Lifeboat Foundation

A remote island could host Elon Musk’s new Space X project — but its residents are not impressed.

They require less maintenance, and less pollution. Imagine if you used them as a battery backup during an emergency.

School board seals deal to bring 300 electric school buses to Montgomery County. The buses will recharge at night and run during the day. During the hot summers, the buses and charging stations can help store needed energy for local businesses.

Users can input a specific address or more generalized region, such as a state or country, and then choose a date ranging from zero to 750 million years ago.

The interactive tool enables users to home in on a specific location and visualize how it has evolved between the Cryogenian Period and the present.

In pharmaceutical research, swapping out hydrogens for methyl groups is a frequent strategy to optimize small-molecule properties. Vasilopoulos et al. report a versatile, convenient, and comparatively safe method for methylation of carbon centers adjacent to nitrogen or aryl rings. Under carefully optimized conditions, di-tert-butyl peroxide plays a dual role as oxidant and methyl source. Cleaving the O–O bond through photosensitization produces butoxyl radicals, some of which cleave substrate C–H bonds, whereas others release methyl radicals that a nickel catalyst delivers to those activated substrates.

Science, this issue p. [398][1]

The “magic methyl” effect describes the change in potency, selectivity, and/or metabolic stability of a drug candidate associated with addition of a single methyl group.

OEC promoting STEM education in Africa.

Remember the project where Bill Gates wanted to cover the sun to cool the Earth? Well, this summer, the tests will begin. According to The Times, a large balloon will soon be launched in Sweden that will spew out of calcium carbonate, which is essentially “chalk dust.”

The Controlled Stratospheric Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx) wants to prove that the release of this dust into the stratosphere could eventually divert some of the sun’s energy and lower the temperatures of our planet.

Continue reading “A Project Supported by Bill Gates Is Set to Temporarily Dim the Sun” »

We are made of stardust, the saying goes, and a pair of studies including University of Michigan research finds that may be more true than we previously thought.

The first study, led by U-M researcher Jie (Jackie) Li and published in Science Advances, finds that most of the carbon on Earth was likely delivered from the interstellar medium, the material that exists in space between stars in a galaxy. This likely happened well after the protoplanetary disk, the cloud of dust and gas that circled our young sun and contained the building blocks of the planets, formed and warmed up.

Carbon was also likely sequestered into solids within one million years of the sun’s birth — which means that carbon, the backbone of life on earth, survived an interstellar journey to our planet.

Circa 2019

To create neutrons in the high flux neutron generator, UC Berkeley researchers heat up deuterium atoms in a vacuum chamber to 50000 degrees Celsius to obtain an ionized plasma (pink glow), then accelerate the ions until they collide and fuse with other deuterium atoms implanted in the titanium cathode, releasing neutrons in the process. The spiral coil is the water-cooled radio-frequency antenna that heats the plasma, viewed through a quartz window into the vacuum chamber. (UC Berkeley photo by Cory Waltz)

In an underground vault enclosed by six-foot concrete walls and accessed by a rolling, 25-ton concrete-and-steel door, University of California, Berkeley, students are making neutrons dance to a new tune: one better suited to producing isotopes required for geological dating, police forensics, hospital diagnosis and treatment.

Continue reading “Students make neutrons dance beneath Berkeley campus” »

Levitation has long been a staple of magic tricks and movies. But in the lab, it’s no trick. Scientists can levitate droplets of liquid, though mixing them and observing the reactions has been challenging. The pay-off, however, could be big as it would allow researchers to conduct contact-free experiments without containers or handling that might affect the outcome. Now, a team reporting in ACS’ Analytical Chemistry has developed a method to do just that.

Scientists have made devices to levitate small objects, but most methods require the object to have certain physical properties, such as electric charge or magnetism. In contrast, acoustic levitation, which uses sound waves to suspend an object in a gas, doesn’t rely on such properties. Yet existing devices for acoustic levitation and mixing of single particles or droplets are complex, and it is difficult to obtain measurements from them as a chemical reaction is happening. Stephen Brotton and Ralf Kaiser wanted to develop a versatile technique for the contactless control of two chemically distinct droplets, with a set of probes to follow the reaction as the droplets merge.

We’ve known for a while that Earth is under a constant rain of space dust, and that it’s copious. Given its microscopic size, however, it’s been very hard to obtain an accurate estimate of the quantity.

Such micrometeorites are no bigger than a fraction of a millimeter, shed like space dander from passing comets and asteroids.

After two decades of collecting the stuff in Antarctica, an international team of scientists now has a number: around 5200 tons of micrometeorites smaller than 700 micrometers (0.7 millimeters), every year.