Micro stories - small news bits too small to have their own thread

[Hamartia Antidote]

Why are Drought Balls Black Instead of White?
...
Los Angeles has coated its reservoirs in millions of black plastic balls. But why are they a heat-absorbing black instead of light-reflecting white? Because they’re shade balls, and their purpose has nothing to do with the drought.
....
The purpose of shade balls is to provide shade, not to prevent evaporation. The primary purpose of the shade balls is to block sunlight so the ultraviolet light doesn’t catalyze nasty chemical reactions. Chlorine can breakdown into bromate when exposed to UV light, which is a carcinogen that really should violate drinking water standards instead of merely being a thing it’s nice to minimize. It is a secondary benefit that the shade also reduces evaporation, a small but important smidgeon of water savings during the ongoing extreme drought.

This story is getting more screwball.
30+ years ago the EPA threatened to shutdown Boston's water supply because the "cleaned" water had an intermediate step of being held in a large exposed pond AFTER being treated. This was a big no-no to the EPA. The water was rerouted and the pond was shutdown. It is only used as an emergency now.

How has LA managed to dance this long around the problem?

 

[Fenrir]

How Does NASA Study Hurricanes?

How Does NASA Study Hurricanes?

MTSTAT and CloudSat imagery of Typhoon Dolphin. Credits: Natalie D. Tourville/Colorado State University

How Does NASA Study Hurricanes?
Hurricanes are the most powerful weather event on Earth. NASA’s expertise in space and scientific exploration contributes to essential services provided to the American people by other federal agencies, such as hurricane weather forecasting.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Hurricane Center (NHC) use a variety of tools to predict these storms’ paths. These scientists need a wealth of data to accurately forecast hurricanes. NASA satellites, computer modeling, instruments, aircraft and field missions contribute to this mix of information to give scientists a better understanding of these storms.

NASA's Research Role

NASA’s role as a research agency is to bring new types of observational capabilities and analytical tools to learn about the fundamental processes that drive hurricanes and work to help incorporate that data into forecasts. NASA collaborates with its interagency partners so that the nation benefits from our respective capabilities.

“Before we had satellites and aircraft, hurricanes would destroy entire cities, like the Labor Day Hurricane in Key West back in 1935,” said Gail Skofronick-Jackson, the project scientist for NASA’s Global Precipitation Measurement mission at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “You would have no idea if a hurricane was coming until it was too late.”

This visible image of Hurricane Katrina was taken on August 29 at 05:16 UTC (1:16 a.m. EDT) by the MODIS instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua satellite as it approached landfall in Louisiana.

Credits: NASA Goddard MODIS Rapid Response Team

Hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean can form when sub-Saharan thunderstorms travel westward with areas of lower pressure. These troughs are known as African Easterly Waves. Warm, moist air rises within the storm clouds, drawing air into the thunderstorms. Like an ice skater pulling in her arms to increase her spin, this inward moving air increases the rotation of the air within the storm cloud. Moving across the warm Atlantic, this cycle repeats on a daily basis, and, with a favorable environment, potentially accelerates to create a monstrous vortex powered by oceanic heat.

NASA uses an arsenal of instruments to learn more about how these storms progress as they form. These devices orbit Earth on a fleet of spacecraft, including Aqua, Terra, the Global Precipitation Measurement core observatory, NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite, Calipso, Jason-2 and CloudSat.

“There are typically multiple instruments on every spacecraft with various purposes that often complement each other,” said Eric Moyer, the Earth science operations manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “We can see the progression of a storm from one day to the next using the Terra and Aqua satellites—a morning and afternoon view of every storm system, every day.”

What NASA Studies

These instruments analyze different aspects of these storms, such as rainfall rates, surface wind speed, cloud heights, ocean heat and environmental temperature and humidity. Observing these factors helps identify the potential for storm formation or intensification. Similarly, the data allows meteorologists to better predict where, when and how hard hurricanes will strike land.

