Tag: atmosphere

Professors Claim Passive Cooling Breakthrough Via Plastic Film

What if you could cool buildings without using electricity? charlesj68 brings word of “the development of a plastic film by two professors at the University of Colorado in Boulder that provides a passive cooling effect.” The film contains embedded glass beads that absorb and emit infrared in a wavelength that is not blocked by the atmosphere. Combining this with half-silvering to keep the sun from being the source of infrared absorption on the part of the beads, and you have a way of pumping heat at a claimed rate of 93 watts per square meter. The film is cheap to produce — about 50 cents per square meter — and could create indoor temperatures of 68 degrees when it’s 98.6 outside. “All the work is done by the huge temperature difference, about 290C, between the surface of the Earth and that of outer space, ” reports The Economist. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Professors Claim Passive Cooling Breakthrough Via Plastic Film

NASA Scientist Revive 10,000-Year-Old Microorganisms

“Scientists have extracted long-dormant microbes from inside the famous giant crystals of the Naica mountain caves in Mexico — and revived them, ” reports the BBC. An anonymous reader writes: “The organisms were likely to have been encased in the striking shafts of gypsum at least 10, 000 years ago, and possibly up to 50, 000 years ago, ” according to the BBC, which calls the strange lifeforms “another demonstration of the ability of life to adapt and cope in the most hostile of environments.” With no light, extremophile species must “chemosynthesise, ” deriving all their energy by extracting minerals from rocks. These ancient microbes “are not very closely related to anything in the known genetic databases, ” according to the new director of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute, who helped conduct the research, and believes that the microbes could help suggest what life might look like on other planets. The BBC adds that many other scientists “suspect that if life does exist elsewhere in the Solar System, it is most likely to be underground, chemosynthesising like the microbes of Naica.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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NASA Scientist Revive 10,000-Year-Old Microorganisms

Serious Computer Glitches Can Be Caused By Cosmic Rays

The Los Alamos National Lab wrote in 2012 that “For over 20 years the military, the commercial aerospace industry, and the computer industry have known that high-energy neutrons streaming through our atmosphere can cause computer errors.” Now an anonymous reader quotes Computerworld: When your computer crashes or phone freezes, don’t be so quick to blame the manufacturer. Cosmic rays — or rather the electrically charged particles they generate — may be your real foe. While harmless to living organisms, a small number of these particles have enough energy to interfere with the operation of the microelectronic circuitry in our personal devices… particles alter an individual bit of data stored in a chip’s memory. Consequences can be as trivial as altering a single pixel in a photograph or as serious as bringing down a passenger jet. A “single-event upset” was also blamed for an electronic voting error in Schaerbeekm, Belgium, back in 2003. A bit flip in the electronic voting machine added 4, 096 extra votes to one candidate. The issue was noticed only because the machine gave the candidate more votes than were possible. “This is a really big problem, but it is mostly invisible to the public, ” said Bharat Bhuva. Bhuva is a member of Vanderbilt University’s Radiation Effects Research Group, established in 1987 to study the effects of radiation on electronic systems. Cisco has been researching cosmic radiation since 2001, and in September briefly cited cosmic rays as a possible explanation for partial data losses that customer’s were experiencing with their ASR 9000 routers. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Serious Computer Glitches Can Be Caused By Cosmic Rays

Astronaut filmed elusive blue lightning aboard the ISS

Some types of electrical discharge phenomena like blue jets and red sprites occur way above the altitudes where normal lightning occurs. That makes it tough to see them or even to confirm that they actually take place. There’s a group of people living in just the right place to witness them happen, though: astronauts aboard the International Space Station . ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen filmed thunderstorms from the ISS in September 2015 using the most sensitive camera in the orbiting lab. Now, Denmark’s National Space Institute has finally confirmed that Mogensen indeed caught 245 blue flashes on cam — you’ve really got to watch the video after the break. Apparently, satellites tried to capture upper-atmosphere lightning in the past, but their viewing angles aren’t ideal for filming them. ESA says Mogensen’s successful attempt proves the ISS is “a suitable base for observing these phenomena.” Back in 2012, the ISS crew also successfully captured an image of a red sprite by accident. Now that researchers know how to best observe these little-understood phenomena, they’ll be able to study them further and help us better understand how the atmosphere protects us from radiation. Source: ESA

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Astronaut filmed elusive blue lightning aboard the ISS

Breakthrough Starshot to fund planet-hunting hardware for telescope

Enlarge / The VISIR instrument before its impending upgrades. (credit: ESO ) Today, the European Southern Observatory announced an agreement with Breakthrough Starshot, the group dedicated to sending hardware to return data from the nearest stars. The agreement would see Breakthrough Starshot fund the development of new hardware that would allow the ESO’s Very Large Telescope to become an efficient planet hunter. The goal is presumably to confirm there’s something in the Alpha Centauri system worth sending hardware to image. Breakthrough Starshot’s audacious plan involves using ground-based lasers and light sails to accelerate tiny craft to a significant fraction of the speed of light. This would allow the craft to visit the stars of the Alpha Centauri system within decades. The company’s goal is to get data back to Earth while many of the people alive today are still around. Getting meaningful data requires a detailed understanding of the Alpha Centauri system, which is where the new telescope hardware will come in. Last year, scientists confirmed the existence of an exoplanet orbiting the closest star of the three-star system, Proxima Centauri. But we’ll want to know significantly more about it, its orbit, and whether there are signs of any other planets in the system before we send spacecraft. The other two stars of Alpha Centauri are also worth a closer look. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Breakthrough Starshot to fund planet-hunting hardware for telescope

