Circa 2015
— — Boeing’s new patent may let the force be with you even in real life.
The aircraft and defense company has taken a cue from science fiction with its plan to develop a Star Wars-style force field that would use energy to deflect any potential damage.
Officials of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va., issued a small-business innovation research (SBIR) solicitation (HR001120S0019-05) for the Wearable Laser Detection and Alert System.
DARPA researchers want to understand the feasibility of a wearable laser sensor that can detect laser irradiation rapidly during the day and at night and alert the wearer in real-time of lasing.
DARPA wants a wearable laser-detection system with low size, weight, and power consumption (SWaP) that would act as a stand-alone sensor to detect laser illumination over the 450-to-1600-nanometer visible to shortwave infrared region.
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Ships with sails that capture the wind and convert the sun’s rays to electrical charge can cut fossil fuel use and emissions by more than 10 percent.
China might be secretly conducting nuclear tests with very low explosive power despite Beijing’s assertions that it is strictly adhering to an international accord banning all nuclear tests, according to a new arms-control report to be made public by the State Department.
The coming report doesn’t present proof that China is violating its promise to uphold the agreement, but it cites an array of activities that “raise concerns” that Beijing might not be complying with the “zero-yield” nuclear-weapons testing ban.
Wind power surged worldwide in 2019, but will it sustain? More than 340,000 wind turbines generated over 591 gigawatts globally. In the U.S., wind powered the equivalent of 32 million homes and sustained 500 U.S. factories. What’s more, in 2019 wind power grew by 19 percent, thanks to both booming offshore and onshore projects in the U.S. and China.
A study by Cornell University researchers used supercomputers to look into the future of how to make an even bigger jump in wind power capacity in the U.S.
“This research is the first detailed study designed to develop scenarios for how wind energy can expand from the current levels of seven percent of U.S. electricity supply to achieve the 20 percent by 2030 goal outlined by the U.S. Department of Energy National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in 2014,” said study co-author Sara C. Pryor, a professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Studies, Cornell University. Pryor and co-authors published the wind power study in Nature Scientific Reports, February 2020.
High vibrational states of the Magnesium dimer (Mg2) are an important system in studies of fundamental physics, although they have eluded experimental characterization for half a century. Experimental physicists have so far resolved the first 14 vibrational states of Mg2, despite reports that the ground-state may support five additional levels. In a new report, Stephen H. Yuwono and a research team in the departments of physics and chemistry at the Michigan State University, U.S., presented highly accurate initial potential energy curves for the ground and excited electron states of Mg2. They centered the experimental investigations on calculations of state-of-the-art coupled-cluster (CC) and full configuration interaction computations of the Mg2 dimer. The ground-state potential confirmed the existence of 19 vibrational states with minimal deviation between previously calculated rovibrational values and experimentally derived data. The computations are now published on Science Advances and provide guidance to experimentally detect previously unresolved vibrational levels.
Background
Weakly bound alkaline-earth (AE2) dimers can function as probes of fundamental physics phenomena, such as ultracold collisions, doped helium nanodroplets, binary reactions and even optical lattice clocks and quantum gravity. The magnesium dimer is important for such applications since it has several desirable characteristics including nontoxicity and an absence of hyperfine structure in the most abundant 24 Mg isotope that typically facilitates the analysis of binary collisions and other quantum phenomena. However, the status of Mg2 as a prototype heavier AE2 species is complicated since scientists have not been able to experimentally characterize its high vibrational levels and ground-state potential energy curve (PEC) for so long.
USC scientists have developed a new battery that could solve the electricity storage problem constraining widespread use of renewable energy.
The technology is a new spin on a known design that stores electricity in solutions, sorts the electrons and releases power when it’s needed. So-called redox flow batteries have been around awhile, but the USC researchers have built a better version based on low-cost and readily available materials.
“We have demonstrated an inexpensive, long-life, safe and eco-friendly flow battery attractive for storing the energy from solar and wind energy systems at a mass-scale,” said chemistry professor Sri Narayan, lead author for the study and co-director of the Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute at USC.
