Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: energy – Page 56

Tesla continues to make progress on its upcoming diner, drive-in theater and Supercharger in Los Angeles, with recent drone footage showing new water runoff infrastructure, preparations for stucco installation on the first-floor walls, and seemingly, materials for the start of some interior construction.

In a drone video update shared by YouTube channel 247Tesla on Sunday, you can see new stacks of sheetrock both inside and outside of entrances to the Tesla diner building, as construction prepares to begin focus on interiors. The video also shows a new rectangular area dug roughly five feet deep into the ground, which the video’s host says will likely be used to control water runoff.

In addition, you can see shots of the site’s power shed, though it doesn’t include transformers or batteries as of yet. The diner building’s walls surrounding the first-floor structure have also now been covered with a waterproofing sealer, the host notes, which is usually installed prior to stucco being applied.

Read more | >

A new gravimeter is compact and stable and can detect the daily solar and lunar gravitational oscillations that are responsible for the tides.

Gravity measurements can help with searches for oil and gas or with predictions of impending volcanic activity. Unfortunately, today’s gravimeters are bulky, lack stability, or require extreme cooling. Now researchers have demonstrated a design for a small, highly sensitive gravimeter that operates stably at room temperature [1]. The device uses a small, levitated magnet whose equilibrium height is a sensitive probe of the local gravitational field. The researchers expect the design to be useful in field studies, such as the mapping of the distribution of underground materials.

Several obstacles have impeded the development of compact gravimeters, says Pu Huang of Nanjing University in China. Room-temperature devices generally use small mechanical oscillators, which offer excellent accuracy. However, they are made from materials that exhibit aging effects, so these gravimeters can lose accuracy over time. Much higher stability can be achieved with superconducting devices, but these require cryogenic conditions and so consume lots of power and are hard to use outdoors.

Read more | >

Open any astronomy textbook to the section on white dwarf stars and you’ll likely learn that they are “dead stars” that continuously cool down over time. New research published in Nature is challenging this theory, with the University of Victoria (UVic) and its partners using data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite to reveal why a population of white dwarf stars stopped cooling for more than eight billion years.

“We discovered the classical picture of all white dwarfs being dead stars is incomplete,” says Simon Blouin, co-principal investigator and Canadian Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics National Fellow at UVic.

“For these white dwarfs to stop cooling, they must have some way of generating extra energy. We weren’t sure how this was happening, but now we have an explanation for the phenomenon.”

Read more | >

In a novel experiment, physicists have observed long-range quantum coherence effects due to Aharonov-Bohm interference in a topological insulator-based device. This finding opens up a new realm of possibilities for the future development of topological quantum physics and engineering. This finding could also affect the development of spin-based electronics, which may potentially replace some current electronic systems for higher energy efficiency and may provide new platforms to explore quantum information science.

The research, published in Nature Physics, is the culmination of more than 15 years of work at Princeton. It came about when Princeton scientists developed a quantum device — called a bismuth bromide (α-Bi4Br4) topological insulator — only a few nanometers thick and used it to investigate quantum coherence.

Scientists have used topological insulators to demonstrate novel quantum effects for more than a decade. The Princeton team developed their bismuth-based insulator in a previous experiment where they demonstrated its effectiveness at room temperature. But this new experiment is the first time these effects have been observed with a very long-range quantum coherence and at a relatively high temperature. Inducing and observing coherent quantum states typically requires temperatures near absolute zero on artificially designed semiconducting materials only in the presence of strong magnetic fields.

Read more | >