Renewable Revolution

Quote from: RE on March 24, 2017, 07:23:49 pm

That was an interesting video.  I actually watched the whole thing.

I've known about the Space Elevator concept for at least a decade, and in principle it's plausible.  The manufacturing and engineering challenges to actually building such a thing are incredible though, and I think his estimates of being able to get one up in 20 years are overly optimistic.

About the only thing that surprises me is that so far Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos hasn't done an IPO underwritten by The Squid to  get the Big Elevator Corporation (Stock Ticker code BEC) off the ground. (pun intended) 

Anybody got any idea what kind of accent the narrator has is?  I never heard anyone speak English with that accent.

RE

He's hearing impaired. Probably about 20%. His delivery is similar to my youngest son's. He's hearing impaired as well.

Thank you, AZ   

James Sprittles, Assistant Professor in Mathematics, University of Warwick

March 22, 2017


From the raindrops that soak you on your way to work to the drops of coffee that inevitably end up on your white shirt when you arrive, you’d be forgiven for thinking of drops as a mere nuisance.

But beneath a mundane facade, droplets exhibit natural beauty and conceal complex physics that scientists have been trying to figure out for decades. Recently, I have contributed to this field by working on a new theory explaining what happens to the critical thin layer of air between a drop of water and a surface to cause a splash.

At just a few thousandths of a second, the lifetime of a splashing drop is too rapid for us to see. It took pioneering advances in high-speed imaging to capture these events – the most iconic being Edgerton’s Milk Drop Coronet in 1957. These pictures simultaneously captured the public’s imagination with their aesthetic nature while intriguing physicists with their surprising complexity. The most obvious question is why, and when, do drops splash?

Nowadays, cameras can take over a million frames per second and resolve the fine details of a splash. However, these advances have raised as many questions as they have answered. Most importantly, remarkable observations, coming from the NagelLab in 2005, showed that the air surrounding the drop plays a critical role. By reducing the air pressure, one can prevent a splash (see second video). In fact, drops which splash at the bottom of Mount Everest may not do so at the top, where the air pressure is lower.



Ethanol drop at low pressure doesn’t splash.

The discoveries created an explosion of experimental work aimed at uncovering the curious details of the air’s role. New experimental methods revealed incredible dynamics: millimetre-sized liquid drops are controlled by the behaviour of microscopic air films that are 1,000 times smaller.

Notably, after a liquid drop contacts a solid it can be prevented from spreading across it by a microscopically thin layer of air that it can’t push aside. The sizes involved are equivalent to a one-centimetre layer of air stopping a tsunami wave spreading across a beach. When this occurs, a sheet of liquid can fly away from the main drop and break into smaller droplets – so that a splash is generated.

Major breakthrough

Experimental analyses have produced incredibly detailed observations of drops splashing. But they do not establish why the drops splash, which means we don’t understand the underlying physics. Remarkably, for such a seemingly innocuous problem the classical theory of fluids – used to forecast weather, design ships and predict blood flow – is inadequate. This is because the air layer’s height becomes comparable to the distance air molecules travel between collisions. So for this specific problem we need to feed in microscopic details that the classical theory simply doesn’t account for.   


The air’s behaviour can only be captured by a theory originally developed for violent aerodynamic gas flows – such as for space shuttles entering the Earth’s atmosphere – namely the kinetic theory of gases. My new article, published in Physical Review Letters, is the first to use kinetic theory to understand how the air film behaves as it is displaced by a liquid spreading over a solid.

The article establishes criteria for the maximum speed at which a liquid can stably spread over a solid. It was already known that for a splash to be produced, this critical speed must be exceeded. If the speed is lower than that, the drop spreads smoothly instead. Notably, the new theory explains why reducing the air pressure can suppress splashing: in this case, air escapes more easily from the layer and provides less resistance to the liquid drop. This is the missing piece of a jigsaw to which numerous important scientific contributions have been made since the experimental discoveries of 2005.

Important applications

While being of fundamental scientific interest, an understanding of the conditions that cause splashing can be exploited – leading to potential breakthroughs in a number of practical fields.

