"A recently discovered form of carbon graphite – the material in pencil lead – has turned out to have a completely unexpected property which could revolutionise the development of green energy and electric cars.

Researchers have discovered that graphene allows positively charged hydrogen atoms or protons to pass through it despite being completely impermeable to all other gases, including hydrogen itself.

The implications of the discovery are immense as it could dramatically increase the efficiency of fuel cells, which generate electricity directly from hydrogen, the scientists said.

Professor Sir Andrei Geim received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 Professor
Sir Andrei Geim received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 (Getty)

The breakthrough raises the prospect of extracting hydrogen fuel from air and burning it as a carbon-free source of energy in a fuel cell to produce electricity and water with no damaging waste products.

“In the atmosphere there is a certain amount of hydrogen and this hydrogen will end up on the other side [of graphene] in a reservoir. Then you can use this hydrogen-collected reservoir to burn it in the same fuel cell and make electricity,” said Professor Sir Andrei Geim of Manchester University.

Ever since its discovery 10 years ago, graphene has astonished scientists. It is the thinnest known material, a million times thinner than human hair, yet more than 200 times stronger than steel, as well as being the world’s best conductor of electricity.

Until now, being permeable to protons was not considered a practical possibility, but an international team of scientists led by Sir Andre, who shares the 2010 Nobel Prize for his work on graphene, has shown that the one-atom thick crystal acts like a chemical filter. It allows the free passage of protons but forms an impenetrable barrier to other atoms and molecules.

“There have been three or four scientific papers before about the theoretical predictions for how easy or how hard it would be for a proton to go through graphene and these calculations give numbers that take billions and billions of years for a proton to go through this same membrane,” Sir Andrei said.

“It’s just so dense an electronic field it just doesn’t let anything through. But it’s a question of numbers, no more than that. This makes a difference between billions of years and a reasonable time for permeation. There is no magic,” he said."===http://www.independent.co.uk/news/scienc...85425.html

http://news.ufl.edu/archive/2014/11/proc...-fuel.html

RELEASE: Buck Rogers surely couldn’t have seen this one coming, but at NASA’s request, University of Florida researchers have figured out how to turn human waste -- yes, that kind -- into rocket fuel.

Adolescent jokes aside, the process finally makes useful something that until now has been collected to burn up on re-entry. What’s more, like so many other things developed for the space program, the process could well turn up on Earth, said Pratap Pullammanappallil, a UF associate professor of agricultural and biological engineering.

“It could be used on campus or around town, or anywhere, to convert waste into fuel,” Pullammanappallil said.

In 2006, NASA began making plans to build an inhabited facility on the moon’s surface between 2019 and 2024. As part of NASA’s moon-base goal, the agency wanted to reduce the weight of spacecraft leaving Earth. Historically, waste generated during spaceflight would not be used further. NASA stores it in containers until it’s loaded into space cargo vehicles that burn as they pass back through the Earth’s atmosphere. For future long-term missions, though, it would be impractical to bring all the stored waste back to Earth.

Dumping it on the moon’s surface is not an option, so the space agency entered into an agreement with UF to develop test ideas.

Pullammanappallil and then-graduate student Abhishek Dhoble accepted the challenge.

“We were trying to find out how much methane can be produced from uneaten food, food packaging and human waste,” said Pullammanappallil, a UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences faculty member and Dhoble’s adviser. “The idea was to see whether we could make enough fuel to launch rockets and not carry all the fuel and its weight from Earth for the return journey. Methane can be used to fuel the rockets. Enough methane can be produced to come back from the moon.”

NASA started by supplying the UF scientists with a packaged form of chemically produced human waste that also included simulated food waste, towels, wash cloths, clothing and packaging materials, Pullammanappallil said. He and Dhoble, now a doctoral student at the University of Illinois, ran laboratory tests to find out how much methane could be produced from the waste and how quickly.

They found the process could produce 290 liters of methane per crew per day, all produced in a week, Pullammanappallil said.

Their results led to the creation of an anaerobic digester process, which kills pathogens from human waste, and produces biogas -- a mixture of methane and carbon dioxide by breaking down organic matter in waste.

In earth-bound applications, that fuel could be used for heating, electricity generation or transportation.

The digestion process also would produce about 200 gallons of non-potable water annually from all the waste. That is water held within the organic matter, which is released as organic matter decomposes. Through electrolysis, the water can then be split into hydrogen and oxygen, and the astronauts can breathe oxygen as a back-up system. The exhaled carbon dioxide and hydrogen can be converted to methane and water in the process, he said.

