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Submission + - Nuclear-diamond battery could power devices for 1000s of years. (livescience.com) 1

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: Live Science has a report about the world's first nuclear-diamond battery using carbon-14, which has a half-life of 5,700 years, to power devices.

The nuclear battery uses the reaction of a diamond placed close to a radioactive source to spontaneously produce electricity, scientists at the University of Bristol in the U.K. explained in a Dec. 4 statement. No motion — neither linear nor rotational — is required. That means no energy is needed to move a magnet through a coil or to turn an armature within a magnetic field to produce electric current, as is required in conventional power sources.

The diamond battery harvests fast-moving electrons excited by radiation, similar to how solar power uses photovoltaic cells to convert photons into electricity, the scientists said.

The researchers chose carbon-14 as the source material because it emits short-range radiation, which is quickly absorbed by any solid material — meaning there are no concerns about harm from the radiation. In addition, while carbon-14 is extremely toxic to touch or ingest, the surrounding diamond also provides maximal protection.

A single nuclear-diamond battery containing 0.04 ounce (1 gram) of carbon-14 could deliver 15 joules of electricity per day. For comparison, a standard alkaline AA battery, which weighs about 0.7 ounces (20 grams), has an energy-storage rating of 700 joules per gram. It delivers more power than the nuclear-diamond battery would in the short term, but it would be exhausted within 24 hours.

By contrast, the half-life of carbon-14 is 5,730 years, which means the battery would take that long to be depleted to 50% power. This is close to the age of the world's oldest civilization. As another point of comparison, a spacecraft powered by a carbon-14 diamond battery would reach Alpha Centauri — our nearest stellar neighbor, which is about 4.4 light-years from Earth — long before its power were significantly depleted.

The battery, which was built on a plasma deposition rig near Abingdon, Oxfordshire, in the U.K. by a team from the University of Bristol and the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), has no moving parts and thus requires no maintenance, nor does it have any carbon emissions.

Submission + - Is AI making you less creative? (techxplore.com)

Submitted by Big Hairy Gorilla
Big Hairy Gorilla writes: Researchers at the University of Toronto, explore the impact of LLMs on Human Creativity. The use of LLMs in particular, but automation in general, leads to a conundrum. "The smarter the tool the dumber the operator" is how I put it. Observationally, it's clear that we in technology use tools extensively. At what point do we lose skills because the tools do "too much" for you?

Submission + - Were the Egyptian pyramids built with kites? (caltech.edu) 1

Submitted by Smonster
Smonster writes: When people think about the building of the Egyptian pyramids, they probably have a mental image of thousands of slaves laboriously rolling massive stone blocks with logs and levers. But as one Caltech aeronautics professor is demonstrating, the task may have been accomplished by just four or five guys who flew the stones into place with a kite.

On Saturday, June 23, Mory Gharib and his team raised a 6,900-pound, 15-foot obelisk into vertical position in the desert near Palmdale by using nothing more than a kite, a pulley system, and a support frame. Though the blustery winds were gusting upwards of 22 miles per hour, the team set the obelisk upright on second try.

In the course of researching the tools available to the Egyptian pyramid builders, she has discovered, for example, that a brass ankh—long assumed to be merely a religious symbol—makes a very good carabiner for controlling a kite line. And a type of insect commonly found in Egypt could have supplied a kind of shellac to make linen sails hold wind. As for objections to the use of pulleys, the team's intention was always to progress later—actually, "regress" might be a more appropriate word— to the windlasses apparently used to hoist sails on Egyptian ships.

Finally, one might ask whether there was and is sufficient wind in Egypt for a kite or a drag chute to fly. The answer is that steady winds of up to 30 miles-per-hour are not unusual in the areas where the pyramids and obelisks are found.

Submission + - Osmo Startup Wants to Give Computers a Sense of Smell (cnbc.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Of the five human senses, AI is already able to mimic sight and hearing. And one company wants to use the technology to digitize another: smell.