NASA's RapidScat instrument that flies aboard the International Space Station measures surface winds over the ocean and is used to gather data on tropical cyclones. This can show where in a hurricane the strongest winds occur. RapidScat continues a long satellite record of these observations that began with NASA's QuikScat satellite.

Scientists must completely understand a hurricane to predict its trajectory and strength. This means meteorologists must peer inside the cloud itself.

This 3-D view of the area northeast of Typhoon Dolphin's eye on May 16 created by data from NASA/JAXA's GPM core satellite shows heaviest rain over the open waters of the Pacific Ocean at a rate of over 65 mm (2.6 inches) per hour.
Credits: NASA/SSAI/JAXA, Hal Pierce

“Looking at the cloud structure can help us understand the storm’s structure and location, which improves our forecasts,” said Michael Brennan, a senior hurricane specialist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Hurricane Center. “We heavily rely on the passive microwave imagers from satellites to see what is happening in the core of the storm.”

Passive microwave imagers aboard NASA’s Global Precipitation Measurement and NASA-NOAA's Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership missions can peer through cloud canopies, allowing scientists to observe where the water is churning in the clouds.

“Just like a doctor using x-rays to understand what’s happening in the human body, our radiometers can pierce the clouds and understand the cyclone’s structure,” Skofronick-Jackson said. “We learn about the amount of liquid water and falling snow in the cloud. Then we know how much water may fall out over land and cause floods.”

“Having satellites to watch the oceans is critical, and that will never change,” Skofronick-Jackson said. “Radars on Earth can only see a certain distance out in the ocean, so without spacecraft, you would need radars on every ship. With satellite data informing computer models, we can predict the storms’ paths, to the point where regions only need to evacuate half as much coastline as before. That’s important, because it costs a lot of money to pack up, move to a hotel and close down businesses.”

Computer Modeling

Computer modeling is another powerful NASA research tool.

NASA's Global Modeling and Assimilation Office, or GMAO works to improve the understanding of hurricanes and assess models and procedures for quality. GMAO helps to identify information that was missing and determines what services could be added to help future investigation and prediction of hurricane systems.

On July 14, RapidScat saw the sustained winds surrounding Claudette's center of circulation were no stronger than 21 meters per second with the exception of stronger winds in the southwestern quadrant. Credits: NASA JPL/Doug Tyler


As NASA launches more sophisticated Earth-observing instruments, teams produce models with higher and higher resolutions, the ability to ingest such data, or the data assimilation procedure, increases. Each new instrument provides scientists and modelers a closer and more varied look at tropical cyclones. The higher the resolution of models and the capability of data assimilation systems, the easier it is to exploit data from satellite-borne instruments and to determine a hurricane’s intensity and size in terms of things such as the wind field and cloud extent.

Airborne Missions

NASA also conducts field missions to study hurricanes. With an arsenal of instruments, ranging from radiometers that read moisture levels; lidars that measure aerosols, moisture, and winds; dropsonde systems to measure high-resolution profiles of temperature, pressure, moisture, and winds; to Doppler radar systems to map the 3-D precipitation and winds within storms. These instruments monitor the structure and environment of hurricanes and tropical storms as they evolve.

The most recent NASA field mission to study hurricanes was the Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel or HS3. For three consecutive years, the HS3 mission investigated the processes that underlie hurricane formation and intensity change in the Atlantic Ocean basin. The mission used the Global Hawk, a high-altitude long-endurance aircraft capable of flights of 26 hours at altitudes above 55,000 ft. Flying from the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, the uninhabited Global Hawks could cover the entire Atlantic Ocean, enabling measurements of storms at early stages in the central or eastern Atlantic or spending 12-18 hours over storms in the western Atlantic.

A Future Mission

In 2016, NASA is launching the Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System, a constellation of eight small satellites. CYGNSS will probe the inner core of hurricanes in such detail to better understand their rapid intensification. One advantage of CYGNSS is that it can get frequent measurements within storms. This allows CYGNSS to make accurate measurements of ocean surface winds both in and near the eye of the storm throughout the lifecycle of tropical cyclones. The goal is to improve hurricane intensity forecasts.

