Short Takes – 1-23-24 – Geek Edition

Self-powered sensor automatically harvests magnetic energy. News.MIT.edu article. Pull quote: “The versatile design framework is not limited to sensors that harvest magnetic field energy, and can be applied to those that use other power sources, like vibrations or sunlight. It could be used to build networks of sensors for factories, warehouses, and commercial spaces that cost less to install and maintain.”

Salad in space? New research says it's not a healthy choice. Phys.org article. Really needs confirmation study on ISS. Pull quote: “It wasn't true microgravity, Totsline said, but it did the job to help plants lose their sense of directionality. Ultimately, the researchers discovered that it appears Salmonella can invade leaf tissue more easily under simulated microgravity conditions than it can under typical conditions on Earth.”

Japan hopes sunlight can save stricken Slim Moon lander. BBC.com article. Pull quote: “It's currently "morning" at Slim's landing location on the slopes of Shioli Crater. If, as suspected, the spacecraft's solar cells are pointing westward, then it may have to wait until the "lunar afternoon" before those cells catch enough light to start charging the battery system.”

At last: NASA's complete sample of the 'potentially hazardous' asteroid Bennu is finally freed from its canister. LiveScience.com article. Pull quote: “After landing in the Utah desert on Sept. 24, the OSIRIS-REx capsule was taken to NASA's  Johnson Space Center in Houston, where scientists began working on its disassembly. Yet two out of the capsule's 35 fasteners got stuck, meaning that NASA engineers had to design and manufacture two bespoke clamp-like tools from scratch. Made from surgical steel, the tools were used to remove the clasps and crack open the capsule on Jan. 11.”

Turnover and retention: an unspoken cost center affecting space companies. TheSpaceReview.com article. Pull quote: “This is compounded by the fact that most companies are searching for “unicorns”: people with levels of skill and experience that rarely exist, causing them to focus on a tiny pool of candidates. That is a wonderful position for seasoned space professionals who are open to being poached back and forth across the community, but not a model that can be sustained, or one that adds talent to the industry. The cost in time and resources spent chasing the “perfect hire” is significant. There is a better way.” This seems to be a typical tech industry problem.

Here’s What I Learned as the U.S. Government’s UFO Hunter. ScientificAmerican.com article. Pull quote: “AARO thoroughly investigated these claims as part of its congressionally mandated mission to not only technically evaluate contemporary UAP observations but also review historical accounts going back to the 1940s. One of my last acts before retiring was to sign AARO’s Historical Record Report Volume 1, which is currently being prepared for delivery to Congress and the public. The report demonstrates that many of the circulating allegations described above derive from inadvertent or unauthorized disclosures of legitimate U.S. programs or related R&D that have nothing to do with extraterrestrial issues or technology. Some are misrepresentations, and some derive from pure, unsupported beliefs. In many respects, the narrative is a textbook example of circular reporting, with each person relaying what they heard, but the information often ultimately being sourced to the same small group of individuals.”

Short Takes – 1-4-24 – Geek Edition

Evolution might stop humans from solving climate change, says new study. NewsWise.com article. Pull quote: “The global human expansion was facilitated by the process of cultural adaptation to the environment. This leads to the accumulation of adaptive cultural traits — social systems and technology to help exploit and control environmental resources such as agricultural practices, fishing methods, irrigation infrastructure, energy technology and social systems for managing each of these.”

SpaceX soars into 2024 with a burst of color and six special satellites. Phys.org article. Pull quote: “The Falcon 9 rocket carried 21 low-orbit satellites for its sister company, Starlink, including six that—for the first time—feature direct-to-cell communications. The satellites are designed to eliminate cellphone service "dead zones" with expanding access to text, voice and data messages for all LTE cellular devices, according to the company.”

Missions to the moon, Mars, Jupiter and more: These are the coolest space missions in 2024. LiveScience.com article. Pull quote: “In the first half of the year, there will be four attempts to land on the moon — two from the U.S. and one each from Japan and China — and each successful mission would make history. The second half of the year will feature the debut of Europe's Ariane 6 rocket, another trip to the asteroid Dimorphos, a mission to assess the habitability of Jupiter's icy moon Europa, and more.”

