2nd Nuclear Fusion breakthrough could "pave way for future of clean power"

CBS News on Youtube has the story.

In December 2022, California scientists achieved a major breakthrough - a nuclear fusion reaction that produced more energy than was used to create it. Scientists have done it again and this time their results produced even more energy. Professor Peter Hosemann, chair of nuclear and mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, joins CBS News to discuss the implications of this accomplishment.

So-called "Nuclear Fusion" is certainly a reaction in which two or more atomic nuclei, usually deuterium and tritium (hydrogen variants), are combined to form one or more different atomic nuclei and subatomic particles (neutrons or protons). The difference in mass between the reactants and products is manifested as either the release or absorption of energy. This difference in mass arises due to the difference in nuclear binding energy between the atomic nuclei before and after the reaction. Nuclear fusion is the process that powers active or main-sequence stars and other high-magnitude stars, where large amounts of energy are released.

A nuclear fusion process that produces atomic nuclei lighter than iron-56 or nickel-62 will generally release energy. These elements have a relatively small mass and a relatively large binding energy per nucleon. Fusion of nuclei lighter than these releases energy (an exothermic process), while the fusion of heavier nuclei results in energy retained by the product nucleons, and the resulting reaction is endothermic. The opposite is true for the reverse process, called nuclear fission. Nuclear fusion uses lighter elements, such as hydrogen and helium, which are in general more fusible; while the heavier elements, such as uranium, thorium and plutonium, are more fissionable. The extreme astrophysical event of a supernova can produce enough energy to fuse nuclei into elements heavier than iron.

1st time ever:

In December 2022, researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California reached a historic milestone: they really got more energy out of a fusion reaction than they put in.

2nd time ever:

A breakthrough fusion experiment has produced a net gain in energy for only the second time ever and with improved performance over the first successful attempt.

Cherenkov Effect: Technically it is Faster than Light

The Science Loop Channel on Youtube has another interesting science video for you. It is about the Cherenkov Effect.

Technically, this is a photonic boom. Don't get excited here! This is called the Cherenkov effect. When a charged particle goes faster than the speed of light in a medium it creates this gorgeous blue light. In a medium Light travel a little bit slower than the vacuum. So other particles can go faster without violating relativity.

Particle physics (also known as high energy physics) is really a branch of physics that studies the nature of the particles that constitute matter and radiation.

The Cherenkov effect occurs when a particle carrying an electric charge travels through a transparent medium like water or air. If the particle travels faster than light in this medium, its passage causes a brief flash of light, a Cherenkov light. Very high speeds are impressive.

Cherenkov (Russian: Черенков) radiation  is electromagnetic radiation emitted when a charged particle (such as an electron) passes through a dielectric medium at a speed greater than the phase velocity (speed of propagation of a wave in a medium) of light in that medium. Special relativity is not violated since light travels slower in materials with refractive index greater than one, and it is the speed of light in vacuum which cannot be exceeded (or reached) by particles with mass. A classic example of Cherenkov radiation is really the characteristic blue glow of an underwater nuclear reactor. Its cause is similar to the cause of a sonic boom, the sharp sound heard when faster-than-sound movement occurs. The phenomenon is named for Soviet physicist Pavel Cherenkov, who shared the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physics for its discovery.

The so-called Frank-Tamm formula yields the amount of Cherenkov radiation emitted on a given frequency as a charged particle moves through a medium at superluminal velocity. It is named for Russian physicists Ilya Frank and Igor Tamm who developed the theory of the Cherenkov effect in 1937, for which they were awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1958.

When a so-called charged particle moves faster than the phase speed of light in a medium, electrons interacting with the particle can emit coherent photons while conserving energy and momentum. This process can be viewed as a decay. See Cherenkov radiation and nonradiation condition for an explanation of this effect.

