‘Diamond rain’ on Uranus and Neptune seems likely

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This illustration shows the diamond rain on Neptune. (Image credit: Greg Stewart/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)

By , Live Science

The ice giants Uranus and Neptune don’t get nearly enough press; all the attention goes to their larger siblings, mighty Jupiter and magnificent Saturn.

At first glance, Uranus and Neptune are just bland, boring balls of uninteresting molecules. But hiding beneath the outer layers of those worlds, there may be something spectacular: a constant rain of diamonds.

“ice giants” may conjure the image of a Tolkien-esque creature, but it’s the name astronomers use to categorize the outermost planets of the solar system, Uranus and Neptune.

Confusingly, though, the name has nothing to do with ice in the sense you would normally recognize it — as in, say, ice cubes in your drink. The distinction comes from what these planets are made of. The gas giants of the system, Jupiter and Saturn, are made almost entirely of gas: hydrogen and helium. It’s through the rapid accretion of those elements that these huge planets managed to swell to their current size.

In contrast, Uranus and Neptune are made mostly of water, ammonia and methane. Astronomers commonly call these molecules “ices,” but there really isn’t a good reason for it, except that when the planets first formed, those elements were likely in solid form.

Into the (not so) icy depths
Deep beneath the green or blue cloud tops of Uranus and Neptune, there’s a lot of water, ammonia and methane. But these ice giants likely have rocky cores surrounded by elements that are probably compressed into exotic quantum states. At some point, that quantum weirdness transitions into a super-pressurized “soup” that generally thins out the closer you get to the surface.

But truth be told, we don’t know a lot about the interiors of the ice giants. The last time we got close-up data of those two worlds was three decades ago, when Voyager 2 whizzed by in its historic mission.

Since then, Jupiter and Saturn have played host to multiple orbiting probes, yet our views of Uranus and Neptune have been limited to telescope observations.

To try to understand what’s inside those planets, astronomers and planetary scientists have to take that meager data and combine it with laboratory experiments that try to replicate the conditions of those planets’ interiors. Plus, they use some good old-fashioned math — a lot of it. Mathematical modeling helps astronomers understand what’s happening in a given situation based on limited data.

And it’s through that combination of mathematical modeling and laboratory experiments that we realized Uranus and Neptune might have so-called diamond rain.

Click here to read the full article on Live Science.

7 ways Einstein changed the world
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black and white photo of einstein looking at the camera

By , Live Science

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) is one of the most famous scientists of all time, and his name has become almost synonymous with the word “genius.”

While his reputation owes something to his eccentric appearance and occasional pronouncements on philosophy, world politics and other non-scientific topics, his real claim to fame comes from his contributions to modern physics, which have changed our entire perception of the universe and helped shape the world we live in today.

Here’s a look at some of the world-changing concepts we owe to Einstein.

Space-time

One of Einstein’s earliest achievements, at the age of 26, was his theory of special relativity — so-called because it deals with relative motion in the special case where gravitational forces are neglected. This may sound innocuous, but it was one of the greatest scientific revolutions in history, completely changing the way physicists think about space and time. In effect, Einstein merged these into a single space-time continuum. One reason we think of space and time as being completely separate is because we measure them in different units, such as miles and seconds, respectively. But Einstein showed how they are actually interchangeable, linked to each other through the speed of light — approximately 186,000 miles per second (300,000 kilometers per second).

Perhaps the most famous consequence of special relativity is that nothing can travel faster than light. But it also means that things start to behave very oddly as the speed of light is approached. If you could see a spaceship that was traveling at 80% the speed of light, it would look 40% shorter than when it appeared at rest. And if you could see inside, everything would appear to move in slow motion, with a clock taking 100 seconds to tick through a minute, according to Georgia State University’s HyperPhysics website. This means the spaceship’s crew would actually age more slowly the faster they are traveling.

