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Arahan PDPR Minggu 23 (26 Julai-30 Julai 2021

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Arahan PDPR Minggu 23 (26 Julai-30 Julai 2021

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Cuaca Angkasa Lepas

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Setiap kali dapat bil elektrik, korang mesti takkan fokus sangat dekat perkakas elektrik mana yang guna banyak tenaga. Sebaliknya, korang akan hanya tengok amaun yang perlu dibayar, dan terus bayar je tanpa tahu berapa banyak tenaga elektrik yang dah digunakan. Selama ni, korang mungkin akan beli perkakas elektrik yang paling murah je. Tapi nak tahu tak, sebenarnya, setiap perkakas elektrik ni ada ratingnya yang tersendiri, dan makin tinggi rating perkakas tu, makin banyak tenaga elektrik dapat dijimatkan.

Gambar logo rating jimat tenaga boleh tengok contoh seperti di atas. Di negara kita, antaranya terdapat 4 perkakas elektrik yang akan ditampal dengan label kecekapan tenaga yang diiktiraf oleh Suruhanjaya Tenaga. Label kecekapan tenaga ni datang dalam bentuk bintang, jadi makin tinggi bintang, makin banyak tenaga yang dapat dijimatkan.

4 Perkakas Elektrik yang Mempunyai Label Kecekapan Tenaga

Kebanyakan perkakas elektrik yang dilabelkan dengan 5 bintang, harganya mungkin akan menjadi lebih mahal sedikit dan membuatkan korang berfikir dua kali juga sebelum nak beli. Tapi kalau kira-kira kos jangka panjangnya, ternyata perkakas elektrik yang tinggi rating adalah lebih menjimatkan.

Peti Sejuk

Antara perkakas elektrik 5 bintang yang korang wajib beli adalah peti sejuk. Ini kerana, peti sejuk ni korang akan pasang 24 jam sehari, setiap minggu, malah akan dibiarkan terpasang sepanjang tahun!

Penggunaan peti sejuk biasa (3 bintang) akan menggunakan tenaga sebanyak 1242kWh manakala peti sejuk yang jimat tenaga (5 bintang) pula hanya menggunakan sebanyak 993kWh. Maksudnya, dalam setahun, korang boleh jimat sebanyak RM95.94!

Nanti masa nak beli peti sejuk 5 bintang, pastikan dah bertanya pada penjual, kapasiti mana yang sesuai untuk keluarga korang gunakan. Kalau keluarga yang kecil atau yang selalu makan luar, tak perlulah nak beli peti sejuk 600L pula kan.

Televisyen

Antara tips jimat semasa menggunakan TV yang korang tahu adalah menutupnya kalau tak ada orang tengok. Tapi walaupun korang dah amalkan cara ni, TV tersebut masih menggunakan tenaga elektrik kerana plagnya masih terpasang. Menurut Pihak Berkuasa Pembangunan Lestari (SEDA) Malaysia, TV akan gunakan 2.2 Watt setiap jam plagnya terpasang pada soket. Bayangkan, berapa banyak tenaga yang digunakan secara senyap-senyap.

Sebab tu lah korang kena tukar TV korang kepada TV 5 bintang yang hanya menggunakan 133kWh dalam setahun, berbanding 325kWh untuk TV 3 bintang. Korang boleh jimat sebanyak RM73.98 dalam setahun.

Kipas

Kadang-kadang, kita susah nak tutup kipas sebab nak udara mengalir dengan baik dalam rumah. Kalau tak nanti rasa terperap je dalam rumah kalau tutup kipas. Kalau nak buka pintu pula, takut makin banyak habuk masuk dalam. Semua benda ni dah tak payah fikir dah kalau korang gunakan kipas jimat tenaga. Kalau kipas 3 bintang akan gunakan 168 kWh setahun, kipas 5 bintang pula hanya gunakan 141 kWh setahun dan jumlah yang dapat dijimatkan dalam setahun, RM 10.40. Itu baru sebuah kipas. Kalau di rumah korang ada 4 kipas, dah dapat jimat RM41.60 setahun.

Pendingin Hawa

Malaysia ni memang kita kenali dengan dua cuaca je, sejuk dan panas. Dan kebanyakan harinya lebih banyak panas terik, kadang-kadang bahangnya sampai ke malam! Walaupun kipas dah pasang paling laju, pun kita akan tidur dalam keadaan berpeluh juga. Ramai yang tak nak beli aircond sebab takut bil elektrik melambung tinggi. Tapi kalau korang gunakan dengan cara yang betul, dan aircond yang digunakan pun bertaraf 5 bintang, bil elektrik korang takkan jadi mahal pun.

Bayangkan, aircond 3 bintang akan gunakan 2520 kWh setahun. Tapi aircond 5 bintang pula hanya gunakan sebanyak 1800 kWh tenaga elektrik untuk setahun. Dan jumlah yang korang boleh jimat mencecah RM 277.42 setahun, untuk satu aircond!

Macam Mana Nak Tahu Perkakas Elektrik yang Kita Beli Tu 5 Bintang?

Kalau beli dekat kedai, memang kita akan nampak perkakas elektrik yang dilabel dengan 4 atau 5 bintang. Tapi macam mana nak beli online? Penjual tu boleh je tipu kan? Jangan risau, ada cara nak periksa, sama ada perkakas elektrik tu berapa bintang.

Di bahagian MEPS Appliance, korang boleh pilih kategori, brand, dan rating sesuatu perkakas tu. Kemudian klik Search.

Nanti boleh nampak senarai perkakas elektrik dengan rating 4 atau 5 bintang yang korang beli sebelum tebus baucar RM200 tu.

