A team of researchers have posted a paper in which they claim to have achieved a holy grail of materials science: creating metallic hydrogen in a laboratory. Source: https://www.livescience.com/65827-metallic-hydrogen-claim.html
Tag: hydrogen
Latest claim of turning hydrogen into a metal may be the most solid yet
If true, the study would complete a decades-long quest to find the elusive material. But such claims have been made prematurely many times before. Source: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/hydrogen-metal-claim-diamond-pressure4…
Cyanide compounds discovered in meteorites may hold clues to the origin of life
Cyanide and carbon monoxide are both deadly poisons to humans, but compounds containing iron, cyanide, and carbon monoxide discovered in carbon-rich meteorites by a team of scientists at Boise State University and NASA may have helped power life on early Earth. The extraterrestrial compounds found in meteorites resemble the active site of hydrogenases, which are enzymes that provide energy to bacteria…
MUSE reveals a glowing ring of light in the distant universe
The MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile has revealed very detailed halos of neutral hydrogen around distant galaxies. A new result zooms on a few such halos, one of them forming a large, almost-complete ring of light. This result will be presented by Adélaïde Claeyssens (Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon—CRAL UMR5574) at the annual meeting of the…
Smash and grab: A heavyweight stellar champion for dying stars
Dying stars that cast off their outer envelopes to form the beautiful yet enigmatic “planetary nebulae” (PNe) have a new heavy-weight champion, the innocuously named PNe BMP1613-5406. Massive stars live fast and die young, exploding as powerful supernovae after only a few million years. However, the vast majority of stars, including our own sun, have much lower mass and may live…
Remembering The ENIAC Programmers
On Princeton’s “Freedom to Tinker” site, the founder of the ENIAC Programmers Project summarizes 20 years of its research, remembering the “incredible acts of computing innovation during and just after WWII” that “established the foundation of modern computing and programming.” Commissioned in 1942, and launched in 1946, the ENIAC computer, with its 18,000 vacuum tubes, was the world’s very first modern…
Bezos Says Blue Origin Will One Day Refuel Its Lunar Lander With Ice From the Moon
Earlier this week, Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos explained how its spacecraft will eventually be powered with fuel harvested from the moon. CNBC reports: “We know things about the moon now we didn’t know about during the Apollo days,” Bezos said, speaking at the JFK Space Summit in Boston, Massachusetts. One of the things learned since Apollo that Bezos…
Abundance of gases in Enceladus’s ocean are a potential fuel—if life is there to consume it
The subsurface ocean of Saturn’s moon Enceladus probably has higher than previously known concentrations of carbon dioxide and hydrogen and a more Earthlike pH level, possibly providing conditions favorable to life, according to new research from planetary scientists at the University of Washington. Source: https://phys.org/news/2019-06-abundance-gases-enceladus-ocean-potential.html…
Astronomers Detected Signs of Our Milky Way Colliding With Another Galaxy
fahrbot-bot shares a report from ScienceAlert: Antlia 2, the “ghost of a galaxy” orbiting the Milky Way, is a dark horse in more ways than one. Not only is it so faint it was only just discovered last year, it may now be responsible for curious ripples in the hydrogen gas that makes up the Milky Way’s outer disc. According to…
UK could use hydrogen instead of natural gas – if it can make enough
The UK can safely switch to using hydrogen for heating, power and manufacturing, but doing so will require a ten-fold production increase, says a new report Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2206546-uk-could-use-hydrogen-instead-of-natural-gas-if-it-can-make-enough/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…