NASA data and research allows scientists to observe the fundamental processes that drive hurricanes. Meteorologists incorporate this satellite, aircraft and computer modeling data into forecasts in the United States and around the world.

For more on NASA’s hurricane observations and research, visit:

www.nasa.gov/hurricane

 

[Fenrir]

Finally, A Convincing 3D Display That Doesn't Require Glasses

Viewing 3D content without glasses or goggles has proved to be one of the toughest things for interface designers to achieve—it never really looks right. At this year’s SIGGRAPH, a group of researchers presented a display that creates a 3D human in stunning detail using a cluster of 216 projectors.

A team from USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies has built an automultiscopic 3D display which essentially makes a 3D model of the person with video. After capturing video of a person using 30 cameras in intensely bright light, the images are divided among the 216 projectors. The projectors are arranged in a semicircle around a large screen, so as viewers walk around the screen their eyes smoothly transition from one projection to the next. The result is feeling as if you can see crystal-clear depth and detail.

Since it’s so realistic, the tech is being used to create full-scale “digital humans” which could be used in a museum or educational context. Speech recognition helps cue up answers to questions so it feels interactive even if it’s not. And because the humans are so realistic, you feel like the person is actually making eye contact with you and listening closely as you’re talking to them.

When I saw this at action at SIGGRAPH it was playing the engrossing memories of a Holocaust survivor. Unlike so many other attempts at holograms or innovative VR experiences that allowed you to “talk” to people, this one felt the most real. And true to the description, as you walked from one side of the screen to the other, you were able to see new details in his face and clothing.

Of course, the stories this digital human was telling were particularly captivating but I also think the technology was especially engaging. Dozens of people crowded around this man to hear his tales, and it felt as if he was right there in front of us. That fact that we weren’t wearing goggles and stumbling around to see it made the experience that much more poignant.

 

[Dubious]

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=1040794592597825

 

[Dubious]

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=796381430397526

 

[Fenrir]

A DC-10 Air Tanker Took A Dump On This Camera Guy

The town of Chelan in central Washington state is currently under evacuation orders as wildfires sparked by lightning prove difficult to contain. But that didn’t stop KOMO News photographer Eric Jensen from getting this amazing shot of a 10 Tanker Air Carrier DC-10 making a drop directly over his head.

The video above shows the plane flying low over a Chelan neighborhood while releasing fire retardant chemicals (often a phosphate mixed with water, but difficult to know in this case) over Eric’s position. As Eric pans the camera back down, we see the lens covered with reddish-orange goo.

Eric later tweeted this selfie to show that the tanker effectively made a direct hit. Despite needing to thoroughly clean his camera (and himself) after the specially modified DC-10 screamed past, we think it was totally worth it to get such an amazing shot.

Photo credit: Top shot .gif via embedded YouTube/KOMO News

...

This thread since I've been gone.



I'm using Technogaianist's account for a week while she accompanies myself and my wife during the Scandinavian leg of our European tour.

SvenSvensonov

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

A DC-10 Air Tanker Took A Dump On This Camera Guy

The town of Chelan in central Washington state is currently under evacuation orders as wildfires sparked by lightning prove difficult to contain. But that didn’t stop KOMO News photographer Eric Jensen from getting this amazing shot of a 10 Tanker Air Carrier DC-10 making a drop directly over his head.

...

This thread since I've been gone.



I'm using Technogaianist's account for a week while she accompanies myself and my wife during the Scandinavian leg of our European tour.

SvenSvensonov

Haha. Hey she's doing a great job! She's juggling 3 threads. Love her posts.
She even called somebody an idiot the other day.

 

[Dubious]

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=1034191913259710

 

[Fenrir]

Watch Boston Dynamics' Robot Run Outside Oh God They're Coming For Us

Possible cause of the singularity Boston Dynamics is secretive about upcoming projects, but new footage shows their robots in action—and the results are highly unsettling.

