most basic needs, and the cleaner, but not yet economically feasible alternative technologies. To that end, a group at UC Santa Barbara has explored methods by which currently cheap and abundant methane (CH4) can be reduced to clean-burning hydrogen (H2) while also preventing the formation of carbon dioxide (CO2), a greenhouse gas. Its report, "Catalytic molten metals for the direct conversion of methane to hydrogen and separable carbon," appears in the journal Science. "In the U.S., methane will be the heart of our economy for four or five decades, and figuring out ways to use it more sustainably is what motivates us," said UCSB chemical engineering professor Eric McFarland. "This paper was an interesting angle on something we've been looking at for a long time." A product of both natural and man-made processes, methane—the primary component of natural gas—is an important source of fuel for cooking, heating and powering our homes and is used in manufacturing and transportation. As a waste product that is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, it is the target of many efforts to capture and reduce such emissions. Steam methane reforming (SMR) has been commercialized for decades and is the most common process for producing commercial hydrogen. However, the researchers point out, SMR consumes significant amounts of energy and necessarily produces carbon dioxide, which is usually released into the atmosphere. When the process was introduced, CO2 was not considered a problem. But as we became more greenhouse gas-conscious, it has grown into a global concern. The cost of operating the SMR process, and the potential additional costs of carbon taxes and carbon sequestration, puts hydrogen production by SMR at risk for significant cost increases—especially in smaller scale operations that might provide the hydrogen needed for fuel cell vehicles. The UCSB team includes a longstanding collaboration on catalytic approaches to natural gas conversion between theoretical chemist and professor Horia Metiu and McFarland. Together with chemical engineering professor Michael Gordon, they began investigating the use of molten metals and molten salts as interesting and unexplored catalytic systems. Metiu's theoretical work suggested that different combinations of metals in molten alloys might provide increased catalytic activity for converting methane into hydrogen and solid carbon. The researchers have developed a single-step method by which methane can be converted into hydrogen, which is not only simpler and potentially less expensive than conventional SMR methods, and results in a solid form of carbon that can be readily transported and stored indefinitely. "You introduce a bubble of methane gas into the bottom of a reactor filled with this catalytically active molten metal," McFarland explained. "As the bubble rises, the methane molecules hit the wall of the bubble and they react to form carbon and hydrogen." Eventually, he continued, by the time the methane bubble reaches the surface, it has broken down into hydrogen gas, which is released at the top of the reactor; carbon solids that float to the top of the liquid metal can then be skimmed off. Compared to conventional methods that rely on reactions that occur on solid surfaces, the molten metal alloy surfaces are not deactivated by the accumulation of carbon and can be reused indefinitely. The combination of an active liquid metal and its solubility to hydrogen allows the melt to take up relatively more hydrogen and carbon than may be present in the gas bubbles. This allows the process to be efficient with very high-pressure methane to produce high-pressure hydrogen. "You're really allowing yourself to pull all the products away from the reactants and that causes the equilibrium to be shifted toward the products. The process in principle can operate at high pressure and still get very high methane conversion," McFarland said. The ecosystem for deploying this type of technology already exists, given existing infrastructure for processing hydrocarbons such as coal and natural gas, the current abundance of methane, and legislative and industry efforts to tighten up the capture of fugitive emissions, according to McFarland. The research has captured the attention and support of Royal Dutch Shell, he added. The electricity produced from hydrogen derived by this zero-carbon dioxideprocess would be cheaper than current rates for solar energy, which, while ultimately more sustainable, is not cost competitive with fossil fuels today. "If the entire world is wealthy, then wind and solar would be sufficiently low cost to be widely deployed, but it's not cheap enough for the world that we have today," McFarland said. From an emissions standpoint, he continued, it is particularly important to deploy low-cost, low-emissions technologies in places such as China, currently the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases. India and Africa, which have enormous and growing hydrocarbon consumptions, would benefit from such technology also; they are not rich enough yet to have the luxury of solar panels. Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-11-potentially-low-cost-low-emissions-technology-methane.html#jCp
