Lifeboat Foundation

Photosynthesis drives all life on Earth. Complex processes are required for the sunlight-powered conversion of carbon dioxide and water to energy-rich sugar and oxygen. These processes are driven by two protein complexes, photosystems I and II. In photosystem I, sunlight is used with an efficiency of almost 100%. Here a complex network of 288 chlorophylls plays the decisive role.

A team led by LMU chemist Regina de Vivie-Riedle has now characterized these chlorophylls with the help of high-precision quantum chemical calculations—an important milestone toward a comprehensive understanding of energy transfer in this system. This discovery may help exploit its efficiency in artificial systems in the future.

The chlorophylls in photosystem I capture sunlight in an antenna complex and transfer the energy to a reaction center. There, the solar energy is used to trigger a redox process—that is to say, a chemical process whereby electrons are transferred. The quantum yield of photosystem I is almost 100%, meaning that almost every absorbed photon leads to a redox event in the reaction center.

Hugely powerful lasers are shining light on the cosmos and can generate energy using the same process that occurs in the scorching interior of stars.

A team of researchers at UT Wein in Austria have developed an innovative oxygen-ion battery that is cleaner and safer than lithium-ion.

Researchers at Technische Universität Wien (TU Wien) in Vienna, Austria, have made an oxygen-ion battery that could be used in large energy storage systems instead of lithium-ion batteries. Even though the energy density of an oxygen-ion battery is not quite as high as that of a lithium-ion battery, it has some important advantages.

Continue reading “This oxygen-ion battery could be the battery of the future” »

The secret to a perfect croissant is the layers—as many as possible, each one interspersed with butter. Similarly, a new material with promise for new applications is made of many extremely thin layers of metal, between which scientists can slip different ions for various purposes. This makes them potentially very useful for future high-tech electronics or energy storage.

Until recently, these materials—known as MXenes, pronounced “max-eens”—were as labor-intensive as good croissants made in a French bakery.

But a new breakthrough by scientists with the University of Chicago shows how to make these MXenes far more quickly and easily, with fewer toxic byproducts.

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It’s incredibly rechargeable, made from safe materials, and—get this—not going to catch on fire.

(CNN) — Startup Relativity Space sent what it’s calling the “world’s first 3D-printed rocket” toward space on Wednesday, vaulting it into the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Though, it suffered an engine issue after launch and failed to reach orbit.

Terran 1, a 110-foot-tall (33.5-meter) vehicle designed to haul lightweight satellites into orbital space, lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Florida’s eastern coast at just before 11:30 pm ET. The rocket, powered by super-chilled methane and oxygen, burned a bright blue-green against the night sky.

After the first stage of the rocket — the bottommost portion of the rocket that gives the initial thrust at liftoff — expended its fuel, it detached from the rocket’s upper stage. But the engine meant to propel that portion appeared to ignite only briefly, leaving the rocket without enough power to reach orbit.

The animation shows a subset of more than 1,500 light curves collected by the Large Area Telescope over nearly 15 years in space.

NASA has released an intriguing animated video of the sky in gamma rays, the “highest-energy form of light”. Captured by the Large Area Telescope (LAT) aboard NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, the animation shows activity during observations from February 2022 to February 2023.

According to a press release, the “pulsing circles represent just a subset of more than 1,500 light curves – records of how sources change in brightness over time – collected by the LAT over nearly 15 years in space”. The LAT detects gamma rays with energies ranging from 20 million to over 300 billion electron volts.

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A term MEG refers to motionless electromagnetic generator circuit which is designed to generate electrical energy without using any moving components or involving any kind of mechanical stages.

The device is made solely through a strategic placement and interaction of permanent magnets, coils and a ferromagnetic core. The specialty of this device as claimed by the inventors and researchers lies in its potential to generate an output power much higher than the induced input triggering power.

Designing, building, and launching a spacecraft is hugely expensive. That’s why NASA missions to Mars are designed with the hope that they’ll last as long as possible — like the famous Opportunity rover which was supposed to last for 90 days and managed to keep going for 15 years. The longer a mission can keep running, the more data it can collect, and the more we can learn from it.

That’s true for the orbiters which travel around Mars as well as the rovers which explore its surface, like the Mars Odyssey spacecraft which was launched in 2001 and has been in orbit around Mars for more than 20 years. But the orbiter can’t keep going forever as it will eventually run out of fuel, so figuring out exactly how much fuel is left is important — but it also turned out to be more complicated than the NASA engineers were expecting.

Odyssey started out with nearly 500 pounds of hydrazine fuel, though last year it looked as if the spacecraft was running much lower on fuel than had been predicted.