/thread
Soy juice. Ditto almond, rice…
Gotta love the derisive posts about “conservatives” negatively politicizing the science thread then immediately followed by political posts from the other ‘side’.
Science is political, isn’t it?
Well, theres certainly “Political Science” as a subject. But i always figured it was a blatant misnomer.
I take your point though.
This is one of the few unFUBARed threads left on the site.
It would be nice to keep it that way.
wim out.
Good job Maryam. Very well done, although l won’t pretend to know anything about the work she does. The article is a very worthwhile read.
Bandied around for a long time, but if they can indeed get it working it would be pretty impressive. Certainly a game changer in so many ways.
Quantum supercomputer could ‘change life completely
Previous attempts at building a quantum machine have been limited to a computing capability of 10 or 15 qubits, but now physicists claim to have come up with a way around this restriction.
Whereas scientists had previously used fibre optic connections to connect individual computer modules, the new invention uses electric fields to push ions from one module to another.
“A modular design is absolutely critical in order to realise a quantum computer with truly phenomenal processing power,” Hensinger told the BBC.
https://cdn.rt.com/files/2017.02/original/58931f14c4618884118b4620.jpg
Multiple sclerosis: New blood test can identify types of MS and if treatments are working
By medical reporter Sophie Scott and the National Reporting Team's Meredith Griffiths Updated yesterday at 2:05pmPatients with multiple sclerosis will soon have access to a new test which can tell them exactly what type of MS they have and how well their medications are working.
Key points:
It’s the first test to accurately determine which kind of MS patients have
Markers can also be used to see if medications are working
Researchers have hailed it as a “stunning breakthrough” for Australian patients
At the moment, patients have to have an array of expensive tests to determine what kind of MS they have.
The study, published in Nature scientific reports, shows a blood test could greatly simplify and speed up this process, allowing doctors to adapt a patient’s treatment more accurately and rapidly.
Neuroscience Professor Gilles Guillemin from Macquarie University said the discovery was the culmination of 12 years’ hard work in the lab.
“We can tell you which sub-type of MS you have and if you respond to treatment,” he said.
At the moment, patients have to wait weeks on a medication to see if it is effective.
“If you can have the blood test and see the marker not working, and this treatment doesn’t work, the clinician will be able to realise very quickly change to another therapy,” Professor Guillemin said.
MS is a debilitating disorder of the central nervous system that affects more than 23,000 Australians and 2.3 million people worldwide.
What are the types of MS?
Relapsing-remitting: partial or total recovery after attacks or flares. This is the most common form of MS
Secondary progressive: where patients have some recovery but later become steadily progressive
Primary-progressive MS: Symptoms generally do not remit. 15 per cent of people with MS are diagnosed with this type
Source: MS Australia
Mike Hemingway was diagnosed with MS 15 years ago, but doctors could not tell him which form of the disease he had.
He was pleased to hear about the new test.
“It will make a substantial difference. For me, yes I would have liked to know ‘this is what I have got’,” he said.
Doctors hope if patients are put on the right drug earlier they will not be affected by MS as much as patients like Mr Hemingway have been.
“The earlier you can have those treatments the less damage there is going to be to your central nervous system and things like cognitive problems and walking problems vision problems hopefully will become over time things of the past,” Mr Hemingway said.
‘Stunning breakthrough’ for Australian research
Matthew Miles, chief executive of MS Research Australia, said it was a “stunning breakthrough” for Australia and for Australian research.
“It’s absolutely critical that we understand which type of MS, so people can be treated with the right therapy quicker, particularly when other therapies for progressive disease become available,” Dr Miles said.
“There’s the potential for being treated earlier, there’s also the potential for being much more in control and peace of mind so you understand the disease.”
The lead researcher of the study, Edwin Lim, who is currently based at Macquarie University, said the breakthrough was an important move towards personalised medicine for MS patients.
“The unique information that we will receive from the biomarker within an individual, means that it could also be possible develop biomarker guided personalised treatment for each patient,” Dr Lim said.
Potential hope for other conditions: researchers
The findings could have implications for other conditions such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and motor neuron disease.
The test relies on detecting compounds in a pathway of the brain using a substance called tryptophan.
“By increasing our understanding of how our cells process tryptophan, we will be better able to identify its involvement in many neuro-degenerative diseases,” Professor Guillemin said.
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How to empty the ketchup bottle every time
And improve power plants, too
The Economist Science and technology
Dec 3rd 2016
Open sauce operating system
FOR anyone (and that is almost everyone) who has shaken and thumped a bottle of ketchup to squeeze the last dollop out of it, or flattened and then rolled up a tube of toothpaste to eject one final squirt onto their brush, help may soon be at hand. For more than a decade Kripa Varanasi and his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have been creating and studying slippery surfaces for use in industrial equipment such as steam turbines and desalination plants.