The study was published last month in the journal Advances in Space Research.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2...112414.php

RELEASE: Led by a University of Oklahoma professor, an international team of researchers has discovered the first evidence of milk consumption in the ancient dental calculus--a mineralized dental plaque--of humans in Europe and western Asia. The team found direct evidence of milk consumption preserved in human dental plaque from the Bronze Age to the present day.

"The study has far-reaching implications for understanding the relationship between human diet and evolution," said Christina Warinner, professor in the OU Department of Anthropology. "Dairy products are a very recent, post-Neolithic dietary innovation, and most of the world's population is unable to digest lactose, often developing the symptoms of lactose intolerance." Warinner led a group of researchers from the universities of York and Copenhagen, and the University College London.

Understanding how, where and when humans consumed milk products is a necessary link between human consumption and their livestock. The new research provides direct protein evidence that the milk of all three major dairy livestock--cattle, sheep and goats--has been consumed by human populations for at least 5,000 years. This corroborates previous evidence for milk fats identified on pottery and cooking utensils in early farming communities.

"The discovery of milk proteins in human dental calculus will allow scientists to unite these lines of evidence and compare the genetic traits and cultural behaviors of specific individuals who lived thousands of years ago," said Warinner.

- - - - - - -

A research article, "Direct evidence of milk consumption from ancient human dental calculus" has been published in Nature's Scientific Reports at http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep07104. The research was supported by the Swiss Foundation for Nutritional Research, the Zurich Maxi Foundation, the University of York's Centre for Chronic Diseases and Disorders (Wellcome Trust) and EUROTAST (EU Marie Curie).

For more information on this research, please contact Christina Warinner at christina.warinner@ou.edu or visit the OU Department of Anthropology website at http://LMAMR.org.

http://scitechdaily.com/mysterious-ecosy...lien-life/

RELEASE: At one of the world’s deepest undersea hydrothermal vents, tiny shrimp are piled on top of each other, layer upon layer, crawling on rock chimneys that spew hot water. Bacteria, inside the shrimps’ mouths and in specially evolved gill covers, produce organic matter that feed the crustaceans.

Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, are studying this mysterious ecosystem in the Caribbean to get clues about what life could be like on other planetary bodies, such as Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, which has a subsurface ocean.

“For two-thirds of the Earth’s history, life has existed only as microbial life,” said Max Coleman, senior research scientist at JPL. “On Europa, the best chance for life would be microbial.”

The particular bacteria in the vents are able to survive in extreme environments because of chemosynthesis, a process that works in the absence of sunlight and involves organisms getting energy from chemical reactions. In this case, the bacteria use hydrogen sulfide, a chemical abundant at the vents, to make organic matter. The temperatures at the vents can climb up to a scorching 750 degrees Fahrenheit (400 degrees Celsius), but waters just an inch away are cool enough to support the shrimp. The shrimp are blind, but have thermal receptors in the backs of their heads.

“The overall objective of our research is to see how much life or biomass can be supported by the chemical energy of the hot submarine springs,” Coleman said.

Hydrogen sulfide is toxic to organisms in high concentrations, but the bacteria feeding the shrimp need a certain amount of this chemical to survive. Nature has worked out a solution: The shrimp position themselves on the very border between normal, oxygenated ocean water and sulfide-rich water so that they and the bacteria can coexist in harmony.

“It’s a remarkable symbiotic system,” Coleman said.

Coleman was part of a team led by Chris German at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, that discovered these vents in 2009, off the west coast of Cuba. This research, funded under NASA’s Astrobiology Science and Technology for Exploring Planets program, detected the vents by picking up the chemical signals of their plumes of water in the ocean.

The researchers returned in 2012 on the RV Atlantis with a robotic vehicle called Jason, supported by the National Science Foundation. Scientists collected extensive specimens from two hydrothermal vent fields: The Von Damm field at 7,500 feet (2,300 meters) and Piccard at more than 16,000 feet (4,900 meters), which is the world’s deepest.

Coleman and collaborator Cindy Van Dover, marine biologist at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, examined the shrimp for the first time when the same team returned in 2013 on the RV Falkor, provided by the Schmidt Ocean Institute in Palo Alto, California. Van Dover returned soon after using the robotic vehicle Hercules aboard the Exploration Vessel Nautilus, and did more collections and studies.