The History of Radiation Discoveries is interesting. This is really one of various effects of radiation. This radiation effect is named after the Soviet scientist Pavel Cherenkov, the 1958 Nobel Prize winner, who was the first to detect it experimentally under the supervision of Sergey Vavilov at the Lebedev Institute in 1934. Therefore, it is also known as Vavilov-Cherenkov radiation. Cherenkov saw a faint bluish light around a radioactive preparation in water during experiments. His doctorate thesis was on luminescence of uranium salt solutions that were excited by gamma rays instead of less energetic visible light, as done commonly. He discovered the anisotropy of the radiation and came to the conclusion that the bluish glow was not a fluorescent phenomenon.

"Fluorescence" is the ability of certain chemicals to give off visible light after absorbing radiation which is not normally visible, such as ultraviolet light.

"Anisotropy" is the property of being directionally dependent, as opposed to isotropy, which means homogeneity in all directions. It can be defined as a difference in the physical property of a certain material when measured along different axes. Anisotropy in ultrasound examination is an angle-generated artifact.

Cherenkov Effect: a theory of this certain effect was later developed in 1937 within the framework of Einstein's special relativity theory by Cherenkov's colleagues Igor Tamm and Ilya Frank, who also shared the 1958 Nobel Prize.

Cherenkov radiation as conical wave front had been theoretically predicted by the English polymath Oliver Heaviside in papers published between 1888 and 1889 and by Arnold Sommerfeld in 1904, but both had been quickly forgotten following the relativity theory's restriction of super-c particles until the 1970s. Marie Curie observed a pale blue light in a highly concentrated radium solution in 1910, but did not investigate its source. In 1926, the French radiotherapist Lucien Mallet described the luminous radiation of radium irradiating water having a continuous spectrum.

In 2019, a team of researchers from Dartmouth’s and Dartmouth-Hitchcock's Norris Cotton Cancer Center discovered Cherenkov light being generated in the vitreous humor of patients undergoing radiotherapy. The light was observed using a camera imaging system called a CDose, which is specially designed to view light emissions from biological systems. For decades, patients had reported phenomena such as "flashes of bright or blue light" when receiving radiation treatments for brain cancer, but the effects had never been experimentally observed.

There is also something called "Reverse Cherenkov effect." A reverse Cherenkov effect can be experienced using materials called negative-index metamaterials (materials with a subwavelength microstructure that gives them an effective "average" property very different from their constituent materials, in this case having negative permittivity and negative permeability). This means that, when a charged particle (usually electrons) passes through a medium at a speed greater than the phase velocity of light in that medium, that particle emits trailing radiation from its progress through the medium rather than in front of it (as is the case in normal materials with, both permittivity and permeability positive). One can also obtain such reverse-cone Cherenkov radiation in non-metamaterial periodic media where the periodic structure is on the same scale as the wavelength, so it cannot be treated as an effectively homogeneous metamaterial.

Cherenkov radiation has many uses, such as:

Detection of labelled biomolecules

Medical imaging of radioisotopes and external beam radiotherapy

Nuclear reactors

Cherenkov radiation in a TRIGA reactor pool

Astrophysics experiments

Particle physics experiments

There are 2 kinds of radiation: non-ionizing radiation and ionizing radiation. Non-ionizing radiation has enough energy to move atoms in a molecule around or cause them to vibrate, but not enough to remove electrons from atoms. Examples of this kind of radiation are radio waves, visible light and microwaves.

Radiation can also be put into these 7 types of radiation:

The electromagnetic spectrum includes, from longest wavelength to shortest: radio waves, microwaves, infrared, optical, ultraviolet, X-rays, and gamma-rays.

Radiation is energy that comes from a source and travels through space and may be able to penetrate various materials. Light, radio, and microwaves are types of radiation that are called nonionizing. Gamma radiation and x rays are examples of electromagnetic radiation.

Exposure to very high levels of radiation, such as being close to an atomic blast, can cause acute health effects such as skin burns and acute radiation syndrome (radiation sickness). It can also result in long-term health effects such as cancer and cardiovascular disease.

