Many of today’s methods of purifying water rely on filters and chemicals that need regular replenishing or maintenance. Millions of people, however, live in areas with limited access to such materials, leading the research community to explore new options of purifying water in using plasmas. Many plasma-based approaches are expensive, but a new class of plasma devices may change that.
Researchers at the University of Alabama in Huntsville have been studying a new type of plasma generator for water purification. The new generator pulses voltage signals to ionize gas at atmospheric pressure and produce many useful byproducts, including hydroxyl radicals, which cause a cascade of reactions that lead to purer water samples.
“We’re finding ways to speed up the purification process,” said Ryan Gott, a doctoral candidate in aerospace engineering at UAH who will present the research next week at the American Physical Society 71st Annual Gaseous Electronics Conference and the 60th Annual meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics, which will take place Nov. 5–9 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland.
Researchers at the University of South Carolina in Columbia have demonstrated an experimental plasma device capable of cleaning gas samples of D4, one of the most common siloxanes. Drawing on a technique for creating plasma called dielectric barrier discharge, the group was able to significantly reduce the amount of D4 samples after treating it with a helium-based plasma.
The findings point to a new potential solution for accommodating landfill gas rich in siloxanes. They will be presented at the American Physical Society 71st Annual Gaseous Electronics Conference and 60th Annual meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics, which takes place Nov. 5–9 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland.
“This is the first time dielectric barrier discharge has been used to remove volatile organic silicate compounds,” said Malik Tahiyat, one of the researchers involved with the study. “In our case, there’s no wait for removing it or material that has to be thrown out after a certain amount of time.”
It is a few years since I posted here on Lifeboat Foundation blogs, but with the news breaking recently of CERN’s plans to build the FCC [1], a new high energy collider to dwarf the groundbreaking engineering triumph that is the LHC, I feel obliged to write a few words.
The goal of the FCC is to greatly push the energy and intensity frontiers of particle colliders, with the aim of reaching collision energies of 100 TeV, in the search for new physics [2]. Below linked is a technical note I wrote & distributed last year on 100 TeV collisions (at the time referencing the proposed China supercollider [3][4]), highlighting the weakness of the White Dwarf safety argument at these energy levels, and a call for a more detailed study of the Neutron star safety argument, if to be relied on as a solitary astrophysical assurance. The argument applies equally to the FCC of course:
The LSAG, and others including myself, have already written on the topic of astrophysical assurances at length before. The impact of CR on Neutron stars is the most compelling of those assurances with respect to new higher energy colliders (other analogies such as White Dwarf capture based assurances don’t hold up quite as well at higher energy levels). CERN will undoubtedly publish a new paper on such astrophysical assurances as part of the FCC development process, though would one anticipate it sooner rather than later, to lay to rest concerns of outsider-debate incubating to a larger audience?
Hope springs eternal. Hearing that folk from China’s IHEP were later in contact with the LSAG on this specific issue, one infers due diligence is in mind, albeit seemingly in retrospect again, on the premise that as CERN take up the baton, significant progress in collecting further input for the overall assessment (eg from cosmic rays, direct astrophysical observations, etc) is expected in the ~20 years timescale of development.
Meanwhile those of us keen on new science frontiers, and large scale engineering projects, have exciting times ahead yet again with a new CERN flagship.
[4] Reflecting on China’s Ambition to Build the World’s Most Powerful Supercollider, Existential Risk/Opportunity Singularity Management, 2015. http://www.global-risk-sig.org/erosmB9F.pdf
Another step forward in robotics self-awareness. This robot learns it’s own kinematics without human intervention and then learns to plot solution paths.
Columbia Engineering researchers have made a major advance in robotics by creating a robot that learns what it is, from scratch, with zero prior knowledge of physics, geometry, or motor dynamics. Once their robot creates a self-simulation, it can then use that self-model to adapt to different situations, to handle new tasks as well as detect and repair damage in its own body.
Scientists have been searching for “dark matter” – an unknown and invisible substance thought to make up the vast majority of matter in the universe – for nearly a century. The reason for this persistence is that dark matter is needed to account for the fact that galaxies don’t seem to obey the fundamental laws of physics. However, dark matter searches have remained unsuccessful.
But there are other approaches to make sense of why galaxies behave so strangely. Our new study, published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, shows that, by tweaking the laws of gravity on the enormous scales of galaxies, we may not actually need dark matter after all.
The Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky discovered in the 1930s that velocities in galaxy clusters were too high to account for how much matter we could see. A similar phenomenon was described by several groups of astronomers, such as Vera Rubin and Kent Ford, when they studied the motion of stars at the far edges of the Andromeda Galaxy.
When you beam intense pulses of light into a thin circle, strange things will happen, according to new research based on the optical equivalent of a whispering gallery.
Inside tiny loops of transparent fibre, waves of light can be forced to break step and change the orientation of their wiggle in odd ways, bending the rules and potentially giving future engineers new tools for emerging optical technology.
Researchers from the UK’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL) and Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh have watched light break its usual symmetrical patterns inside devices called optical ring resonators.
Global thermonuclear war. The slight possibility that a massive asteroid could boop Earth. Jenga. These are a few of the things that give humans debilitating anxiety.
Robots can’t solve any of these problems for us, but one machine can now brave the angst that is the crumbling tower of wooden blocks: Researchers at MIT report today in Science Robotics that they’ve engineered a robot to teach itself the complex physics of Jenga. This, though, is no game—it’s a big step in the daunting quest to get robots to manipulate objects in the real world.
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The Big Bang didn’t just result in our familiar universe, according to a mind-bending new theory — it also generated a second “anti-universe” that extended backwards in time, like a mirror image of our own.
A new story in Physics World explores the new theory, which was proposed by a trio of Canadian physicists who say that it could explain the existence of dark matter.
The new theory, which is laid out in a recent paper in the journal Physical Review of Letters, aims to preserve a rule of physics called CPT symmetry. In the anti-universe before the Big Bang, it suggests, time ran backwards and the cosmos were made of antimatter instead of matter.