First you can see Spot, an agile autonomous quadruped ripped directly from Isaac Asimov’s nightmares, opening a door with the arm it sports instead of a face. Spot would almost be adorable the way it trots around on four legs except for the protruding face-arm that will turn the handle on your front door with its superstrength. Sleep well tonight.

Next, humanoid robot Atlas, an early prototype for the Terminator that will one day destroy us, is seen striding across uneven rocky surfaces and stalking through the woods. Atlas in action outside the lab is new—no doubt Boston Dynamics’ way of telling a cowed planet, “Be afraid. They know no environmental boundaries.” Atlas is also shown being hit by heavy weights and maintaining his balance, so good luck, future freedom fighters of the underground human resistance.

“We’re interested in getting this robot out into this world,” says Boston Dynamics founder Marc Raibert in the video, as part of MIT’s FAB 11 conference. He seems calm and blithely unafraid, ignoring the fact that his creation is moving through the trees with an ease of motion that would make Gort weep. “We’re working on a version that doesn’t have that [power tether],” Raibert says of Atlas, which is code for “run, you helpless fleshbag fools. RUN!”

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

Advances in magnet technology could bring cheaper, modular fusion reactors from sci-fi to sci-reality in less than a decade

"Advances in magnet technology have allowed MIT scientists to design a cheaper, more compact, modular and highly efficient fusion reactor that is efficient enough to use commercially. The era of clean, practically inexhaustible energy may be upon us in as little as a decade, scientists report.

MIT PhD candidate Brandon Sorbom holds REBCO superconducting tapes (left), enabling technology behind the ARC reactor. When cooled to liquid nitrogen temperature, the superconducting tape can carry as much current as the large copper conductor on the right, enabling the construction of extremely high‑field magnets, which consume minimal amounts of power.


The team used newly available rare-earth barium copper oxide (REBCO) superconducting tapes to produce high-magnetic field coils.

“[The implementation of these magnets] just ripples through the whole design,” says Dennis Whyte, professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering and director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center. “It changes the whole thing.”

Bigger bang for your magnet
But how do magnets help us build a mini-star? Well, fusion reactors generate electricity by using the same physical process that powers stars. In such a reactor, two lighter atoms are mushed together to create heavier elements. And just like natural stars, they generate immensely hot plasma – a state of matter similar to an electrically charged gas.

The stronger magnets and the stronger magnetic fields they generate allow the plasma to be contained in a much smaller space than previously possible. This translates to less materials and space necessary to build the reactor, and less hours of work, meaning a cheaper, more affordable reactor.

The proposed reactor, using a tokamak (donut-ish) geometry is described in a paper in the journal Fusion Engineering and Design, co-authored by Whyte, PhD candidate Brandon Sorbom, and 11 others at MIT.

A cutaway view of the proposed ARC reactor. Thanks to powerful new magnet technology, the much smaller, less-expensive ARC reactor would deliver the same power output as a much larger reactor.
Illustration credits to the MIT ARC team

Power plant prototype
The basic concept of the reactor and its associated elements rely on well-tested and proven principles that have been developed over decades of study.

The new reactor is intended to allow basic research on fusion and to potentially function as a prototype power plant – that could produce significant quantities of power.

“The much higher magnetic field,” Sorbom says, “allows you to achieve much higher performance.”

The reactor uses hydrogen fusion to form helium, with enormous releases of energy. To sustain the reaction and make it energy efficient (to release more energy than the reaction consumes) the plasma has to be heated to temperatures hotter than the cores of stars. And here is where the new magnets come in handy – they trap the heated particles in the center of the tokamak.

Cutaway of the inner workings of the ITER reactor. Not much difference structurally in the tokamak, the increase in power comes from the magnets. Notice the solid cover over the reactor.
Image via nature

“Any increase in the magnetic field gives you a huge win,” Sorbom says.

This is because in a fusion reactor, changing the strength of the magnetic field has a dramatic effect on the reaction: available fusion power increases to the fourth power of the increase in the magnetic field. Doubling the field would thus produce a 16-fold increase in the power generated by the device.