One example is 3D printing where liquid drops form the building blocks of tailor-made products such as hearing aids. Here, stopping splashing is key to making products of the desired quality. Another important area is forensic science, where blood-stain-pattern analysis relies on splash characteristics to provide insight into where the blood came from – yielding vital information in a criminal investigation.

Most promisingly, the new theory will have applications to a wide range of related flows where microscopic layers of air appear. For example, in climate science it will enable us to understand how water drops collide during the formation of clouds and to estimate the quantity of gas being dragged into our oceans by rainfall.

Do keep this in mind the next time you splatter coffee drops across your desk. Take a moment to admire the pattern and appreciate the underlying complexity before cursing and heading for your “mopper upper” of choice. 

James Sprittles, Assistant Professor in Mathematics, University of Warwick

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

http://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/why-water-drop-splash/


Agelbert NOTE: So, now you know that the fellow that made the following animation was NOT describing dripping water at high altitude atmospheric pressure. Test on Monday. 


 

This video will introduce you with the a laser cooling lab. The working and cooling of hot air up to absolute zero is also shown here.   

http://www.dnatube.com/video/29076/What-is-Laser-Cooling

Agelbert NOTE: This is a BIG deal. WHY? Because, as much as I hate to admit it, this provides a way to escape the temperature effects (but NOT the ocean acidification effects!) of global warming.

This counterintuitive process gives the appearance of violating the second law of thermodynamics because it uses laser energy to COOL a gas or liquid.

The German scientist Rudolf Clausius laid the foundation for the second law of thermodynamics in 1850 by examining the relation between heat transfer and work. His formulation of the second law, which was published in German in 1854, is known as the Clausius statement:

Heat can never pass from a colder to a warmer body without some other change, connected therewith, occurring at the same time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics

But laser cooling doesn't violate the above law, of course.   So, how does it work it's magic of cooling, instead of heating, while ADDING energy to a system?

A tuned set of lasers is fired at a gas or a liquid. This uses energy. BUT the targeted gas or liquid does NOT heat up in this case; it RADICALLY COOLS!

Temperature is, as everybody knows, just a measurement of how fast the atoms/molecules are moving around in a given 3 dimensional space. Faster moving atomic mass is hotter while slower is cooler. Absolute zero temperature is full atom stop (in theory  ).

The trick is making use of a weird property of photons which enables them to have momentum WITHOUT mass. The photons hit the target, transfer their momentum (but no mass) and SLOW the molecules down, making them real cold real fast.

The casual observer will scratch his head   and ask WHY the momentum doesn't make some of the atoms/molecules go faster (by hitting them from behind instead of head on), since molecules are going in every which way all the time.

I mean, shouldn't it all sort of even out?     

NOPE.

THAT has to do with photon frequencies. All atoms/molecules have absorption frequencies. A CO2 molecule will absorb high energy photons (UV band) and emit lower energy photons (IR band) which cannot get out of the earth's atmosphere. That's how global warming got going.

Well, the tuned laser photons (in the video below, they mention using six of them in GPS satellites for atomic clock cooling) do not hit atoms/molecules going AWAY from them because their frequency enables them to "miss" them (no photon momentum absorption due to Doppler effect frequency difference  ).

In the process of absorbing a photon, the atom receives a small push, a push in the direction away from the source of light, which is the key to laser cooling.

https://www.learner.org/courses/physics/visual/animation.html?shortname=PHY05_laser_cooling

The end result is billions of molecules slowing down and getting real cold, real quick as a consequence of a teeny tiny amount of laser energy injected to do the cooling.

I hope you realize that this means we will soon have air conditioners that use MUCH LESS ENERGY (look ma, no compressor!). It's painfully obvious that lasers, BECAUSE they shoot ZERO MASS photons (there ain't any other kind of photons  ), will require much less energy to cool down a gas than present refrigeration technology.

AND, they won't need any fancy refrigeration gas or fluid. WATER will do quite nicely for an ICE box refrigerator or air conditioner, thank you very much. 