All modern communication systems use forms of electromagnetic radiation. Variations in the intensity of the radiation represent changes in the sound, pictures, or other information being transmitted. For example, a human voice can be sent as a radio wave or microwave by making the wave vary to corresponding variations in the voice. Musicians have also experimented with gamma rays sonification, or using nuclear radiation, to produce sound and music.

Researchers use radioactive atoms to determine the age of materials that were once part of a living organism. The age of such materials can be estimated by measuring the amount of radioactive carbon they contain in a process called radiocarbon dating. Similarly, using other radioactive elements, the age of rocks and other geological features (even some man-made objects) can be determined; this is called Radiometric dating. Environmental scientists use radioactive atoms, known as tracer atoms, to identify the pathways taken by pollutants through the environment.

Radiation is used to determine the composition of materials in a process called neutron activation analysis. In this process, scientists bombard a sample of a substance with particles called neutrons. Some of the atoms in the sample absorb neutrons and become radioactive. The scientists can identify the elements in the sample by studying the emitted radiation.

Some other Radiation Effects:

Askaryan Effect

Bremsstrahlung (from bremsen "to brake" and Strahlung "radiation"; i.e., "braking radiation" or "deceleration radiation")

Radioluminescence is the phenomenon by which light is produced in a material by bombardment with ionizing radiation such as alpha particles, beta particles, or gamma rays.

A tachyon or tachyonic particle is a hypothetical particle that always travels faster than light.

Transition Radiation (TR) is a form of electromagnetic radiation emitted when a charged particle passes through inhomogeneous media, such as a boundary between 2 certain different media. This is in contrast to Cherenkov radiation, which occurs when a charged particle passes through a homogeneous dielectric medium at a speed greater than the phase velocity of electromagnetic waves in that medium.

Elon Musk Neuralink Monkey Brain Plays Pong Game explained - Science Loop

Science Loop on Youtube has interesting explanations. Neuralink just implanted a chip in a monkey's brain and demonstrated it playing video games with its mind. The science behind that could be a game-changer. Pager, a nine year old Macaque, plays MindPong with his Neuralink.

The Neuralink Website is at https://neuralink.com

Neuralink Corporation is a neurotechnology company founded by Elon Musk and others, developing implantable brain-machine interfaces (BMIs). The company's headquarters is in San Francisco. The company was started in 2016 and was first publicly reported in March 2017.

Since its founding, the company has hired several high-profile neuroscientists from various universities. By July 2019, it had received $158 million in funding (of which $100 million was from Musk) and was employing a staff of 90 employees. At that time, Neuralink announced that it was working on a "sewing machine-like" device capable of implanting very thin (4 to 6 μm in width) threads into the brain, and demonstrated a system that read information from a lab rat via 1,500 electrodes, they had anticipated starting experiments with humans in 2020; but have since moved that projection to 2021.

This innovative technology has certainly been criticized by several neuroscientists and publications, including the MIT Technology Review.

Elon Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) - an American aerospace manufacturer and space transportation services company headquartered in Hawthorne, California.

The monkey "Pager" has learned to control a computer with his brain activity. At first, the monkey uses a joystick to interact with the computer for a "tasty banana smoothie, delivered through a straw." It seems that Pager has 2 Neuralink devices implanted in his brain. The devices, which Musk calls a "Fitbit for your skull," were certainly revealed at a press briefing in August 2020.

The Neuralink devices in the monkey's brain are reading his brain activity. When the team disconnect the joystick, Pager keeps playing the game - and the amazing brain-implant allows him to play the game "MindPong."

So-called "MindPong is an initial demonstration of the potential capabilities of the N1 Link. In the future, the device could be able to achieve even greater things.

Colour Pink doesn't exist - Science Loop

An interesting new video by Science loop on Youtube explains why Colour Pink doesn't exist. It seems that the colour of the Banana (Pink) does not exist. Not joking. Even You can not find pink on the Rainbow. 

The colour pink does not exist in reality. Even you can not find it on rainbow. You can not find any wavelength for pink or magenta. Actually colour pink or magenta is the creation of our brain. So what is the real colour for this?