Ten times more power
The new magnets do not quite produce a doubling of the field strength, but they are strong enough to increase the power generation of the reactor ten times over previously used superconducting technology, the study says. This opens up the path for a series of improvements to be done to the standard design of the reactor.



The world’s most powerful planned fusion reactor, a huge device under construction in France called ITER, is expected to cost around US$ 40 billion. This device was designed and put into production before the new superconductors became available. Sorbom and the MIT team believe that their new design would produce about the same power as the french reactor, while being only half the diameter, cost but a fraction of its price and being faster to construct.

But despite the difference in size and magnetic field strength, the proposed reactor, called ARC, is based on “exactly the same physics” as ITER, Whyte says.

“We’re not extrapolating to some brand-new regime,” he adds.

The team also plans to include a method for removing the fusion core from the reactor without having to dismantle the entire device. Being able to do this would lend well to research aimed at further improving the system by using different materials or designs of its core to improve performance.

In addition, as with ITER, the new superconducting magnets would enable the reactor to operate in a sustained way, producing a steady power output, unlike today’s experimental reactors that can only operate for a few seconds at a time without overheating of copper coils.

Molten core and liquid cover
Another key breakthrough the design of the reactor brings is that it replaces the blanket of solid materials that surrounds the fusion chamber with a liquid material, that can be easily circulated and replaced. This curbs operating costs associated with replacement of the materials that degrade over time.

“It’s an extremely harsh environment for [solid] materials,” Whyte says, so replacing those materials with a liquid could be a major advantage.

In its current state, the reactor should be capable of producing about three times as much electricity as is needed to keep the reaction going. Sorbom says that the design could probably be improved and fine-tuned to crank up to about five or six times that much power. So far, no completed fusion reactor has produced energy (well they did, but they use more juice than they make) so the kind of net energy production ARC is expected to deliver would be a major breakthrough in fusion technology, the team says. They estimate that the design should be able to produce electricity for about 100,000 people.

“Fusion energy is certain to be the most important source of electricity on earth in the 22nd century, but we need it much sooner than that to avoid catastrophic global warming,” says David Kingham, CEO of Tokamak Energy Ltd. in the UK, who was not connected with this research. “This paper shows a good way to make quicker progress,” he says.

The MIT research, Kingham says, “shows that going to higher magnetic fields, an MIT speciality, can lead to much smaller (and hence cheaper and quicker-to-build) devices.” The work is of “exceptional quality,” he says; “the next step … would be to refine the design and work out more of the engineering details, but already the work should be catching the attention of policy makers, philanthropists and private investors.”

The research was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.

 

[Fenrir]

This one's not really news, just found it interesting

Does Europa Have An Ocean?

Europa’s fabled ocean has inspired science fiction movies and actual space missions alike — and yet we aren’t even sure it exists. NASA has gotten so curious, it recently greenlit a mission to Europa that’ll hopefully settle the matter once and for all. And the space agency has just produced an excellent video explaining why we should care.

With Pluto behind us and a new Europa mission moving full steam ahead, NASA is now hoping to drum up public interest in the distant, ice-covered moon. The first order of business? Making sure we’re all on the same page about Europa’s deep sea diving prospects. To that end, a short NASA animation details why we think Europa could have more water than Earth.

If that ocean really does exist, it’s poised to be the first place we discover alien life. The as-yet-unnamed spacecraft that’ll find out for sure, and perhaps put an end our cosmic loneliness, is slated to launch in the 2020s and arrive at Europa several years later.

 

[Dubious]

Working moms have more successful daughters and more caring sons, Harvard Business School study says

The guilt many working mothers confess to may be real, but it’s looking less and less warranted.

According to a working paper (pdf) published June 19 by the Harvard Business School, daughters of working mothers are more likely to be employed, hold supervisory positions, and earn more money than the daughters of women who don’t work outside the home. The researchers also found a statistically significant effect on the sons of working women, who are likely to spend more time caring for family members and doing household chores than are the sons of stay-at-home mothers.

