How Platinum Powers The World

Superstretchable, supercompressible supercapacitors

Flexible, wearable electronics require equally flexible, wearable power sources. In the journal Angewandte Chemie, Chinese scientists have introduced an extraordinarily stretchable and compressible polyelectrolyte which, in combination with carbon nanotube composite paper electrodes, forms a supercapacitor that can be stretched to 1000 percent in length and compressed to 50 percent in thickness with even gaining, not losing capacity.

Supercapacitors bridge the gap between batteries, which are merely energy-storing devices, and normal capacitors, which release and take up electric energy very quickly but cannot store so much energy. With their ability to charge and release large amounts of electric power in a very short time, supercapacitors are preferably used in regenerative braking, as power buffers in wind turbines, and, increasingly, in consumer electronics such as laptop computers and digital cameras. To make supercapacitors fit for future electrics demands like, for example, wearables and paper electronics, Chunyi Zhi from the City University of Hong Kong and his colleagues are searching for ways to endow them with mechanical flexibility. It can be achieved with a new electrolyte material: they developed a polyelectrolyte that can be stretched more than 10 times its length and compressed to half its thickness retaining full functionality, without breakage, cracking, or other damage to its material.

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Elon Musk Announces New Hyperloop Approval Making NYC to DC Trip in Only 29 Minutes

The ocean is where the aliens live.

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That Time We Flew Past Pluto…

Two years ago today (July 14), our New Horizons spacecraft made its closest flyby of Pluto…collecting images and science that revealed a geologically complex world. Data from this mission are helping us understand worlds at the edge of our solar system.

The spacecraft is now venturing deeper into the distant, mysterious Kuiper Belt…a relic of solar system formation…to reach its next target. On New Year’s Day 2019, New Horizons will zoom past a Kuiper Belt object known as 2014 MU69.

The Kuiper Belt is a disc-shaped region of icy bodies – including dwarf planets such as Pluto – and comets beyond the orbit of Neptune. It extends from about 30 to 55 Astronomical Units (an AU is the distance from the sun to Earth) and is probably populated with hundreds of thousands of icy bodies larger than 62 miles across, and an estimated trillion or more comets.

Nearly a billion miles beyond Pluto, you may be asking how the spacecraft will function for the 2014 MU69 flyby. Well, New Horizons was originally designed to fly far beyond the Pluto system and explore deeper into the Kuiper Belt. 

The spacecraft carries extra hydrazine fuel for the flyby; its communications system is designed to work from beyond Pluto; its power system is designed to operate for many more years; and its scientific instruments were designed to operate in light levels much lower than it will experience during the 2014 MU69 flyby.

What have we learned about Pluto since its historic flyby in 2015?

During its encounter, the New Horizons spacecraft collected more than 1,200 images of Pluto and tens of gigabits of data. The intensive downlinking of information took about a year to return to Earth! Here are a few things we’ve discovered:

Pluto Has a Heart

This image captured by New Horizons around 16 hours before its closest approach shows Pluto’s “heart.” This stunning image of one of its most dominant features shows us that the heart’s diameter is about the same distance as from Denver to Chicago. This image also showed us that Pluto is a complex world with incredible geological diversity.

Icy Plains

Pluto’s vast icy plain, informally called Sputnik Planitia, resembles frozen mud cracks on Earth. It has a broken surface of irregularly-shaped segments, bordered by what appear to be shallow troughs.

Majestic Mountains

Images from the spacecraft display chaotically jumbled mountains that only add to the complexity of Pluto’s geography. The rugged, icy mountains are as tall as 11,000 feet high.

Color Variations

This high-resolution enhanced color view of Pluto combines blue, red and infrared images taken by the New Horizons spacecraft. The surface of tPluto has a remarkable range of subtle color variations. Many landforms have their own distinct colors, telling a complex geological and climatological story.

Foggy Haze and Blue Atmosphere

Images returned from the New Horizons spacecraft have also revealed that Pluto’s global atmospheric haze has many more layers than scientists realized. The haze even creates a twilight effect that softly illuminates nightside terrain near sunset, which makes them visible to the cameras aboard the spacecraft.

Water Ice

New Horizons detected numerous small, exposed regions of water ice on Pluto. Scientists are eager to understand why water appears exactly where it does, and not in other places.

Stay updated on New Horizons findings by visiting the New Horizons page. You can also keep track of Pluto News on Twitter via @NASANewHorizons.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

Solar System: Things to Know This Week

Reaching out into space yields benefits on Earth. Many of these have practical applications — but there’s something more than that. Call it inspiration, perhaps, what photographer Ansel Adams referred to as nature’s “endless prospect of magic and wonder.“ 

Our ongoing exploration of the solar system has yielded more than a few magical images. Why not keep some of them close by to inspire your own explorations? This week, we offer 10 planetary photos suitable for wallpapers on your desktop or phone. Find many more in our galleries. These images were the result of audacious expeditions into deep space; as author Edward Abbey said, "May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view.”

