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Category: climatology – Page 151

Scientists create ‘quantum ball lightning’ in the lab in breakthrough that could pave the way for stable fusion reactors…

In the new research, led by scientists at Amherst College and Aalto University, the team created a three-dimensional skyrmion in an extremely cold quantum gas.

The three-dimensional particle consists of knots made from the spin fields of a Bose-Einstein condensate – or, atoms cooled to a point just above absolute zero.

According to the researchers, this bizarre tangle may share some of the characteristics of ball lightning.

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Antimatter is notoriously tricky to store and study, thanks to the fact that it will vanish in a burst of energy if it so much as touches regular matter. The CERN lab is one of the only places in the world that can readily produce the stuff, but getting it into the hands of the scientists who want to study it is another matter (pun not intended). After all, how can you transport something that will annihilate any physical container you place it in? Now, CERN researchers are planning to trap and truck antimatter from one facility to another.

Antimatter is basically the evil twin of normal matter. Each antimatter particle is identical to its ordinary counterpart in almost every way, except it carries the opposite charge, leading the two to destroy each other if they come into contact. Neutron stars and jets of plasma from black holes may be natural sources, and it even seems to be formed in the Earth’s atmosphere with every bolt of lightning.

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TAE Technologies, the California-based fusion company backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, said its latest and greatest plasma generator has exceeded the headline-grabbing performance of its previous machine.

“This announcement is an important milestone on our quest to deliver world-changing, clean fusion energy to help combat climate change and improve the quality of life for people globally,” Michl Binderbauer, the company’s president and chief technology officer, said in a news release. “This achievement further validates the robustness of TAE’s underlying science and unique pathway.”

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Lightyear One, a car whose ability to use solar power has been thought of as an impossible feat, just won a Climate Change Innovator Award.

Designed by the Dutch startup Lightyear, the “car that charges itself” can supposedly drive for months without charging and has a 400–800 km range. But is a solar-powered car feasible?

For years, the concept of “solar-powered cars” has loomed over the electric car industry as a hopeful, possible future. But there are many who argue that this concept is not only impractical, it is basically impossible.

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All animals need to breathe oxygen and we know that regions of the ocean that are losing oxygen are becoming more and more common. We’re seeing the marine animals leaving those areas.

Almost two dozen marine scientists from around the world have issued a warning about an often-overlooked side effect of climate change and pollution.

In a paper published this week in Science, they say oxygen is disappearing from increasingly large areas of ocean and threatening marine life.

The research, sponsored by an international body affiliated with UNESCO, finds the problem has been growing since the 1950s. Over the last 50 years, the amount of affected ocean has expanded by 4.5 million square kilometres to 32 million square kilometres of coastal and deep-sea water.

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Despite being battered by Hurricane Maria, and facing a decrease in funding from the U.S. government, the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico is still going strong, and is now up and running again, following a series of repairs. And with the near-Earth asteroid 3200 Phaethon having just flown by our planet, Arecibo has just sent back images that are supposed to represent the highest-resolution photos of the asteroid, which help reveal some important details about the object.

According to a press release from NASA, the radar images were taken by the Arecibo Observatory Planet Radar last Saturday, December 16, and generated the day after, as asteroid Phaethon 3200 had its close encounter with Earth. At the time of its closest approach, the object was only 1.1 million miles away from Earth, or less than five times the distance separating our planet from the moon. The images have resolutions estimated at about 250 feet per pixel, making them the best-quality photos of the asteroid that are currently available, Phys.org added.

Based on Arecibo’s radar images, scientists believe that 3200 Phaethon is substantially larger than once estimated, with a diameter of approximately 3.6 miles, or 0.6 miles larger than what previous studies had suggested. That also makes Phaethon the second largest near-Earth object classified as a “potentially hazardous asteroid,” or a comparatively large asteroid that orbits much closer to Earth than most others do. The images also suggest Phaethon has a spheroidal shape, with a number of peculiar physical features that scientists are still trying to understand in full. These features include a concave area believed to be several hundred meters wide, and a dark, crater-like area located near one of its poles.

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Climate Change Research: our team came up with this concept — https://www.behance.net/gallery/59176073/Climate-Change This team tested an instrument that gathers key data about aerosols—small, solid or liquid particles suspended in the Earth’s atmosphere—to better to assess their effects on weather, climate and air quality.

We recently put an instrument to the test that gathers key data about aerosols—small, solid or liquid particles suspended in the Earth’s atmosphere—to better to assess their effects on weather, climate and air quality. See what happened: http://go.nasa.gov/2BfdJdL

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SENS Research Foundation co-founder Aubrey de Grey believes in a world in which we no longer age. At a London event, he explained that he believes the first person who will live to be 1,000 has already been born, and we’ll solve this “aging problem” within 20 years.

Aging has plagued biological organisms since life first began on planet Earth and it’s an accepted and universally understood part of life. Sure, things like climate change pose significant threats to society, but aging will almost certainly still exist even if we ever manage to stop damaging our environment.

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Have you ever lifted half a ton? With the Guardian GT, a set of robotic arms, you could do so with as little as two kilogram (five pounds) of force, allowing you to have superhuman strength.

Elon Musk recently made headlines asserting that, in order for us to both progress and survive as a species, we must merge with machines and become cyborgs. And, as climate change rages onwards and the biological difficulties of completing a human mission to Mars become ever more apparent, many are beginning to agree.

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