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Category: energy – Page 191

Japanese inventor, Akinori Ito, has created a household appliance which converts plastic bags into fuel for heat generators and some stoves.

Let’s talk numbers. On average, Americans use 100 billion plastic bags a year, which are produced with 12 million barrels of oil. When you think about the fact that one plastic bag takes 1,000 years to degrade, that’s a lot of waste lying around in landfills or poured into the ocean. What’s worse is that these plastic bags don’t even break down completely. They get polluted by the sunlight and turn into microplastics that absorb toxins, polluting the environment.

While the stats look worrisome, there are many, and usually ingenious, ways to properly recycle plastic bags. One smart solution belongs to a Japanese inventor, Akinori Ito has created a household appliance that converts plastic bags into fuel. The resulting fuel can be used for various applications such as the generation of heat.

Continue reading “Japanese Inventor Built a Machine That Turns Plastic Bags into Oil” | >

In a new report now published in Science, primary authors Zhen Zhu, Michal Papaj, and an international research team in physics, materials science, and condensed matter at the Jiao Tong University, China, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, U.S., and the Chinese Academy of Sciences discovered the Fermi surface of supercurrent-induced quasiparticles in a superconducting system for the first time. This discovery comes 50 years after the initial theoretical prediction was made by physicist Peter Fulde and revealed the impact of the finite Cooper pair momentum on the quasiparticle spectrum. In condensed matter physics, Cooper pairs are a pair of electrons with opposite spins loosely bound due to electron-lattice interactions. Superconductivity is based on their condensation to Bosonic states at low temperatures. The interplay of superconductivity and magnetic fields leads to the phenomenon of a ‘segmented Fermi surface. A leading author of this work, MIT Professor of Physics Liang Fu, outlined the significance of this discovery.

Supercurrent flow in a superconductor

Physicists assume that a sufficiently large supercurrent can close the energy gap in a superconductor and create gapless quasiparticles via the Doppler shift of quasiparticle energy. This is facilitated by the finite momentum of Cooper pairs in the presence of supercurrent flow in a superconductor, where the shift in Cooper pair momentum can result in a Doppler shift. In this work, Zhu et al. used quasiparticle interference to image the field-controlled Fermi surface of bismuth telluride (Bi2Te3) thin films proximitized by the superconductor niobium diselenide (NbSe2). A small applied in-plane magnetic field induced a screening supercurrent, which led to finite momentum pairing on the topological surface states of Bi2Te3. The scientists identified distinct interference patterns to indicate a gapless superconducting state with a segmented Fermi surface to reveal the strong impact of the finite Cooper pair momentum on the quasiparticle spectrum.

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Fighting ransomware with bounties.

In May, a ransomware attack shut down a pipeline carrying 45 percent of the fuel used on the US East Coast. The Colonial Pipeline incident led to panic buying and heightened fears about the threat posed by simple hacks to national infrastructure. Now, the US State Department is offering a bounty of up to $10 million to anyone who can supply the “identity or location” of the leaders of the group responsible — an outfit known as DarkSide.

In addition to the $10 million bounty, the state department is offering a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to the arrest or conviction “of any individual conspiring to participate in or attempting to participate in a DarkSide variant ransomware incident.” What exactly that means isn’t clear. Is a “DarkSide variant ransomware incident” one that involves the group’s hacking tools? What if the software has been altered slightly? It seems deliberately ambiguous, allowing the State Department to cast as wide a net as possible.

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One of the largest weaknesses of the U.S. military is its dependence on fuel. During the Global War on Terror, fuel convoys were easy targets for insurgent attacks. They will likely be targeted in future conflicts as well. This supply chain vulnerability is critical since, without access to fuel, military aircraft cannot maintain air superiority, a major requirement for winning wars.

Last week, the Air Force Operational Energy office awarded a contract to the energy company Twelve to develop the technology necessary to produce jet fuel from air. While this may sound unrealistic, the process is actually fairly straightforward. Indeed, Twelve has already shown that this process can be done at small levels. However, there are significant challenges involved in using this process at scale.

Full Story:

One of the largest weaknesses for the U.S. military is its dependence on fuel. During the Global War on Terror, fuel convoys were easy targets for insurgent attacks. They will likely be targeted in future conflicts as well. This supply chain vulnerability is critical, since without access to fuel, military aircraft cannot maintain air superiority, a major requirement for winning wars.

Continue reading “U.S. Air Force Has Impractical Goal Of Producing Jet Fuel From Air” | >

Today marks the official retail availability of Intel’s 12th Generation Core processors, starting with the overclockable versions this side of the New Year, and the rest in 2022. These new processors are the first widescale launch of a hybrid processor design for mainstream Windows-based desktops using the underlying x86 architecture: Intel has created two types of core, a performance core and an efficiency core, to work together and provide the best of performance and low power in a singular package. This hybrid design and new platform however has a number of rocks in the river to navigate: adapting Windows 10 Windows 11 and all sorts of software to work properly, but also introduction of DDR5 at a time when DDR5 is still not widely available. There are so many potential pitfalls for this product, and we’re testing the flagship Core i9-12900K in a few key areas to see how it tackles them.

Let’s Talk Processors

Since August, Intel has been talking about the design of its 12th Generation Core processor family, also known as Alder Lake. We’ve already detailed over 16,000 words on the topic, covering the fundamentals of each new core, how Intel has worked with Microsoft to improve Windows performance with the new design, as features like DDR5, chipsets, and overclocking. We’ll briefly cover the highlights here, but these two articles are worth the read for those that want to know.

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It’s been a tumultuous 12 months for mainland China’s richest. Shifts in government policy covering the education and tech industries, along with worries about real estate debt, led to many of the country’s largest private-sector companies experiencing steep share declines. A government push to promote “common prosperity” saw tycoons and tech companies announce billions of dollars in donations to social causes.

Yet overall, China’s 100 Richest saw their collective net worth rise from last year’s list. Their total wealth increased to $1.48 trillion from $1.33 trillion a year earlier. Among the biggest gainers were those who benefited from increased sales at companies tied to green energy industries in which China is a global leader, such as lithium-ion batteries. China, the world’s largest auto market, also leads the world in EV sales. The minimum net worth to make the top 100 rose to $5.74 billion from $5.03 billion a year ago.

The second-biggest increase in wealth went to Robin Zeng, chairman of battery-maker Contemporary Amperex Technology, whose fortune increased to $50.8 billion from $20.1 billion last year. That earned him the No. 3 spot on this year’s list.

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