Science

1439 Articles

Frank Drake’s Legacy, Or: Are We All Alone In The Universe?

September 9, 2022 by 85 Comments

When Frank Drake began his astronomy career in the late 1950s, this was an incredibly exciting time for the field. Humanity was beginning to unlock the secrets of the Universe using ever more powerful radio frequency and optical telescopes, including the tantalizing prospect of space-based telescopes. Amidst the ramping up Space Race between the US and USSR, there was an ever-growing excitement about humankind’s future among the stars.

As concrete plans for landings and colonies on the Moon, Venus and Mars were proposed and put into action, it also brought to the forefront many existing and new questions about humanity’s place in the Universe. During Frank Drake’s 92 years on planet Earth – until his passing on September 2nd of this year – he was one of the driving forces behind the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), along with other legends like Carl Sagan.

Although to the average person the acronym SETI is most likely to bring to mind popcorn movies about little grey – or green – men, Drake’s Project Ozma, as well as the SETI Institution and the ongoing Breakthrough Listen project are just some of the attempts made by Drake and his colleagues over the decades to answer that one question that may affect the very course of humankind’s future: are we alone in the Universe?

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Don’t Be Salty: How To Make Desalination Work In Tomorrow’s World

September 8, 2022 by 60 Comments

Although water is often scarce for human consumption and agriculture, this planet is three-quarters covered by the stuff. The problem is getting the salt out, and this is normally done by the Earth’s water cycle, which produces rain and similar phenomena that replenish the amount of fresh water. Roughly 3% of the water on Earth is fresh water, of which a fraction is potable water.

Over the past decades, the use of desalination has increased year over year, particularly in nations like Saudi Arabia, Israel and the United Arab Emirates, but parched United States states such as California are increasingly looking into desalination technologies. The obvious obstacles that desalination faces – regardless of the exact technology used – involve the energy required to run these systems, and the final cost of the produced potable water relative to importing it from elsewhere.

Other issues that crop up with desalination include the environmental impact, especially from the brine waste and conceivably marine life sucked into the intake pipes. As the need for desalination increases, what are the available options to reduce the power needs and environmental impact?

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Agrivoltaics Is A Land Usage Hack For Maximum Productivity

September 7, 2022 by 53 Comments

Land tends to be a valuable thing. Outside of some weird projects in Dubai, by and large, they aren’t making any more of it. That means as we try to feed and power the ever-growing population of humanity, we need to think carefully about how we use the land we have.

The field of agrivoltaics concerns itself with the dual-use of land for both food production and power generation. It’s all about getting the most out of the the available land and available sunlight we have.

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Nanoparticles Rip Hydrogen From Water

September 5, 2022 by 38 Comments

Hydrogen fuel is promising, and while there’s plenty of hydrogen in the air and water, the problem is extracting it. Researchers have developed a way to use aluminum nanoparticles to rip hydrogen out of water with no additional energy input. It does, however, require gallium to enable the reaction. The reaction isn’t unknown (see the video below), but the new research has some interesting twists.

Aluminum, of course, is cheap and plentiful. Gallium, not so much, but the process allows recovery and reuse of the gallium, so that makes it more cost-effective. There is a patent pending for the process and — of course — the real trick is making the aluminum nanoparticles. But if you have that, this is a simple way to extract hydrogen from water with no extra energy and at room temperature. Since the reaction of creating aluminum oxide and releasing hydrogen with gallium is pretty well-known, it appears the real research here is determining the optimal properties of the aluminum and the ratio of aluminum to gallium.

While gallium isn’t a common item around the typical hacker’s workshop — unless you count the stuff bound up in semiconductors — it isn’t that expensive and it is relatively easy to handle. Hydrogen, though, not so much — so if you do decide to use this method to produce hydrogen, be careful!

We’ve seen gallium robots and even an antenna. So if you do get some of the liquid metal, there are plenty of experiments to try.

