Group items tagged

for Franco - nothing revolutionary to me but OK ...

Duncan: of interest to have a closer look at it?

In a surprise announcement earlier today (July 13), the European Southern Observatory said that monster black holes - those giants of millions or billions of solar masses, thought to lurk at the hearts of most galaxies - have a mechanism to become active other than galaxy collisions.

"A new study combining data from ESO's Very Large Telescope and ESA's XMM-Newton X-ray space observatory has turned up a surprise. Most of the huge black holes in the centers of galaxies in the past 11 billion years were not turned on by mergers between galaxies, as had been previously thought." and "The process that activates a sleeping black hole - turning its galaxy from quiet to active - has been a mystery in astronomy. What triggers the violent outbursts at a galaxy's center, which then becomes an active galactic nucleus? Up to now, many astronomers thought that most of these active nuclei were turned on when two galaxies merged, or when they passed close to each other and the disrupted material became fuel for the central black hole. Results of the new study indicate this idea may be wrong for many active galaxies." very interesting indeed

Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life. The simulation results made me think of Jojo's attempts to make a self-assembling space structure. Seems he may have been on the right track, just not thinking big enough

:-P Thanks Thijs... I do not agree with the premise of the article that a possible correlation of energy dissipation in living systems and their fitness means that one is the cause for the other - it may just be that both go hand-in-hand because of the nature of the world that we live in. Maybe there is such a drive for pre-biotic systems (like crystals and amino acids), but once life as we know it exists (i.e., heredity + mutation) it is hard to see the need for an amendment of Darwin's principles. The following just misses the essence of Darwin: "If England's approach stands up to more testing, it could further liberate biologists from seeking a Darwinian explanation for every adaptation and allow them to think more generally in terms of dissipation-driven organization. They might find, for example, that "the reason that an organism shows characteristic X rather than Y may not be because X is more fit than Y, but because physical constraints make it easier for X to evolve than for Y to evolve." Darwin's principle in its simplest expression just says that if a genome is more effective at reproducing it is more likely to dominate the next generation. The beauty of it is that there is NO need for a steering mechanism (like maximize energy dissipation) any random set of mutations will still lead to an increase of reproductive effectiveness. BTW: what does "better at dissipating energy" even mean? If I run around all the time I will have more babies? Most species that prove to be very successful end up being very good at conserving energy: trees, turtles, worms. Even complexity of an organism is not a recipe for evolutionary success: jellyfish have been successful for hundreds of millions of years while polar bears are seem to be on the way out.

Localized high concentrations of methane have been discovered by the Curiosity rover. This points to localized sources of methane of yet unknown nature. Maybe the ACT's odor source localization should be resurrected!

Here's the an English article on the topic: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/dec/16/methane-spikes-mars-fuel-speculation-life-nasa-curiosity

Mining the moon - now we know that the Moon's poles hold millions of tonnes of water ice, firms in the US as well as the Indian and Chinese space agencies are planning to mine this resource and sell it to space missions as fuel.

The blockchain technology behind bitcoin has been gaining traction. This article makes a good job of describing it, and the different (not-bitcoin) ways in which it's being adopted. Worth reading, even if only for the funny bit about self-driving self-owning cars who pay themselves for fuel, parking and repairs.

Nature paper showing a new photo-bioelectrochemical cell with a new photon-driven biocatalytic fuel cell method achieving electrical power generation from solar energy.

do you have the pdf?

Imagine if your clothing could, on demand, release just enough heat to keep you warm and cozy, allowing you to dial back on your thermostat settings and stay comfortable in a cooler room. Or, picture a car windshield that stores the sun's energy and then releases it as a burst of heat to melt away a layer of ice.

interesting indeed: Such chemically-based storage materials, known as solar thermal fuels (STF), have been developed before, including in previous work by Grossman and his team. But those earlier efforts "had limited utility in solid-state applications" because they were designed to be used in liquid solutions and not capable of making durable solid-state films, Zhitomirsky says. The new approach is the first based on a solid-state material, in this case a polymer, and the first based on inexpensive materials and widespread manufacturing technology. Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-01-material-harvest-sunlight-day-demand.html#jCp

After a series of rapid developments, the researchers claim their fluid can now hold 250 watt-hours of energy per kilogram, which is double the the energy capacity of Tesla's Powerwall batteries, according to the NBC.

Interesting research. Bit hyped in the article though. The actual paper says the promising stuff is in the 83-160Wh range. So maybe not double Tesla's Powerwall batteries?

"By extension, GCMs are not fit for the purpose of justifying political policies to fundamentally alter world social, economic and energy systems. It is this application of climate model results that fuels the vociferousness of the debate surrounding climate models."

but you know wo these global warming policy foundation is, do you? they are the main advocacy group for climate change deniers in the UK, nothing scientific to start with; fine to post here reasonable scientific papers criticising global climate models but please not this shit

An international team of scientists led by Liang-shi Li at Indiana University has achieved a new milestone in the quest to recycle carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere into carbon-neutral fuels and others materials.

interesting approach, quite a gamble in my view but moving in the right direction