Ancient mummy gets CT scan after 2,000 years, is diagnosed with cancer Mike Wehner @MikeWehner December 11th, 2017 at 2:57 PM Modern medicine can be a truly amazing thing, extending and in sometimes outright saving the lives of people who would otherwise meet untimely ends. For one man who lived some 2,000 years ago, doctors arrived many centuries too late, but his remains have gotten plenty of attention from medical experts anyway. The man’s body, long mummified and found in an Egyptian tomb, was recently given a full CT scan at Crouse Hospital in Syracuse, New York, in the hopes of shining some light on how the individual died. Remarkably, doctors were actually able to diagnose the long-dead man — who has been nicknamed “Hen” — and explain the circumstances of his demise. As it turns out, he fell victim to an ailment that still plagues us today: cancer. “He had a tumor on his Fibula which is one of the two bones of the lower leg,” Dr. Mark Levinsohn of Crouse Hospital explains. “Looking at it, it had all the characteristics of a malignant tumor and one that’s somewhat rare. So, here we have a rare circumstance and a rare tumor and that evoked our interest a lot.” It’s impossible to know how Hen’s life played out, including whether or not the tumor claimed him outright or if he fell ill and made the decision himself, or even died during an attempted operation. The ancient Egyptians would not likely have had any idea of the man’s fatal disease, much less the technology to adequately treat him, but evidence of crude surgery attempts has been documented by archeologists working in Egypt before. This is actually the second time the Hen mummy has been examined by physicians, with the previous attempt in 2006 resulting in a muddy diagnosis. “Since that time, the last ten years, they’ve upgraded the equipment,” Dr. Levinsohn notes. “What, at that time was a 16 detector scanner is now a 320 detector scanner and all that additional information is now derived when we scan the body. So, we can tell all kinds of greater detail.” In a spot of good news, the scanning and diagnosis was donated by the hospital, so at least the 2,000-year-old Hen doesn’t have to worry about being stuck with the bill in the afterlife. It’s impossible to know how Hen’s life played out, including whether or not the tumor claimed him outright or if he fell ill and made the decision himself, or even died during an attempted operation. The ancient Egyptians would not likely have had any idea of the man’s fatal disease, much less the technology to adequately treat him, but evidence of crude surgery attempts has been documented by archeologists working in Egypt before. This is actually the second time the Hen mummy has been examined by physicians, with the previous attempt in 2006 resulting in a muddy diagnosis. “Since that time, the last ten years, they’ve upgraded the equipment,” Dr. Levinsohn notes. “What, at that time was a 16 detector scanner is now a 320 detector scanner and all that additional information is now derived when we scan the body. So, we can tell all kinds of greater detail.” In a spot of good news, the scanning and diagnosis was donated by the hospital, so at least the 2,000-year-old Hen doesn’t have to worry about being stuck with the bill in the afterlife.
Can I Spliff it this is right up your alley. https://newatlas.com/prince-ruperts-drop-strength-fragility-mystery-solved/49494/
PHYSICS Negative mass particles forged in new laser device Michael Irving An illustration of a device that can create particles with negative mass, thanks to an atomically thin semiconductor material placed inside the optical microcavity of a laser(Credit: Michael Osadciw/University of Rochester) 17 hours ago Negative mass has mostly only been demonstrated in theoretical analyses, although an experiment last year manipulated rubidium atoms with lasers to create a fluid that acted like it had negative inertial mass. Now, the University of Rochester researchers say they've developed a device that can create particles exhibiting negative mass, by combining photons from laser light and excitons in a semiconductor. The device is based on a laser, with a core difference. Normally, light is bounced between a pair of mirrors facing each other, and the space where that light is confined is called the optical cavity, or microcavity. In this device's optical microcavity, the team placed an atomically-thin semiconductor made of molybdenum diselenide, where it could interact with the confined light. Excitons in the semiconductor combined with photons in the confined laser light to form new particles called polaritons, which have negative mass. "By causing an exciton to give up some of its identity to a photon to create a polariton, we end up with an object that has a negative mass associated with it," says Nick Vamivakas, lead author of a study describing the device. "That's kind of a mind-bending thing to think about, because if you try to push or pull it, it will go in the opposite direction from what your intuition would tell you." The researchers are still working to explore the physics of negative mass particles in the device, and although practical applications are still a long way off, one of the first improvements could be more efficient lasers. "We're dreaming up ways to apply pushes and pulls – maybe by applying an electrical field across the device – and then studying how these polaritons move around in the device under application of external force," says Vamivakas. "But it also turns out the device we've created presents a way to generate laser light with an incrementally small amount of power. With the polaritons we've created with this device, the prescription for getting a laser to operate is completely different. The system starts lasing at a much lower energy input." The research was published in the journal Nature Optics. Source: University of Rochester