 
Like I said before, THIS IS BIG! 

Last updated on May 15th, 2017 at 5:19 pm by Mihai Andrei

Mountains have played a central role in human culture since times immemorial. Yet it’s only recently that we’ve started to understand how mountains form and develop; to this day, these magnificent landforms still hold many secrets. There are several ways to analyze and classify mountains depending on what field of science you come from, but here, we’ll have a look at the most common classification and then go into a bit more detail.


The types of mountains

Generally, mountains are split into: fold mountains, block mountains, dome mountains, and volcanic mountains. Plateau mountains, uplifted passive margins, and hotspot mountains are also sometimes considered.

⦁   Fold mountains — the most common type, formed when two or more tectonic plates collide.

⦁   Block mountains (or fault-block) — formed through geological processes which push some rocks up and others down.

⦁  Dome mountains — formed as a result of hot magma pushing beneath the crust.

⦁  Volcanic mountains — also known by a simpler name: volcanoes.

⦁  Other types of mountains sometimes brought into classifications are plateau mountains, uplifted passive margins, and hotspot mountains.


Fold mountains


These are the not only the most common, but also the biggest types of mountains (on Earth, at least). Fold mountain chains can spread over thousands of kilometers — we’re talking about the Himalayas, the Alps, the Rockies, the Andes, all the big boys. They’re also relatively young mountains (which is another reason they’re so tall, as they haven’t been thoroughly eroded), but that’s “young” in geological terms — still a few good tens of millions of years.

In order to understand how fold mountains form and develop, we have to dip our fingers into some tectonics. The Earth’s litosphere is split into rigid plates which move independently to each other. There are seven major plates, and several smaller ones across the world. When two plates collide, all sorts of things can start happening. For instance, if one is denser than the other (oceanic plates are typically denser due to the rocks they are made of), a process a subduction will start — the heavier one will slowly glide beneath the other one. But if they have relatively similar densities, then they will start to crumple up and drive movement upwards. Basically, the tectonic plates are pushed, but since neither can slide beneath each other, they just build up geological folds. To get a better idea of how this looks like, try to push two pieces of papers towards each other. Some parts will go up, and those are the mountains.


This process is called orogeny (giving birth to mountains) and it generally takes millions of years for it to complete. Many of today’s fold mountains are still developing as the tectonic process unfolds. The process doesn’t only happen on tectonic edges, sometimes the mountain-generating fold process can take place well inside a tectonic plate.


Block mountains (or fault-block)

Whereas the previous category was all about folds, this one is all about faults; geological faults, that is.


Let’s go back to the previous idea for a moment. Let’s say that under pressure, some parts of a tectonic plate is starting to fold. As the pressure grows and grows, at one point the rock can simply break. Faults are those breaks, they’re the planar fractures or discontinuities in volumes of rock. They can vary tremendously in size from a few centimeters to mountain-sized.

Basically, when big blocks of rock are broken through faulting, some of them can be pushed up or down, and thus block mountains can result. Higher blocks are called horsts and troughs are called grabens. Their size can also be impressive, though they’re generally not as big as the fold mountains because the process which generates them takes place on a smaller scale and involves less pressure. Still, the Sierra Nevada mountains, which are a good example of block mountains, feature a block 650 km long and 80 km wide. Another good example is the Rhine Valley and the Vosges mountain in Europe. Rift valleys can also generate block mountains, as is the case in the Eastern African Rift, for example.



It can be quite difficult to identify a block mountain without knowing its underlying geology but generally, they tend to have a steep side and a slowly sloping side.
Volcanic mountains


Everyone knows something about volcanoes, though we rarely think about them as mountains (and truth be told, they aren’t always mountains).
Volcanic mountains are created when magma from deep under the surface starts to rise up. At one point, it erupts in the form of lava, and then cools down, solidifies, and starts to pile on, building a mountain. Mount Fuji in Japan and Mount Rainier are typical examples of volcanic mountains — with Mount Rainier being one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world. However, it’s not necessary for the volcano to be active.


