Researchers believe they’ve found a way to tap deeper into one of nature’s most impressive, life-sustaining mechanisms.
Category: energy – Page 98
Li-ion batteries power almost everything these days, but their star is waning as more promising chemistries are developed. Scientists at the Technische Universität Wien (TU Wien) in Austria have invented a new battery type that uses abundant materials. The Oxygen-ion battery is cheap to produce and can last forever.
This could be the end of battery fires and protect battery supply from geopolitical risks.
Researchers at Texas A&M University in the U.S. have been exploring metal-free water-based battery electrodes that could one day be used for a wide range of applications, in place of the lithium-ion batteries popular today.
Lithium-ion batteries are at the core of the electrification of transportation that countries around the world are undertaking to reduce their carbon emissions. While the U.S. has ambitious plans to go shift to this cleaner way of transportation, it is also well aware of its shortcomings in this area.
Scientific Literacy and Its Importance
Posted in energy
Scientific literacy is based on the understanding that science is an ongoing human endeavor. It is a powerful instrument to understand the natural world and provides tools to augment scientific knowledge. It is the means by which a person can inquire, involve, discover, and draw meaningful inferences. A scientifically literate citizen is capable of evaluating different points of view based on appropriate evidence.
Learn more about the scientific method.
Every day, there are newspaper stories related to pharmaceuticals, energy needs, and the environment.
Camero-Tech, a firm based in Israel, has created a next-generation portable, high-performance imaging device that can actually “see” through walls. Called the Xaver 1,000, according to a press release from Camero-Tech, the company has now officially added this next-generation of the company’s product line.
Camero-Tech is a member of Samy Katsav Group (aka SK Group), and a world leader and pioneer in developing, producing, and marketing pulse-based UWB micro-power radar, like the Xaver 1000.
Some of the more well-known examples include retrievable and reusable rockets, retrieval at sea, mid-air retrieval, single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) rockets, and kinetic launch systems.
In addition, there are also efforts to develop propulsion systems that do not rely on conventional propellants. This technology offers many advantages, including lower mass and improved energy efficiency, ultimately lowering costs.
On June 10, 2023, an all-electrical propulsion system for satellites (the IVO Quantum Drive) will fly to space for the first time. The system was built by North Dakota-based wireless power company IVO, Ltd. and will serve as a testbed for an alternative theory of inertia that could have applications for propulsion.
Using NASA’s Chandra spacecraft, an international team of astronomers has performed X-ray observations of the Cigar Galaxy. Results of the observational campaign, presented March 16 on the pre-print repository arXiv, deliver crucial information regarding diffuse emission from this galaxy.
Discovered in 1,774, Cigar Galaxy (Messier 82, or M82) is a starburst galaxy located some 11.73 million light years away in the constellation Ursa Major. It has a size of about 40,800 light years and is one of the closest starburst galaxies to Earth.
Observations of the Cigar Galaxy have found that it experiences a large-scale galactic wind at various wavelengths, for instance, in hard X-rays above a few keV. This superwind appears to be concentrated in the galaxy’s two high surface brightness regions or clumps, and is fueled by energy released by supernovae within the clumps that occur at a rate of about one every ten years. Previous Chandra studies of this galaxy have detected bright X-ray binaries that dominate the hard X-ray band and revealed that there is residual diffuse emission surrounding the starburst disk.
The unique radiation emitted by heated or electrified elements has been converted into sound, enabling us to hear the distinctive chord each element produces. Although the idea has been tried before, advances in technology have now made it possible for a far more complete and subtle sonification of the periodic table.
When elements are energized electrons can jump to higher energy levels. Eventually, they return to their ground state, releasing a photon in the process. The wavelength of the photon depends on the size of the energy gap between the excited state and the ground state – more energy produces higher frequency/shorter wavelength light.
The discovery of this fact has proven crucial for our understanding of the universe. We can identify the elements in a star billions of light-years away from the distinctive wavelengths it emits, known as its emission spectra. At the American Chemical Society’s Spring Conference over the weekend, the University of Indiana’s W. Walker Smith demonstrated the result if every element’s electromagnetic spectrum is converted to sound.
It is well-known that an ordinary high frequency electromagnetic (EM) wave radiated into the ionosphere at the Spitze angle is totally transformed at the reflection height (z0) into the Z-mode. This mode, in turn, penetrates deeper into the ionosphere and it is reflected at some height (zref) usually significantly higher than the O-mode reflection height. This result is reconsidered in the present paper. It is argued that the wave appearing as a continuation of the propagating upward quasi-electrostatic wave changes the direction of motion along the vertical axis slightly above z0 and takes the form of the down-going wave. This wave is excited in the vicinity of the height z0 due to the phase resonance with the up-going O-mode wave which transforms into the Z-mode propagating upward. Thus, the ionospheric window is not totally transparent for the O-mode radiated at the Spitze angle. The up-going O-mode wave loses some part of its energy due to excitation of the down-going EM wave. This wave, in turn, propagates to the ground as the O-mode wave.
Photosynthesis is the process that plants, algae, and even certain species of bacteria use to convert sunlight into oxygen and chemical energy stored as sugar (aka gluclose). But what are the mechanisms behind one of nature’s most profound processes?
These are questions that a team of researchers led by the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU) hope to answer as they used quantum chemical calculations to examine a photosynthesis protein complex known as photosystem I (PSI) in hopes of better understanding the complete process of photosynthesis and how plants are able to convert sunlight to energy, specifically pertaining to how chlorophylls and the reaction center play their roles in the process.