The universal translator is here. Travis the translator aims to make people understood January 10, 2018 Netherlands-based startup Travis is out to make people understood no matter what language they speak. Travis was at the Consumer Electronics Show here late Tuesday with a small device capable of translating conversations between people speaking different languages in real time. "Technology connects us as far as we are accessible to each other, but those true connections aren't going to happen until we all understand and are understood by each other," US Travis representative Robb Selander told AFP while demonstrating the gizmo at a CES event. "We are driven to break down language barriers." Travis synchs to computing in the cloud to translate any combination of 80 languages, and a Travis foundation is working to 'digitize' lesser known languages in the world. "Once a language is digitized it can not only be used in translation technology like Travis but for education and preservation," said company international affairs manager Elissa Glorie. Digitizing languages also means that those who speak it could get better shots at reaping benefits of technology advances such as voice-commanded computers or virtual assistants, according to Glorie. Travis was founded early last year and launched an Indiegogo crowd-funding campaign in April that blew past the company's goal. More than 80,000 Travis translation devices priced at $199 were pre-ordered, and most have been delivered, according to Selander. Google late last year hit the market with Pixel ear buds capable of real-time translation of conversations in 40 languages. Pixel Buds infused with its digital assistant smarts were quickly branded an internet-Age version of the alien "Babel Fish" depicted in famed science fiction work "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." In the literature, inserting a Babel Fish in an ear enabled a person to understand anything spoken in any language. Pixel Buds work wirelessly with second-generation Pixel smartphones to handle real-time translations. Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-01-travis-aims-people-understood.html#jCp
That's awesome. Microsoft has something similar, saw a demo on it a few years ago that will supposedly be integrated into Skype and is the same principle. Not sure where it's at currently but I wouldn't be shocked if they bought Travis for a substantial sum in the next year.
Google's AirPods competitor is supposed to be able to do that live translation thig as well though I haven't read any reviews about that specific function.
I think the bigger application is in the way they set up the lasers than the negative mass properties. The setup and way they produce the negative mass may make it impractical to apply to any real world scenario. I mostly thought it was really cool that they kind of just blew up physics.
Gravity battery. Brilliant. For storing grid scale energy in times of surplus to use on demand. Transforming old mine shafts into future storage sites February 12, 2018 by Nancy Owano, Tech Xplore Just as there is an interest in sources of energy, there is also an urgent keen interest in storage. What is viable, as in what can work efficiently and make economic sense? "Companies around the world are pouring time and money into projects to develop large-scale batteries to store energy and release it when there is greater demand on the grid," said Greig Cameron, Scottish Business Editor, The Times. That is one focal point, but an innovative company called Gravitricity, reported on this month by The Times and several other publications, thinks of another way to store energy. Gravitricity Managing Director Charlie Blair: "So far there is a lot of focus on batteries, but our idea is quite different." Mining Technology quoted him: "It's a simple case of 'What goes up, must come down'." Its system can operate for decades without any reduction in performance. The company said the system had a 50-year design life with no cycle limit or degradation. So what is their technology? They want to use old mine shafts for energy stores. These would be disused mine shafts transformed into energy facilities through a system that uses gravity and massive weights. ESI Africa said that according to Blair, the company was "keen to speak with mine operators in South Africa" to understand how they might work together. The technology operates in the 1MW to 20 MW power range. (Each unit can be configured to produce between 1 and 20MW peak power, with the output duration from 15 minutes to 8 hours.) The company said their technology has similar advantages to pumped storage for networks up to 33kV, but it does not need any nearby mountain with a lake or loch at the top. "A cylindrical weight of up to 3000 tonnes is suspended in a deep shaft by a number of synthetic ropes each of which is engaged with a winch capable of lifting its share of the weight. Electrical power is then absorbed or generated by raising or lowering the weight. The weight is guided by a system of tensioned guide wires (patents applied for) to prevent it from swinging and damaging the shaft. The winch system can be accurately controlled through the electrical drives to keep the weight stable in the hole." That is how the company explains what the system is about. Time of response is impressive. The system should be able to respond to fluctuations in demand almost instantly. The company stated response time as "zero to full power in less than one second." The company was awarded a £650,000 grant by the British Government agency Innovate UK. A deep hole in the ground can be a disused mineshaft brought back into use, or a purpose-sunk shaft, said the company. Shaft depths can be from 150m for new shafts down to 1500m for existing mines. Costs for such a system? Blair said the biggest single cost was the hole, "and that is why the start-up is developing their technology using existing mine shafts," said ESI-Africa. The company said they will prove the technology using existing mine shafts. "As our technology costs decrease, the costs of drilling will reduce significantly, opening the opportunity for purpose-built shafts." What's next? Stay tuned for 2020. The company is examining a number of disused mine shafts in the UK and South Africa, said The Engineer. The company said, "Over the 12 months from January 2018 we will be undertaking sub-system design and deploying a 250kW concept demonstrator. We aim to trial our first full-scale prototype in 2019 or 2020 at a disused mine in the UK."