Several types of volcanoes can generate mountains, with Stratovolcanoes typically being the biggest ones. Despite Mount Everest being the tallest mountain above sea level, Mauna Kea is actually much taller than Everest — at over 10,000 meters. However, much of it is submerged, with only 4205 meters rising above sea level.


Dome mountains

Dome mountains are also the result of magmatic activity, though they are not volcanic in nature.


Sometimes, lots of magma can accumulate beneath the ground and start to swell the surface up. Sometimes, it never reaches the surface but still forms a dome. As that magma cools down and solidifies, it is often tougher than other surrounding rocks can be exposed after millions of years of erosion. The mountain is this dome — a former accumulation of magma which cooled down and was exposed by erosion.

Round Mountain is a relatively recent dome mountain. It represents a volcanic feature of the Canadian Northern Cordilleran Volcanic Province that formed in the past 1.6 million. Black Dome Mountain is another popular example, also in Canada.


Other types of mountains

As we mentioned above, there’s no strict classification of all mountains, so other types are sometimes mentioned.


Plateau mountains

Basically, plateau mountains aren’t formed by something going up — they’re formed by something going down. Imagine a plateau, for instance. Let’s say it has a river on it. Year after year, that river carves a part of the plateau, bit by bit. After some time, there might only be a bit of the original plateau left un-eroded, and that part basically becomes a mountain. This generally takes a very long time even by geological standards and can go up to billions of years. Some geologists group all these mountains along with dome mountains into a broader category called erosional mountains.


Uplifted passive margins

There’s no geological model to fully explain how uplifted passive margins formed, but we do see them in the world. The Scandinavian Mountains, Eastern Greenland, the Brazilian Highlands or Australia’s Great Dividing Range are such examples, owing their existence to some uplifting mechanism.

Hotspot mountains



Although once thought to be identical to volcanic mountains, new research has shed some light on this belief. Hotspots are volcanic regions thought to be fed by a part of the underlying mantle which is significantly hotter than its surroundings. However, even though that hot area is fixed, the plates move around it — causing it to leave a hotspot trail of mountains.

http://www.zmescience.com/other/feature-post/main-types-mountains-earths-ups-downs/

Discussion with article Author: 


agelbert • 2 days ago
Great article! I know that it is very controversial in main stream academic geology circles, but what do you think of the theory of global expansion causing mountain formation as the surface of the sphere becomes less curved? There is indisputable geologic evidence that all the ocean basins are much younger than the earth's crust on continents. Tectonic plate theory does not have an answer to that but the expanding earth theory fits the planetary geology much better. I am not saying that plate tectonics are not involved in mountain formation; I am saying that an expanding globe combined with plate tectonics is a more comprehensive theory of our geology.



 Mihai > ⦁   agelbert ⦁   a day ago
I'm not particularly familiar with this theory, but the tectonic mechanism of orogeny is pretty well established.

agelbert > Andrei Mihai • 17 hours ago
Well, the maximum age of the ocean basins is about 190 million years. But the thing that is most convincing to me that something besides plate tectonics is at work is the distance of the oceanic rifts from the land masses of Australia and Antarctica. It makes no sense UNLESS they stretched apart without any subduction whatsoever.

Also, the closer you get to the oceanic volcanic ridges, the younger the crust is. Finally the crust of the earth is thinner in the ocean basins than on continents. All of that argues for global expansion.

I know you will think this unscientific, but I am familiar with stretch marks on human female breasts when they grow too quickly for the skin to adjust normally. The ocean basin topography looks uncannily like these types of stretch marks. But the stretching of landscape on land is a known geologic feature that also appears to be identical, though in much smaller scale to the oceanic "stretch mark" like topography.

Please watch the video and tell me what you think is inaccurate about global expansion theory.

Two intriguing screen shots from the Expanding Earth video:

Published on Oct 31, 2016


One of the best educational videos on Chaos Theory and Dynamic Systems that I have ever seen.

Chaos is order out of disorder, and order out of non-linearity.

When there is agreement within a system, the more complex a system, the better a bottom up/emergent organizational structure handles the diversity.