Senang je kan sebenarnya nak jimat elektrik ni? Selain daripada menggunakan perkakas elektrik cekap tenaga, ada beberapa cara lagi yang korang boleh buat untuk jimat tenaga elektrik. Kalau nak tahu, boleh baca tipsnya di .

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Kenapa Perlu Pakai Alat Elektrik 5 Bintang Cekap Tenaga? Ini Cara Semak Alatan Elektrik 5 Star Rating

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Setiap kali dapat bil elektrik, korang mesti takkan fokus sangat dekat perkakas elektrik mana yang guna banyak tenaga. Sebaliknya, korang akan hanya tengok amaun yang perlu dibayar, dan terus bayar je tanpa tahu berapa banyak tenaga elektrik yang dah digunakan. Selama ni, korang mungkin akan beli perkakas elektrik yang paling murah je.

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Kita mungkin pernah mendengar atau menerima soalan daripada teman-teman mengenai risiko dan bahaya sekiranya tinggal di rumah yang berdekatan dengan Pencawang Elelektrik dan Menara Talian Atas Penghantaran Voltan Tinggi .

Persoalan ini menjadi semakin popular dan hangat di kalangan masyarakat terutama kepada pembeli-pembeli rumah yang berhampiran dengan lokasi Pencawang Elektrik dan Menara Talian Atas Penghantaran Voltan Tinggi ..

Secara amnya, persoalan ini lebih menjurus kepada kesedaran dan kebimbangan orang-ramai mengenai bahaya elektrik di samping untuk mendapatkan kepastian jawapan mengenai jaminan keselamatan dari pihak yang bertanggungjawab bahawa kehidupan harian mereka adalah bebas daripada sebarang risiko dan bahaya yang mungkin berlaku.

Sudah semestinya, persoalan ini akan kekal menjadi tandatanya dari masa ke semasa sekiranya tiada jawapan yang jelas dan munasabah diberikan oleh pihak yang bertanggungjawab,

Apatah lagi masyarakat sekarang makin maju dan terdedah kepada maklumat-maklumat berkaitan yang daripada sumber-sumber internet dan sebagainya.

Secara teknikalnya, risiko dan bahaya yang boleh dikaitkan ialah mengenai kesan radiasi gelombang elektromagnetik daripada Pencawang Elektrik dan Menara Talian Atas Penghantaran Voltan Tinggi yang akan melibatkan keselamatan orang-ramai yang tinggal di sekitarnya.

Memahami Keperluan Menara Talian Atas Penghantaran Voltan Tinggi Dan Pencawang Elektrik

Semua Menara Talian Atas Penghantaran Voltan Tinggi ini bersambung antara satu sama lain di seluruh negara dan membentuk Rangkaian Grid Nasional.

Nota : Sila rujuk artikel berkaitan Sistem Agihan Bekalan Elektrik

Mengenali Jenis Peralatan Di Dalam Pencawang Elektrik

Memahami Teori 'Elektro-Magnetic Field' (EMF)

Peralatan Alatubah (Transformer) di dalam Pencawang Elektrik yang terdiri daripada gelungan tembaga pengalir elektrik dan berfungsi untuk menurunkan Voltan Tinggi (VT) kepada Voltan Rendah (VR) mempunyai kesan aruhan EMF yang paling tinggi berbanding peralatan lain.

Justifikasi Kebimbangan Risiko Kesan 'Elektro-Magnetic Field' (EMF)

Kebimbangan kesan radiasi EMF ini adalah berasas kerana dari segi kajian dan amalan perubatan mengesahkan bahawa ianya sememangnya membahayakan kesihatan seseorang yang terdedah kepada kesan EMF yang kuat untuk suatu tempoh jangkasamasa yang berterusan.

Walaubagaimanapun, sehingga kini persoalan dan kebimbangan tersebut terus menjadi tandatanya dari masa ke semasa kerana ketiadaan laporan dan analisa saintifik dari pakar dan agensi perubatan yang lengkap dan jelas untuk menyokong dan membuktikan serta mengaitkan kesan radiasi EMF ini dengan bahaya kanser tersebut.

Ulasan Agensi Pembekal Elektrik Mengenai Risiko Kesan EMF

Kajian Pertubuhan Kesihatan Sedunia (WHO) juga menunjukkan bahawa kesan radiasi EMF ini tidak membahayakan kesihatan pada tahap bacaan 1000 milliGaus (mG) dan Menara Penghantaran Talian Atas Voltan Tinggi hanya menghasilkan kesan EMF sebanyak 15mG.

Nota : Sila rujuk artikel berkaitan daripada Berita Harian : EMF tidak bahaya jika bawah 100mG - TNB

Rumusan Risiko Kesan Radiasi Elektromagnetik Daripada Pencawang Elektrik

Berdasarkan kepada perbincangan di atas, antara rumusan yang boleh dilakukan mengenai persoalan dan risiko serta bahaya kesan radiasi gelombang elektrmagnetik dari Pencawang Elektrik dan Menara Talian Atas Penghantaran Voltan Tinggi adalah seperti berikut :-

Persoalan dan kebimbangan mengenai risiko radiasi EMF adalah berasas untuk dijawab dan dibuktikan oleh pakar-pakar perubatan dan agensi swasta dan kerajaan yang bertanggungjawab.

Kesedaran mengenai bahaya elektrik termasuk pemahaman mengenai radiasi gelombang EMF yang dimaksudkan mestilah sentiasa disampaikan dengan lebih kerap melalui artikel-artikel, seminar-seminar, kursus-kursus, media cetak dan elektronik dari masa ke semasa.