First step towards synthetic CO2 fixation in living cells. NewsWise.com article. Pull quote: ““Bringing parts of the THETA cycle into living cells is an important proof-of-principle for synthetic biology”, adds Tobias Erb. “Such modular implementation of this cycle in E. coli paves the way to the realization of highly complex, orthogonal new-to-nature CO2-fixation pathways in cell factories. We are learning to completely reprogram the cellular metabolism to create a synthetic autotrophic operating system for the cell."”

Study: From NYC to D.C. and beyond, cities on the East Coast are sinking. NewsWise.com article. Pull quote: “The new findings appear in the open access journal PNAS Nexus. In the work “Slowly but surely: Exposure of communities and infrastructure to subsidence on the US east coast,” Virginia Tech and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) scientists measured how much the land along the East Coast has sunk and which areas, populations, and critical infrastructure within 100 km of the coast are at risk of land subsidence. Subsidence can undermine building foundations; damage roads, gas, and water lines; cause building collapse; and exacerbate coastal flooding – especially when paired with sea level rise caused by climate change.” 

Short Takes – 11-20-23 – Geek Edition

SpaceX’s Starship gets farther on its second test flight. CosmicLog.com article. Pull quote: “SpaceX took the day as a win — based not only on a successful liftoff from its South Texas launch pad a little after 8 a.m. CT (5 a.m. PT), but also on the successful execution of a hot-stage separation maneuver two and a half minutes after launch.”

SpaceX Makes Progress in 2nd Launch of Giant Moon and Mars Rocket. NYTimes.com article (free). Pull quote: “Daniel L. Dumbacher, the executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, agreed. “This is a large launch system,” he said. “It’s going to take some work to get it to where it needs to go. I have no doubt that the SpaceX team will be able to figure out how to get the launch vehicle working.””

New cooling mechanism set to revolutionize conventional environmentally harmful refrigeration technologies. Newswise.com article. Scale-up work is ongoing. Pull quote: “In this particular case, the electrocaloric effect involves applying an electric field to ceramic capacitors, inducing temperature changes, and creating a cooling effect. “Our proposed solution involves an assembly of multilayer capacitors stacked within an electrically connected fluid-filled pipe,” explains Dr Emmanuel Defay, who leads the Nanotechnology unit within the Materials Research and Technology (MRT) department at LIST. Defay and his team have been working on electrocaloric materials for several years. “The fluid flows back and forth between the capacitors, creating a temperature gradient,” he adds.”

NASA is pausing all Mars missions, effective immediately. Here's why. LiveScience.com article. Pull quote: “"NASA will hold off sending commands to its Mars fleet for two weeks, from Nov. 11 to 25, while Earth and the Red Planet are on opposite sides of the sun. Called Mars solar conjunction, this phenomenon happens every two years," NASA said in a statement. "The missions pause because hot, ionized gas expelled from the sun's corona could potentially corrupt radio signals sent from Earth to NASA's Mars spacecraft, leading to unexpected behaviors."”

Removing Cesium: Solutions to a Chemically Complex Problem. Newswise.com article. Pull quote: “Cesium-137 is mostly human-made. It is found in large quantities in nuclear waste because it’s a byproduct of making plutonium, a necessary step in nuclear weapons production. Scientists have discovered how to safely store this radioactive waste in glass, but before that can happen a portion of the liquid tank waste needs to be treated to remove most of the cesium-137. That’s because the type of gamma radiation it emits—energy higher than X-rays—can penetrate through the human body and even through steel, making it too dangerous for workers to operate and maintain the processing technology used to make low-activity waste glass.”

SpaceX founding employee successfully moves from rockets to in-space propulsion. ArsTechnica.com article. Pull quote: “Fully fueled, the Mira spacecraft masses about 650 pounds (300 kg) and is the size of a dishwasher. The vehicle is designed to maximize its delta-V capability, so it is mostly propellant and fuel tanks, and powered by Saiph thrusters that operate at a specific impulse (ISP) of 290. "It's a pretty whiz-bang little machine," Mueller said.”

