At three o’clock in the afternoon on September 4, 1882, the electrical age began. The Edison Illuminating Company switched on its Pearl Street power plant, and a network of copper wires came alive, delivering current to a few dozen buildings in the surrounding neighborhood.
Electroactive bacteria were running current through “wires” long before humans learned the trick.
The log, which is 16m long and weighs 60 tonnes, was found during excavation for a new geothermal power station near Ngāwhā Springs earlier this year.
Last week, scientists completed a radiometric analysis to reveal the kauri stood between 41,000 and 42,500 years ago – making it the only tree found anywhere in the world that was alive during a mysterious shift in the world’s magnetic field.
Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences have designed and tested a prototype cathodoluminescent lamp for general lighting. The new lamp, which relies on the phenomenon of field emission, is more reliable, durable, and luminous than its analogues available worldwide. The development was reported in the Journal of Vacuum Science & Technology B.
While LED lamps have become commonplace, they are not the only clean and power-saving alternative to incandescent lamps. Since the 1980s, engineers around the world have been looking into the so-called cathodoluminescent lamps as another option for general lighting purposes.
Shown in figure 1, a lamp of this kind relies on the same principle that powered TV cathode-ray tubes: A negatively charged electrode, or cathode, at one end of a vacuum tube serves as an electron gun. A potential difference of up to 10 kilovolts accelerates the emitted electrons toward a flat positively charged phosphor-coated electrode—the anode—at the opposite end of the tube. This electron bombardment results in light.
In April, clean energy provided 23% of America’s electricity compared to coal’s 20% – the first time coal has been surpassed by renewable sources.
Heat flows from hot to cold objects. When a hot and a cold body are in thermal contact, they exchange heat energy until they reach thermal equilibrium, with the hot body cooling down and the cold body warming up. This is a natural phenomenon we experience all the time. It is explained by the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the total entropy of an isolated system always tends to increase over time until it reaches a maximum. Entropy is a quantitative measure of the disorder in a system. Isolated systems evolve spontaneously toward increasingly disordered states and lack of differentiation.
An experiment conducted by researchers at the Brazilian Center for Research in Physics (CBPF) and the Federal University of the ABC (UFABC), as well as collaborators at other institutions in Brazil and elsewhere, has shown that quantum correlations affect the way entropy is distributed among parts in thermal contact, reversing the direction of the so-called “thermodynamic arrow of time.”
In other words, heat can flow spontaneously from a cold object to a hot object without the need to invest energy in the process, as is required by a domestic fridge. An article describing the experiment with theoretical considerations has just been published in Nature Communications.
A secretive startup has been awarded a launch contract for the U.S. military using a rather novel launch system – based on kinetic energy technology that would essentially shoot satellites directly into space using a hypersonic vehicle.
Last week on Wednesday, June 19, California-based company SpinLaunch announced they had secured a launch contract with the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). They didn’t release any further details, other than noting it was a “responsive launch prototype contract… for kinetic energy-based launch services.”
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — SpaceX launched its heftiest rocket with 24 research satellites Tuesday, a middle-of-the-night rideshare featuring a deep space atomic clock, solar sail, a clean and green rocket fuel testbed, and even human ashes.
It was the third flight of a Falcon Heavy rocket, but the first ordered up by the military.
The Defense Department mission, dubbed STP-2 for Space Test Program, is expected to provide data to certify the Falcon Heavy — and reused boosters — for future national security launches. It marked the military’s first ride on a recycled rocket.
Outdoor sport brand Goldwin and Japanese company Spiber developed the Moon Parka, a ski jacket made from synthetic spider silk.
The parka was originally to be released by The North Face, marketed by Goldwin, in 2016, but its release was postponed. Back then, Spiber’s QMONOS was said to be the world’s first successfully-produced synthetic spider silk material (since then, other brands have succeeded in making products with this material, like Bolt Threads and Adidas).
Currently, most sports apparel is made from synthetic materials such as polyester and nylon. These materials are made using petroleum, and consume massive amounts of energy to produce.
Of all the crazy garage-built weapons I’ve ever come across, this one from YouTuber/tinkerer Alex Smyth is definitely one of the craziest. Aside from the fact that it looks like a prop that was stolen from the set of District 9, Smyth’s “phased plasma” gun doesn’t just fire normal projectiles. It’s actually designed to fire rounds filled with ionized plasma, which in turn should, at least in theory, explode on impact.
If you’re unfamiliar, a railgun is a type of weapon that uses electricity instead of gunpowder to fire a projectile. Leveraging a phenomenon called the Lorentz Force, rail guns work by delivering a high power electric pulse to a pair of conductive rails, which in turn generates a magnetic field and rapidly accelerates the bullet situated between them.
Smyth’s gun is a bit different, though. Rather than using straight rails, his build features a pair of rails that are twisted to form a double helix. According to Smyth, this gives the projectile some spin and extra stability, just like the rifling on a firearm barrel would provide for a normal bullet. The only difference is that, in lieu of a regular metal projectile, Smyth’s gun is designed to fire glass vacuum tubes filled with neon gas. In theory, the electromagnetic fields created by the rails will ionize the gas to create plasma, which will be released when the glass projectile breaks.
A group of astronomers led by Crystal Martin and Stephanie Ho of the University of California, Santa Barbara, has discovered a dizzying cosmic choreography among typical star-forming galaxies; their cool halo gas appears to be in step with the galactic disks, spinning in the same direction.
The researchers used W. M. Keck Observatory to obtain the first-ever direct observational evidence showing that corotating halo gas is not only possible, but common. Their findings suggest that the whirling gas halo will eventually spiral in towards the disk.
“This is a major breakthrough in understanding how galactic disks grow,” said Martin, Professor of Physics at UC Santa Barbara and lead author of the study. “Galaxies are surrounded by massive reservoirs of gas that extend far beyond the visible portions of galaxies. Until now, it has remained a mystery how exactly this material is transported to galactic disks where it can fuel the next generation of star formation.”