Langkah-langkah keselamatan yang diambil oleh pihak yang bertanggungjawab mestilah ditingkatkan dan ditunjukkan dengan lebih jelas kepada pihak orang-ramai seperti papan tanda aras bacaan gelombang EMF dipamerkan di setiap Pencawang Elektrik dan Menara Talian Atas Penghantaran Voltan Tinggi dan sebagainya.

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Pencawang Elektrik Dan Kesan Radiasi Elektromagnetik - My Electric Info

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Kita mungkin pernah mendengar atau menerima soalan daripada teman-teman mengenai risiko dan bahaya sekiranya tinggal di rumah yang berdekatan dengan Pencawang Elelektrik dan Menara Talian Atas Penghantaran Voltan Tinggi . Persoalan ini menjadi semakin popular dan hangat di kalangan masyarakat terutama kepada pembeli-pembeli rumah yang berhampiran dengan lokasi Pencawang Elektrik dan Menara Talian Atas Penghantaran Voltan Tinggi ..

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PDPR KERADIOAKTIFAN MINGGU 22 (12 Julai 2021)

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PDPR KERADIOAKTIFAN MINGGU 22 (12 Julai 2021)

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Bahaya Elektrik: Kesan Menara Pilon dan lain-lain

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Bahaya Elektrik: Kesan Menara Pilon dan lain-lain

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pendedahan gelombang elektromagnet emf di talian atas dan bawah tanah - dr wan saffiey

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THREE PHASE SYSTEM INTRO (PENGENALAN SISTEM TIGA FASA)

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Untuk bab 6, Elektrik dan Kemagnetan buat masa ini kita tidak dapat membuat eksperimen, cikgu dah cuba cari video yg sesuai utk memudahkan kamu faham terutama mengenai transformer. Semua video cikgu dah letakkan di ruangan Bab 6 yaa..selamat belajar..!
# perasan tak ada butang komen di bawah setiap artikel atau column..kamu boleh tambah maklumat atau berinteraksi di situ.

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6.3 PENGHANTARAN & PENGAGIHAN TENAGA ELEKTRIK | Sains Tingkatan 3 KSSM | BAB 6 ELEKTRIK & KEMAGNETAN

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How does an Electric Motor work?  (DC Motor)

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#freeenergy
 How to make wind turbine and generator || at your home 100% working||

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Hari ini kelas 3AT jam 7.40-8.40 (harap semua bangun awal yaa). diikuti oleh 3IK tengah hari nanti. 3AB tunggu esok yaa..Jangan lupa nanti klik utk kehadiran dlm telegram. Kita akan berkomunikasi melalui telegram..

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High Speed Vertical Axis Wind Turbine EVER MADE!!

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Assalammualaikum semua anak murid cikgu yang dikasihi. Bermulalah sesi PDPR bagi kelas kita di alam maya. Kali ini cikgu gunakan padlet bagi memudahkan untuk kamu akses bahan-bahan.

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Cikgu dah masukkan skema jawapan untuk modul bagi bab 1 hingga bab 6. Bagi sesiapa yang tertinggal atau belum mengisi jawapan dlm modul boleh mengulangkaji dan melengkapkan jawapan anda. Fail-fail ini semua dalam format pdf.

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Video ini menunjukkan keadaan di dalam dinamo. bagaimanakah wujudnya arus aruhan di dalam dinamo sehingga boleh menyalakan lampu basikal..?

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how to works bicycle dynamo generator and how to use free energy electric

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Video You Tube Sains F3 Bab 9 Cuaca Angkasa Lepas

Tingkatan 3 | Sains PT3 | Cuaca Angkasa Lepas dan Kesannya ke atas Bumi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ut0ku0zbtJI

NOTA SAINS TING 3 KSSM BAB 9 CUACA ANGKASA LEPAS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZIIenpmKOw

Cuaca Angkasa Lepas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZPdpF215sI

Kesan Fenomena Matahari Kepada Bumi Sains Tingkatan 3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hD4TSv9mijI

NOTA BAB 9 SC F3 CUACA ANGKASA LEPAS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY_sK6eaG2E

BAB 9 SAINS T3: CUACA ANGKASA LEPAS (PART 1)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZgrAiWANJE

Tingkatan 3 | Sains PT3 | Kepentingan Magnetosfera Bumi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QecQMKm6FZI

Tingkatan 3 | Sains PT3 | Struktur Matahari dan Fenomena yang Berlaku pada Permukaan Matahari Lepas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgpd96J9XZI

PART 2: CUACA ANGKASA LEPAS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hg6-_9cU4Ic

Sains (PT3) : Cuaca Angkasa Lepas - Cikgu Saimma Binti Ahmad
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNkJrRqsj1k

TING. 3 SAINS KSSM BAB 9: CUACA ANGKASA LEPAS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlefQNJm-s0

Sains Tingkatan 3 KSSM/ Bab 9: Cuaca Angkasa Lepas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nk4sLkRCHLI

Bab 9 Cuaca Angkasa Lepas Form 3 2019 KSSM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcGLAI1liJo

SAINS TING 3 BAB 9 1 CUACA ANGKASA LEPAS AKTIVITI MATAHARI YANG MEMBERI KESAN KEPADA BUMI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAsmTHNjrFE

sains :cuaca angkasa lepas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2ZW9pktsGo

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Ruangan padlet ini dikongsikan untuk kelas sains 3AB, 3AT dan 3IK. Ruangan subjek ialah ruangan pembelajaran PDPC, manakala ruang Modul akan disediakan jawapan modul yg akan dibincangkan. Terdapat juga ruangan kuiz online untuk memudahkan murid mengakses kuiz selepas sesi pembelajaran.

