Sunday 10 August 2014

A tree may have the answers to renewable energy

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Through an energy conversion process that mimics that of a tree, a University of Wisconsin-Madison materials scientist is making strides in renewable energy technologies for producing hydrogen. Xudong Wang, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at UW-Madison, recently collaborated with researcher, Dr. Zhiyong Cai, in the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory in Madison on research to use cellulose nanofibers (CNFs) for water splitting, a process that converts solar energy to hydrogen fuel. Wang’s vision is to use cellulose like a sponge “tree” that soaks up water from a lake or ocean. At the top would be a photocatalyst that splits the water into hydrogen and oxygen. An illustration of the water splitting process Wang describes. And while researchers have explored water-splitting techniques for years, those techniques have relied on photocatalysts submerged in the water, which limits light penetration to the catalyst. “People made photocatalysts in the water and shone light into the water to generate hydrogen and oxygen,” Wang says. “But the limitations included light penetration through the water to get to the catalyst. You cannot simply increase the amount of the catalyst since sun is refracted and diffracted. That limited the efficiency of those techniques.” Wang and his collaborators are soaking water up

The post A tree may have the answers to renewable energy has been published on Technology Org.

 
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Northern Lights Or Aurora Borealis, Tilton Lake, S Posters

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ImageID: 42-24118648 / Mike Grandmaison / All Canada Photos/Corbis / Northern Lights Or Aurora Borealis, Tilton Lake, Sudbury, Ontario, Canada.

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This week I learned that a little bit of poison is good for you, and more

Science Focus

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Read more about the facts mentioned:

Poison yourself, it's good for you (OutsideOnline.com)

Hummingbirds are freaks of nature (TheWeek.com)

9 poems penned by presidents (Mental Floss)

The struggle is real (Reddit)

Listen to more of The Week's mini podcasts:

  • The sheer terror of being alone
  • 4 common words that come from heat
  • This week I learned the moon might be littered with dinosaur fossils, and more

*You can also find The Week's mini podcasts on iTunes, SoundCloud, and TuneIn.*

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 » see original post http://theweek.com/article/index/265996/this-week-i-learned-that-a-little-bit-of-poison-is-good-for-you-and-more
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Dinosaurs that led to birds were shrinking for millions of years

Science Focus

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Davide Bonnadonna

We tend to think of feathers as one of the defining features of birds. But in recent years, it's become apparent that the lineage of dinosaurs that gave rise to birds (the Theropods) had feathers millions of years before anything remotely bird-like existed. Just last week, feathers were also found on a dinosaur outside the theropod lineage, raising questions about what made the theropods special (aside from, well, all sorts of cool dinosaur species).

Previous attempts to detect any global trends in bird-like traits among the theropods haven't come up with anything definitive. But today, scientists are releasing a new computer analysis of thousands of traits from theropod dinosaur fossils. The results show that the lineage that gave rise to birds has been getting smaller for 50 million years, and it underwent a huge burst of adding novel anatomical features. Both of these revelations are in sharp contrast to the rest of the theropod lineage.

The first theropods appear in the fossil record after the Triassic-Jurassic mass extinction event. During the early part of their history, they were notable for being rather large and static. Some groups appeared in the fossil record 180 million years ago, persisting right up to the mass extinction event that ended the non-avian dinosaurs. And one of the earliest groups to split off the lineage that led to birds were the Megalosaurids—which, as their name implies, were rather large.

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 » see original post http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~r/arstechnica/science/~3/PmZO7mv8mwA/
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Physicists detect process even rarer than the long-sought Higgs particle

Science Focus

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New stringent test of the Standard Model and the mechanism by which the Higgs imparts mass to other particles Brookhaven Lab/ATLAS physicist Marc-André Pleier adjusting detector components. Scientists running the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest and most powerful “atom smasher,” report the first evidence of a process that can be used to test the mechanism by which the recently discovered Higgs particle imparts mass to other fundamental particles. More rare than the production of the Higgs itself, this process—a scattering of two same-charged particles called W bosons off one another—also provides a new stringent test of the Standard Model of particle physics. The findings, which so far are in agreement with predictions of the Standard Model, are reported in a paper just accepted by Physical Review Letters. “By measuring this process we can check whether the Higgs particle we discovered does its job the way we expect it to.” — Brookhaven Lab/ATLAS physicist Marc-André Pleier “Only about one in 100 trillion proton-proton collisions would produce one of these events,” said Marc-André Pleier, a physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory who played a leadership role in the analysis of this result for the ATLAS

The post Physicists detect process even rarer than the long-sought Higgs particle has been published on Technology Org.

