Snowflake's Forum

Techspot reports : Coin-sized nuclear 3V battery with 50-year lifespan enters mass production A Chinese battery manufacturer has developed a breakthrough, sparking a worldwide race for compact nuclear energy. The innovation is a small coin-sized battery powered by a radioactive nickel isotope that decays into stable copper. While the initial cell is relatively weak, it can easily be layered to provide more power for up to 50 years. Energy storage technology has reached a transformative milestone as the BV100, a miniature atomic energy battery, enters mass production. Popular Mechanic notes that the coin-sized cell from Beijing Betavolt New Energy Technology can provide juice lasting up to 50 years without charging or maintenance. The BV100 harnesses energy from the radioactive decay of its nickel-63 core. The two-micron thick core, sandwiched between two 10-micron thick diamond semiconductors, efficiently converts the isotope's decay into electricity. Its modular structure allows ...

As we all know form posts here and info elsewhere, climate science experts are concerned about the collapse of the AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation). That deep sea water current powers the Gulf Stream and a large network of currents in the Atlantic Ocean. AMOC heavily affects weather in Europe . Sci Tech Daily writes about troubles with the Beaufort Gyre, which could wind up accelerating the collapse of the AMOC:  A major ocean current in the Arctic, the Beaufort Gyre, is changing rapidly due to climate warming—and this could trigger a chain reaction that disrupts the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the system behind the Gulf Stream. Scientists warn that melting sea ice may reach a tipping point, causing the Gyre to release massive amounts of freshwater into the North Atlantic. If that happens, the AMOC could weaken or collapse, drastically altering weather patterns across the Northern Hemisphere, especially in Europe. New model ...

Sōichi Kakeya in 1917 when he was 31 Quanta Magazine discusses the importance of solving the Kakeya Conjecture, a conjecture that has bedeviled mathematicians for 50 years. Quanta calls it a "once in a century" mathematical proof. Quanta writes : In 1917, Sōichi Kakeya posed the problem, but with an infinitely thin pencil [or needle or line segment]. He found a way of sliding the pencil that covered less area than the instinctual circular motion. Kakeya's original 1917  2D space solution Kakeya wondered how small an area the pencil could possibly sweep. Two years later, the Russian mathematician Abram Besicovitch found the answer: a complicated set of narrow turns that, counterintuitively, covers no space at all.**  ** Unfortunately, there is no image of the Besicovitch solution. Besicovitch's construction can be mathematically described, but creating a visual image of the full shebang ["infinite iteration process"] is fundamentally impossible due to its fra...

  “Back in my day, we… / we didn’t…” (fill in the blanks).  We’ve all heard that when we were younger.  Maybe we even say it to the young snots of today.  But face it, would you really want to go back?   Bunny grumbling about all the hassle it will be tomorrow to get to the airport, security and immigration check, and the long flight.  But wait.  Bunny will be on the other side of the planet in under 24 hours.  Aside from leaving the front door and getting into the cab, he will not be exposed to the elements at all.  On demand entertainment on the plane.  Bet granny and gramps would never dream of such. Since we are living in the now, what would you say to those clamoring for the good old days? J.P. Bunny

In the last ~4-5 years I started noticing that more and more people are having a hard time checking out of grocery stores and other retail places. In these bouts of bizarre behavior, I look very closely at what the check-out impaired people say and do. They act confused, overwhelmed and/or somehow paralyzed or mentally slowed down. It isn't just old people with this problem. It is  EVERYONE!  It includes middle-school and high-school students, of which there is an abundance of in our happy little neighborhood.  When whining about this, I describe the increasingly annoying check-out problem something like this: Fumbling, bumbling, mumbling, stumbling, fiddling, piddling, diddling, floundering, futzing, putzing, dawdling and farting around. I swear, the problem continues to slowly get worse. Either that or I am getting worse. Something is getting worse.  Today I stumbled across a possible explanation for "impaired check-out syndrome."  Smithsonian Maga...

Quanta magazine reports about a line of research on dark energy that I know all of us have been following very closely: Is Dark Energy Getting Weaker? New Evidence Strengthens the Case. Computer-simulated  flight through the Dark Energy  Spectroscopic  Instrument’s (DESI ’ s)  new map of millions of galaxies  Cosmologists have mapped billions of years of cosmic expansion based on the new data and analysis Last spring, a team of nearly 1,000 cosmologists announced that dark energy — the enigmatic agent propelling the universe to swell in size at an ever-increasing rate — might be slackening . [But that] was tentative and preliminary. Today, the scientists report  that they have analyzed more than twice as much data as before and that it points more strongly to the same conclusion: Dark energy is losing steam. Portions of the newly mapped universe by two observatories 15 million galaxies spanning 32 billion light-years of space[1]  (I think: Top: Southe...