Lifeboat Foundation

In Brief A team of Chinese chemists have developed a method that could allow plastics to be turned into diesel fuel.

While several companies and institutions have been working at reducing the world’s plastic waste, they are hampered by the lack of means to dispose of them. The most common plastic, polyethylene, happens to also be the hardest to break down. But a solution seems at hand.

A team of Chinese chemists has developed a method for degrading polyethylene and turning it into a liquid fuel.

Prabhuraj Balakrishnan, a PhD student researcher at the University of Manchester, talks about his recent discovery that could see a major leap in sustainable energy production, realised using graphene and other 2D materials in fuel cell systems.

1st February 2017 in News, Science & Technology

Prabhuraj Balakrishnan

Continue reading “Fuel cells could provide new green energy solutions” »

Will we finally solve world peace though with AI on QC? Hmmm.

I work in computational quantum condensed-matter physics: the study of matter, materials, and artificial quantum systems. Complex problems are our thing.

Researchers in our field are working on hyper-powerful batteries, perfectly efficient power transmission, and ultra-strong materials—all important stuff to making the future a better place. To create these concepts, condensed-matter physics deals with the most complex concept in nature: the quantum wavefunction of a many-particle system. Think of the most complex thing you know, and this blows it out of the water: A computer that models the electron wavefunction of a nanometer-size chunk of dust would require a hard drive containing more magnetic bits than there are atoms in the universe.

Continue reading “The most complex problem in physics could be solved by machines with brains” »

Nothing to fret about, but it is interesting that our Earth and Moon may end up colliding in the end. That’s long after our Sun has expanded as a Red Giant, but the implications for other earth-moon type systems are interesting.

For now, our anomalously large Moon is spinning away from us at a variable rate of 3.8 centimeters per year. But, in fact, the Earth and Moon may be on a very long-term collision course — one that incredibly some 65 billion years from now, could result in a catastrophic lunar inspiral.

“The final end-state of tidal evolution in the Earth-Moon system will indeed be the inspiral of the Moon and its subsequent collision and accretion onto Earth,” Jason Barnes, a planetary scientist at the University of Idaho, told me.

Continue reading “Earth And Moon May Be On Long-Term Collision Course” »

The pair are kicking in $85 million a piece to build a plant in Michigan.

These three stats show the dramatic change in the country’s gas resources, which has transformed the country in many ways.

China’s Chang’e lunar probe dynasty is already having a great year. The Chang’e 3 lunar lander surpassed all expectations last week to emerge from its 14th hibernation while the Chang’e 5-T1 just completed its transfer from the Earth-Moon Lagrange Point 2 into a stable orbit around the Moon. Chang’e 3’s main mission was only to take spectrographic and ground penetrating radar measurements, but the Chang’e 5 missions will bring back the first samples containing the actual prize — fusion-ready helium-3.

One of the main reasons helium-3 is sought as a fusion fuel is because there are no neutrons generated as a reaction product. The protons that do get generated have charge, and can therefore be safely contained using electromagnetic fields. Early dreamers imagined that Saturn or Jupiter would be the ideal places to try and get their hands on some helium-3, but it now appears that the Chinese have set their sights on the Moon.

Continue reading “China is going to mine the Moon for helium-3 fusion fuel” »

Microsoft’s cofounder vows to change the “supply side” for breakthrough energy technologies by investing billions of his and his friends’ dollars.

In Brief

• By applying 4.95 million atmospheres of pressure to liquid hydrogen, Harvard physicists have claimed they were able to make it metallic, a state of hydrogen that had never existed on Earth before.
• Physicists predict that metallic hydrogen is an authentic superconductor, so if stabilized, it could revolutionize everything from energy storage to rocketry.

As reported back in September, two studies, each with a different approach, were attempting to created metallic hydrogen, and now, more than 80 years after it was predicted to be possible, the Harvard University team has finally managed to produce the elusive state. Physicists Isaac Silvera, who has been working on this problem for 45 years, and Ranga Dias published their study’s results this week in the journal Science.

Continue reading “Scientists Have Finally Created Metallic Hydrogen” »