Analyzing data from two dozen countries, the researchers concluded that the daughters of employed mothers are 4.5% more likely to be employed themselves than are the daughters of stay-at-home mothers. While this number may seem small, it is statistically significant at the 99% level, meaning there is less than a 1% chance that such a result is due to chance.

Even more surprising, says Kathleen McGinn, a professor at Harvard Business School and the lead author of the study, is the effect that working mothers have on their daughters’ chances of being a supervisor at work. “We did expect that it would effect employment but we didn’t expect that it would effect supervisory responsibility,” she tells Quartz.

Even after controlling for gender attitudes—to take beliefs regarding gender roles out of the equation—the researchers found that 33% of daughters of working mothers held supervisory roles, compared to only 25% of daughters of stay-at-home moms. “What I take away is that employed mothers create an environment in which their children’s attitudes on what is appropriate for girls to do and what is appropriate for boys to do is affected,” McGinn says.

The study was based on national-level data, as well as individual-level survey data collected across 24 countries by the International Social Survey Programme in 2002 and 2012. In particular, the researchers examined results from a survey question that asked respondents whether, during their childhood, their mother had ever spent a year or more working full- or part-time; then they regressed these responses against a host of variables to test the outcomes.

McGinn says that the effects of working mothers were most striking in countries labeled in the study as “stagnating moderates,” a category that included both the US and the UK. These are countries where respondents generally held moderate views about gender issues and egalitarianism in 2002, and where the attitudes remained roughly the same 10 years later.

McGinn says that the income of daughters of working mothers in the US was $5,200 higher than that of daughters of women who stayed at home, when controlling for gender attitudes.

Her message for working mothers is that being employed has long-lasting, positive effects on children. “When you go to work, you are helping your children understand that there are lots of opportunities for them,” McGinn says.


Working moms have more successful daughters and more caring sons, Harvard Business School study says - Quartz

1st para kind of explains why MOST Pakistani men dont help in household chores

 

[Fenrir]

Here's The Box That Can Turn a Puny Laptop Into a Graphical Powerhouse

USB Type-C is shaping up to be the holy grail of ports. It can charge your laptop, deliver 4K video, and transfer loads of USB data all over a single cable—all at the same time. What could be better? You’re looking at the answer.

What you see in these pictures is a hub that uses Intel’s Thunderbolt 3, a supercharged version of USB-C with doublethe bandwidth. What does that actually mean in practice? It’s fast enough that you can actually augment the power of a relatively weak laptop with an external graphics card... yes, while still charging the laptop... driving two 4K monitors... and powering your USB devices all at the same time. Here’s what that looks like:

That’s right: with just a single USB-C Thunderbolt cable plugged into the side of this super thin, super light laptop we spotted at IDF 2015, you get three USB 3.0 ports, two HDMI ports, two DisplayPorts, external audio, and ethernet all at the same time. Plus an extra USB Type-C port for—in this case—attaching a ridiculously-fast external solid state drive.

The best part isn’t the plethora of ports, though: it’s the fact that this sleek box has an external graphics chip inside. In this case, an AMD Radeon R9 M385. Hello, games!

What if you need even more graphical muscle? Say, if you want to plug your thin and light laptop in at night and play some Grand Theft Auto V? Thunderbolt 3 can handle a way bigger external graphics card dock, too. Here’s what it looks like with a full-size AMD R9 200 series graphics card, delivering a respectable framerate in the Unigine Heaven benchmark.

Sadly, all of these Thunderbolt 3 boxes—and the laptop—are just Inventec reference designs, not commercial products yet. Plus, Intel won’t say what they might cost or when they might arrive, though the first real Thunderbolt 3 products will allegedly start hitting the market by the end of the year.

Will manufacturers actually build external graphics solutions with Thunderbolt 3? “Watch this space,” says Navin Shenoy, an Intel executive.

...

 

[Fenrir]

It's Impossible To Overexpose a Shot With a New Camera Built By MIT

Many scenes you point a camera at are doomed to result in a crappy picture. Either the background is blown out, or the foreground is too dark. It’s a limitation of every camera sensor. MIT is working on technology that captures light in a new way, eliminating this problem completely.

