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Lawrence Berkeley National LaboratoryMajor advance in artificial photosynthesis poses win/win for the environment

A potentially game-changing breakthrough in artificial photosynthesis has been achieved with the development of a system that can capture carbon dioxide emissions before they are vented into the atmosphere and then, powered by solar energy, convert that carbon dioxide into valuable chemical products, including biodegradable plastics, pharmaceutical drugs and even liquid fuels.

Scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)‘s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley have created a hybrid system of semiconducting nanowires and bacteria that mimics the natural photosynthetic process by which plants use the energy in sunlight to synthesize carbohydrates from and water. However, this new artificial photosynthetic system synthesizes the combination of carbon dioxide and water into acetate, the most common building block today for biosynthesis.

“We believe our system is a revolutionary leap forward in the field of ,” says Peidong Yang, a chemist with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and one of the leaders of this study. “Our system has the potential to fundamentally change the chemical and oil industry in that we can produce chemicals and fuels in a totally renewable way, rather than extracting them from deep below the ground. Read more

By Tasha Keeney, Analyst: Industrial Innovation — Seeking Alpha

In December of last year, Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) announced Prime Air, the company’s plan to deliver future packages by drone (“UAV”). While the media and others mocked this announcement, UAV delivery is likely to disrupt traditional package delivery significantly. If the FAA gives Amazon clearance for commercial rollout of its drone delivery service, the price that a consumer would pay for the delivery of a five-pound package could be as low as $1.1 Just as impressive, delivery times could drop below thirty minutes. As shown below, FedEx Corp. (NYSE:FDX) and United Parcel Service (NYSE:UPS) cost 8–13 times more for much longer delivery times for a small package.2http://static.cdn-seekingalpha.com/uploads/2015/4/17/saupload_AmazonDroneComparison2-e1429221389620_thumb1.pngRead more

By — Fast Company
Mars One, the Netherlands-based nonprofit that wants to send human colonists to Mars using private-industry rockets, has been widely criticized for its unrealistic goals and timeline. This week, in a U.S. House Committee hearing for NASA’s 2016 budget, NASA chief administrator Charles Bolden told the committee that “No commercial company without the support of NASA and government is going to get to Mars,” reports Engadget. Bolden’s statement, while not a direct reference to Mars One, certainly seems to support the skepticism surrounding the project. Read more

By — SingularityHubhttp://cdn.singularityhub.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/4-steps-physics-theory-to-invention-1000x400.jpg

Ever wondered how the technology we use every day came into existence? Sure, an engineer designed it, a manufacturer produced it, and some savvy marketing helped sell you the product, but where did the ideas come from? Many famous inventions and household name technologies originated from research done by physicists, either as byproducts or direct application of their ideas. How does it all happen?

“So as a physicist, what do you actually do?”

Many people outside of academic physics departments often have this question, due to a lack of communication between general public and researchers. Read more

The retrieved global constancy of c in the equivalence principle implies that the vertical distance to the surface of the neutron star has increased compared to the traditional view: the indentation into the “cloth” of spacetime has become deeper.

The stronger the gravitational acceleration, the deeper the trough. The new globally constant-c result due to Noether implies that the spatial distance right down to the “horizon” (surface) of a black hole has become infinite. This novel spatial distance valid from the outside corresponds with the well-known infinite temporal distance valid from the outside for light sent down to, or coming up from, the horizon (Oppenheimer and Snyder, 1939).

So black holes are never finished in finite outer time. But I hear you ask: Is it not quite well known that one can fall-in onto a large black hole in finite astronaut time? Yes, this is correct.

How come? This is the last Noetherian point: The on-board clocks of the astronaut are infinitely slowed. Also our rotating wheel comes to a virtual standstill of its rotation on the horizon (the tangential velocity of the wheel staying invariant in reality while the wheel’s diameter invisibly approaches infinity).

So the Noether wheel teaches us that there is no Hawking radiation. And that general relativity can be re-scaled so that it no longer masks the new c-global constraint. Noether’s genius thus implies that a whole new simpler version of general relativity exists – predictably without any remaining incompatibility to quantum mechanics: a bonanza for young physicists.

c-global forms a no longer ignorable reason to renew the 7 years old Safety Report LSAG of the LHC experiment in Geneva which, in light of Noether’s result, will now with a certain probability produce miniature black holes that can only grow exponentially inside matter.

Dear young generation: I publish this “call to you in 4 parts” on Lifeboat.com before CERN can start to double their in the universe unheard-of center-of-mass collision energies on one celestial body – yours – in the no longer valid hope to create Hawking-evaporating black holes down on earth.

Such pre-Noetherian experiments are scientifically outdated by now and will, if endangering the planet as the Noeterian result implies, in addition constitute a crime against humanity if attempted. Can you help me persuade CERN to kindly reply to this objective criticism of what they have announced to do – before starting to “shoot sharp” in June as still officially planned?

To see what happens, let your Noether wheel rotate about a horizontal axis (that is, rotate vertically). Then the doubled radius will still be optically masked in the horizontal direction, but not so in the vertical direction. Hence you get a 2:1 vertical ellipse.

The optical contraction in the horizontal directions, found to be valid downstairs using the Noether wheel, implies that light will be seen to “creep” downstairs at halved speed when watched from above. This is what Einstein already found in 1907. So everything is fine.

But: does light really creep down there? The answer is no. For the distance travelled is doubled compared to above.

The conserved angular momentum L obeys a simple formula for a constant vertical (or else horizontal) rotation axis of the wheel:

L = ω m r^2

Since this expression is hard to remember by heart, the word “L’hombre” can help even though it is not high-Spanish. ω is the rotation rate, m the mass and r the radius of Noether’s frictionlessly rotating bicycle wheel.

If ω is halved (as on the surface of a neutron star), what about m and r , the other two components of the conserved L ?

You guess it: m is halved and r doubled. How come? The halved mass follows from the halved frequency and hence energy of the photons produced down there. They are locally transformable into particles with mass, via quantum mechanics’ creation and annihilation operators. The resulting half-mass atoms have a doubled Bohr radius: so r is doubled if ω is halved.

But does this doubled size of the wheel rotating downstairs at halved speed not contradict the fact, implicit in the theory which underlies the accelerating Einstein rocketship (special relativity), that light has to travel up and down along straight vertical lines?

The latter fact indeed remains in charge. It thereby entails that the doubled radius of the horizontally rotating wheel must be optically masked when viewed from above. So the wheel looks non-enlarged horizontally when viewed from above – even though its radius r is doubled.

This simple insight amounts to a revolution in physics. It resolves an inconsistency accepted by Einstein in the absence of Noether’s theorem in 1907: that c were reduced downstairs in a constantly accelerating long rocketship in outer space.

Noether allows you to see what happens. She discovered “global conservation of angular momentum in nature” as is well known in 1916.

Take a frictionless bicycle wheel that is suspended from its hub, and lower it and then pull it back up again. What happens if angular momentum is constant all the time as she showed?

Answer: The rotation rate of this “clock” must go down reversibly like that of any other clock. But since angular momentum is conserved (Noether), the other two components in angular momentum besides rotation rate (i.e. mass and radius) cannot both remain unchanged.

This is a wonderful new result enabled by Emmy Noether.

Vicki Turk & Brian Anderson | Motherboard
“That’s another basic thing that the doom-and-gloom, death-is-preferable-to-the-future crowd seem to misunderstand. The world won’t just stay the same, with everyone trudging along in a state of boredom; it’ll keep changing. There’ll be new stuff to do because we’ll keep making new stuff. We’ll get those jetpacks we were promised, and that’s just the start.” Read more