E = mc^2

An unexpected offshoot of special relativity was Einstein’s celebrated equation E = mc^2, which is likely the only mathematical formula to have reached the status of cultural icon. The equation expresses the equivalence of mass (m) and energy (E), two physical parameters previously believed to be completely separate. In traditional physics, mass measures the amount of matter contained in an object, whereas energy is a property the object has by virtue of its motion and the forces acting on it. Additionally, energy can exist in the complete absence of matter, for example in light or radio waves. However, Einstein’s equation says that mass and energy are essentially the same thing, as long as you multiply the mass by c^2 — the square of the speed of light, which is a very big number — to ensure it ends up in the same units as energy.

This means that an object gains mass as it moves faster, simply because it’s gaining energy. It also means that even an inert, stationary object has a huge amount of energy locked up inside it. Besides being a mind-blowing idea, the concept has practical applications in the world of high-energy particle physics. According to the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN), if sufficiently energetic particles are smashed together, the energy of the collision can create new matter in the form of additional particles.

Lasers

Lasers are an essential component of modern technology and are used in everything from barcode readers and laser pointers to holograms and fiber-optic communication. Although lasers are not commonly associated with Einstein, it was ultimately his work that made them possible. The word laser, coined in 1959, stands for “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation” — and stimulated emission is a concept Einstein developed more than 40 years earlier, according to the American Physical Society. In 1917, Einstein wrote a paper on the quantum theory of radiation that described, among other things, how a photon of light passing through a substance could stimulate the emission of further photons.

Einstein realized that the new photons travel in the same direction, and with the same frequency and phase, as the original photon. This results in a cascade effect as more and more virtually identical photons are produced. As a theoretician, Einstein didn’t take the idea any further, while other scientists were slow to recognize the enormous practical potential of stimulated emission. But the world got there in the end, and people are still finding new applications for lasers today, from anti-drone weapons to super-fast computers.

Black holes and wormholes

Einstein’s theory of special relativity showed that space-time can do some pretty weird things even in the absence of gravitational fields. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg, as Einstein discovered when he finally succeeded in adding gravity into the mix, in his theory of general relativity. He found that massive objects like planets and stars actually distort the fabric of space-time, and it’s this distortion that produces the effects we perceive as gravity.

Einstein explained general relativity through a complex set of equations, which have an enormous range of applications. Perhaps the most famous solution to Einstein’s equations came from Karl Schwarzschild’s solution in 1916 — a black hole. Even weirder is a solution that Einstein himself developed in 1935 in collaboration with Nathan Rosen, describing the possibility of shortcuts from one point in space-time to another. Originally dubbed Einstein-Rosen bridges, these are now known to all fans of science fiction by the more familiar name of wormholes.

The expanding universe

One of the first things Einstein did with his equations of general relativity, back in 1915, was to apply them to the universe as a whole. But the answer that came out looked wrong to him. It implied that the fabric of space itself was in a state of continuous expansion, pulling galaxies along with it so the distances between them were constantly growing. Common sense told Einstein that this couldn’t be true, so he added something called the cosmological constant to his equations to produce a well-behaved, static universe.

But in 1929, Edwin Hubble’s observations of other galaxies showed that the universe really is expanding, apparently in just the way that Einstein’s original equations predicted. It looked like the end of the line for the cosmological constant, which Einstein later described as his biggest blunder. That wasn’t the end of the story, however. Based on more refined measurements of the expansion of the universe, we now know that it’s speeding up, rather than slowing down as it ought to in the absence of a cosmological constant. So it looks as though Einstein’s “blunder” wasn’t such an error after all.

Click here to read the full article on Live Science.

Artificial Photosynthesis Can Produce Food in Complete Darkness
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Plants are growing in complete darkness in an acetate medium that replaces biological photosynthesis. Credit: Marcus Harland-Dunaway/UCR

By Sci Tech Daily

For millions of years, photosynthesis has evolved in plants to turn water, carbon dioxide, and the energy from sunlight into plant biomass and the foods we eat. However, this process is very inefficient, with only around 1% of the energy found in sunlight ending up in the plant. Researchers at the University of California, Riverside and the University of Delaware have found a way to bypass the need for biological photosynthesis altogether and create food independent of sunlight by using artificial photosynthesis.

