JON CARTWRIGHT – Page 5 – & THREE QUARKS EDITORIAL

Tenfold improvement in liquid batteries mean electric car refuelling could take minutes

HorizonJon Cartwright17 September, 2018

One of the biggest drawbacks of electric vehicles – that they require hours and hours to charge – could be obliterated by a new type of liquid battery that is roughly ten times more energy-dense than existing models, according to Professor Lee Cronin, the Regius Chair of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow, UK.

What’s so special about this liquid, or flow, battery?

‘A normal electric vehicle has a solid battery, and when that runs out of charge you have to recharge it by plugging it in to a power socket. This takes half an hour or so if you find a rapid charger at a motorway service station, or up to 12 hours at home. Our battery, however, is made of a liquid rather than a solid. If you run out of charge, you could in principle pump out the depleted liquid and – like a regular petrol or diesel vehicle – refill it with liquid that is ready-charged. And that would take minutes.’ […]

The rest of this article is available here.

African climate research infrastructure gears up

Energy & EnvironmentJon Cartwright17 September, 2018

A network of observation stations for recording greenhouse gas and other emissions in Africa has nearly 25 times less capacity than the equivalent network in Europe, according to an international team of researchers.

The result, which highlights one of the areas of climate change research where Africa lags behind other continents, is part of a broader effort by Veronika Jorch of Thünen Institute of Climate-Smart Agriculture, Germany, and colleagues to establish a pan-African research infrastructure for greenhouse gas emissions.

The researchers believe that such an infrastructure would help in climate change prediction, mitigation and adaptation for the continent.

“A research infrastructure does not just appear like mushrooms after a bit of rain,” says Jorch. “It is a long process, and various factors have to come together.”

The rest of this article is available here.

Dark matter clusters could reveal nature of dark energy

HorizonJon Cartwright10 September, 2018

Scientists are hoping to understand one of the most enduring mysteries in cosmology by simulating its effect on the clustering of galaxies.

That mystery is dark energy – the phenomenon that scientists hypothesise is causing the universe to expand at an ever-faster rate. No-one knows anything about dark energy, except that it could be, somehow, blowing pretty much everything apart.

Meanwhile, dark energy has an equally shady cousin – dark matter. This invisible substance appears to have been clustering around galaxies, and preventing them from spinning themselves apart, by lending them an extra gravitational pull.

Such a clustering effect is in competition with dark energy’s accelerating expansion. Yet studying the precise nature of this competition might shed some light on dark energy. […]

The rest of this article is available here.

Dark energy is the biggest mystery in cosmology, but it may not exist at all – leading physicist

HorizonJon Cartwright3 September, 2018

The most mysterious phenomenon in cosmology – dark energy – may not exist at all, according to Professor Subir Sarkar, head of the particle theory group at the University of Oxford in the UK.

In the late 1990s, astronomers found evidence from supernovae that the universe has been expanding faster and faster as it gets older. Having no explanation for what was driving it, they dubbed this accelerating expansion ‘dark energy’. What did you think about these findings at the time?

‘I was sceptical from the beginning. I’m unusual in the cosmology community in that I’ve had experience working in experiments as well as theory, and I didn’t think the astronomers were taking full account of the systematic uncertainties in their data. But for a long time, the data were not made available for checking. That changed in 2014 when an international collaboration published a catalogue of all the relevant supernovae – publicly, for the first time.’ […]

The rest of this article is available here.

Time traders

Physics WorldJon Cartwright10 July, 2018

In today’s markets, every microsecond counts. Jon Cartwright discovers how the UK’s National Physical Laboratory is keeping regulators up to speed

Just after 2.30 p.m. local time on 6 May 2010, Wall Street experienced one of the biggest, and briefest, crashes in its history. Within minutes, the Dow, one of the three most-followed US market indices, plunged 9%, while prices of individual shares became intensely volatile, in some cases fluctuating between tens of dollars and cents in the same second. More than $850bn was wiped off stock values – although by the end of the trading day they had mostly recovered.

What caused the Flash Crash, as it came to be known? Early theories blamed either an error in trading software, or a human at a computer inadvertently selling a large number of shares – the so-called fat-finger hypothesis. Some analysts even claimed the Flash Crash was merely part of the more exaggerated ups and downs we should expect as financial trading becomes more decentralized and complex. But many suspected foul play.