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FREE ENERGY DEVICE || WATER WHEEL FREE ENERGY DEVICE || WATER RECYCLE

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Video You Tube Sains F3 Bab 10 Penerokaan Angkasa Lepas

Tingkatan 3 | Sains PT3 | Perkembangan Teknologi dan Aplikasinya dalam Penerokaan Angkasa Lepas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADx2ojj4aYo

Apa yang Angkasawan Makan Dekat Angkasa?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8-g_LKrZjk

TEKNOLOGI REMOTE SENSING
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mjoiODjV-w

TING. 3 SAINS KSSM BAB 10: PENEROKAAN ANGKASA LEPAS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEtWaBVSzXs

Dr. Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor Video Journey to Space
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sz-aZ_mqVxs

China Rancang Hantar Misi Manusia Ke Bulan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAEWOLwGQ_U

Keindahan Bumi Dari Angkasa Lepas | Earth Musical And Timelapse Compilation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7WfVbhh9EQ

SAINS TING 3 BAB 10 1 PENEROKAAN ANGKASA LEPAS PERKEMBANGAN DALAM ASTRONOMI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ic3LPCbNE4Y

Penerokaan Angkasa Lepas sains form 3 KSSM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyUoVdo7_NY

Kenapa Manusia Perlu Ke Angkasa Lepas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ss1u-nKDHwo

Sains Ting. 3 KSSM/Bab 10:Penerokaan Angkasa Lepas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YsljkoH9Ro

SAINS TING 3 BAB 10 2 PENEROKAAN ANGKASA LEPAS PERKEMBANGAN DAN TEKNOLOGI DALAM PENEROKAAN ANGKASA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hXDQXMatE0

BAB 10 PENEROKAAN ANGKASA LEPAS (UNIT 10.1) #cikgitikatika
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAi7E-8rhcY

Kisah Malang Angkasawan Jatuh Dari Angkasa Lepas Yg Ramai TAK Tahu | Perlumbaan Angkasa 1967
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nn2MnXb9jEk

Angkasa Lepas (part 2) | Perlumbaan Angkasa
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5J8RdCXg5Y
Angkasa Lepas (part 3) | Satelit buatan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDIit_ivffg

SAINS BAB 10
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlULdeJzpj8

BAB 10 PENEROKAAN ANGKASA LEPAS (UNIT 10.2) #cikgutikatika
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfhRQrcp320

NOTA BAB 10 SC F3 PENEROKAAN ANGKASA LEPAS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vH0Jk7Z9JZs

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Belajar Online Bab Radioaktif dengan Miss Ash!
[eTuisyen] TINGKATAN 3 SAINS : Bab 8 - Keradioaktifan (Part 1)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIL-CfQEX38
eTuisyen] TINGKATAN 3 SAINS: Bab 8 - Keradioaktifan (Part 2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doO3FVzQ6z4
[eTuisyen] TINGKATAN 3 SAINS : Bab 8 - Keradioaktifan (Part 3)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZvs-YrwKNA

Belajar Keradioaktifan dengan Cikgu Taufik:
Sains Tingkatan 3 KSSM I Bab 8 Keradioaktifan I 8.3 Sinaran Mengion & Sinaran Tidak Mengion I Bah 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQ9s3Otcmvo
Sains Tingkatan 3 KSSM I Bab 8 Keradioaktifan I 8.1 Sejarah Penemuan Keradioaktifan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YD72UJPplxk
Sains Tingkatan 3 KSSM I Bab 8 Keradioaktifan I 8.2 Atom dan Nukleus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xyk9ENgJlng

Tingkatan 3 | Sains PT3 | Kegunaan Sinaran Radioaktif
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YElNrpsQ20
Tingkatan 3 | Sains PT3| Sejarah Penemuan Keradioaktifan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVrWRfp0UCg
Tingkatan 3 | Sains PT3 | Keradioaktifan dan Separuh Hayat
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5QplWUY4CU
Tingkatan 3 | Sains PT3 | Risiko Pendedahan kepada Sinaran Mengion Semula jadi dan Buatan Manusia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_u8TowobkBk

Kegunaan Sinaran Radioaktif
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cgrhKFcflQ
Kegunaan Sinar Radioaktif
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umip7d__UHA

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💋BUKU DIGITAL lengkap 📖
🌷sains tingkatan 3 ( 2 set)
Bab 1 -10
🧬by Norazila Khalid

🧠Bab 1 Rangsangan dan Gerak Balas
https://anyflip.com/zlpwl/qucq/
https://anyflip.com/zlpwl/sbzm/

🫁Bab 2 Respirasi
https://anyflip.com/zlpwl/puzw/
https://anyflip.com/zlpwl/sgeo/

🚙Bab 3 Pengangkutan
https://anyflip.com/zlpwl/vmqt/
https://anyflip.com/zlpwl/jqfa/

🧑‍🔬Bab 4 Kereaktifan Logam
https://anyflip.com/zlpwl/epbr/
https://anyflip.com/zlpwl/iqha/

🧪Bab 5 Termokimia
https://anyflip.com/zlpwl/huhf/
https://anyflip.com/zlpwl/tvyp/

⚡️Bab 6 Elektrik dan Kemagnetan
https://anyflip.com/zlpwl/ybpw/
https://anyflip.com/zlpwl/lrcz/

🔋Bab 7 Tenaga dan Kuasa
https://anyflip.com/zlpwl/hmlm/
https://anyflip.com/zlpwl/dfvb/

☢️Bab 8 Keradioaktifan
https://anyflip.com/zlpwl/arse/
https://anyflip.com/zlpwl/nyus/