In physics, colour is associated specifically with electromagnetic radiation of a certain range of wavelengths visible to the human eye. Radiation of such wavelengths constitutes that portion of the electromagnetic spectrum known as the visible spectrum - i.e., light.

Pink isn't out there. True, no single wavelength of light appears pink. Pink requires a mixture of red and purple light (colors from opposite ends of the visible spectrum). If you try to roll up the rainbow to make a color wheel, there will be a gap between red and violet.

There are also other kinds of light in the universe - radio waves, microwaves, infrared, ultraviolet, x-rays, gamma rays and so on. However, we can't see any of those wavelengths.

You could say that no color is really "out there." The world is full of electromagnetic radiation. The only intrinsic properties that this radiation possesses are physical ones such as wavelength and intensity. This might sound complicated. "Color" seems to be "all in your head." 

Color seems to be a sensation that arises within the brain.

This is pretty weird. Recent research even indicates that people can be made to see "forbidden colors" - greens that are tinted red, or blues that appear yellow.

In color theory, a tint is a mixture of a color with white, which increases lightness, while a shade is a mixture with black, which increases darkness. Both processes affect the resulting color mixture's relative saturation. A tone is produced either by mixing a color with grey, or by both tinting and shading. Mixing a color with any neutral color (including black, gray, and white) reduces the chroma, or colorfulness, while the hue (the relative mixture of red, green, blue, etc. depending on the colorspace) remains unchanged.

Why Wood is more important than Diamond in the whole universe

Here is another interesting video on Youtube from Science Loop: Why Wood is more important than Diamond in the whole universe.

Diamonds are one of the most precious materials on Earth. The whole universe has many materials. Is wood more precious than diamond in the whole universe?

Diamond is a solid form of the element carbon with its atoms arranged in a crystal structure called diamond cubic. At room temperature and pressure, another solid form of carbon known as graphite is the chemically stable form of carbon, but diamond almost never converts to it. Diamond has the highest hardness and thermal conductivity of any natural material, properties that are utilized in major industrial applications such as cutting and polishing tools. They are also the reason that diamond anvil cells can subject materials to pressures found deep in the Earth.

The arrangement of atoms in diamond is extremely rigid. Few types of impurity can contaminate it (two exceptions being boron and nitrogen). Small numbers of defects or impurities (about one per million of lattice atoms) color diamond blue (boron), yellow (nitrogen), brown (defects), green (radiation exposure), purple, pink, orange or red. Diamond also has relatively high optical dispersion (ability to disperse light of different colors).

Most natural diamonds have ages between 1 billion and 3.5 billion years. Most were formed at depths between 150 and 250 kilometers (93 and 155 mi) in the Earth's mantle. Under high pressure and temperature, carbon-containing fluids dissolved various minerals and replaced them with diamonds. Much more recently (tens to hundreds of million years ago), they were carried to the surface in volcanic eruptions and deposited in igneous rocks known as kimberlites and lamproites.

Synthetic diamonds can be grown from high-purity carbon under high pressures and temperatures or from hydrocarbon gas by chemical vapor deposition (CVD). Imitation diamonds can also be certainly made out of materials such as cubic zirconia and silicon carbide. Natural, synthetic and imitation diamonds are most commonly distinguished using optical techniques or thermal conductivity measurements.

Diamond can also found inside or outside the solar system ( Asteroid, Diamond planet, star etc.)

On the other hand, wood is a complex organic structure. Wood is a porous and fibrous structural tissue found in the stems and roots of trees and other woody plants.

Wood is an organic material - a natural composite of cellulose fibers that are strong in tension and embedded in a matrix of lignin that resists compression.

Wood is sometimes defined as only the secondary xylem in the stems of trees, or it is defined more broadly to include the same type of tissue elsewhere such as in the roots of trees or shrubs.

What is a xylem? (BOTANY) The vascular tissue in plants that conducts water and dissolved nutrients upward from the root and also helps to form the woody element in the stem.

Wood may also refer to other plant materials with comparable properties, and to material engineered from wood, or wood chips or fiber.