Picture of a Single Atom Wins Science Photo Contest https://petapixel.com/2018/02/12/picture-single-atom-wins-science-photo-contest/
Why is shit on Reddit so old? Second time I've ever reposted from there and both times got the I guess the lesson here is don't go to Reddit. I did finally figure out how to navigate the comments though...gotta use those little dashes to minimize threads as you go
BLINK AND YOU'LL MISS IT — Robot smashes Rubik’s Cube record with 0.38-second solve “The machine can definitely go faster,” inventor says. TIMOTHY B. LEE - 3/7/2018, 4:42 PM Rubik's Cube record. Hardware hackers Ben Katz and Jared Di Carlo have smashed the previous record for solving the Rubik's cube robotically. Their machine solved the puzzle in 0.38 seconds—a 40-percent improvement over the previous record of 0.637. "We noticed that all of the fast Rubik's Cube solvers were using stepper motors and thought that we could do better if we used better motors," Di Carlo wrote in a blog post. A custom-built motor controller allows a single turn of the Rubik's Cube to be completed in around 10 milliseconds. With a a typical Rubik's Cube solution taking 19 to 23 turns, that should allow a cube to be solved in around 0.25 seconds—but the pair say the current iteration of the machine makes a move every 15 milliseconds instead. "The machine can definitely go faster, but the tuning process is really time consuming since debugging needs to be done with the high-speed camera, and mistakes often break the cube or blow up FETs," Katz wrote on his blog. "For the time being, Jared and I have both lost interest in playing the tuning game, but we might come back to it eventually and shave off another 100 ms or so." While a human player would be inclined to loosen the cube up to make it easier to turn, Katz says they found the opposite approach works better for robot solving. "When the cube is loose (like it would be if a person were trying to solve it fast), the outer faces just cam outwards when you try to turn the center faces quickly," Katz wrote. "It took tightening the cube way past what intuitively felt appropriate in order to stop the camming action from happening." To detect the current state of the cube, Katz and Di Carlo acquired a pair of Playstation 3 Eye webcams for $7 each. They positioned them at opposite corners of the cube, allowing each camera to observe three faces. The cameras had trouble distinguishing red and orange faces, so they painted the orange faces black to make them stand out better. "The software identifies all the colors, builds a description of the cube, and passes it to the min2phase solver," Di Carlo wrote. The solution is then sent out via a serial cable to the six motors, one for each face of the cube. The whole process—from capturing the image to sending the instructions to the motors—takes around 45 milliseconds. There's even more detail on the project on Katz and Di Carlo's blog posts. Listing image by Ben Katz
I've seen the 3D printing with concrete and it's pretty incredible. I'm not entirely sure how it would do larger structures, but for smaller things it's very functional.