Alex Wiltschko is the CEO and co-founder of Osmo, a startup that uses artificial intelligence technology to help computers “generate smells like we generate images and sounds,” per the company’s website.

Wiltschko found that molecules can be tricky for computers to analyze due to their complex structures.

“The reason why it’s so challenging is because you can move one tiny thing around in that molecule, like one bond, and the scent of the molecule goes from roses to rotten egg,” he says.

But thanks to advances in AI technology, the model was able to pick up on patterns in the different structures of the molecules and use that knowledge to accurately predict the odor of other molecules.

Submission + - China's battery technology reflects research boom and big spending (archive.is)

Submitted by echo123
echo123 writes: Stressing science education, China is outpacing other countries in research fields like battery chemistry, crucial to its lead in electric vehicles.

= = = = = =

China’s domination of electric cars, which is threatening to start a trade war, was born decades ago in university laboratories in Texas, when researchers discovered how to make batteries with minerals that were abundant and cheap.

Companies from China have recently built on those early discoveries, figuring out how to make the batteries hold a powerful charge and endure more than a decade of daily recharges. They are inexpensively and reliably manufacturing vast numbers of these batteries, producing most of the world’s electric cars and many other clean energy systems.

Batteries are just one example of how China is catching up — or passing — advanced industrial democracies in its technological and manufacturing sophistication. It is achieving many breakthroughs in a long list of sectors, from pharmaceuticals to drones to high-efficiency solar panels.

the article continues...

Submission + - Not Learning to Code In An Age of AI Considered Harmful

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: As the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) Conference kicked off Tuesday in Las Vegas, new guidance was issued by authors from tech-backed CSTA and Code.org led TeachAI arguing that K-12 computer science education is more important than ever in an age of AI.

From the press release: "As AI becomes increasingly present in the classroom, educators are understandably concerned about how it might disrupt the teaching of core CS skills like programming. With these briefs, TeachAI and CSTA hope to reinforce the idea that learning to program is the cornerstone of computational thinking and an important gateway to the problem-solving, critical thinking, and creative thinking skills necessary to thrive in today's digitally driven world. The rise of AI only makes CS education more important."

To help drive home the point to educators, the 39-page Guidance on the Future of Computer Science Education in an Age of AI (penned by five authors from nonprofits CSTA and Code.org) includes a pretty grim comic entitled Learn to Program or Follow Commands. In the panel, two high school students who scoff at the idea of having to learn to code and instead use GenAI to create their Python apps wind up getting stuck in miserable warehouse jobs several years later as a result where they're ordered about by an AI robot. One wonders how the comic will play with Code.org Platinum Supporter ($3,000,000+) and CSTA Strategic Partner Amazon, who coincidentally came under fire in a Senate report Wednesday for its treatment of warehouse workers.

Amazon is also the Presenting Sponsor for this week's CSTA 2024 Conference, which will feature a panel Thursday on CS Education in the Age of AI, where experts will be asked the already-answered-by-CSTA questions: "Is computer science education still relevant in the age of AI? Why learn to code when AI can do it for you?"

Comment Re:Early risers get the sunrise and sunset (Score 1) 85

In northern Montana, in the summer the fading twilight is gone at around 11pm (standard not daylight time) and the earliest hint of morning twilight is... I'm usually not awake then... 2am? I'm not in the center of the time zone. Of course use of DST makes the clock times look more extreme. In the winter I joke that I like to make good use of both hours of daylight every day. Even night owls see sunrise and sunset in the winter. I like to say I get up about an hour after sunrise, but that's not realistic when the day/night ratio varies so much around the year.

Makes me wonder - do the researches on circadian rhythms and night owls and early risers take into account latitude and seasons? When daylight hours are abundantly generous or scroogerly miserly, that affects everyone, and maybe not night owls any different as compared to early riser nuts or "normal" people? How do people in northern states deal as a society with varied circadian compared to those living in the tropical zone who get roughly 12 hours and 12 hours all year round?