Wood has been used for thousands of years for fuel, as a construction material, for making tools and weapons, furniture and paper.

Above: The chemistry of Diamond and Graphite

The above image is from https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Advanced-in-Wood-Chemistry-Wang/7c255aef07a4f33d23d450c22e0579c1686c694e - Advanced in Wood Chemistry - You can see Other Figures and Tables from this paper

Will This Travel Faster Than Light? Physics Truth and Possibilities

Here is another exciting video by Science Loop on YouTube. In Theory, Nothing can go ( Travel ) faster than light in space. So, here some methods to travel faster than the universal speed limit (the speed of light).

So, this video tries to explain some methods, Tricks to go faster than light ( light speed- 299 792 458 m /s or 3x108 m/s ). Here you will find some Theoretical ways ( tachyon, warp drive ), Expanding of space, Some misconceptions etc.

Take a look at these exciting concepts and sources:

1) Warp drive - https://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/technology/warp/warp.html

2) Warp drive - https://g.co/kgs/gch1Rw

3) expanding of Space - https://g.co/kgs/YqGXpx

4) tachyon - https://g.co/kgs/YzWhso

5) worm hole - https://www.space.com/20881-wormholes.html

6) https://bigthink.com/dr-kakus-universe/what-travels-faster-than-the-speed-of-light

Here is another interesting fact: The X-15's official world record for the highest speed ever recorded by a manned, powered aircraft, was set on October 1967, when William J. Knight flew at Mach 6.70 at 102,100 feet, at a speed of 4,520 miles per hour.

Could there be anything faster than the speed of light? There is no limit to how fast the universe can expand, says physicist Charles Bennett of Johns Hopkins University. Einstein's theory that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum still holds true (theoretically), because space itself is stretching, and space is nothing (nothing? ok, whatever that means. You get what I mean).

The following might sound complicated. Is there a speed of dark? How fast is the speed of dark? 54 meters per second, think some experts. This mysterious energy makes up 80 percent of all matter in the universe. In a 2013 study, scientists determined that dark matter should have a speed of 54 meters per second, or 177 feet (slow compared to the speed of light) [source: Armendariz-Picon and Neelakanta].

Read interesting recent Physics news:

September 21, 2020 - COVID Research and Resources Group brings physicists together - physicsworld.com

September 17, 2020 - How Renormalization Saved Particle Physics - quantamagazine.org

September 22, 2020 - Coronavirus: what can nuclear physics tell us about stopping the pandemic? - scmp.com

September 21, 2020 - Sustainable Plastics Inspired by Nature - physics.aps.org

September 20, 2020 - Physicists May Have The First Experimental Evidence of a New Type of Dark Boson - sciencealert.com

Length Contraction and Time dilation explained - special relativity ch.2

This is another interesting new science video from Science Loop on Youtube. This is the explanation of Special Theory of Relativity with Animation. It is the 2nd video of this Series. This video is about Length Contraction and Time dilation explained with simple animated videos.

This is pretty fascinating. Amazingly, Time Dilation explains why two working clocks will actually report different times after different accelerations. For example, at the ISS time goes slower, lagging approximately 0.01 seconds behind for every 12 earth months passed. For GPS satellites to work, they must certainly adjust for similar bending of spacetime to coordinate properly with systems on Earth.

Time dilation is really a difference in the elapsed time measured by two clocks, either due to them having a velocity relative to each other, or by there being a gravitational potential difference between their locations. After compensating for varying signal delays due to the changing distance between an observer and a moving clock (i.e. Doppler effect), the observer will measure the moving clock as ticking slower than a clock that is at rest in the observer's own reference frame. A clock that is close to a massive body (and which therefore is at lower gravitational potential) will record less elapsed time than a clock situated further from the said massive body (and which is actually at a higher gravitational potential).