🌞Bab 9 Cuaca Angkasa Lepas
https://anyflip.com/zlpwl/cuep/
https://anyflip.com/zlpwl/qept/

👽Bab 10 Penerokaan Angkasa Lepas
https://anyflip.com/zlpwl/suvt/
https://anyflip.com/zlpwl/cwiw/

Link pertama : rujukan buku teks
Link kedua : rujukan buku rujukan

❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️TAMAT ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
Semoga bermanfaat 🌷

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Who is leading in renewable energy? | CNBC Explains

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Sains Tingkatan 3: Bab 5 Termokimia #cikgooTUBE

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Tingkatan 3 | Sains PT3 | Pengestrakan Logam daripada Bijihnya

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Kaedah elektrolisis untuk ekstrak logam yang lebih reaktif daripada karbon

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Kaedah elektrolisis untuk ekstrak logam yang lebih reaktif daripada karbon

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Pengestrakkan Aluminium dari aluminium oksida

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Eksperimen Wajib: Membanding dan membezakan antara tindak balas eksotermik dengan tindak balas endotermik

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Eksperimen Wajib: Membanding dan membezakan antara tindak balas eksotermik dengan tindak balas endotermik

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Sains Tingkatan 3 : Termokimia (5.1.3) - Eksperimen wajib

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The chemistry of cold packs - John Pollard

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Pek sejuk paling mudah untuk menghilangkan kekejangan otot  😾

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Cara-Cara Untuk Menghasilkan Pek Sejuk Segera

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Sizzling Up: Australian policeman fries egg on car hood in 46°C weather

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What is Solar Power? | National Geographic

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What is Solar Power? | National Geographic

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What is Solar Power? | National Geographic

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Sains Tingkatan 3 - Formula/Pengiraan Masalah berkaitan Transformer

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Memahami Prinsip Kerja Sebuah Transformer

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Memahami Prinsip Kerja Sebuah Transformer

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Anda akan mempelajari tentang fungsi dan cara kerja transformer injak naik dan injak turun

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Menyelesaikan masalah bekalan tenaga elektrik

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Menyelesaikan masalah bekalan tenaga elektrik

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Jika anda ada video lain yang menarik mengenai penyelesaian masalah bekalan tenaga elektrik di sesuatu kawasan, boleh share di ruangan komen

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Sistem Penjanaan Tenaga Elektrik Mini Daripada Aliran Air

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Memahami asas arus terus dan arus ulang alik

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Memahami asas arus terus dan arus ulang alik

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Bagaimana tenaga ombak menghasilkan elektrik

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Bagaimana tenaga ombak menghasilkan elektrik

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Bagaimana tenaga biojisim digunakan utk menghasilkan elektrik di Malaysia

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Bagaimana tenaga biojisim digunakan utk menghasilkan elektrik di Malaysia

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Jika anda ada maklumat tambahan boleh share di ruangan komen

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15kW Vortex turbine with more technical details

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Cummins 1500 kW Standby Diesel Generator– 277/480 V, Used Genset #87139

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Three Mile Island Pennsylvania Nuclear Power Station Meltdown

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Inside Video Of Fukushima Nucler Power Reactor The Massive W

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Inside a nuclear reactor core - Bang Goes The Theory - BBC

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Jem Stansfield explores a never used reactor core at the Zwentendorf nuclear power plant in Austria, to explain how a nuclear power station works. Bang Goes The Theory, investigating the science behind the headlines and making sense of the everyday issues that matter to us all.

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Bagaimana stesen janakuasa terma berfungsi

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Bagaimana stesen janakuasa terma berfungsi

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16 Inventions Getting Us Off Fossil Fuels

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China's probe to Mars touched down on the red planet Saturday to deploy its Zhurong rover, state media reported, a triumph for Beijing's bold space ambitions and a history-making feat for a nation on its first-ever Martian mission.

The lander carrying Zhurong completed the treacherous descent through the Martian atmosphere using a parachute to navigate the "seven minutes of terror" as it is known, aiming for a vast northern lava plain known as the Utopia Planitia.

It "successfully landed in the pre-selected area", state broadcaster CCTV said in a special television program dedicated to the mission called "Nihao Mars" ("Hello Mars").

The official Xinhua news agency cited the China National Space Administration (CNSA) in confirming the touchdown.

It makes China the first country to carry out an orbiting, landing and roving operation during its first mission to Mars - a feat unmatched by the only other two nations to reach the red planet so far, the United States and Russia.

President Xi Jinping sent his "warm congratulations and sincere greetings to all members who have participated in the Mars exploration mission", Xinhua reported.

China has now sent astronauts into space, powered probes to the Moon and landed a rover on Mars - the most prestigious of all prizes in the competition for dominion of space.

Three-month mission

Zhurong, named after a Chinese mythical fire god, arrived a few months behind America's latest probe to Mars - Perseverance - as the show of technological might between the two superpowers plays out beyond the bounds of Earth.

Six-wheeled, solar-powered, and weighing roughly 240 kilograms (530 pounds), the Chinese rover is on a quest to collect and analyze rock samples from Mars' surface.

In a message published Saturday evening on the social network Weibo, the Zhurong greeted its "Earth friends".

"I'm still inside the landing pod," a post on its official account said. "Can't wait to find out what's on Mars."

The launch of China's Tianwen-1 Mars probe which carried the rover last July marked a major milestone in China's space program.

The spacecraft entered Mars' orbit in February and after a prolonged silence state media announced it had reached the "crucial touchdown stage" on Friday.