More recently, they have found ways to apply their ideas to create internal coatings for containers so that their contents will flow out easily and completely, with no shaking, thumping or squeezing. And now they think they have discovered a way to adapt these super-slippery coatings to steer liquids across flat surfaces, opening up the possibility of pumping fluids around without the need for pipes.
The lotus position
Dr Varanasi’s work started with what are known as super-hydrophobic water-shedding surfaces, a classic natural example of which is a lotus leaf. It repels water so effectively that droplets simply tumble off. The reason is that the leaf’s surface is covered with microscopic structures which contain air pockets. This reduces the surface tension that would otherwise cause a water droplet to cling on. By coating the condensing areas used in steam turbines with similar surfaces his team believes it will be possible to speed up the shedding of water droplets. That would boost efficiency and, as most of the world’s electricity is still generated by coal, gas and nuclear plants that rely on steam turbines, it would also save an awful lot of money.
The same idea has since been adapted to help move other substances, such as toothpaste, paint and ketchup. These have a gooeyness that means they can get into the air pockets and take a grip. To counter that, the researchers replace the air with liquids such as oils. The resulting surfaces are, in effect, self-lubricating—so that even the stickiest substances flow across them easily. The trick, says Dr Varanasi, is to have the right combination of surface structure and lubricating fluid, so that the oiling liquid does not get swept away by what is flowing over it.
To create a completely emptyable container for a substance, be it ketchup, toothpaste, shampoo or face cream, means matching that substance to a specific surface structure and a bespoke lubrication fluid. The best way to do this, says Dr Varanasi, is to design the texture of the surface to trap a lubricant which is itself derived from the substance with which the container will be filled. That also has the benefit of not contaminating the product should some of the fluid escape. A lubricant for a food product, for instance, might be derived from a natural oil which it contains.
Dr Varanasi’s team have developed a database of recipes that can be used to lubricate containers for a wide range of materials. In 2012 he and one of his students, Dave Smith, founded a company called LiquiGlide, which is working with a number of consumer-goods firms such as Elmer’s, an American gluemaker, to create easy-to-pour, squeeze and shake containers for their products.
LiquiGlide has also devised a variant of the system that can be applied to the vast number of vessels and pipes in factories. This, the company claims, could reduce production losses considerably. At the moment, the tendency of things like paints to stick to piping, mixing tanks and so on means that as much as 30% of the material may be lost, especially during clean-ups in batch production, as when switching to a different colour of paint.
One feature of Dr Varanasi’s liquid-impregnated surfaces is that droplets forming upon them tend to have a large area of contact. It increases the effects of the surface’s temperature on a droplet. And that got Dr Varanasi and David Quéré of ESPCI, a research university in Paris, and their colleagues thinking about how to exploit one of those effects, known as thermocapillary motion. A change in temperature can alter the surface tension of a droplet, causing it to move. Usually, very large temperature differences are needed even for a droplet to move slowly. Out of curiosity they devised an experiment using a surface texture impregnated with oil. As they report in Physical Review Fluids, the researchers applied a temperature gradient and recorded the movement of water droplets. Even with low changes in temperature the droplets skipped along their slippery surfaces. The group have subsequently upped the speed at which they can propel water droplets to a heady ten millimetres a second. That is ten times quicker than has been reported on conventional surfaces.
Dr Varanasi and Dr Quéré have several ideas for making use of this discovery by selectively heating and cooling different areas of the surface to steer the droplets around. One is to create new types of microfluidic devices—or labs-on-a-chip, as they are known colloquially. These one-shot machines, about a centimetre across, are being increasingly used for things like analysing blood. To work, they have to be able to move reagents around inside themselves through tiny pipes and valves. This movement is hampered by surface tension, the effects of which increase as the dimensions of the pipework diminish. Dr Varanasi and Dr Quéré think that by selectively heating and cooling different areas of a liquid-impregnated surface, they could move and mix fluids without such intricate plumbing.
Steering fluids around might also help with the group’s work in developing more powerful condensers. It may even solve one of the problems of space flight. Much conventional equipment depends on gravity to move liquids around inside it. That does not work in orbit. But thermocapillary motion would.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, most people might settle for saving even a little of what every year amounts to a massive lake of wasted condiments, bathroom products, creams and just about anything else that comes in bottles, containers or tubes. If Dr Varanasi has his way the days of shake and thump are numbered.
The reason is that the leaf’s surface is covered with microscopic structures which contain air pockets. This reduces the surface tension that would otherwise cause a water droplet to cling on. By coating the condensing areas used in steam turbines with similar surfaces his team believes it will be possible to speed up the shedding of water droplets. That would boost efficiency and, as most of the world’s electricity is still generated by coal, gas and nuclear plants that rely on steam turbines, it would also save an awful lot of money.
Not so sure about that.