 
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 » see original post http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TechnologyOrgPhysicsNews/~3/MiPsT2tvC0E/
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A Perseid Below

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Zazzle Space Gifts for young and old

Cat's Eye Nebula Room Decals

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The Cat's Eye Nebula or NGC 6543, is a planetary nebula in the constellation of Draco. Structurally, it is one of the most complex nebulae known, with high-resolution Hubble Space Telescope observations revealing remarkable structures such as knots, jets, bubbles and sinewy arc-like features. In the center of the Cat's Eye there is a bright and hot star; around 1000 years ago this star lost its outer envelope, producing the nebula. - Wikipedia.org. Image by NASA.

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Pandora's Cluster Detail iPad Air Cover

Here's a great iPad case from Zazzle featuring a Hubble-related design. Maybe you'd like to see your name on it? Click to personalize and see what it's like!


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A colorful space image galaxy cluster Abell 2744, otherwise known as Pandora's Cluster. Source of image is NASA/Hubble programs.

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Study shows forward osmosis desalination not energy efficient

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In a recent study published in the Journal of Membrane Science, MIT professor John Lienhard and postdoc Ronan McGovern, both of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, reported that, contrary to popular support, forward osmosis desalination of seawater is significantly less energy efficient, compared to reverse osmosis. In forward osmosis, water is drawn from the seawater into a concentrated salt solution, known as a draw solution. Then, a second step is required to regenerate the concentrated draw solution and produce purified water. With reverse osmosis, the seawater is directly desalinated by being pressurized and driven through a membrane that only allows water to pass through. McGovern performed an energetic comparison of reverse osmosis and forward osmosis to identify their respective energy consumptions. The problem, he says, is that even if the second step of draw regeneration — in which the concentrated salt solution is dewatered, producing fresh water — can achieve the same level of efficiency as the reverse osmosis process, the actual energy consumption of forward osmosis will consistently surpass that of reverse osmosis. This is because the salt solution that results from the first step of forward osmosis is necessarily more highly concentrated than standard seawater, meaning it always requires a

The post Study shows forward osmosis desalination not energy efficient has been published on Technology Org.

 
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Earth Rising Over Moon Surface Poster

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ImageID: 42-17734567 / Bloomimage / Corbis / Earth Rising Over Moon Surface /

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The Landscape of Carina Room Stickers

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"NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured this billowing cloud of cold interstellar gas and dust rising from a tempestuous stellar nursery located in the Carina Nebula, 7,500 light-years away in the southern constellation Carina. This pillar of dust and gas serves as an incubator for new stars and is teeming with new star-forming activity.

"Hot, young stars erode and sculpt the clouds into this fantasy landscape by sending out thick stellar winds and scorching ultraviolet radiation. The low-density regions of the nebula are shredded while the denser parts resist erosion and remain as thick pillars. In the dark, cold interiors of these columns new stars continue to form."

(qtd. from HubbleSite.org NewsCenter release STScI-2010-13)

Credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Livio and the Hubble 20th Anniversary Team (STScI)

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Galaxy collision images taken by the Hubble iPad Mini Cases

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Galaxy collision images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope Sign up to Mr. Rebates for FREE and save 12% on any zazzle order in addition to a $5.00 sign up bonus All Rights Reserved; without: prejudice, recourse or notice (U.C.C. 1-308) http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Galaxies_Gone_Wild!.jpg galaxy hubble astronomy collision collage

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