The Akademik Lomonosov floating nuclear power plant, moored at Pevek, Russia. It provides power and heat to the isolated community.

Cogeneration And District Heating For Comfortable Homes And Happy Factories

September 1, 2022 by 28 Comments

Most of modern society’s energy usage is spent on heating in some form, whether it is to heat water, raise the temperature in a room, or for use in industrial processes. This makes it an excellent target for improvements in efficiency and resilience, as well as in the effort to decarbonize the world’s energy production. Here district heating and similar solutions are likely to play a major role in the near future.

Over the past decades, a number of nations have either already built out extensive district heating grids, or are in the process of doing so. The main advantage of these heating grids is that they not only allow for more efficient, centralized generating of heat, but also allow for e.g. industrial waste heat to be used productively rather than wasted, even if most of the heat will come from either dedicated or cogeneration thermal plants.

Recently, district heating has received a big push in e.g. China in the form of nuclear cogeneration, while the potential of using thermal storage to buffer heat for later use along with the concept of tying data centers into heating grids are also being explored. Although district heating is hardly new, it may help to ease humanity into a low-carbon future, without losing a bit of comfort.

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Visual Mandela Effect: You Don’t Know Iconic Images As Well As You Think

August 29, 2022 by 63 Comments

Pop quiz, hotshot: does the guy on the Monopoly box (standard edition) wear a monocle? Next question: does the Fruit of the Loom logo involve a cornucopia? And finally, does Pikachu have a black-tipped tail? If you answered yes to any of these, I am sad to say that you are wrong, wrong, wrong.

So, what’s the deal? These are all examples of the visual version of the Mandela effect (VME), which is named after the common misconception/mass false memory that anti-Apartheid activist Nelson Mandela died decades ago in prison, despite leading South Africa in the latter half of the ’90s and living until 2013. Many people even claim having seen TV coverage of his funeral, or say they learned about his death in school during Black History Month. The whole thing has VICE wondering whether CERN is causing these mass delusions somehow with the LHC.

The more attention VME gets, the more important it seems to be to study it and try to come to some conclusion. To that end, University of Chicago researchers Deepasri Prasad and Wilma A. Bainbridge submitted an interesting and quite readable study earlier this year purporting that the VME is ‘evidence for shared and specific false memories across people’. In the study, they conducted four experiments using crowd-sourced task completion services.

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The Quiet Before The Storm?

August 27, 2022 by 82 Comments

My wife and I are reading a book about physics in the early 1900s. It’s half history of science and half biography of some of the most famous physicists, and it’s good fun. But it got me thinking about the state of physics 120 years ago.

What we’d now call classical mechanics was fully settled for quite a while, and even the mysterious electricity and magnetism had been recently put to rest by Maxwell and Heaviside. It seemed like there was nothing left to explain for a while. And then all the doors broke wide open.

As much as I personally like Einstein’s relativity work, I’d say the most revolutionary change in perspective, and driver of the most research in the intervening century, was quantum mechanics. And how did it all start? In the strangest of ways – with Niels Bohr worrying about why hydrogen and helium gasses gave off particular colors when ionized, which lead to his model of the atom and the idea of energy in quantum packets. Or maybe it was De Broglie’s idea that electrons could behave like waves or magnets, from slit and cathode-ray experiments respectively, that lead to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.

Either way, the birth of the strangest and most profound physics revolution – quantum mechanics – came from answering some ridiculously simple and straightforward questions. Why does helium emit pink, and how do TVs work? (I know, they didn’t have TVs yet…) Nobody looking at these phenomena, apart or together, could have thought that answering them would have required a complete re-thinking of how we think about reality. And yet it did.

I can’t help but wonder if there are, in addition to the multi-bazillion dollar projects like the Large Hadron Collider or the James Webb Space Telescope, some simpler phenomena out there that we should be asking “why?” about. Are we in a similar quiet before the storm? Or is it really true that the way to keep pushing back the boundaries of our ignorance is through these mega-projects?

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