Scientists develop a cool new method of refrigeration

Adding salt to a road before a winter storm changes when ice will form. Researchers at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have applied this basic concept to develop a new method of heating and cooling. The technique, which they have named "ionocaloric cooling," is described in a paper published Dec. 23 in the journal Science.

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Betelgeuse Visualisation

Astronomers Pierre Kervella and Dr. Bernd Freytag used data gathered over 7 years to create this animation of what Betelgeuse might look like, due to the very low density of red super giants, fluctuations inside cause material to be flung out millions of miles before eventually falling back.

"If it were at the center of our Solar System, its surface would lie beyond the asteroid belt and it would engulf the orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars"

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The brain's ability to perceive space expands like the universe

Young children sometimes believe that the moon is following them, or that they can reach out and touch it. It appears to be much closer than is proportional to its true distance. As we move about our daily lives, we tend to think that we navigate space in a linear way. But Salk scientists have discovered that time spent exploring an environment causes neural representations to grow in surprising ways...

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99% Efficiency: Princeton Engineers Have Developed a New Way To Remove Microplastics From Water
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Scientists Have Discovered an Enzyme That Converts Air Into Electricity

Australian researchers have uncovered an enzyme capable of transforming air into energy. The study, which was recently published in the prestigious journal Nature, shows that the enzyme utilizes small amounts of hydrogen in the air to generate an electrical current. This breakthrough paves the way for the development of devices that can literally generate energy from thin air.

While this research is at an early stage, the discovery of Huc has considerable potential to develop small air-powered devices, for example as an alternative to solar-powered devices.

The bacteria that produce the required enzyme are common and can be grown in large quantities, meaning we have access to a sustainable source of the enzyme. Dr. Grinter says that a key objective for future work is to scale up production. “Once we produce Huc in sufficient quantities, the sky is quite literally the limit for using it to produce clean energy.”

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Physicists Claim Creation of a Superconductor at Near-Ambient Conditions

Few discoveries in science would revolutionize technology as much as a material that achieves superconductivity at room temperature, under relatively mild pressures.

A team of physicists led by Ranga Dias, a physicist from the University of Rochester in New York now claims they might have cracked it, demonstrating a rare earth metal called lutetium combined with hydrogen and nitrogen can conduct electricity without resistance at 21 degrees Celsius (70 degrees Fahrenheit) and around just 10,000 atmospheres of pressure, the team reports.

If confirmed by other researchers, this would be a huge breakthrough in creating devices that don't waste energy on heat when producing a current.

Ideally this could one day be used to create more efficient computers; faster, frictionless maglev trains; superior X-ray technology; and even more powerful nuclear fusion reactors...

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Scientists Say The Moon Needs Its Own Lunar Time Zone. Here's Why.

On July 21, 1969, Neil Armstrong took that first fateful step onto the Moon. The exact moment occurred just as our planet's standard universal time hit 2.56 am. But what time was it for Neil?

There's currently no answer to that question, but with plans in place to inhabit the Moon, that may need to change.

At a recent meeting in the Netherlands, members from space organizations around the world agreed that we need to implement a proper lunar time zone – an internationally accepted common lunar reference time that all future missions can use to communicate and navigate with ease.

"A joint international effort is now being launched towards achieving this," says navigation system engineer Pietro Giordano from the European Space Agency (ESA).

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