In April 2015, at the request of US prosecutors, Navinder Singh Sarao was arrested at his parents’ semi-detached home in Hounslow, west London, UK. A lone trader, Sarao, then 36, was accused of crafting “spoofing” algorithms that could order thousands of future contracts, only to cancel them at the last minute before the actual purchases went through. By exploiting the resultant dips in markets, he allegedly earned some $40m (£27m) over five ?years. […]

The rest of this article is available here.

Plasma accelerators could overcome size limitations of Large Hadron Collider

HorizonJon Cartwright9 July, 2018

Plasma particle accelerators more powerful than existing machines could help probe some of the outstanding mysteries of our universe, as well as make leaps forward in cancer treatment and security scanning – all in a package that’s around a thousandth of the size of current accelerators. All that’s left is for scientists to build one.

If you know what a particle accelerator is, you probably think first of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – that gargantuan ring on the Franco-Swiss border that smashes protons and ions together, exposing the secrets of the subatomic world.

Built by the European lab CERN, the LHC accelerates particles to the kinds of speeds found during the eruption of the early universe. To do so, it needs a very, very big circumference – 27 kilometres.

Yet the LHC is already finding limits to what it can explore. Physicists want even more powerful accelerators – but building one much bigger than the LHC is hard to contemplate. […]

The rest of this article is available here.

Switching oil type could cut emissions

Energy & EnvironmentJon Cartwright15 May, 2018

The average greenhouse-gas emissions from the entire life cycle of shale and other “light tight” oils are two-thirds of those for heavy oil and bitumen resources, researchers in the US have found.

The result comes alongside an appeal to policy makers that we should be concerned not just with minimizing our consumption of oil, but on the type of oil that we do use, in order to reduce climate change.

“The main attention is on reducing oil consumption – which is [the] right direction,” said Mohammad Masnadi of Stanford University. “But … policy makers should pay equivalent attention to crude oil type and the corresponding greenhouse-gas emissions for designing future policies and strategies.” […]

The rest of this article is available here.

How clean is tropical hydropower?

Energy & EnvironmentJon Cartwright14 May, 2018

Hydropower in the Mekong river basin in Southeast Asia is not a “categorically low-emission” energy source, according to researchers who studied its long-term greenhouse-gas output.

The study – the first to assess emissions on a large scale over a lifetime of 100 years – paints a mixed picture for hydropower in the tropics. Although many of the Mekong reservoirs have emissions comparable to renewable energy sources, a large portion have considerably greater emissions, with some even matching those from fossil-fuel power plants.

The researchers believe that if low emissions are to be considered important, many factors must be taken into account and the merits of hydroelectric reservoirs must be assessed on a case-by-case basis. […]

The rest of this article is available here.

Water takes the heat off Hong Kong air-con

Energy & EnvironmentJon Cartwright1 May, 2018

Using water to cool non-domestic air-conditioning systems could have reduced outside air temperatures by as much as 1.5°C during a heatwave in Hong Kong, researchers have found.

The study shows that water-cooled air-conditioning units are not only more energy-efficient, but also relieve the anthropogenic “urban heat island” effect, which sees cities have greater ambient temperatures than the countryside.

“We cannot ignore the effect of air-conditioning systems on the city environment,” said Yi Wang of the University of Hong Kong. […]

The rest of this article is available here.

Large surface area lends superpowers to ultra-porous materials

HorizonJon Cartwright25 April, 2018

Some materials are special not for what they contain, but for what they don’t contain. Such is the case with metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) – ultra-porous structures that are being developed for a variety of future applications from fire-proofing to drug-delivery.

MOFs are, in fact, the most porous materials known to humankind. One metal-organic framework, so-called NU-110, has such a large surface area that just one gram of it could be unfolded to cover one-and-a-half football fields.

That huge internal surface area is a result of the atomic components – metal atoms linked together by organic molecules, forming a cage-like structure. It is by tinkering with the chemistry of these cages, and by inserting different objects inside them, that scientists are able to contemplate so many different applications. […]

The rest of this article is available here.