Hollywood's first blockchain movie: an end to piracy? March 30, 2018 by Frankie Taggart Hollywood is turning to the technology behind cryptocurrency bitcoin to distribute movies in a development hailed as the beginning of the end for piracy A few years behind Wall Street, Hollywood is turning to the technology behind cryptocurrency bitcoin to distribute movies in a development hailed as the beginning of the end for piracy. Leading the charge is "No Postage Necessary," a romantic indie comedy about a luckless hacker that is being distributed via peer-to-peer video network app Vevue, running on Qtum, the most advanced blockchain in the world. Jeremy Culver ("An Evergreen Christmas") wrote, directed and produced the release from US production house Two Roads Picture Co., shot on 35 mm film. The movie gets its US theatrical release and worldwide blockchain debut in June and will also be available to buy online using cryptocurrency. "We are thrilled to provide movie lovers around the world a brand new way to experience their entertainment by turning the blockchain into a feature film distribution channel," Culver said in a statement. "Although this is a first for the industry, we hope it will signal a shift in the way content is shared and consumed." A blockchain is essentially a shared, encrypted "ledger" that cannot be manipulated, offering the promise of secure transactions that allow anyone to get an accurate accounting of money, property or other assets. The technology publicly records the unique alphanumeric strings that identify buyers and sellers, allowing more transparent and secure peer-to-peer payment systems. Blockchain debuted in 2009 as a ledger for the leading cryptocurrency bitcoin and is already used in food safety, finance and sea freight. Its advantages, according to Culver, include immutable proof of intellectual property rights, transparent royalty payments, and, since all blockchain data is resistant to duplication, a future in which movies are "no longer pirated." 'Timely and relevant' "No Postage Necessary" tells the story of cynical, single computer hacker Sam—played by "Vikings" and "Black Mirror" actor George Blagden—who makes ends meet by stealing mail while disguised as a postal worker. He happens upon a letter written by a heartsick Josie (Charleene Closshey) to her late husband and fallen marine, and the tender missive awakens something in Sam. He conspires to meet the beautiful, young war widow and she warms to the idea of a new chance at love—but not before Sam's past comes knocking in the form of an FBI agent looking for missing bitcoins. Closshey, who composed the score and was part of the female-led production team, says she and her colleagues recognized the opportunities around the title the moment they read the "timely and relevant" script. "Although the film makes light of a misguided cyber genius who can hack a multi-billion dollar corporation within minutes, these types of technological advancements are becoming a normal part of everyday life for society as a whole," she said. Culver is hoping blockchain can help "No Postage Necessary" go viral, as moviegoers who upload a review as soon as they leave the theater will be able to unlock Vevue tokens as rewards. "Up until now, the technology just hasn't been ready—there wasn't a platform to support the vision," he added, noting the serendipity of a movie about bitcoin being the first to release on the blockchain. "But innovation creates its own timing." Following the movie into blockchain technology will be sci-fi anthology "New Frontiers," effectively five sci-fi movies filmed around the world and stitched together into one feature film. 'Simply a database' Funded and distributed on the blockchain via a partnership between XYZ Films, Ground Control, and SingularDTV, production is already underway with a release expected before the end of the year. "Decentralized," a movie from the LiveTree ADEPT blockchain platform, is set for release in autumn, starring Amari Cheatom ("Django Unchained") as a skeptical economics professor learning about the technology. The feature from video shorts specialist Christopher Arcella will serve as a pilot to a television series covering many topics in the complex tech and computing sector. "The story is written to provide an educational narrative in a fictional setting to help people completely unfamiliar with the technology gain some initial footing," a spokesman for ADEPT said in a statement. A number of issues need to be resolved before blockchain technology becomes mainstream, with the anonymity of transactions concerning regulators seeking to crack down on money laundering and financing of terrorism. Pop culture writer Amy Roberts says Culver's statements are demonstrative of a widespread fallacy that the mere presence of a blockchain can guarantee the information in it is resistant to alteration. "Bitcoins, for example, cannot be copied as they are just entries on a ledger—not digital files per se—whose authenticity is incentivized and managed by thousands of individual peer operators worldwide," Roberts wrote in a commentary for the Film Daily online magazine. "But media or other data, even if referenced on a blockchain, can always be duplicated. A blockchain is simply a database." Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-03-hollywood-blockchain-movie-piracy.html#jCp
