Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5

OldNews thread#1: Dinosaur blood vessels + Metal powder fuel + Time travel computing

#1
C C Offline
Dinosaur Blood Vessels Survived 80 Million Years Without Fossilizing
http://www.livescience.com/53032-dinosau...ssels.html

EXCERPT: Tiny, delicate vessels that carried blood through a duck-billed dinosaur 80 million years ago never fossilized and still contain the beast's tissue, a new study finds. Researchers discovered the prize specimens on the femur (leg bone) of Brachylophosaurus canadensis, a 30-foot-long (9 meters) duck-billed dinosaur that was excavated in Montana in 2007. But it wasn't immediately clear whether the blood vessels were made of organic matter originally from the dinosaur, or whether they had been contaminated over the years and were now made of bacteria or other components. Now, several tests show that the specimens are the original blood vessels, making them the oldest blood vessels on record to survive with their original components, the researchers said....



Could metal particles be the clean fuel of the future? Research points to metal powders as potential replacement for fossil fuels
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/201...144320.htm

RELEASE: Can you imagine a future where your car is fueled by iron powder instead of gasoline?

Metal powders, produced using clean primary energy sources, could provide a more viable long-term replacement for fossil fuels than other widely discussed alternatives, such as hydrogen, biofuels or batteries, according to a study in the Dec. 15 issue of the journal Applied Energy.

"Technologies to generate clean electricity -- primarily solar and wind power -- are being developed rapidly; but we can't use that electricity for many of the things that oil and gas are used for today, such as transportation and global energy trade," notes McGill University professor Jeffrey Bergthorson, lead author of the new study.

"Biofuels can be part of the solution, but won't be able to satisfy all the demand; hydrogen requires big, heavy fuel tanks and is explosive, and batteries are too bulky and don't store enough energy for many applications," says Bergthorson, a mechanical engineering professor and Associate Director of the Trottier Institute for Sustainability in Engineering and Design at McGill. "Using metal powders as recyclable fuels that store clean primary energy for later use is a very promising alternative solution."

Novel concept

The Applied Energy paper, co-authored by Bergthorson with five other McGill researchers and a European Space Agency scientist in the Netherlands, lays out a novel concept for using tiny metal particles -- similar in size to fine flour or icing sugar -- to power external-combustion engines.

Unlike the internal-combustion engines used in gasoline-powered cars, external-combustion engines use heat from an outside source to drive an engine. External-combustion engines, modern versions of the coal-fired steam locomotives that drove the industrial era, are widely used to generate power from nuclear, coal or biomass fuels in power stations.

The idea of burning metal powders is nothing new -- they've been used for centuries in fireworks, for instance. Since the mid-20th century, they've also been used in rocket propellants, such as the space shuttle's solid-fuel booster rockets. But relatively little research has been done in recent decades on the properties of metal flames, and the potential for metal powders to be used as a recyclable fuel in a wide range of applications has been largely overlooked by scientists.

Recyclable after combustion

The idea put forward by the McGill team takes advantage of an important property of metal powders: when burned, they react with air to form stable, nontoxic solid-oxide products that can be collected relatively easily for recycling -- unlike the CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels that escape into the atmosphere.

Using a custom-built burner, the McGill researchers demonstrated that a flame can be stabilized in a flow of tiny metal particles suspended in air. Flames from metal powders "appear quite similar" to those produced by burning hydrocarbon fuels, the researchers write. "The energy and power densities of the proposed metal-fueled heat engines are predicted to be close to current fossil-fueled internal combustion engines, making them an attractive technology for a future low-carbon society."

Iron could be the primary candidate for this purpose, according to the study. Millions of tons of iron powders are already produced annually for the metallurgy, chemical and electronic industries. And iron is readily recyclable with well-established technologies, and some novel techniques can avoid the carbon dioxide emissions associated with traditional iron production using coal.

Next step: building a prototype

While laboratory work at McGill and elsewhere has shown that the use of metal fuels with heat engines is technically feasible, no one has yet demonstrated the idea in practice. The next step toward turning the lab findings into usable technology, therefore, will be "to build a prototype burner and couple it to a heat engine," Bergthorson says.

"Developing metal recycling processes that don't involve CO2 emissions is also critical."