Submission + - US regulators approve rule that could speed renewables

Submitted by necro81
necro81 writes: The U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which controls interstate energy infrastructure, approved a rule Monday that should boost new transmission infrastructure and make it easier to connect renewable energy projects. (More coverage here, here, and here

Some 11,000 projects totaling 2,600 GW of capacity are in planning, waiting to break ground, or connect to the grid. But they're stymied by the need for costly upgrades, or simply waiting for review. The frustrations are many. Each proposed project undergoes a lengthy grid-impact study and assessed the cost of necessary upgrades. Each project is considered in isolation, regardless of whether similar projects are happening nearby that could share the upgrade costs or auger different improvements. The planning process tends to be reactive — examining only the applications in front of them — rather than considering trends over the coming years. It's a first-come, first-served queue: if one project is ready to break ground, it must wait behind another project that's still securing funding or permitting.

Two years in development, the dryly-named Improvements to Generator Interconnection Procedures and Agreements directs utility operators to plan infrastructure improvements with a 20-yr forecast of new energy sources and increased demand. Rather than examining each project in isolation, similar projects will be clustered and examined together. Instead of a First-Come, First-Served serial process, operators will instead examine First-Ready, allowing shovel-ready projects to jump the queue. The expectation is that these new rules will speed and streamline the process of developing and connecting new energy projects through more holistic planning, penalties for delays, sensible cost-sharing for upgrades, and justification for long-term investments.

Comment Permanently locked up? (Score 1) 134

"...locking up the carbon permanently."
So what will we do in three or four or five centuries, or maybe twenty, when for some reason we can't imagine today, the atmosphere has not enough CO2? There's no way to free up that carbon? No way to use it for something useful, to make it into plastics, diamond, nanotubes, or create more bio-matter perhaps to put on the Moon or Mars or something? Today we can't imagine a good use for the carbon we might extract from the air, but who knows what we may need in the future.

Submission + - Breakthrough in imaging 3D chemistry at nanometer resolution (phys.org) 1

Submitted by Hovden
Hovden writes: A recent leap in our ability to see the chemistry of matter in three-dimensions at the nanoscale was achieved, allowing scientists to understand how nanomaterials are chemically arranged. Measuring the 3D distribution of chemistry at the nanoscale is a longstanding challenge for metrological science. Traditionally, seeing matter at the smallest sizes requires too many high-energy electrons for 3D chemical imaging. The high beam exposure that destroys the specimen before an experiment is completed. Even larger doses are required to achieve high resolution. Thus, chemical mapping in 3D has been unachievable except at lower resolution with the most radiation-hard materials.

High-resolution 3D chemical imaging is now achievable near or below one-nanometer resolution by a team from Dow Chemical and the University of Michigan. Using a newly introduced method, called multi-modal data fusion, high-resolution chemical tomography provides 99% less dose by linking information encoded within both elastic and inelastic scattered signals. The researches show sub-nanometer 3D resolution of chemistry is measurable for a broad class of geometrically and compositionally complex materials.

Submission + - Lead from gasoline blunted the IQ of about half the U.S. population, study says (nbcnews.com)

Submitted by ArchieBunker
ArchieBunker writes: Exposure to leaded gasoline lowered the IQ of about half the population of the United States, a new study estimates.

The peer-reviewed study, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, focuses on people born before 1996 — the year the U.S. banned gas containing lead.

Overall, the researchers from Florida State University and Duke University found, childhood lead exposure cost America an estimated 824 million points, or 2.6 points per person on average.

Certain cohorts were more affected than others. For people born in the 1960s and the 1970s, when leaded gas consumption was skyrocketing, the IQ loss was estimated to be up to 6 points and for some, more than 7 points. Exposure to it came primarily from inhaling auto exhaust.

Comment Moment (Score 1) 144

by darenw (#64284044) Attached to: Worldwide Obesity Tops 1 Billion

In possibly related news, Earth's day is one billion nanoseconds longer than it was three decades ago. "The Earth's moment of inertia seems to have increased for some mysterious reason" explained some scientist.

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