1. Martian Selfie

This self-portrait of NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover shows the robotic geologist in the “Murray Buttes” area on lower Mount Sharp. Key features on the skyline of this panorama are the dark mesa called “M12” to the left of the rover’s mast and pale, upper Mount Sharp to the right of the mast. The top of M12 stands about 23 feet (7 meters) above the base of the sloping piles of rocks just behind Curiosity. The scene combines approximately 60 images taken by the Mars Hand Lens Imager, or MAHLI, camera at the end of the rover’s robotic arm. Most of the component images were taken on September 17, 2016.

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2. The Colors of Pluto

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft captured this high-resolution, enhanced color view of Pluto on July 14, 2015. The image combines blue, red and infrared images taken by the Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC). Pluto’s surface sports a remarkable range of subtle colors, enhanced in this view to a rainbow of pale blues, yellows, oranges, and deep reds. Many landforms have their own distinct colors, telling a complex geological and climatological story that scientists have only just begun to decode.

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3. The Day the Earth Smiled

On July 19, 2013, in an event celebrated the world over, our Cassini spacecraft slipped into Saturn’s shadow and turned to image the planet, seven of its moons, its inner rings — and, in the background, our home planet, Earth. This mosaic is special as it marks the third time our home planet was imaged from the outer solar system; the second time it was imaged by Cassini from Saturn’s orbit, the first time ever that inhabitants of Earth were made aware in advance that their photo would be taken from such a great distance.

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4. Looking Back

Before leaving the Pluto system forever, New Horizons turned back to see Pluto backlit by the sun. The small world’s haze layer shows its blue color in this picture. The high-altitude haze is thought to be similar in nature to that seen at Saturn’s moon Titan. The source of both hazes likely involves sunlight-initiated chemical reactions of nitrogen and methane, leading to relatively small, soot-like particles called tholins. This image was generated by combining information from blue, red and near-infrared images to closely replicate the color a human eye would perceive.

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5. Catching Its Own Tail

A huge storm churning through the atmosphere in Saturn’s northern hemisphere overtakes itself as it encircles the planet in this true-color view from Cassini. This picture, captured on February 25, 2011, was taken about 12 weeks after the storm began, and the clouds by this time had formed a tail that wrapped around the planet. The storm is a prodigious source of radio noise, which comes from lightning deep within the planet’s atmosphere.

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6. The Great Red Spot

Another massive storm, this time on Jupiter, as seen in this dramatic close-up by Voyager 1 in 1979. The Great Red Spot is much larger than the entire Earth.

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7. More Stormy Weather

Jupiter is still just as stormy today, as seen in this recent view from NASA’s Juno spacecraft, when it soared directly over Jupiter’s south pole on February 2, 2017, from an altitude of about 62,800 miles (101,000 kilometers) above the cloud tops. From this unique vantage point we see the terminator (where day meets night) cutting across the Jovian south polar region’s restless, marbled atmosphere with the south pole itself approximately in the center of that border. This image was processed by citizen scientist John Landino. This enhanced color version highlights the bright high clouds and numerous meandering oval storms.

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8. X-Ray Vision

X-rays stream off the sun in this image showing observations from by our Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, overlaid on a picture taken by our Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). The NuSTAR data, seen in green and blue, reveal solar high-energy emission. The high-energy X-rays come from gas heated to above 3 million degrees. The red channel represents ultraviolet light captured by SDO, and shows the presence of lower-temperature material in the solar atmosphere at 1 million degrees.

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9. One Space Robot Photographs Another

This image from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows Victoria crater, near the equator of Mars. The crater is approximately half a mile (800 meters) in diameter. It has a distinctive scalloped shape to its rim, caused by erosion and downhill movement of crater wall material. Since January 2004, the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has been operating in the region where Victoria crater is found. Five days before this image was taken in October 2006, Opportunity arrived at the rim of the crater after a drive of more than over 5 miles (9 kilometers). The rover can be seen in this image, as a dot at roughly the “ten o'clock” position along the rim of the crater. (You can zoom in on the full-resolution version here.)

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10. Night Lights

Last, but far from least, is this remarkable new view of our home planet. Last week, we released new global maps of Earth at night, providing the clearest yet composite view of the patterns of human settlement across our planet. This composite image, one of three new full-hemisphere views, provides a view of the Americas at night from the NASA-NOAA Suomi-NPP satellite. The clouds and sun glint — added here for aesthetic effect — are derived from MODIS instrument land surface and cloud cover products.

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Americas at night

Discover more lists of 10 things to know about our solar system HERE.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

IMPOSSIBLE! Right? You may have heard “the interior angles of a triangle always add up to 180 degrees”. This is not always true. Check out the second image, it shows a triangle with 3 right angles for a total of 270 degrees! 

It is true in flat Euclidean geometry (the geometry you probably learned in school) however. But there are so many other geometries out there! You may be thinking, are other geometries real though? A mathematician would argue they are just as real as the typical flat geometry you know and love (or hate). These alternative geometries can be practically useful too!