Currently, there’s only so wide a range of lights and darks a camera sensor can record. This is why high-contrast scenes are such a pain to take a good picture of. MIT’s camera, dubbed Modulo, is composed of pixels that can read the light hitting them, then reset themselves to take multiple readings to deal with excess light in the bright areas of a scene. Those multiple readings are then processed and turned into an image where detail is preserved in the brightest and darkest areas.

The result is similar to HDR photography, but it doesn’t require shooting multiple exposures at separate instances and then combining them afterwords. The Modulo seems to rely on pixels that measure multiple levels of light radiance throughout a scene, re-interpolating the data into a recognizable image. It’s hard to say how practical or effective this technology could be in real world photography. It’s still experimental and we have no idea if it could result in any kind of consumer application.

Yet it’s always intriguing to see steps being made toward tackling such a fundamental limitation to cameras. Knowing the rules of exposure and harnessing the camera’s controls to make a pleasing image is one of the foundations of photography. To imagine a world of Modulo cameras, where exposure is no longer an issue, is pretty crazy.

 

[Fenrir]

The CO2 In Our Atmosphere Can Now Be Transformed Into a Building Material

Carbon nanofibers are an incredibly exciting material. They’ve been around for a long time, but still aren’t common, partially because they’re difficult and expensive to make. Now, a team of engineers say it figured out a simple way to make them–by sucking carbon dioxide straight out of the atmosphere.

The research, which was published in the American Chemical Society’s Nano Letters and presented today by its authors, is part of a growing body of study that looks for ways to “capture” or “sequester” carbon in the atmosphere by trapping it. There are a number of different ways to do the trapping: One project in Iceland is injecting carbon dioxide into porous basalt rock, where it is mineralized and then buried, making it impossible for it to seep into the atmosphere. And just this month, the Department of Energy discovered a copper material that can be used to turn captured CO2 into fuel.

The group of researchers behind the new study, from George Washington University’s Department of Chemistry, are pursuing another approach to gobbling up pesky CO2. The idea is to take the captured gas and then subject it to an electrochemical process that turns it into carbon nanotubes—which have, historically, been very difficult, wasteful, and expensive to manufacture. Instead, their “one pot” method uses two electrodes in a “pot” of lithium carbonate.

When electricity passes through the liquid, carbon fibers start to form on the cathode (the anode, meanwhile, produces oxygen!). The researchers report that a low voltage creates carbon nanotube structures, at a cost far lower than normal manufacturing methods.

They even note that they tried out the “one pot” approach using power harvested from photovoltaics to heat the molten lithium carbonate:

Atmospheric carbon dioxide is then bubbled through the cell. The CO2 reacts with the lithium carbonate, and depending on the reaction temperature attained, either solid carbon is deposited at the cathode or carbon monoxide is produced. This conversion of carbon dioxide into solid carbon is facilitated by the visible rays of the sun that drive the reaction, when the visible rays are converted to electricity through photovoltaic techniques.

To review, they made one of the most difficult and expensive—yet promising—materials out of a gas that’s causing extraordinary harm to our world, using heat from the sun. So, what can be done with the resultant material? The authors finish up their report by saying that their next study will focus on the strength and other aspects of the resulting tubes, but they do have some inkling of how this strong, lightweight stuff could be used—infrastructure, for example, or buildings themselves, or for high-performance composites.

As MIT Technology Review rightfully points out, one caveat to all of this is the fact that a cheaper, easier way to make carbon nanofibers doesn’t necessarily provide an impetus for any industry to start using them. Right now, there just isn’t a market for the stuff; no surprise, given that it costs 30 to 100 times more to make than aluminum at the moment.

Eventually, thanks to this research, that price could drop precipitously. And it’s easy to see how integrating a building panels that are actually carbon negative could be a popular idea in the building industry—which is finally coming under scrutiny as a major source of the CO2 in our atmosphere.