The landing was set to be a nail-biter for the China National Space Administration, with state media describing the process of using a parachute to slow descent and buffer legs as "the most challenging part of the mission".

It is expected to spend around three months there taking photos and harvesting geographical data.

The complicated landing process is called the "seven minutes of terror" because it happens faster than radio signals can reach Earth from Mars, meaning communications are limited.

"The distance was too far away that the spacecraft has to do it totally by itself," said Chen Lan, an independent analyst specializing in China's space program. "If there was something wrong, people on the Earth have no way to help."

Several US, Russian, and European attempts to land rovers on Mars have failed in the past, most recently in 2016 with the crash-landing of the Schiaparelli joint Russian-European spacecraft.

The latest successful arrival came in February, when US space agency NASA landed its rover Perseverance, which has since been exploring the planet.

The US rover launched a small robotic helicopter on Mars which was the first-ever powered flight on another planet.

China has come a long way in its race to catch up with the United States and Russia, whose astronauts and cosmonauts have decades of experience in space exploration.

It successfully launched the first module of its new space station last month with hopes of having it crewed by 2022 and eventually sending humans to the Moon.

Last week a segment of the Chinese Long March 5B rocket disintegrated over the Indian Ocean in an uncontrolled landing back to Earth.

That drew criticism from the United States and other nations for a breach of etiquette governing the return of space debris to Earth, with officials saying the remnants had the potential to endanger life and property.

Editor's note (15 May 2021): This file has been updated since its original publication with additional information and quotes.

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Breaking: China's Zhurong Rover Has Successfully Landed on Mars

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China's probe to Mars touched down on the red planet Saturday to deploy its Zhurong rover, state media reported, a triumph for Beijing's bold space ambitions and a history-making feat for a nation on its first-ever Martian mission.

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If you're going to gargle something next time you go for a run, here's some free advice: Try using a pink-colored drink. As strange as it sounds, pink drinks appear to be linked with enhanced running performance.

In a new study, scientists found that runners who rinsed their mouths with a pink-colored liquid solution - as opposed to a clear, identical-tasting one - ran for longer and at a faster average speed, while having a more enjoyable running experience too.

"Adding a pink colorant to an artificially sweetened solution not only enhanced the perception of sweetness, but also enhanced feelings of pleasure, self-selected running speed, and distance covered during a run," explains performance nutritionist Sanjoy Deb from the University of Westminster in the UK.

Before you make a beeline for the drinks aisle in your local supermarket, though, let's get some caveats out of the way.

This is a small study that only involved 10 participants in total, so bear that in mind. Plus, as with any experiment like this, all the researchers found was an association with pink drinks - not definitive scientific confirmation that pink drinks actually cause your legs to move quicker or anything like that.

That said, the results are certainly suggestive that pink-colored drinks could be making a significant difference to people's overall running performance... so how exactly is that possible?

According to the researchers, the answers have to do with how our bodies respond to energy intake during exercise, even if it's only perceived energy intake.

Previous studies have already shown that performance in sports like running and cycling seems to be enhanced when people use carbohydrate mouth rinses, with the stimulus thought to deliver a boost to areas in the brain involved with motor output and reward system functions - effects that may make exercise seem simultaneously more pleasurable and less tiring.

Caffeine is another substance that can deliver enhancements to physical performance, but the same kinds of benefits can be realized without actually consuming energy or stimulants, it seems.

As for the specific color pink, the team chose this based on previous research that has demonstrated we associate pink with sweetness.

"Although there may be no immediate link between drink color, taste perception and performance nutrition, if the color pink is associated with perceived sweetness, and therefore expectations of sugar/carbohydrate intake, it may be plausible that the provision of a pink-colored mouth rinse during exercise may elicit a similar ergogenic [ performance-enhancing] benefit to that of carbohydrate mouth rinse through a potential placebo effect," Deb and his co-authors write in their new paper.

To test their placebo effect hypothesis, the researchers recruited 10 fit, healthy adults experienced with running as part of their regular exercise, and got them to run on a treadmill for 30 minutes, with instructions to set their own speed for a challenging workout.

At several times during the experiment, the volunteers were asked to rinse their mouths out with an artificially sweetened, non-caloric solution - either a clear liquid, or the same solution colored pink with a food dye (but otherwise identical to the clear drink).

That one simple addition made a notable difference to running performance, the researchers say, with the pink drink linked to an average speed boost of roughly 0.5 kilometers (about 0.3 miles) per hour, which in the experiment meant an extra 213 meters (almost 700 ft) being run, for an overall 4.4 percent improvement in performance.

"An increase in feelings of pleasure was also reported during exercise in the pink mouth rinse condition, a potential psychophysiological mechanism which may have underpinned the performance improvement reported," the authors write.

This mechanism, the researchers suggest, is underpinned by a placebo effect, in which the runners may have expected to receive an energy boost from potential sugar/carbohydrate consumption in the sweet-tasting mouth rinse they used.

It's worth noting that prior to the experiment, the participants did watch a video detailing the performance-enhancing benefits of carbohydrate mouth rinses, and were informed that the tests they were about to undertake were designed to measure the effects of mouth-rinsing two commercial sports drinks.

That was a ruse, of course, designed to 'blind' the volunteers to what the experiment was actually about. But it also means they were perhaps primed for a placebo effect to happen - in a way that might be difficult to replicate at home by simply gargling pink-colored liquid when you go for a run. (Could still be worth a shot though!)

In any case, it's a pretty fascinating result, and one that the researchers say warrants further investigation in future studies - to see just how far this pink (and maybe other colored) placebo effect might extend in terms of potential performance enhancement during exercise and sport.

