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Nov 21, 2021

How Morocco Secretly Controls China, India, The United States, And the World

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, economics, food

This is a farm in China.
This is a Mcdonalds in New York.
This is an apartment complex in Mumbai.
And this is a skyscraper in London.

What do all these have in common? Well as it turns out. All of these places’ successes or failures…
Economic booms or collapses…
And even population growth or famines…
Might soon be decided by the nation of Morocco.

Continue reading “How Morocco Secretly Controls China, India, The United States, And the World” »

Nov 21, 2021

Understanding the early universe depends on estimating the lifespan of neutrons

Posted by in categories: cosmology, physics

When we look into the night sky, we see the universe as it once was. We know that in the past, the universe was once warmer and denser than it is now. When we look deep enough into the sky, we see the microwave remnant of the big bang known as the cosmic microwave background. That marks the limit of what we can see. It marks the extent of the observable universe from our vantage point.

The cosmic background we observe comes from a time when the universe was already about 380,000 years old. We can’t directly observe what happened before that. Much of the earlier period is fairly well understood given what we know about physics, but the earliest moments of the big bang remain a bit of a mystery. According to the , the earliest moments of the universe were so hot and dense that even the fundamental forces of the acted differently than they do now. To better understand the big bang, we need to better understand these forces.

One of the more difficult forces to understand is the . Unlike more familiar forces such as gravity and electromagnetism, the weak is mostly seen through its effect of radioactive decay. So we can study the weak by measuring the rate at which things decay. But there’s a problem when it comes to neutrons.

Nov 21, 2021

Novel device harvests drinking water from humidity around the clock

Posted by in categories: energy, space, sustainability

Freshwater is scarce in many parts of the world. While currently there is enough fresh water on earth to support consumption, it is not available in a way where supply meets demand. To solve this issue, engineers at ETH Zurich have developed a new device that can harvest drinking water 24 hours around the clock, with no energy input, even under the blazing sun.

It consists of a specially coated glass pane, which both reflects solar radiation and also radiates away its own heat through the atmosphere to outer space. The resulting device thus cools itself down to as much as 15 degrees Celsius below the ambient temperature. At the bottom of the pane, the moisture in the air condenses into the water which is collected.

The glass pane is coated with layers of a specially designed polymer and silver, which allows it to firstly reflect sunlight away to prevent it from heating up. The coating causes the pane to emit infrared radiation at a specific wavelength window to the outer space, with no absorption by the atmosphere nor reflection back onto the pane.

Nov 21, 2021

Franz-Josef Feilmeier about large-scale electric storage systems

Posted by in category: futurism

Commercial storage: Many customers want as many functions and high performance as possible, but want to pay as little as possible. Franz-Josef Feilmeier, CEO of Fenecon, explains how this fits together.

Nov 21, 2021

Elon Musk congratulates space startup Astra for reaching orbit for the first time

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, space

Elon Musk said “orbit is not easy” after congratulating the California-based company Astra Space for reaching orbit after several failed attempts.

Nov 21, 2021

What a fusion breakthrough means for the future of clean energy

Posted by in categories: military, nuclear energy, particle physics

Scientists have been experimenting with the creation of nuclear energy for decades and have used nuclear fission — the process of breaking atoms apart — to power everything from devasting atomic bombs to clean nuclear energy.

However, this kind of nuclear energy is different from cosmic inspired nuclear fusion in one significant way: it’s not self-sustaining. Creating enough energy on Earth to power this kind of reaction has been just out of reach for decades.

Continue reading “What a fusion breakthrough means for the future of clean energy” »

Nov 21, 2021

Developing Next-Generation Electronic Devices

Posted by in categories: engineering, security

Ruonan Han seeks to push the limits of electronic circuits.

Ruonan Han’s research is driving up the speeds of microelectronic circuits to enable new applications in communications, sensing, and security.

Han, an associate professor who recently earned tenured in MIT

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Nov 21, 2021

Magnetene — A Graphene-Like 2D Material — Leverages Quantum Effects To Achieve Ultra-Low Friction

Posted by in categories: engineering, particle physics, quantum physics

Magnetene could have useful applications as a lubricant in implantable devices or other micro-electro-mechanical systems.

A team of researchers from University of Toronto Engineering and Rice University have reported the first measurements of the ultra-low-friction behaviour of a material known as magnetene. The results point the way toward strategies for designing similar low-friction materials for use in a variety of fields, including tiny, implantable devices.

Magnetene is a 2D material, meaning it is composed of a single layer of atoms. In this respect, it is similar to graphene 0, a material that has been studied intensively for its unusual properties — including ultra-low friction — since its discovery in 2004.

Nov 21, 2021

Palo Alto Networks unveils ML-powered cloud security platform

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, security

Palo Alto Networks on Tuesday unveiled a new cloud security offering, its next-generation Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), which taps machine learning to bolster the protection of software-as-a-service (SaaS) and collaboration apps.

The company’s next-generation CASB platform will use ML and AI to provide capabilities such as the automatic discovery of applications and improved data loss prevention for sensitive data, the company announced.

The next-generation CASB is the latest product from the Santa Clara, California-based cyber firm to get a significant injection of ML-and AI-powered functionality, said Lee Klarich, chief product officer at Palo Alto Networks, in a briefing with reporters.

Nov 21, 2021

In World First, Scientists Turn Carbon Dioxide Back Into Coal

Posted by in categories: innovation, sustainability

When it comes to carbon capture and storage, researchers have been getting creative by turning carbon dioxide into everything from carbon monoxide (CO) for the use in industrial processes to oxalic acid for processing rare earth elements. Now, it seems they are going back to its source, turning it into solid coal.

In a world-first breakthrough, a research team led by RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia developed a technique that can convert CO2 back into particles of carbon, decreasing pollution by removing greenhouse gases from our environment.

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