So condensate can travel quicker off a surface. That doesn’t automatically mean that the process will increase production or reduce costs. You would need a different system, for that. If you held a funnel upside down over a steaming pan, it would not matter (after the initial saturation) how fast the droplets slid down the side - you would need a bigger funnel to increase productivity and/or reduce costs. Then again, I may be wrong.
We finally have a computer that can survive the surface of Venus
Sulphuric rain? Easy. Not burning up at 500°C or crushed by 90 atmospheres? Hard.
SEBASTIAN ANTHONY (UK) - 2/9/2017, 1:01 AM
Venus is one of the most inhospitable places in the solar system. Descending through the clouds of boiling sulphuric rain is actually the easy bit—the hard bit is not being cremated by the surface temperature of 470°C (878°F) or crushed by the atmospheric pressure, which is about 90 times that of Earth, the same as swimming 900 metres under water.
The longest survival time for a human-made object on Venus was 127 minutes, back in 1981 when the Soviet spacecraft Venera 13 landed there. Not dying for two hours, and netting our first ever colour photos of the planet’s surface, was considered a huge success; the probe had only been designed to live for 32 minutes before it was cooked, crushed, and dissolved by its environs. Three more spacecraft followed, all Soviet—Venera 14, Vega 1, Vega 2—but we haven’t tried to land anything on Venus since 1985.
One of the core problems of exploring Venus is that normal digital computers don’t really work there. Standard silicon chips can hang in to around 250°C, but eventually there’s just so much energy in the system that the silicon stops being a semiconductor—electrons can freely jump the bandgap—and everything stops working. The Venera landers kept their electronics cool with cumbersome hermetically sealed chambers, and sometimes the innards were also pre-cooled to around -10°C before being dropped into the atmosphere by the parent orbiter.
Over the last few years electronics based on the semiconductor silicon carbide (SiC) have started to mature. SiC has drawn a lot of interest from the military and heavy industries because it can support very high voltages and temperatures—and those properties make it a very suitable candidate for computing on Venus, too.
Now, researchers out of NASA’s Glenn Research Centre appear to have cracked the other big problem with high-temperature integrated circuits: they’ve crafted interconnects—the tiny wires that connect transistors and other integrated components together—that can also survive the extreme conditions on Venus.
The NASA Glenn researchers combined the new interconnects with some SiC transistors to create a ceramic-packaged chip. The chip was then placed into the GEER—the Glenn Extreme Environments Rig, a machine that can maintain Venus-like temperature and pressure for hundreds of hours at a time. The chip, a simple 3-stage oscillator, kept functioning at a steady 1.26MHz for 521 hours (21.7) days before the GEER had to be shut down.
NASA Glenn says this is the first reported demonstration of a computer chip operating in Venus-like conditions for multiple days/weeks without the aid of a pressure vessel, cooling system, or other means of protection. “With further technology maturation, such SiC IC electronics could drastically improve Venus lander designs and mission concepts, fundamentally enabling long-duration enhanced missions to the surface of Venus,” the researchers conclude.
Sending a lander to Venus requires more than just high-temperature electronics, though. While researching this story I stumbled across a fascinating website that dives into the Soviet exploration of Venus from 1961 to 1985. It turns out that creating tools that continue to work at 470°C and 9MPa is rather difficult.
Capable of drilling 3 cm into solid igneous rock, if needs be, the drill required the invention of new alloys and an electric motor. Machine parts were designed to fit and function properly only after thermal expansion to 500°C. The telescoping drill head lowers to the surface and bores for two minutes. Pyrotechnic charges break a series of seals that allow the high pressure atmosphere of Venus to rush into an assembly of tubes. Soil is carried in stages, into a soil transfer tube and onto a sample container. The sample container is driven through an airlock by pyrotechnic charges and into the x-ray fluorescence chamber. A large vacuum reservoir then lowers the chamber pressure to about 0.06 atmospheres.
The mechanical side of engineering a Venus lander would still be difficult today, but thanks to advances in materials science, oil drilling, and other high-temperature industrial pursuits, it should be within our capabilities. A rover, with more moving parts, would be a lot harder—though apparently NASA Glenn is working on a land-sailing rover that could be ready for 2023.
New, long-lasting flow battery could run for more than a decade with minimum upkeep
Battery stores energy in nontoxic, noncorrosive aqueous solutions
Date:
February 9, 2017
Source:
Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Summary:
A new flow battery has been developed that stores energy in organic molecules dissolved in neutral pH water. This new chemistry allows for a non-toxic, non-corrosive battery with an exceptionally long lifetime and offers the potential to significantly decrease the costs of production.
Flow batteries are a promising storage solution for renewable energy sources like wind and solar.
Researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a new flow battery that stores energy in organic molecules dissolved in neutral pH water. This new chemistry allows for a non-toxic, non-corrosive battery with an exceptionally long lifetime and offers the potential to significantly decrease the costs of production.