The new research, published on June 23, 2022, in the journal Nature Food, uses a two-step electrocatalytic process to convert carbon dioxide, electricity, and water into acetate, the form of the main component of vinegar. Food-producing organisms then consume acetate in the dark to grow. Combined with solar panels to generate electricity to power the electrocatalysis, this hybrid organic-inorganic system could increase the conversion efficiency of sunlight into food, up to 18 times more efficient for some foods.

“With our approach we sought to identify a new way of producing food that could break through the limits normally imposed by biological photosynthesis,” said corresponding author Robert Jinkerson, a UC Riverside assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering.

In order to integrate all the components of the system together, the output of the electrolyzer was optimized to support the growth of food-producing organisms. Electrolyzers are devices that use electricity to convert raw materials like carbon dioxide into useful molecules and products. The amount of acetate produced was increased while the amount of salt used was decreased, resulting in the highest levels of acetate ever produced in an electrolyzer to date.

“Using a state-of-the-art two-step tandem CO2 electrolysis setup developed in our laboratory, we were able to achieve a high selectivity towards acetate that cannot be accessed through conventional CO2 electrolysis routes,” said corresponding author Feng Jiao at University of Delaware.

Experiments showed that a wide range of food-producing organisms can be grown in the dark directly on the acetate-rich electrolyzer output, including green algae, yeast, and fungal mycelium that produce mushrooms. Producing algae with this technology is approximately fourfold more energy efficient than growing it photosynthetically. Yeast production is about 18-fold more energy efficient than how it is typically cultivated using sugar extracted from corn.

“We were able to grow food-producing organisms without any contributions from biological photosynthesis. Typically, these organisms are cultivated on sugars derived from plants or inputs derived from petroleum—which is a product of biological photosynthesis that took place millions of years ago. This technology is a more efficient method of turning solar energy into food, as compared to food production that relies on biological photosynthesis,” said Elizabeth Hann, a doctoral candidate in the Jinkerson Lab and co-lead author of the study.

The potential for employing this technology to grow crop plants was also investigated. Cowpea, tomato, tobacco, rice, canola, and green pea were all able to utilize carbon from acetate when cultivated in the dark.

“We found that a wide range of crops could take the acetate we provided and build it into the major molecular building blocks an organism needs to grow and thrive. With some breeding and engineering that we are currently working on we might be able to grow crops with acetate as an extra energy source to boost crop yields,” said Marcus Harland-Dunaway, a doctoral candidate in the Jinkerson Lab and co-lead author of the study.

By liberating agriculture from complete dependence on the sun, artificial photosynthesis opens the door to countless possibilities for growing food under the increasingly difficult conditions imposed by anthropogenic climate change. Drought, floods, and reduced land availability would be less of a threat to global food security if crops for humans and animals grew in less resource-intensive, controlled environments. Crops could also be grown in cities and other areas currently unsuitable for agriculture, and even provide food for future space explorers.

“Using artificial photosynthesis approaches to produce food could be a paradigm shift for how we feed people. By increasing the efficiency of food production, less land is needed, lessening the impact agriculture has on the environment. And for agriculture in non-traditional environments, like outer space, the increased energy efficiency could help feed more crew members with less inputs,” said Jinkerson.

This approach to food production was submitted to NASA’s Deep Space Food Challenge where it was a Phase I winner. The Deep Space Food Challenge is an international competition where prizes are awarded to teams to create novel and game-changing food technologies that require minimal inputs and maximize safe, nutritious, and palatable food outputs for long-duration space missions.

Click here to read the full article on Sci Tech Daily.

The next Elon Musk? Meet Alexandr Wang, CEO of Scale AI and the world’s youngest self-made billionaire at 25, who already counts Toyota and PayPal as clients
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Alexandr Wang is the son of two physicists, and clearly inherited aptitude for science. Photo: Alexandr Wang/Facebook

By SCMP

Alexandr Wang, the tech entrepreneur and CEO founder of Scale AI, has recently made global headlines for becoming the world’s youngest self-made billionaire. He is 25 years old.
So who exactly is the young Asian-American billionaire and how did he make his fortune? We take a closer look.