Video on how it works in link. In desert trials, next-generation water harvester delivers fresh water from air June 8, 2018, University of California - Berkeley The crystal structure of the newest, aluminum-based metal-organic framework, MOF-303, which captures twice as much water as the earlier MOF used in the water harvester. Credit: Yaghi lab, UC Berkeley Last October, a University of California, Berkeley, team headed down to the Arizona desert, plopped their newest prototype water harvester into the backyard of a tract home and started sucking water out of the air without any power other than sunlight. The successful field test of their larger, next-generation harvester proved what the team had predicted earlier in 2017: that the water harvester can extract drinkable water every day/night cycle at very low humidity and at low cost, making it ideal for people living in arid, water-starved areas of the world. "There is nothing like this," said Omar Yaghi, who invented the technology underlying the harvester. "It operates at ambient temperature with ambient sunlight, and with no additional energy input you can collect water in the desert. This laboratory-to-desert journey allowed us to really turn water harvesting from an interesting phenomenon into a science." Yaghi, the James and Neeltje Tretter chair in chemistry at UC Berkeley and a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and his team will report the results of the first field test of a water -collecting harvester in the June 8 issue of the journal Science Advances. The trial in Scottsdale, where the relative humidity drops from a high of 40 percent at night to as low as 8 percent during the day, demonstrated that the harvester should be easy to scale up by simply adding more of the water absorber, a highly porous material called a metal-organic framework, or MOF. The researchers anticipate that with the current MOF (MOF-801), made from the expensive metal zirconium, they will ultimately be able to harvest about 200 milliliters (about 7 ounces) of water per kilogram (2.2 pounds) of MOF, or 3 ounces of water per pound. But Yaghi also reports that he has created a new MOF based on aluminum, called MOF-303, that is at least 150 times cheaper and captures twice as much water in lab tests. This will enable a new generation of harvesters producing more than 400 ml (3 cups) of water per day from a kilogram of MOF, the equivalent of half a 12-ounce soda can per pound per day. Optical microscope images of crystals of the newest, aluminum-based metal-organic framework, MOF-303, which captures twice as much water as the earlier MOF used in the water harvester Credit: Omar Yaghi laboratory, UC Berkeley "There has been tremendous interest in commercializing this, and there are several startups already engaged in developing a commercial water-harvesting device," Yaghi said. "The aluminum MOF is making this practical for water production, because it is cheap." Yaghi is also working with King Abdul Aziz City for Science and Technology in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and its president, Prince Dr. Turki Saud Mohammad Al Saud, on the technology as part of their joint research Center of Excellence for Nanomaterials and Clean Energy. Super-absorbent MOFs Yaghi is a pioneer in metal-organic frameworks, which are solids with so many internal channels and holes that a sugar-cube-size MOF might have an internal surface area the size of six football fields. This surface area easily absorbs gases or liquids but, just as important, quickly releases them when heated. Various types of MOFs are already being tested as a way to pack more gas into the tanks of hydrogen-fueled vehicles, absorb carbon dioxide from smokestacks and store methane. Several years ago, Yaghi created MOF-801, which absorbs and releases water easily, and last year he tested small quantities in a simple harvester to see if he could capture water from ambient air overnight and use the heat of the sun to drive it out again for use. That harvester, built by a collaborator at MIT using less than 2 grams of MOF, proved that the concept worked: the windows fogged up in the sun, though the researchers were not able to collect or accurately measure the water. That same harvester was transported to the desert earlier this year and worked similarly, though again only droplets of water were generated as a proof of concept. Seek00:55Current time01:42Volume In desert trials, UC Berkeley scientists demonstrated that their next-generation water harvester can collect drinkable water from desert air each day/night cycle, using a MOF that absorbs water during the night and, through solar heating during the day, releases it to be condensed and collected. Credit: Roxanne Makasdjian and Stephen McNally For the new paper, the UC Berkeley team—graduate student Eugene Kapustin and postdoctoral fellows Markus Kalmutzki and Farhad Fathieh—collected and measured the water and tested the latest generation harvester under varying conditions of humidity, temperature and solar intensity. The harvester is essentially a box within a box. The inner box holds a 2-square-foot bed of MOF grains open to the air to absorb moisture. This is encased in a two-foot plastic cube with transparent top and sides. The top was left open at night to let air flow in and contact the MOF, but was replaced during the day so the box could heat up like a greenhouse to drive water back out of the MOF. The released water condensed on the inside of the outer box and fell to the bottom, where the researchers collected it with a pipette. The extensive field tests lay out a blueprint allowing engineers to configure the harvester for the differing conditions in Arizona, the Mediterranean or anywhere else, given a specific MOF. "The key development here is that it operates at low humidity, because that is what it is in arid regions of the world," Yaghi said. In these conditions, the harvester collects water even at sub-zero dew points. Yaghi is eagerly awaiting the next field test, which will test the aluminum-based MOF and is planned for Death Valley in late summer, where temperatures reach 110 degrees Fahrenheit in the daytime and remain in the 70s at night, with nighttime humidity as low as 25 percent. Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-06-trials-next-generation-harvester-fresh-air.html#jCp