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WASHINGTON — NASA selected Rocket Lab to launch a pair of cubesats in 2024 to monitor energy entering and exiting the polar regions of the planet.

NASA announced Aug. 14 it awarded a task order through its Venture-class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) contract to Rocket Lab for the launch of two 6U cubesats for the Polar Radiant Energy in the Far-InfraRed Experiment, or PREFIRE mission.

The NASA announcement did not disclose the value of the task order. The agency stated in past awards done under VADR that the pricing is considered “proprietary” because the awards are competed in a closed environment, with only companies on the VADR contract eligible to bid on launches of taxpayer-funded missions.

A new airplane seat concept that allows wheelchair users to stay in their own chair throughout a flight was revealed this week by a subsidiary of US airline Delta, a move welcomed as a “huge step” by potential customers.

“Unbelievably excited,” is how power wheelchair user and avid traveler Cory Lee described his reaction after a working prototype of the design was demonstrated by Delta Flight Products (DFP) at the Aircraft Interiors Expo (AIX) in Hamburg, Germany, a symposium spotlighting airplane cabin innovations.

DFP’s concept seamlessly converts to and from a traditional airplane seat. The built-in seat folds up to allow a wheelchair to be docked into place. The seat would be installed into pre-existing aircraft seat track systems, so would not involve any structural change to the airplane.

Last year, NASA undertook its first planetary defense mission with the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART). The goal was to divert the moonlet Dimorphos from its orbit, demonstrating that an asteroid could be redirected in the case of a catastrophic course toward Earth.

The spacecraft’s impact, while altering the moonlet’s orbit, also resulted in the dispersal of 37 boulders from its surface. Some of these space rocks are as wide as 22 feet off its surface.

The DART mission was watched intently across the globe on September 26, 2022. The spacecraft successfully shifted Dimorphos’s orbit from an original 11 hours and 55 minutes to 11 hours and 23 minutes post-impact.

The polluting emission is rarely recycled and does much damage to the planet.

Methane is an extremely harmful emission and one that is rarely recycled. Now, researchers from the University of Central Florida have found a way to transform it into energy and materials.

This is according to a press release by the institution published on Friday.

Continue reading “Scientists find a way to turn methane into energy, materials” »

What if you could turn concrete into a viable and effective energy storage option? While that might seem a bit out-of-this-world, that’s exactly what MIT researchers have managed to do, according to reports from New Atlas. A paper on the new concrete supercapacitor is also available in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

According to this research, MIT researchers were able to take an idea from 2021 – which said that you could store useful amounts of energy in concrete – and scale it up effectively by simply adding a single additive to the concrete mix. The mixture thus became a combination of concrete, water, and carbon black.

When combined, the three components allowed the researchers to create an energy-storing concrete supercapacitor that was easy to scale up, with it only requiring a change from “1-millimeter-thick electrodes to 1-meter-thick electrodes” to go from powering simple things like LED lights to full-blown buildings and homes.

Irradiating a uniaxial magnetic system with a specific sequence of microwave pulses can induce in the system quantum oscillations that cause the material’s spins to flip back and forth.

To make higher-density magnetic data systems, researchers are looking to crystalline materials that have switchable magnetic orientations. But for some of these materials, switching the magnetization direction—for example from spin-up to spin-down—requires overcoming a large energy barrier. Now Seiji Miyashita at the University of Tokyo and Bernard Barbara of the Institut Néel, CNRS Grenoble, France, predict that experimentalists could reverse a material’s magnetization by applying to it a specific sequence of microwave or optical-frequency pulses [1]. The approach could find applications in quantum information storage.

To reverse the spin of a magnetic material, researchers can apply high temperatures or high magnetic fields to push the system over the potential energy barrier that separates its spin states. Another option is to induce resonant quantum tunneling to move electrons through the barrier. Miyashita and Barbara propose a further method that bypasses the constraints associated with the application of intense magnetic fields in these previous methods.

A team from the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering has invented a device that leverages electrochemistry to increase the efficiency of direct air carbon capture. Their alternative strategy aims to accelerate the widespread adoption of this emerging technology.

“The technology required to pull carbon directly out of the air has been developing for decades, but the field is now accelerating with governments and industry investing in the infrastructure required to actually do this at scale,” says David Sinton, a professor in the faculty’s department of mechanical and industrial engineering and senior author on a paper published in Joule that outlines the new technique.

“One key barrier is that current processes require a lot of energy, and indeed emit a fair amount of carbon themselves,” says Sinton, who holds a Canada Research Chair in microfluidics and energy and is academic director of the Climate Positive Energy Initiative, one of U of T’s Institutional Strategic Initiatives.

Form Energy, led by a former Tesla executive and backed by Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures, sees the cheap metal as a solution to banking surplus green power.

And the results are even more spectacular.