Length contraction is the phenomenon that a moving object's length is measured to be shorter than its proper length, which is the length as measured in the object's own rest frame. Sounds illogical, but that's how it is. It is also known as Lorentz contraction or Lorentz-FitzGerald contraction (after Hendrik Lorentz and George Francis FitzGerald) and is usually only noticeable at a substantial fraction of the speed of light. Length contraction is only in the direction in which the body is travelling. For standard objects, this effect is negligible at everyday speeds, and can be ignored for all regular purposes, only becoming significant as the object approaches the speed of light relative to the observer.

The explanations about Length Contraction and Time dilation are interesting. It might seem like something is disobeying the laws of physics, but it's not.

There are interesting implications of special relativity:

That Fast moving object appear shorter

That Fast moving objects appears to have increased mass 

And finally, the most famous equation in science E=MC2

That mass and energy are equivalent.

In order for your car's GPS navigation to function as accurately as it does, satellites have to take relativistic effects into account. This is because even though satellites aren't moving at anything close to the speed of light, they are still going pretty fast. The satellites are also sending signals to ground stations on Earth. These stations (and the GPS unit in your car) are all experiencing higher accelerations due to gravity than the satellites in orbit.

To get that amazing pinpoint accuracy, the satellites use clocks that are accurate to a few billionths of a second (nanoseconds). Since each satellite is 12,600 miles (20,300 kilometers) above Earth and moves at about 6,000 miles per hour (10,000 km/h), there's a relativistic time dilation that tacks on about 4 microseconds each day. Add in the effects of gravity and the figure goes up to about 7 microseconds. That's 7,000 nanoseconds.

The difference is significant: if no relativistic effects were accounted for, a GPS unit that tells you it's a half mile (0.8 km) to the next gas station would be 5 miles (8 km) off after only one day.

Read interesting recent science news:

August 26, 2020 - Asteroid passing Earth before the election is real, but NASA isn't worried - cnet.com

August 27, 2020 - Scientists: Bacteria Could Survive Trip to Mars on Outside of Spacecraft - futurism.com

August 28, 2020 - New Proof Finally Affirms How Stars Get Devoured By Black Holes - middleeastheadlines.com

August 27, 2020 - Did a supernova cause the Devonian mass extinction event? - universetoday.com

August 26, 2020 - Researchers develop first controllable "walking" micro-robots - design-engineering.com

Theory of Relativity - Chapter 1 With Animation

Here is Science Loop on Youtube with a new video. The Physical Sciences or Physics is the study of matter and energy and the interactions between them. Physicists study such subjects as gravity, light, and time. Albert Einstein, a famous physicist, certainly developed the Theory of Relativity.

The video shows the explanation of Special Theory of Relativity with Animation. It is the first video of this Series. The series will cover all topics in Special Theory of Relativity with simple animated videos.

In physics, the special theory of relativity, or special relativity for short, is a scientific theory regarding the relationship between space and time. So, special relativity. Special relativity is certainly one of the most popularly famous ideas in physics. It is the thing that Einstein figured out about space and time, Length contraction, Time dilation and E=mc^2!

Special relativity was originally proposed by Albert Einstein in a paper published on 26 September 1905 titled "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies."

Many people know this famous equation in science: E=MC2

In 1905, Albert Einstein certainly determined that the laws of physics are the same for all non-accelerating observers, and that the speed of light in a vacuum was independent of the motion of all observers. This was the theory of special relativity.

Einstein's famous equation E = mc2 really shows that energy and mass are interchangeable. The theory of special relativity explains well how space and time are linked for objects that are moving at a consistent speed in a straight line. One of its most famous aspects concerns certain objects moving at the speed of light.

Read Recent Physics news:

August 18, 2020 - Physicists Observe Quantum Time Crystals Interacting with Each Other - sci-news.com

August 21, 2020 - Physics team applies quantitative methods to model how far virus-laden aerosols travel through the air - phys.org

August 14, 2020 - Physicists Develop Error-Correcting Schrödinger’s Cat - sci-news.com

August 17, 2020 - Physicists witness time crystals interacting for the first time ever - newatlas.com

August 17, 2020 - Major quantum computational breakthrough is shaking up physics and maths - phys.org