A bonus finding from studying this extreme oasis of life is that some of the shrimp, called Rimicaris hybisae, appear to be cannibalistic. The researchers discovered that when the shrimp arrange themselves in dense groups, bacteria seem to be the main food supplier, as the shrimp likely absorb the carbohydrates that the bacteria produce. But in areas where the shrimp are distributed more sparsely, the shrimp are more likely to turn carnivorous, eating snails, other crustaceans, and even each other.

Although the researchers did not directly observe Rimicaris hybisae practicing cannibalism, scientists did find bits of crustaceans in the shrimps’ guts. And Rimicaris hybisae is the most abundant crustacean species in the area by far.

“Whether an animal like this could exist on Europa heavily depends on the actual amount of energy that’s released there, through hydrothermal vents,” said Emma Versteegh, a postdoctoral fellow at JPL.

The group received funding for shrimp-collecting expeditions from NASA’s Astrobiology Science and Technology for Exploring Planets (ASTEP) program, through a project called “Oases for Life.” That name is especially appropriate for this investigation, Coleman said.

“You go along the ocean bottom and there’s nothing, effectively,” Coleman said. “And then suddenly we get these hydrothermal vents and a massive ecosystem. It’s just literally teeming with life.”

This research was conducted in collaboration with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Duke University. The Schmidt Ocean Institute provided technical and financial support for marine and underwater robotic operations during the 2013 RV Falkor cruise. The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena manages JPL for NASA.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2...112614.php

RELEASE: Human-induced changes to Earth's carbon cycle - for example, rising atmospheric carbon dioxide and ocean acidification - have been observed for decades. However, a study published this week in Science showed human activities, in particular industrial and agricultural processes, have also had significant impacts on the upper ocean nitrogen cycle.

The rate of deposition of reactive nitrogen (i.e., nitrogen oxides from fossil fuel burning and ammonia compounds from fertilizer use) from the atmosphere to the open ocean has more than doubled globally over the last 100 years. This anthropogenic addition of nitrogen has reached a magnitude comparable to about half of global ocean nitrogen fixation (the natural process by which atmospheric nitrogen gas becomes a useful nutrient for organisms). David Karl, Professor of Oceanography and Director of the Daniel K. Inouye Center for Microbial Oceanography at the University of Hawai'i, teamed up with researchers from Korea, Switzerland and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to assess changes in nitrate concentration between the 1960s and 2000s across the open North Pacific Ocean.

Their analysis, which could discern human-derived nitrogen from natural nitrogen fixation, revealed that the oceanic nitrate concentration increased significantly over the last 30 years in surface waters of the North Pacific due largely to the enhanced deposition of nitrogen from the atmosphere.

"This is a sobering result, one that I would not have predicted," said Karl. "The North Pacific is so vast it is hard to imagine that humans could impact the natural nitrogen cycle."

The researchers used ocean data in conjunction with the state-of-the-art Earth System Model to reconstruct the history of the oceanic nitrate concentration and make predictions about the future state of the North Pacific Ocean. Their assessment revealed a consistent picture of increasing nitrate concentrations, the magnitude and pattern of which can only be explained by the observed increase in atmospheric nitrogen deposition.

Enhanced nitrogen deposition has several potential ecological ramifications. Because biological activity is limited by nitrate availability in the North Pacific Ocean, the input of new nitrogen from the atmosphere may increase photosysnthesis in the sunlit layers and export of carbon-rich organic material out of the surface ocean into the deep.

"The burgeoning human population needs energy and food - unfortunately, nitrogen pollution is an unintended consequence and not even the open ocean is immune from our daily industrial activities," said Karl.

Given the likelihood that the magnitude of atmospheric nitrogen deposition will continue to increase in the future, the North Pacific Ocean could rapidly switch to having surplus nitrate. Thus, past and future increases in atmospheric nitrogen deposition have the potential to alter the base of the marine food web; and, in the long term, the structure of the ecosystem.

In particular, the shift in nutrient availability could favor marine organisms that thrive under the high nitrate and low phosphorus conditions. If similar trends are confirmed in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, it would constitute another example of a global-scale alteration of the Earth system. Further, the findings of this study of the North Pacific highlight the need for greater controls on the emission of nitrogen compounds during combustion and agricultural processes.

###

This research was supported by the Korean National Research Foundation of Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning, Science and Technology (Global Research Project), through a novel collaboration between scientists at Pohang University of Science and Technology and the University of Hawai'i. David Karl's participation was also supported by the U. S. National Science Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation through grants GBMF480.01 and GBMF3794.

This should probably go in "Religions & Spirituality" as much as here; but the latter's shorter on topics.

