Lifeboat Foundation

What processes provide energy to the solar wind as it travels away from the Sun and throughout the solar system? This is what a recent study published in Science hopes to address as an international team of researchers investigated the processes responsible for providing energy to the solar wind as it leaves the Sun and traverses the rest of the solar system. This study holds the potential to help astronomers better understand the Sun’s processes, which could also provide insight into the processes of other stars, as well.

“Our study addresses a huge open question about how the solar wind is energized and helps us understand how the Sun affects its environment and, ultimately, the Earth,” said Dr. Yeimy Rivera, who is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and lead author of the study. “If this process happens in our local star, it’s highly likely that this powers winds from other stars across the Milky Way galaxy and beyond and could have implications for the habitability of exoplanets.”

For the study, the researchers used solar wind data from NASA’s Parker Solar Probe and the joint NASA-ESA Solar Orbiter collected within two days of each other due to the spacecraft being aligned with each other, enabling this research to be conducted. For context, the Parker Solar Probe is currently orbiting inside the Sun’s corona while Solar Orbiter is orbiting approximately halfway between the Earth and the Sun. In the end, the researchers found the solar wind’s acceleration that occurs between the Sun and the Earth is due to what are called “Alfvén waves”, which transport energy through the solar plasma. However, researchers haven’t been able to measure Alfvén waves until now.

Wave energy convertors can work round the clock as reliable source of renewable energy, if a cost-effective method can be arrived at.

The most powerful battery in Australia, and biggest single power unit ever to be connected to the country’s main grid, has completed the first stage of its connection and commissioning process, according to its owner Akaysha Energy.

The Waratah Super Battery will be sized at 850 megawatts (MW) and 1,680 megawatt hours (MWh), and its principal role will be to act as a kind of giant shock absorber, allowing the power lines transporting renewable power from the regions to the major load centres on the coast to operate at or near full capacity.

The battery is being built at the site of the already shuttered Munmorah coal fired generator, and will play a key role as the state’s remaining coal fired power plants are retired, even though the closure of the biggest of them all, the 2.88 GW Eraring generator, has been pushed back by at least two years to late 2027.

Physicists Successfully Demonstrate Quantum Energy Teleportation in Lab Experiments

TL;DR

Bob finds himself in need of energy — he wants to charge that fanciful quantum battery — but all he has access to is empty space. Fortunately, his friend Alice has a fully equipped physics lab in a far-off location. Alice measures the field in her lab, injecting energy into it there and learning about its fluctuations. This experiment bumps the overall field out of the ground state, but as far as Bob can tell, his vacuum remains in the minimum-energy state, randomly fluctuating. But then Alice texts Bob her findings about the vacuum around her location, essentially telling Bob when to plug in his battery. After Bob reads her message, he can use the newfound knowledge to prepare an experiment that extracts energy from the vacuum — up to the amount injected by Alice.

Researchers at Swansea University, in collaboration with Wuhan University of Technology, Shenzhen University, have developed a pioneering technique for producing large-scale graphene current collectors.

This breakthrough promises to significantly enhance the safety and performance of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs), addressing a critical challenge in energy storage technology.

Published in Nature Chemical Engineering, the study details the first successful protocol for fabricating defect-free graphene foils on a commercial scale. These foils offer extraordinary thermal conductivity—up to 1,400.8 W m^–1 K^–1 —nearly ten times higher than traditional copper and aluminum current collectors used in LIBs.

An invisible, weak energy field wrapped around our planet Earth has finally been detected and measured.

It’s called the ambipolar field, an electric field first hypothesized more than 60 years ago, and its discovery will change the way we study and understand the behavior and evolution of our beautiful, ever-changing world.

Continue reading “Scientists Detect Invisible Electric Field Around Earth For First Time” »

Using a polymer to make a strong yet springy thin film, scientists led by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory are speeding the arrival of next-generation solid-state batteries. This effort advances the development of electric vehicle power enabled by flexible, durable sheets of solid-state electrolytes.

The sheets may allow scalable production of future solid-state batteries with higher energy density electrodes. By separating negative and positive electrodes, they would prevent dangerous electrical shorts while providing high-conduction paths for ion movement.

These achievements foreshadow greater safety, performance and energy density compared to current batteries that use liquid electrolytes, which are flammable, chemically reactive, thermally unstable and prone to leakage.

“There are many open clusters in the galaxy. However, not all open clusters have the same level of interest to astronomers,” Ignacio Negueruela, a researcher at the Universidad de Alicante who was part of the team behind the discovery of supergiants in Barbá 2, told Space.com. “Clusters rich in red supergiants are very rare and tend to be very far away, but they play a crucial role in understanding key aspects in the evolution of massive stars.”

The intimidating size and power of supergiants means these monster stars burn through their nuclear fuel much faster than stars like the sun. Whereas our star will exist in its main sequence lifetime for around 10 billion years, supergiants are estimated to last just a few million years.

The short lifetime of supergiants means that while open clusters like Barbá 2 are common, with over 1,100 already discovered in the Milky Way alone, finding one packed with red supergiants is extremely rare.

We present the direct experimental observation of the formation of a diamagnetic cavity and magneto-Rayleigh-Taylor (MRT) instability in a betaapprox1 high energy density plasma. Proton radiography is used to measure the two dimensional path-integrated magnetic field in a laser-produced plasma propagating parallel to a preimposed magnetic field. Flutelike structures, associated with the MRT instability, are observed to grow at the surface of the cavity, with a measured wavelength of 1.2 mm and growth time of 4 ns. These measurements are in good agreement with predictions of three dimensional magnetohydrodynamic simulations using the GORGON code.