October 7, 2024
Hello again science fans,
Aloha hou e ka poʻe ʻepekema,
SPACE
Comets are fickle. They can delight with their brightness, or they can disappoint with their fading. The above long-exposure photo was taken last week in the Southern Hemisphere, but we northern folk will likely be able to see the comet starting Thursday just after sunset on the western horizon. Binoculars will help. If all goes well, it will be visible through the end of the month.
When light from a supernova – usually in a nearby galaxy – reaches Earth, astronomers around the world know about it within a few hours – thanks to the Internet. That’s not soon enough! Astronomers would rather have their best instruments pointed at the doomed star just as it goes supernova. That means being able to predict when it is going to explode – preferably within a few weeks. That predictive ability is ready to be tested. [I’ve often viewed Betelgeuse while hoping i would get to see it explode. The best estimates predict it will go supernova 1.5 million years from now. Dang.]
NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft is being sent to gather data about Jupiter’s moon, Europa. When it reaches there in about five years, instruments on Europa Clipper will look for signs of life. The first launch window for the Europa Clipper is Thursday morning at 9:31 AM PDT
RAFFLE
We are offering a coffee mug disguised as a 450ml laboratory beaker displaying the chemical structure of caffeine. Just send an email before noon Friday to david.almandsmith [at] gmail.com with your guess of an integer between 0 and 1,000. Last time, Ron guessed closest to the randomly generated 485 to win a tabletop Stirling engine.
ENVIRONMENT / CLIMATE
Another hurricane, named Milton, is brewing in the Gulf of Mexico and is predicted to slam into the St. Petersburg / Tampa area Wednesday evening. Over 10,000 government employees, Guardsmen, and troops are still working to repair roads and restore infrastructure as well as bring food, water, and clothing to those affected by Hurricane Helene. Over two hundred people lost their lives and the count continues to rise.
Great Britain closed its last coal-fired power plant last week, ending England’s 140 years of burning coal for power. It is the first of the G7 countries to wean itself away from coal. (The other G7 countries are Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States.) The U.S. has about 200 operational coal-fired power plants but they are rapidly being replaced. The most polluting coal-fired power plant was the San Juan Generating Station located on the Navajo Nation. It was demolished last August. Here is a video compilation of 21 power plants being demolished; all but three were coal-fired.
One early evening in September when the outside air temperature neared 40°C (103°F) the power company shut off Ada Garcia’s home air conditioner. Ada barely noticed since her house was already cool and well-insulated. By agreeing to cede control of her house thermostat to the power company, she gets a discount on her electric bill. The power company was juggling local energy sources – wind, solar, storage battery farms, home storage batteries, natural gas – to meet electricity demand by its customers, but it was maxed out. By shutting down hundreds of home air conditioners, it avoided a black-out without buying power from Texas’ grid at an hour when prices were high. This strategy goes by the name of Virtual Power Plant, or VPP. Here is an excellent video describing the VPP concept.
¿Should we let power companies build big solar farms or should we put solar panels on our roofs? The answer is both. If every roof were covered with solar panels, that would only provide 40% of the country’s needs. Therefore, power companies need other sources to meet demand. If you have the option of putting solar on your roof (in the Bay Area), it will likely pay for itself in under 10 years. Carmen and i thoroughly appreciate fueling her Kia EV, my Zero motorcycle, and the e-bikes — for free.
The above chart shows that 5.6% of U.S. power generation comes from solar and that 15 other countries have exceeded that percentage.
MY PICKS of the WEEK (Hint: save dates & times to your mobile phone)
A lot going on this week. I recommend you browse the entire calendar.
Microproteins: Dark Matter of the Proteome – Mon 4pm, Stanford
Geography of Hope: Changing the World with GIS – Tues 7pm, Mountain View
Religions and Extraterrestrial Life – Livestream Wed 7pm
Eclipses: Influence on Animals & Humans – Livestream Thur 6:30pm
An Earthquake Crawl of the East Bay – Sat, meet 11am in Fremont; return 3:30
Estuary & Ocean Science Center Marine Lab Open House – Sun 11am – 3pm
TECHNOLOGY
When Kaiser Permanente worked to build a ‘forever’ storage for documents, i stressed that – to be safe – the documents need to be re-recorded every two decades because most media physically age and playback technology changes. Consider 8-track tapes. Some folk at the University of Southampton just recorded the billions of base pairs of the human genome within a penny-sized piece of crystal that is expected to last billions of years. It resides inside an Austrian mountain with other items in the Memory of Man Archive.
The price of lithium shot up four years ago due to demand for use in car batteries and power station storage. The price is coming back down as more lithium deposits are discovered and mined.
As refining methods improve, lithium prices will likely reach a record low. One such refining improvement employs a chemically-selective sieve to extract lithium from brine.
Helium is a critical resource and a new concentration of helium has been discovered under Minnesota. However, once helium escapes into the atmosphere from balloons, heliarc welding, airships, rocket propellant tanks, MRI machines, manufacturing, etc., etc., it is gone. Unrecoverable. Although it is the second most abundant element in the universe, it simply disperses into outer space. The helium we use was created as a radioactive product through millions of years. The deposit in Minnesota is estimated to have accumulated over a period of 1.1 billion years. Once we use up the helium we have discovered – in oil deposits, natural gas, and permeable rock – we will need to wait millions of years before helium will again be sufficiently abundant to be useful.
FUN (?) NERDY VIDEOS
Impact of a Keystone Species – The Future with Hannah Fry – 2 mins
Coating the Vera Rubin 8.4m Mirror – NOIRLab Astro – 2 mins
What We Should Know About Alcohol – Cup o’ Joe – Joe Schwaarcz – 4 mins
Brinicle / Brine Icicle / Ice Stalactite / Briner Cold – BBC Earth – 4 mins
A Truly Half Empty Glass – What If? – Randall Munroe – 4 mins
Vredefort Crater – SciShow – Caitlin Hofmeister – 5.5 mins
Gradations of Consciousness – Sabine Hossenfelder – 6 mins
Virtual Power Plants – Just Have a Think – David Borlace – 10 mins
Tipping Points for the Better – Simon Clark – 15 mins
Origin & Mathematics of QR Codes – Veritasium – Derek Muller – 35 mins
Engineering the Future: Solar – 52 mins
Have a marvelous week — while stretching your sphere of empathy to encompass yet more,
Dave, Bay Area Skeptics
The Big Bang gave us hydrogen and helium. We couldn’t make people out of hydrogen and helium, so we’re made out of exploding stars.
— John C. Mather (1946 – ) American astrophysicist & Nobel Laureate
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