He started his company after dropping out of college. Wang began studying for his BS in Mathematics and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology (aka MIT). In the summer after completing his first-year year at the prestigious New England university, he started Scale with fellow young tech whizz Lucy Guo.

According to Forbes, the two co-founders met while both working at question and answer platform Quora. The entrepreneurial duo started the venture with investment from US start-up accelerator Y Combinator. On starting Scale, Wang recounted to Forbes, “I told my parents it was just going to be a thing I did for the summer … Obviously, I never went back to school.” He’s now worth US$1 billion. Last year Wang’s company received investment funding of some US$350 million. This financial backing, coupled with the fact that Scale is already enjoying US$100 million in revenue, valued the young entrepreneur’s company at a massive US$7.3 billion. Thanks to his one per cent stake in the company, Forbes has therefore estimated that his net worth is now US$1 billion. Not too bad for a 25-year-old. In fact, at the time of writing he was ranked 2,534th on the Forbes list of world billionaires.

He comes from a scientific family. The young billionaire’s technological and scientific prowess is perhaps in part due to his family background. Growing up in New Mexico, Wang’s parents were both physicists who worked on projects for the American military, according to Prestige.
Clearly inheriting a strong intellect himself, Wang would regularly compete in maths and coding competitions at school. By the age of 17, when most high school students are likely prepping for their journey towards university and beyond, Wang was coding full time for Quora.

He was previously featured on Forbes. Before achieving the noteworthy distinction of being the youngest self-made billionaire on the planet, Wang had already been name checked in Forbes’ 2018 30 under 30 list. The annual list showcases the most remarkable up-and-coming young entrepreneurs, stars, thought leaders and bright minds across a range of different industries and spheres. Wang and his Scale co-founder Lucy Guo, were included in the esteemed list in the Enterprise Technology category. His company’s technology is used by more than 300 companies. As per Scale’s “about” page on their company website, the organisation aims to “accelerate the development of AI applications”.

Click here to read the full article on SCMP.

Crucial Antarctic ice shelf could fail within five years, scientists say
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An ITGC field site on Thwaites Glacier. (Peter Davis/British Antarctic Survey)

By Sarah Kaplan, The Washington Post

Scientists have discovered a series of worrying weaknesses in the ice shelf holding back one of Antarctica’s most dangerous glaciers, suggesting that this important buttress against sea level rise could shatter within the next three to five years.

Until recently, the ice shelf was seen as the most stable part of Thwaites Glacier, a Florida-sized frozen expanse that already contributes about 4 percent of annual global sea level rise. Because of this brace, the eastern portion of Thwaites flowed more slowly than the rest of the notorious “doomsday glacier.”

But new data show that the warming ocean is eroding the eastern ice shelf from below. Satellite images taken as recently as last month and presented Monday at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union show several large, diagonal cracks extending across the floating ice wedge.

These weak spots are like cracks in a windshield, said Oregon State University glaciologist Erin Pettit. One more blow and they could spiderweb across the entire ice shelf surface.

“This eastern ice shelf is likely to shatter into hundreds of icebergs,” she said. “Suddenly the whole thing would collapse.”

The failure of the shelf would not immediately accelerate global sea level rise. The shelf already floats on the ocean surface, taking up the same amount of space whether it is solid or liquid.

But when the shelf fails, the eastern third of Thwaites Glacier will triple in speed, spitting formerly landlocked ice into the sea. Total collapse of Thwaites could result in several feet of sea level rise, scientists say, endangering millions of people in coastal areas.

“It’s upwardly mobile in terms of how much ice it could put into the ocean in the future as these processes continue,” said Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, and a leader of the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC). He spoke to reporters via Zoom from McMurdo Station on the coast of Antarctica, where he is awaiting a flight to his field site atop the crumbling ice shelf.

“Things are evolving really rapidly here,” Scambos added. “It’s daunting.”

Pettit and Scambos’s observations also show that the warming ocean is loosening the ice shelf’s grip on the underwater mountain that helps it act as a brace against the ice river at its back. Even if the fractures don’t cause the shelf to disintegrate, it is likely to become completely unmoored from the seafloor within the next decade.