Co-author David Jarvis, head of strategic and emerging technologies at the European Space Agency, adds: "We are very interested in this technology because it opens the door to new propulsion systems that can be used in space and on earth. The shift away from fossil fuels for vehicle propulsion is a clear trend for the future. While not perfected and commercialized today, the use of low-cost metallic fuels, like iron powder, is a worthy alternative to petrol and diesel fuels. If we can demonstrate, for the first time, an iron-fueled engine with almost zero CO2 emissions, we believe this would then trigger even more innovation and cost reduction in the near future."

Research on metal combustion at McGill has been funded over the past 20 years by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Canadian Department of National Defence, the U.S. Defence Threat Reduction Agency, the Canadian Space Agency, the European Space Agency, Martec Ltd. (Halifax, NS), and the Trottier Institute for Sustainability in Engineering and Design.



Computing with time travel?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/201...091224.htm

RELEASE: Why send a message back in time, but lock it so that no one can ever read the contents? Because it may be the key to solving currently intractable problems. That's the claim of an international collaboration who have just published a paper in npj Quantum Information.

It turns out that an unopened message can be exceedingly useful. This is true if the experimenter entangles the message with some other system in the laboratory before sending it. Entanglement, a strange effect only possible in the realm of quantum physics, creates correlations between the time-travelling message and the laboratory system. These correlations can fuel a quantum computation.

Around ten years ago researcher Dave Bacon, now at Google, showed that a time-travelling quantum computer could quickly solve a group of problems, known as NP-complete, which mathematicians have lumped together as being hard.

The problem was, Bacon's quantum computer was travelling around 'closed timelike curves'. These are paths through the fabric of spacetime that loop back on themselves. General relativity allows such paths to exist through contortions in spacetime known as wormholes.

Physicists argue something must stop such opportunities arising because it would threaten 'causality' -- in the classic example, someone could travel back in time and kill their grandfather, negating their own existence.

And it's not only family ties that are threatened. Breaking the causal flow of time has consequences for quantum physics too. Over the past two decades, researchers have shown that foundational principles of quantum physics break in the presence of closed timelike curves: you can beat the uncertainty principle, an inherent fuzziness of quantum properties, and the no-cloning theorem, which says quantum states can't be copied.

However, the new work shows that a quantum computer can solve insoluble problems even if it is travelling along "open timelike curves," which don't create causality problems. That's because they don't allow direct interaction with anything in the object's own past: the time travelling particles (or data they contain) never interact with themselves. Nevertheless, the strange quantum properties that permit "impossible" computations are left intact. "We avoid 'classical' paradoxes, like the grandfathers paradox, but you still get all these weird results," says Mile Gu, who led the work.

Gu is at the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) at the National University of Singapore and Tsinghua University in Beijing. His eight other coauthors come from these institutions, the University of Oxford, UK, Australian National University in Canberra, the University of Queensland in St Lucia, Australia, and QKD Corp in Toronto, Canada.

"Whenever we present the idea, people say no way can this have an effect" says Jayne Thompson, a co-author at CQT. But it does: quantum particles sent on a timeloop could gain super computational power, even though the particles never interact with anything in the past. "The reason there is an effect is because some information is stored in the entangling correlations: this is what we're harnessing," Thompson says.

There is a caveat -- not all physicists think that these open timeline curves are any more likely to be realisable in the physical universe than the closed ones. One argument against closed timelike curves is that no-one from the future has ever visited us. That argument, at least, doesn't apply to the open kind, because any messages from the future would be locked....
Reply


Possibly Related Threads…
Thread Author Replies Views Last Post
  UFO/UAP Thread Yazata 55 1,815 Jan 9, 2024 07:56 PM
Last Post: C C
  Nearly 1 in 7 COVID patients in ICU had severe bleeding with full-dose blood thinners C C 0 67 Jan 31, 2022 07:01 PM
Last Post: C C
  Study finds billions of quantum entangled electrons in ‘strange metal’ C C 0 232 Jan 19, 2020 01:15 AM
Last Post: C C
  Astronaut blood flowing backwards + Do head lice prefer some people more than others? C C 0 204 Nov 17, 2019 01:28 AM
Last Post: C C
  Megadontosaurus – The Dinosaur That Wasn’t C C 0 602 May 21, 2015 05:32 PM
Last Post: C C



Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)