Tuesday 2 September 2014

Foam favorable for oil extraction: Experiments visualize methods for enhanced recovery from wells

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A Rice University laboratory has provided proof that foam may be the right stuff to maximize enhanced oil recovery (EOR). In tests, foam pumped into an experimental rig that mimicked the flow paths deep underground proved better at removing oil from formations with low permeability than common techniques involving water, gas, surfactants or combinations of the three. The open-access paper led by Rice scientists Sibani Lisa Biswal and George Hirasaki was published online today by the Royal Society of Chemistry journal Lab on a Chip. Oil rarely sits in a pool underground waiting to be pumped out to energy-hungry surface dwellers. Often, it lives in formations of rock and sand and hides in small cracks and crevices that have proved devilishly difficult to tap. Drillers pump various substances downhole to loosen and either push or carry oil to the surface. Biswal’s lab has learned a great deal about how foam forms. Now, with an eye toward EOR, she and her colleagues created microfluidic models of formations — they look something like children’s ant farms — to see how well foam stacks up against other materials in removing as much oil as possible. Foam sent through a microfluidic model created at Rice University

The post Foam favorable for oil extraction: Experiments visualize methods for enhanced recovery from wells has been published on Technology Org.

 
#materials 
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Magnetic substorms may sometimes be driven by different process than generally thought

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Magnetic substorms, the disruptions in geomagnetic activity that cause brightening of aurora, may sometimes be driven by a different process than generally thought, a new study shows.

via Science Daily

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Purple Stars Galaxy Space Astronomy Print

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Small Magellanic Cloud Galaxy photograph

This stunning space photograph shows the tip of the Small Magellanic Cloud galaxy (SMC), which is situated about 200,000 light years away. This is a composite image created from data from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. In this picture, it has a beautiful purple, pink and red appearance, and the sky is studded with bright twinkling stars.

Image Credit: NASA/CXC/JPL-Caltech/STScI

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AUDIO: Jupiter and Venus light up morning sky

Science Focus

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The two brightest planets, Jupiter and Venus, are currently aligned in the sky, forming a spectacular "double star" in their closest conjunction since 2000. 
#science 
 » see original post http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-28835629#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa
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Monogram - Sculpted Region of the Orion Nebula Sticker

Here's a great sheet of stickers featuring a beautiful image from deep space


tagged with: peel off, envelope sealers, galaxies and stars, orion nebula detail, sculpted gas clouds, sgcion, stellar winds, sculpting trapezium stars, messier 42, messier 43

Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series A region within the Orion Nebula showing the sculpting effect that stars can have on any surrounding gas clouds. This glowing region reveals arcs and bubbles formed when stellar winds - streams of charged particles ejected by the nearby Trapezium stars - collide with material.

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image code: sgcion

Image credit: NASA, ESA, M. Robberto (Space Telescope Science Institute/ESA) and the Hubble Space Telescope Orion Treasury Project Team

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Holometer: A Microscope into Space and Time

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Lobster Nebula Wall Stickers

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This image from ESO’s VISTA telescope captures a celestial landscape of vast, glowing clouds of gas and tendrils of dust surrounding hot young stars. This infrared view reveals the stellar nursery known as NGC 6357 in a new light. It was taken as part of the VISTA Variables in the Vía Láctea (VVV) survey, which is currently scanning the Milky Way in a bid to map our galaxy’s structure and explain how it formed. Source http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1309a/ Author: ESO/VVV Survey/D. Minniti.

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Hubble ACS SWEEPS Field iPad Folio Cases

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Making cashews safer for those with allergies

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For the millions of adults and children in the U.S. who have to shun nuts to avoid an allergic reaction, help could be on the way. Scientists are now developing a method to process cashews — and potentially other nuts — that could make them safer to eat for people who are allergic to them. The researchers are presenting their work at the 248th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world’s largest scientific society. The meeting, being held here through Thursday, features nearly 12,000 presentations on a wide range of science topics. “The only widely accepted practice for preventing an allergic reaction to nuts is strict avoidance — stay away from the food,” notes Chris Mattison, Ph.D. “Clinical trials to test immunotherapy are underway, but we’re approaching it from an agricultural perspective rather than medical. Can we change the food, instead of treating the person, so we can eliminate or reduce severe reactions?” For those with food allergies, responses to offending products can range from mild itching in the mouth or skin to life-threatening anaphylaxis, which makes it hard to breathe. Once every three minutes, someone in the U.S. ends up in the emergency room due

The post Making cashews safer for those with allergies has been published on Technology Org.

 
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Black Hole Astronomy Space Art Posters

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This NASA space art illustration is an artist's concept of a supermassive black hole. The black hole is surrounded by an accretion disk of matter flowing onto it, and there is a beam of energetic particles flowing outwards. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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Butterfly Nebula in Scorpius Constellation Stickers

Here's a great sheet of stickers featuring a beautiful image from deep space


tagged with: envelope sealers, galaxies and stars, stellar winds, btbgneb, butterfly nebula, bug nebula, scorpius constellation, ngc 6302, sculptured gas clouds

Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series NGC 6302, more popularly called the Bug Nebula or the Butterfly Nebula, lies within our Milky Way galaxy, roughly 3,800 light-years away in the constellation of Scorpius.
The central dying star cannot be seen because it's hidden within a doughnut-shaped ring of dust, which appears as a dark band pinching the nebula in the centre. The thick dust belt constricts the star's outflow, creating the classic "bipolar" or hourglass shape displayed by some planetary nebulae.
The nebula's reddish outer edges are largely due to light emitted by nitrogen, which marks the coolest gas visible in the picture. The white-coloured regions are areas where light is emitted by sulphur. These are regions where fast-moving gas overtakes and collides with slow-moving gas that left the star at an earlier time, producing shock waves in the gas (the bright white edges on the sides facing the central star).

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image code: btbgneb

image credit: NGC 6302 was imaged on 27 July 2009 with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 in ultraviolet and visible light. Filters that isolate emissions from oxygen, helium, hydrogen, nitrogen and sulphur were used to create this composite image.

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30 Doradus Nebula in Infrared Light Wall Sticker

Here's a great wall decal featuring a beautiful image from deep space


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"This is a close-up view of a star-birth region within the 30 Doradus nebula that lies inside the satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud, 170,000 light-years away. ... When viewed by Hubble in near-infrared light (right), innumerable stars and protostars can be seen behind the dusty veil. Newly formed stars are often embedded in clouds of dust, and only the near-infrared light can pass through these clouds."

(qtd. from HubbleSite.org NewsCenter release STScI-2014-02)

Credit: NASA, ESA, and E. Sabbi (STScI)

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The Hubble Ultra-Deep Field iPad Mini Cases

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!


tagged with: hubble ultra-deep field, hudf

The Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (HUDF) is an image of a small region of space in the constellation Fornax, composited from Hubble Space Telescope data accumulated over a period from September 24, 2003, through to January 16, 2004. Looking back approximately 13 billion years (between 400 and 800 million years after the Big Bang) it will be used to search for galaxies that existed at that time. The HUDF image was taken in a section of the sky with a low density of bright stars in the near-field, allowing much better viewing of dimmer, more distant objects. The image contains an estimated 10,000 galaxies. In August and September 2009, the Hubble's Deep Field was expanded using the infrared channel of the recently attached Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). When combined with existing HUDF data, astronomers were able to identify a new list of potentially very distant galaxies.

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Observatory: Research Aimed at the Heart of the Sun

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With the aid of a powerful instrument, researchers have detected subatomic particles produced by fusion reactions at the very core of the sun.















via New York Times