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2014/...cebook-age

EXCERPT: [...] We are in danger of losing these replenishing, corrective moments of solitary faith. Silence and seclusion are harder to find, and fewer people seek them out. You find a lone bench in the park on a fall afternoon, gaze up at the sky through the branches, and begin the Rosary only to have a power walker march by barking into an invisible mic. It’s not just the noise, it’s his connection to absent persons, as if to say that being in one place alone with the Lord is insufficient.

Social media is the culprit. Text­ing, selfies, updates, chats, snapchats, tweets, multiplayer games, blogs, wikis, and email enable people to gossip, boast, rant, strategize, self-promote, share, collaborate, inform, emote, and otherwise connect with one another anywhere and all the time. The volume is astounding. Earlier this year, Facebook boasted 1.23 billion active users, while late last year Twitter’s 200 million users sent 400 million tweets per day. According to Nielsen Media, a teen with a mobile device sends or receives on average around 3,300 text messages per month, in addition to logging 650 minutes of phone calls.

Those habits, which researchers term “hypersociality,” dominate leisure time. Data analyst Bill Tancer found in 2008 that social media had passed pornography as the most popular type of search. The whole range of fallen human motives passes through the tools, but the prime one is, precisely, “I want not to be alone.”

[...] In his Time magazine profile of Mark Zuckerberg, Man of the Year for 2010, Lev Grossman stated the aims of Facebook: "Facebook wants to populate the wilderness, tame the howling mob and turn the lonely, antisocial world of random chance into a friendly world, a serendipitous world. You’ll be working and living inside a network of people, and you’ll never have to be alone again."

Zuckerberg told a reporter the same year, “And no matter where you go, we want to ensure that every experience you have will be social.” Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, announced in a 2012 talk at MIT, “We’re social animals. It’s deep into our identity about how we discover meaning in life, what we think is important about what we do.” In conversation with Andrew Keen, Biz Stone, cofounder of Twitter, states bluntly, “The future will be social. . . . The social will be the killer app of the twenty-first century.” By this way of thinking, isolation is hurtful abandonment, quarantine, a denial of support.

[...] Loneliness is everywhere. I see it in my students when I tell them to turn off the TV while studying and one blurts out, “I couldn’t do that—the silence would drive me crazy.” Or when you watch someone at a bus stop end one phone call and promptly dial up another one, and the words you hear have no urgency to them, proving that the only need lay in finding someone to talk to.

[...] The sad truth about all this has two parts. One, the friends and connections one forms, the attention one gathers through digital tools, fail to meet the spiritual hunger. The universal hope that ­I-am-not-alone-and-unacknowledged needs stronger stuff—we aren’t so shallow. This is why the stunning geometrical growth in social-­media volume has occurred. This and that connection aren’t enough, so you grasp for more of them, more “Friends” and “People Talking About This.”

[...] And two, most pitiably, it obscures the surest and permanent source of comfort: God. People awash in ­social media can’t get past the paradox that the best salve for loneliness is ­properly applied alone. They look for answers in added connections, and more-­emotional ones, but God isn’t a closer contact and better friend. He transcends the social, and you must seek him beyond the medium of “share” and “like.” In solitary prayer, the secular pleasures dissipate and the successes of social media melt into nothingness. You drop your social self.

[...] This may explain the findings of a recent study showing a correlation between Internet use and religious disaffiliation. Using data from the General Social Survey, computer scientist Allen B. Downey concluded that Internet use accounts for 20 percent (5.1 million people) of overall decreases in religious commitment since 1990.

[...] That disposition has hit most strongly among the young, the heaviest users. To reverse it, my advice to parents, ministers, and other mentors is not to speak to them of God’s greatness and love, nor to assure them, “God is with you always and best felt in solitude.” Young people trust most the evidence of their own experience. So, give them a spiritual exercise to perform before each session of social media begins...

What do these paintings make you FEEL? What are the subtle tones of this feeling? Desolation? Coziness? Nostalgia? Wonderment?

Your avatar "Scivillage ... The Place To Be" must have somehow become the default one for the forum. I tried to upload a new avatar yesterday, but it was just at or slightly over the 25MB limit and accordingly rejected. I simply assumed the old avatar was still in effect afterwards but when returning with an optimized under-25MB version today I discovered that your avatar had bafflingly appeared in its place. Whether the result of a technical glitch, some otherwise hopefully benign hacker, or other cause --it's obviously still fitting that it should be the default avatar for the forum if such need be recruited by the software under the aforementioned circumstances...