Pluto’s Liquid Water Ocean Might Be Insanely Deep

In recent months, there’s been growing evidence that Pluto is hiding a liquid water ocean beneath its frozen surface. New models by researchers at Brown University support this hypothesis, and take it one mind-boggling step further: Pluto’s ocean may be more than 100 kilometers (62 miles) deep. Read more…

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Pluto’s Liquid Water Ocean Might Be Insanely Deep

Virgin Atlantic turned industrial waste into greener jet fuel

Illinois-based LanzaTech and Virgin Atlantic have been working on an alternative fuel source for Sir Richard Branson’s flagship airline since 2011. This week, the two companies announced a breakthrough that could drastically reduce the airline industry’s carbon emissions. LanzaTech has produced 1, 500 US gallons of jet fuel derived from the industrial gases given off by steel mills. The LanzaTech fuel was created by capturing these gases, which would have otherwise been dispersed into the atmosphere, and converting them to a low-carbon ethanol called “Lanzanol” through a fermentation process. As the New Zealand Herald reports , the Lanzanol was produced in China at the Roundtable of Sustainable Biomaterials-certified demonstration center in Shougang and then converted to jet fuel using a process developed alongside the Pacific Northwest National Lab and the US Department of Energy. While initial tests show the Lanzanol fuel could result is as much as 65 percent less carbon emission than conventional jet fuel, it will need to pass a few more tests before it can be used in an commercial setting. Still, Branson believes Virgin Atlantic could make a Lanzanol-powered “proving flight” as early as 2017. According to LanzaTech, the company could implement their technology at 65 percent of the world’s steel mills, allowing the company to produce 30 billion gallons of Lanzanol annually. That’s enough to create 15 billion gallons of cleaner-burning jet fuel and replace about one-fifth of all the aviation fuel used yearly worldwide. Source: Virgin , New Zealand Herald

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Virgin Atlantic turned industrial waste into greener jet fuel

NASA’s Impossible Propulsion EmDrive Is Heading to Space

An anonymous reader writes:The EmDrive, a hypothetical miracle propulsion system for outer space, has been sparking heated arguments for years. Now, Guido Fetta plans to settle the argument about reactionless space drives for once and for all by sending one into space to prove that it really generates thrust without exhaust. Even if mainstream scientists say this is impossible. Fetta is CEO of Cannae Inc, and inventor of the Cannae Drive. His creation is related to the EmDrive first demonstrated by British engineer Roger Shawyer in 2003. Both are closed systems filled with microwaves with no exhaust, yet which the inventors claim do produce thrust. There is no accepted theory of how this might work. Shawyer claims that relativistic effects produce different radiation pressures at the two ends of the drive, leading to a net force. Fetta pursues a similar idea involving Lorentz (electromagnetic) forces. NASA researchers have suggested that the drive is actually pushing against “quantum vacuum virtual plasma” of particles that shift in and out of existence. Most physicists believe these far-out systems cannot work and that their potential benefits, such as getting to Mars in ten weeks, are illusory. After all, the law of conservation of momentum says that a rocket cannot accelerate forward without some form of exhaust ejected backwards. Yet the drumbeat goes on. Just last month, Jose Rodal claimed on the NASA Spaceflight forum that a NASA paper, “Measurement of Impulsive Thrust from a Closed Radio Frequency Cavity in Vacuum” has finally been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, but this cannot be confirmed yet. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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NASA’s Impossible Propulsion EmDrive Is Heading to Space

Three Earth-sized planets exist in the Aquarius constellation

It’s the dawning of the age of Aquarius. Well, the discovery of three planets orbiting a cooler-than-the-Sun dwarf star located in the Aquarius constellation , according to NASA . A number of telescopes, including the TRAPPIST at the La Silla Observatory in Chile were used in this trio, and the star itself bears the name TRAPPIST-1 for pretty obvious reasons. The planets are Earth-like in size and two of them orbit the star roughly every 1.5 and 2.4 days. The third one has proven a bit harder to track, with NASA saying its orbit is anywhere between 4.5 to 73 days. From the sounds of it, though, none of them are in the habitable zone for their orbits because of how close they are to TRAPPIST-1. The inner two? They might have habitable regions, and the outermost (with the unknown orbital period) might be habitable considering that it “probably” gleans less radiation than Earth does from our sun. Come May 4th, astronomers will be able to get a better look at TRAPPIST-1 and measure two of the planets as they transit the star via the Hubble telescope, analyzing their atmosphere and seeing if there are any bits of water vapor present. An extended campaign will give NASA a chance to study these with the relatively new James Webb Space Telescope’s infrared capabilities to further study their atmospheres. Source: NASA

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Three Earth-sized planets exist in the Aquarius constellation