Other researchers from the ITGC revealed chaos in the “grounding zone” where the land-bound portion of the glacier connects to the floating shelf that extends out over the sea. Ocean water there is hot, by Antarctic standards, and where it enters crevasses it can create “hot spots” of melting.

Without its protective ice shelf, scientists fear that Thwaites may become vulnerable to ice cliff collapse, a process in which towering walls of ice that directly overlook the ocean start to crumble into the sea.

Click here to read the full article on the Washington Post.

Ketchup on Mars: Heinz preps for a future with condiments on the red planet
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Heinz Ketchup Bottle in space

By , C|Net

Matt Damon in The Martian was one letter off. Instead of potatoes, he should have been growing tomatoes, with an eye toward making space-ketchup. Because what’s the point of French fries on Mars if you don’t have anything to dip them in?

Heinz, a brand of ketchup you may have heard of, enlisted a team of astrobiologists to answer the most pressing question of our time: Will future human settlers on Mars be able to make their own ketchup?

Heinz collaborated with 14 astrobiologists at the Aldrin Space Institute at Florida Tech to grow tomatoes in a simulated Martian soil.

“The team successfully yielded a crop of Heinz tomatoes, from the brand’s proprietary tomato seeds, with the exacting qualities that pass the rigorous quality and taste standards to become its iconic ketchup,” the company said in a statement on Monday.

You can’t buy a bottle of the Heinz Marz Edition ketchup, but you can take comfort in knowing your great-great-(great?)-grandchildren living inside their Muskville domes on the red planet will be able to slather some of the good stuff on their burger buns.

While this is a clever bit of marketing, there was also some serious science happening.

“Before now, most efforts around discovering ways to grow in Martian-simulated conditions are short-term plant growth studies. What this project has done is look at long-term food harvesting. Achieving a crop that is of a quality to become Heinz Tomato Ketchup was the dream result and we achieved it,” said astrobiologist Andrew Palmer, who led the two-year project.

Click here to read the full article on C|Net.

Chevron Pledges Net-Zero Operational Emissions By 2050
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Chevron has set a target to cut emissions to net-zero by 2050 for equity upstream Scope 1 and 2 emissions.

By Bojan Lepic, Rigzone

USA-based supermajor Chevron has set a target to cut emissions to net-zero by 2050 for equity upstream Scope 1 and 2 emissions.

Chevron issued an updated climate change resilience report that further details the company’s ambition to advance our lower-carbon future.

The company adopted a 2050 net-zero aspiration for equity upstream Scope 1 and 2 emissions. It is worth noting that unlike many other major companies like Shell and Eni, Chevron did not include greenhouse gases from all fuel products they sell or scope 3 in its net-zero pledge.

But, in its TCFD-aligned report, it describes how the company is incorporating Scope 3 emissions into its greenhouse gas emission targets by establishing a Portfolio Carbon Intensity (PCI) target inclusive of Scope 1 and 2 as well as Scope 3 emissions from the use of its products.

“Solutions start with problem-solving, which is exactly what the people of Chevron do – and have excelled at for over 140 years,” said Michael Wirth, Chevron’s chairman and CEO. “This report offers further insights about our strategy, how we are investing in lower-carbon businesses and why we believe this is an exciting time to be in the energy industry.”

Chevron’s new PCI target assists with transparent carbon accounting and company comparison from publicly available data. The target covers the full value chain, including Scope 3 emissions from the use of products.

The oil major, which last month pledged to triple its investments to $10 billion to reduce its carbon emissions footprint, set a greater than 5 percent carbon emissions intensity reduction target from 2016 levels by 2028.

This target is aligned with Chevron’s strategy which allows flexibility to grow its traditional business, provided it remains increasingly carbon-efficient, and pursue growth in lower-carbon businesses. The company plans to publish a PCI methodology document and online tool to enable third parties to calculate PCI for energy companies.

According to Chevron, its 2050 equity upstream Scope 1 and 2 net-zero aspiration builds on the company’s disciplined approach to target setting and action. Chevron anticipates that the path to this net-zero aspiration would include partnerships with multiple stakeholders and progress in technology, policy, regulations, and offset markets.

Click here to read the full article on Rigzone.

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