Short Takes – 10-24-23 – Geek Edition

An unusual crater on Pluto might be a supervolcano. Phys.org article. Pull quote: “The team suggests strongly that Kiladze is a super cryovolcano. Cryovolcanism is the process that sends ice "lava" to the surface of Pluto. We've seen it across the outer solar system, in some of the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Like its "sister" form of volcanism here on Earth, some kind of heating melts mantle materials, which can eventually escape to the surface. We're used to seeing rocky lavas. However, ice and water act as "lava," too, if conditions are just right.”

California's supervolcano has a massive lid that causes swarms of earthquakes — and that's a good thing, scientists say. LiveScience.com article. Pull quote: “A new study published Oct. 18 in the journal Science Advances, however, finds that the volcano's piping-hot reservoir is covered with a layer of cooled, crystallized magma-turned-rock. The researchers found that as the upper layer of the reservoir cools, it releases volatile gasses in bubbles and burps that cause earthquakes and the ground to inflate — which suggests the seismic activity in the area is not caused by an impending massive eruption.”

Researchers probe how a piece of the moon became a near-Earth asteroid. ScienceDaily.com article. Pull quote: “The other peculiar aspect of Kamo`oalewa is its longevity, said Jose Daniel Castro-Cisneros, the study's lead author and a graduate student in the Department of Physics. Kamo`oalewa is expected to remain as a companion of the Earth for millions of years, which is its remarkable feature, Castro-Cisneros said, unlike other known objects that stay in these very Earth-like orbits only for a few decades.”

NASA's Artemis moon astronauts may wear electric field spacesuits to fight pesky lunar dust. Space.com article. Pull quote: “The new technology is called LiqMEST (Liquid Metal Electrostatic Protective Textile) and aims to overcome the dusty problems NASA's Apollo astronauts struggled with in the 1960s and 1970s. The sharp dust quickly corroded surfaces like rover dust shields, caked the spacesuits of astronauts and generally clung to everything, making even three-day sorties a challenge.”

Short Takes – 8-22-23 – Geek Edition –

A new approach to reduce the risk of losing solar-powered rovers on the moon. Phys.org article. A Pull quote: “A key objective of the recent work by Lamarre and his colleagues was to quantify the probability of losing solar-powered rovers as they are exploring these shadowed areas on the moon. In addition, the team wished to devise an approach that could help to maximize the probability that the solar-powered rovers will safely complete their missions.”

We could soon be getting energy from solar power harvested in space. TheConversation.com article. Pull quote: “In SBSP, the energy is converted several times (light to electricity to microwaves to electricity), and some of it is lost as heat. In order to inject 2 gigawatts (GW) of power into the grid, about 10 GW of power will need to be collected by the satellite.”

Pyrolysed plastic waste converted into valuable chemical feedstocks. ChemistryWorld.com article. Pull quote: “Pyrolysis is currently the most common way to recover hydrocarbons from plastic and involves heating the waste to high temperatures. The long polymer chains thermally decompose through a radical mechanism, forming an olefin-rich mixture known as pyrolysis oil which can then be used as a fuel for other industrial processes. However, George Huber from the University of Wisconsin–Madison believes we could extract greater value from this hydrocarbon mixture by exploiting the high proportion of alkenes present in the oil. ‘The whole chemical industry is based on first making an olefin from crude oil and then using that to access all these different chemistries,’ he explains. ‘So why not take advantage of the olefin functionality in pyrolysis oil and use it to make higher-value chemicals rather than just making fuels from it, or feeding it back to a steam cracker?’”

How Hilary Turned Into a Monster Storm. Wired.com article. Pull quote: “This topology helps explain why hurricanes behave differently on different sides of the US. The East Coast and gulf region are relatively flat, allowing storms to travel more easily, while the mountainous west coasts of Mexico and California tend to break them up quicker. That’s partly why Southern California has been getting such intense rainfall; Hilary is fragmenting and dumping its moisture much faster than a more cohesive hurricane would while lumbering along the East Coast. Think of the East Coast scenario as similar to letting air out of a tire until it’s flat. On the West Coast, with Hilary, it’s more like popping that tire.”

Reminder – CFNS Subscription Sale through August 31st - https://chemical-facility-security-news.blogspot.com/2023/08/cfsn-detailed-analysis-subscription.html  See article for links to reduced rate subscriptions.