BERKELEY, Calif., Dec. 19, 2024 — Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) used lasers and a supersonic sheet of gas to accelerate a high-quality beam of electrons to 10 billion electronvolts (eV) in just 30 cm. The energy and quality of the beam is a significant improvement compared to previous efforts.
Latest battery storage auction prices in China stun analysts with another big price fall that could fast-track green energy switch and uptake of EVs.
Child mortality in conflict settings was 8 percent, compared with 1.1 percent in peaceful countries.
It also said that 83.2 percent of the world’s poorest people live in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
The index, compiled jointly with the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), used indicators such as a lack of adequate housing, sanitation, electricity, cooking fuel, nutrition and school attendance to assess levels of “multidimensional poverty”
The notion of entropy grew out of an attempt at perfecting machinery during the industrial revolution. A 28-year-old French military engineer named Sadi Carnot set out to calculate the ultimate efficiency of the steam-powered engine. In 1824, he published a 118-page book(opens a new tab) titled Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire, which he sold on the banks of the Seine for 3 francs. Carnot’s book was largely disregarded by the scientific community, and he died several years later of cholera. His body was burned, as were many of his papers. But some copies of his book survived, and in them lay the embers of a new science of thermodynamics — the motive power of fire.
Carnot realized that the steam engine is, at its core, a machine that exploits the tendency for heat to flow from hot objects to cold ones. He drew up the most efficient engine conceivable, instituting a bound on the fraction of heat that can be converted to work, a result now known as Carnot’s theorem. His most consequential statement comes as a caveat on the last page of the book: “We should not expect ever to utilize in practice all the motive power of combustibles.” Some energy will always be dissipated through friction, vibration, or another unwanted form of motion. Perfection is unattainable.
Continue reading “What Is Entropy? A Measure of Just How Little We Really Know” »
After forty years, the creator of scar theory has observed the phenomenon in real time.
Quantum scarring is a phenomenon in which traveling electrons end up following the same repeating path.
Scars of Chaos: Visualizing Mysteries in Graphene Dots probabilities cluster along the paths of unstable orbits from their classical counterparts. These scars, while predicted, have remained elusive to direct observation—until now.
+
Using an innovative combination of graphene dot fabrication and advanced wavefunction mapping via scanning tunneling microscopy, researchers captured stunning images of scars. Within stadium-shaped GQDs, they observed striking lemniscate (∞-shaped) and streak-like probability patterns. These features recur at equal energy intervals, aligning with theoretical predictions for relativistic scars—a fascinating blend of mechanics and relativity.
A China-based firm has launched a novel energy storage device that tackles the 18650-battery power challenge. Introduced by Ampace, the latest JP30 cylindrical lithium battery is claimed to be capable of delivering breakthrough performance in a compact form.
Themed “Working Non-stop, compact and more powerful”, the new battery is the latest addition to the JP series.
Continue reading “China: Ampace’s cylindrical lithium battery charges 80% in 10 minutes” »
Built on the bones of a shuttered mill, the battery will store 8,500 megawatt-hours of energy, enough to power about 57,000 homes.
That means digging all the trenching and building out all the electrical distribution equipment on site, if not all the chargers, with a microgrid that’s capable of working as well in the future with 12 MW of power as it does with just 4 MW.
“I think this is the same challenge that all of these large sites are facing—it takes an extremely long time to get the power from the utility. Meanwhile, you don’t need it immediately. So how do you create this sort of staged future-proof solution where you’re not having to open the roads multiple times? You want one construction phase and you want that site to support the future demand,” Putignano said.
For fleets that need their own private charging infrastructure, there are other things to think about, too. Energy management solutions are as important here—microgrids as well as battery storage and battery-buffered chargers will play an important role, for example. But not every energy management solution is charger-agnostic, and the collapse of charger manufacturers like Juicebox and Tritium highlight the perils of being stuck in a walled garden belonging to a dead company.
Husker researchers Seunghee Kim, Karrie Weber and Hyun-Seob Song are studying the Midcontinent Rift — which runs from beneath Lake Superior through parts of Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas — to determine how best to access a potential store of natural hydrogen that could yield vast amounts of clean energy.
Launching in February 2025, NASAs PUNCH mission will study the Sun’s corona and solar wind with four satellites.
NASA and SpaceX plan to launch NASA’s PUNCH mission (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) in late February 2025 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
The PUNCH mission consists of four small satellites designed to enter low Earth orbit and capture 3D, global views of the Sun’s corona. By studying how mass and energy in the corona become the solar wind, scientists hope to gain new insights into solar activity and its effects on space weather.