Oh, and if you are going to rinse your mouth with something when you exercise, maybe steer clear of actual mouthwash. That has some pretty weird effects, too.

The findings are reported in Frontiers in Nutrition.

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Bizarre Discovery Suggests Pink Drinks Make People Run Faster, But Why?

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If you're going to gargle something next time you go for a run, here's some free advice: Try using a pink-colored drink. As strange as it sounds, pink drinks appear to be linked with enhanced running performance.

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Jupiter: king of the planets, protector of the inner Solar System. We all know what the gas giant looks like, with its vanilla and butterscotch ice-cream bands of counter-rotating cloud, and the iconic red storm raging in the southern hemisphere.

But that's only how Jupiter looks in optical wavelengths, though. When imaged in wavelengths beyond the limits of human vision, Jupiter appears differently. In infrared, thermal emission glows brightly, with cooler regions duller red (a bit like lasagna); in ultraviolet, soft, cotton-candy pastels show us different altitudes.

These different wavelengths, showing such very different faces of Jupiter, are the subject of a new image release from the National Science Foundation's National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab), showcasing how multi-wavelength astronomy can provide us with a holistic dataset revealing complexities that can't be seen in one wavelength alone.

All three observations were taken at the same time, at 15:41 UT on 11 January 2017. The Hubble Space Telescope handled the optical and ultraviolet wavelengths, using its Wide Field Camera 3. The ultraviolet image was taken by the Gemini North telescope's Near-Infrared Imager.

The result is a rare snapshot of Jupiter at a single point in time across a wide swathe of the electromagnetic spectrum, and the differences between the images are fascinating.

Visible light, for instance, allows us to see details on the surface of Jupiter's atmosphere, but it's impossible to gauge how thick the cloud layers are. When we view the planet in infrared, vivid streaks of gold indicate thinner regions, allowing thermal energy from below the atmosphere to shine through.

The Great Red Spot, so vivid in visible light and ultraviolet, practically disappears in infrared, only discernible by its outline, and a thin crack in the cyclone's otherwise thick cloud. Its smaller storm buddy, 'Red Spot Jr.' (AKA Oval BA), disappears entirely.

Ultraviolet imagery of Jupiter helps scientists track the altitude and distribution of particles in the atmosphere. Higher layers, for example, appear redder due to the absorption of ultraviolet light at high altitude, whereas bluer regions appear so because of the reflection of ultraviolet light at lower altitudes.

These images, when combined with visible light, show where Jupiter's chromophores are concentrated, too. Those are the particles that produce the red color seen in the Great Red Spot and Red Spot Jr.

Scientists have already been using images such as these to learn more about Jupiter. In 2019, a team of scientists compared Hubble observations with radio observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array to find out what's happening inside Jupiter's storms.

Gemini, Hubble, and Juno observations appeared together in a study last year, finally revealing that the darker streak in the Great Red Spot was in fact a streak of thinner cloud, as well as the structure of the clouds where lightning strikes - the latter detected as radio signals by Juno. This research is also the subject of a new NOIRLab blog post.

The three instruments are going to continue to be working together for some time. In January of this year, NASA announced that the Juno mission is to be extended - instead of its previously scheduled conclusion in July of this year, it will remain in operation until at least September 2025, if the spacecraft doesn't break down before then.

Since arriving in Jovian orbit in 2016, Juno has already given us so much new information on Jupiter that we're going to be processing and learning from it for years to come. We can't wait to see what else multi-wavelength observations can teach us about this incredible planet.

Especially if it's going to keep looking like such a snack.
Image credit at top of story: (International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/NASA/ESA, M.H. Wong and I. de Pater (UC Berkeley) et al./M. Zamani)

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Incredible Images Reveal a Single Moment on Jupiter in Different Wavelengths of Light

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Jupiter: king of the planets, protector of the inner Solar System. We all know what the gas giant looks like, with its vanilla and butterscotch ice-cream bands of counter-rotating cloud, and the iconic red storm raging in the southern hemisphere.

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NASA's Perseverance rover has for the first time captured the low-pitched whirring of the Ingenuity helicopter's blades as it flies through the rarefied Martian atmosphere.

The space agency on Friday released new footage shot by the six-wheeled robot of its rotorcraft companion making its fourth flight on April 30 - this time accompanied by an audio track.

The nearly three-minute-long video begins with the low rumble of the wind blowing across the Jezero Crater, where Perseverance landed in February on a mission to search for signs of ancient microbial life.

Ingenuity takes off, and its blades can be heard humming softly as they spin at nearly 2,400 rpm on the 872-foot (262-meter) roundtrip.

The mission's engineers weren't sure they would pick up the flight sound at all, given that Perseverance was parked 262 feet (80 meters) aware from the takeoff and landing spot.

The Martian atmosphere is about one percent the density of our planet's, making everything much quieter than on Earth.

"This is a very good surprise," said David Mimoun, a professor of planetary science at Institut Superieur de l'Aeronautique et de l'Espace (ISAE-SUPAERO) in Toulouse, France, and science lead for the SuperCam Mars microphone.

"We had carried out tests and simulations that told us the microphone would barely pick up the sounds of the helicopter, as the Mars atmosphere damps the sound propagation strongly," he added.

The SuperCam is an instrument on board Perseverance that laser-zaps rocks from a distance, in order to study their vapor with a device called a spectrometer that reveals their chemical composition.

It also comes with a microphone to record the sounds, which yields additional insights into the physical properties of the targets, like how hard they are.

Similarly, explained Mimoun, the new recording of Ingenuity's flight "will be a gold mine for our understanding of the Martian atmosphere."