The research, published in ACS Energy Letters, was led by Michael Aziz, the Gene and Tracy Sykes Professor of Materials and Energy Technologies and Roy Gordon, the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Materials Science.
Flow batteries store energy in liquid solutions in external tanks – the bigger the tanks, the more energy they store. Flow batteries are a promising storage solution for renewable, intermittent energy like wind and solar but today’s flow batteries often suffer degraded energy storage capacity after many charge-discharge cycles, requiring periodic maintenance of the electrolyte to restore the capacity.
By modifying the structures of molecules used in the positive and negative electrolyte solutions, and making them water soluble, the Harvard team was able to engineer a battery that loses only one percent of its capacity per 1000 cycles.
“Lithium ion batteries don’t even survive 1000 complete charge/discharge cycles,” said Aziz.
“Because we were able to dissolve the electrolytes in neutral water, this is a long-lasting battery that you could put in your basement,” said Gordon. “If it spilled on the floor, it wouldn’t eat the concrete and since the medium is noncorrosive, you can use cheaper materials to build the components of the batteries, like the tanks and pumps.”
This reduction of cost is important. The Department of Energy (DOE) has set a goal of building a battery that can store energy for less than $100 per kilowatt-hour, which would make stored wind and solar energy competitive to energy produced from traditional power plants.
“If you can get anywhere near this cost target then you change the world,” said Aziz. “It becomes cost effective to put batteries in so many places. This research puts us one step closer to reaching that target.”
“This work on aqueous soluble organic electrolytes is of high significance in pointing the way towards future batteries with vastly improved cycle life and considerably lower cost,” said Imre Gyuk, Director of Energy Storage Research at the Office of Electricity of the DOE. “I expect that efficient, long duration flow batteries will become standard as part of the infrastructure of the electric grid.”
The key to designing the battery was to first figure out why previous molecules were degrading so quickly in neutral solutions, said Eugene Beh, a postdoctoral fellow and first author of the paper. By first identifying how the molecule viologen in the negative electrolyte was decomposing, Beh was able to modify its molecular structure to make it more resilient.
Next, the team turned to ferrocene, a molecule well known for its electrochemical properties, for the positive electrolyte.
“Ferrocene is great for storing charge but is completely insoluble in water,” said Beh. “It has been used in other batteries with organic solvents, which are flammable and expensive.”
But by functionalizing ferrocene molecules in the same way as with the viologen, the team was able to turn an insoluble molecule into a highly soluble one that could also be cycled stably.
“Aqueous soluble ferrocenes represent a whole new class of molecules for flow batteries,” said Aziz.
The neutral pH should be especially helpful in lowering the cost of the ion-selective membrane that separates the two sides of the battery. Most flow batteries today use expensive polymers that can withstand the aggressive chemistry inside the battery. They can account for up to one third of the total cost of the device. With essentially salt water on both sides of the membrane, expensive polymers can be replaced by cheap hydrocarbons.
This research was coauthored by Diana De Porcellinis, Rebecca Gracia, and Kay Xia. It was supported by the Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability of the DOE and by the DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy.
With assistance from Harvard’s Office of Technology Development (OTD), the researchers are working with several companies to scale up the technology for industrial applications and to optimize the interactions between the membrane and the electrolyte. Harvard OTD has filed a portfolio of pending patents on innovations in flow battery technology.
Story Source:
Materials provided by Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Original written by Leah Burrows. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Journal Reference:
Eugene S. Beh, Diana De Porcellinis, Rebecca Gracia, Kay Xia, Roy G Gordon, Michael Aziz. A Neutral pH Aqueous Organic/Organometallic Redox Flow Battery with Extremely High Capacity Retention. ACS Energy Letters, 2017; DOI: 10.1021/acsenergylett.7b00019
The issue with this new tech that is sorely needed now is that left to the market it takes years to become ubiquitous. Needs an Elon Musk.
Don’t worry, … Elon is already well onto it. If it is what it claims, he’ll buy it or fund it.
The issue with this new tech that is sorely needed now is that left to the market it takes years to become ubiquitous. Needs an Elon Musk.
Some call it the scientific valley of death, from development to getting it on the market.
Hard to explain. 3 mins. Watch!
Cool. And, the guy from Sideways.
“I am not drinking any f&@cking merlot!”
Do people find it interesting that Trump is pushing NASA to put men on the next moon orbiter (was going to be unmanned) and seems to buy into that science, but not climate science?
Do people find it interesting that Trump is pushing NASA to put men on the next moon orbiter (was going to be unmanned) and seems to buy into that science, but not climate science?
He’s living in the 60s, and not the hippies version. The version when men were men, women were women, racial minorities were sub-human, climate change was unheard of and men went to the damned moon.