The images above show triangles in spherical geometry. Those aren’t triangles though! Oh but they are! A triangle is just a polygon enclosed by three lines. Looks like it fits the criteria. Wait but those aren’t lines, they are curved! Ah yes. I argue that these are, for all intents and purposes, just as good as lines. We need to ask: What is a line? A line is so basic to us we may not know how to describe it. I offer this definition: A line is the shortest path between 2 points. The 3 curves that make the triangle above are in fact the shortest paths from one vertex to the other on the surface of the sphere (they just so happen to be on circumferences of the sphere, which are often referred to as great circles). So it may be more useful to think of lines, in general, as length minimizing curves. In conclusion, we would consider the shape above to be a triangle as it is enclosed by 3 length minimizing curves on a surface.

Spherical geometry can be very useful; think about the Earth. To reduce travel time, airplanes would want to travel along great circles as they are the shortest paths from one place to another. Additionally, this type of thinking (rethinking straight lines as length minimizing curves) is central to Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

read more at http://staffrm.io/@missnorledge/35H6cS1T52

Impressive artwork.

Dr. Greg Dunn (artist and neuroscientist) and Dr. Brian Edwards (artist and applied physicist) created Self Reflected to elucidate the nature of human consciousness, bridging the connection between the mysterious three pound macroscopic brain and the microscopic behavior of neurons. Self Reflected offers an unprecedented insight of the brain into itself, revealing through a technique called reflective microetching the enormous scope of beautiful and delicately balanced neural choreographies designed to reflect what is occurring in our own minds as we observe this work of art. Self Reflected was created to remind us that the most marvelous machine in the known universe is at the core of our being and is the root of our shared humanity.

h-t New Scientist: Brain images display the beauty and complexity of consciousness

Alloys: Steel

According to Dictionary.com, steel is “any of various modified forms of iron, artificially produced, having a carbon content less than that of pig iron and more than that of wrought iron, and having qualities of hardness, elasticity, and strength varying according to composition and heat treatment: generally categorized as having a high, medium, or low-carbon content”. 

Perhaps the most well known alloy around, as well as one of the most common materials in the world, steel is essentially iron with a small percentage of carbon (and, on occasion, one or more other elements). Not enough carbon and you’re stuck with wrought iron, too much carbon and you get cast iron. The graph above is a binary iron-carbon phase diagram that goes from zero percent carbon to about 6.5 percent, illustrating the various phases that can form.

Steel has been known about since ancient times, some pieces dating back to 1800 BC, but it was the invention of the Bessemer process during the industrial revolution that really popularized the alloy. (Technically, similar methods had been used before, particularly in China and Japan, but Henry Bessemer invented the modern method, industrializing it and obtaining a patent in 1856.)

Mainly used in construction, the alloy has been used for almost every possible application: from office furniture to steel wool, from bulldozers to washing machines, and from wires to watches, the possibilities are pretty much endless. Steel is also one of the world’s most-recycled materials, able to be used more than once, with a recycling rate of over 60% globally.

The addition of carbon allows the steel to be stronger than the iron it’s made from. Adding nickel and manganese increases its tensile strength, chromium increases hardness and melting temperature, and vanadium also increases hardness while making it less prone to metal fatigue. Stainless steel has at least eleven percent chromium, whereas Hadfield steel (which resists wearing) contains twelve to fourteen percent manganese. Check out these links for more information on the effects of adding certain elements.  

Sources: 1 (top images), 2 (bottom images)

Alloys: Wood’s Metal

Also known as Lipowtiz’s alloy as well as the commercial names of Cerrobend, Bendalloy, Pewtalloy, and MCP 158 among others, Wood’s metal is a bismuth alloy consisting of 50% bismuth, 26.67% lead, 13.33% tin, and 10% cadmium by weight. Named for the man who invented it, a Barnabas Wood, Wood’s metal was discovered/created by him in 1860.

Wood’s metal is both a eutectic and a fusible alloy, with a low melting temperature of approximately 70 °C (158 °F). While none of its individual components have a melting temperature of less than 200 °C, a eutectic alloy can be considered as a pure (homogeneous) substance and always has a sharp melting point. If the elements in a eutectic compound or alloy are not as tightly bound as they would be in the pure elements, this leads to a lower melting point. (Eutectic substances can have higher melting points, if its components bind tightly to themselves.)

Useful as a low-temperature solder or casting metal, Wood’s metal is also used as valves in fire sprinkler systems. Thanks to its low melting temperature, Wood’s metal melts in the case of a fire and thanks to the bismuth it is made from, the alloy also shrinks when it melts (bismuth, like water ice, is one of the few substances to do so) which is the key to setting off the sprinkler system. Wood’s metal is also often used as a filler when bending thin walled metal tubes: the filler prevents the tube from collapsing, then can be easily removed by heating and melting the Wood’s metal. Other applications include treating antiques, as a heat transfer medium in hot baths, and in making custom shaped apertures and blocks for medical radiation treatment.

With the addition of both lead and cadmium, however, Wood’s metal is considered to be a toxic alloy. Contact with bare skin is thought to be harmful, especially once the alloy has melted, and vapors from cadmium containing alloys are also quite dangerous and can result in cadmium poisoning. A non-toxic alternative to Wood’s metal is Field’s metal, composed of bismuth, tin, and indium.

Sources: ( 1 - image 4 ) ( 2 - image 2 ) ( 3 ) ( 4 )

Image sources: ( 1 ) ( 3 )