Apart from having a lower volume, sounds emitted on Mars travel slower than they do on Earth, because of cold temperatures, which average minus 81 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 63 degrees Celsius) on the surface.

The speed of sound on the planet is therefore around 540 mph (roughly 240 meters per second), compared to about 760 mph (roughly 340 meters per second) here.

The atmosphere of Mars, made up of 96 percent carbon dioxide, tends to absorb higher-pitched sounds, so only lower-pitched sounds can travel long distances.

Audio enhanced

NASA enhanced the audio, which was recorded in mono, by isolating the pitch of the helicopter blades at 84 hertz, and reducing audio at frequencies below 80 and above 90 hertz. They then increased the volume of the remaining signal.

Soren Madsen, Perseverance payload development manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said the recording was an example of how the mission's instruments are able to work in tandem to enhance our understanding of the Red Planet.

As Ingenuity moves away from Perseverance and out of shot, the pitch decreases, and as it returns, the pitch increases.

This is known as the Doppler Effect, and it provides an additional layer of confirmation of the helicopter's flight path when it is out of visual range.

Ingenuity first flew on April 19, the first powered, controlled flight on another planet, and was set to carry out its fifth on Friday at 3:26 pm Eastern Time (1926 GMT), with data coming down no sooner than four hours later.

After proving itself more robust than its engineers had imagined, the 4-pound (1.8-kilogram) mini chopper will then embark on a new mission, to scout ahead of the Perseverance rover to assist in its hunt for ancient life.

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Have a Listen to The Historic Sound of Ingenuity Flying on Mars

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NASA's Perseverance rover has for the first time captured the low-pitched whirring of the Ingenuity helicopter's blades as it flies through the rarefied Martian atmosphere. The space agency on Friday released new footage shot by the six-wheeled robot of its rotorcraft companion making its fourth flight on April 30 - this time accompanied by an audio track.

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Sharks are known for their long-distance migrations - across thousands of kilometers - but what's not clear is exactly how they navigate. An interesting new experiment involving swimming pools and magnetic fields may give us some big hints, however.

Knowing that sharks are sensitive to electromagnetic fields, researchers ran tests involving 20 juvenile bonnethead (Sphyrna tiburo) sharks, captured in the wild and placed individually inside a circular pool.

Magnetic cues around the pool were simulated and then modified to see if they had an effect on the swimming direction of the sharks - and the bonnetheads did indeed appear to use the magnetic fields to work out which direction home was in.

"It had been unresolved how sharks managed to successfully navigate during migration to targeted locations," says oceanographer Bryan Keller, from Florida State University. "This research supports the theory that they use the Earth's magnetic field to help them find their way; it's nature's GPS."

In the tanks, the bonnetheads were exposed to magnetic fields that replicated conditions both a long way north and a long way south from their home. In the south configuration, the sharks showed a tendency to want to travel north.

When the magnetic field in the tank matched the magnetic field at the site where the sharks were captured, they showed no preference in terms of swimming in a particular direction - it seems as though they thought they were back where they should be. Both these conditions matched the hypothesis of the study team.

There was no noticeable difference when the sharks were exposed to the north configuration, through.

The researchers suggest this was because the sharks had never experienced a magnetic field configuration like this - in other words, they only respond to environments they've learned from their travels, rather than from any magnetic field reading anywhere on Earth. But more research will need to be done to confirm this.

What happens with these young bonnethead sharks is likely to apply to other types of shark species too. The study authors point to the great white that was documented journeying between South Africa and Australia one year, for example.

"How cool is it that a shark can swim 20,000 kilometers round trip in a three-dimensional ocean and get back to the same site?" says Keller. "It really is mind blowing. In a world where people use GPS to navigate almost everywhere, this ability is truly remarkable."

Population structure could also be controlled by this magnetic sense, the researchers suggest - it's possible that responses to Earth's magnetic field affect the location of shark populations and the genetics of those communities.

Sharks aren't the only creatures to get around like this either, because sea turtles also rely on magnetic signatures to find their way back to the beaches where they hatched, sometimes covering similarly huge distances to sharks.

There's more work to do - the researchers want to test out how sharks respond to magnetic fields from human-made objects like cables, and how these fields affect everyday shark life - but this initial swimming pool and magnets piece of research is a definite success.

"To be honest, I am surprised it worked," says Keller. "The reason this question has been withstanding for 50 years is because sharks are difficult to study."

The research has been published in Current Biology.

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Sharks Navigate Using Earth's Magnetic Fields Like a Compass, New Research Shows

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Sharks are known for their long-distance migrations - across thousands of kilometers - but what's not clear is exactly how they navigate. An interesting new experiment involving swimming pools and magnetic fields may give us some big hints, however.

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NASA's Ingenuity mini-helicopter has been dropped on the surface of Mars in preparation for its first flight, the US space agency said.

The ultra-light aircraft had been fixed to the belly of the Perseverance rover, which touched down on the Red Planet on February 18.

"MarsHelicopter touchdown confirmed!" NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory tweeted Saturday.

"Its 293 million mile (471 million kilometer) journey aboard @NASAPersevere ended with the final drop of 4 inches (10 centimeter) from the rover's belly to the surface of Mars today. Next milestone? Survive the night."

#MarsHelicopter touchdown confirmed! Its 293 million mile (471 million km) journey aboard @NASAPersevere ended with the final drop of 4 inches (10 cm) from the rover's belly to the surface of Mars today. Next milestone? Survive the night. https://t.co/TNCdXWcKWE pic.twitter.com/XaBiSNebua
- NASA JPL (@NASAJPL) April 4, 2021

A photograph accompanying the tweet showed Perseverance had driven clear of the helicopter and its "airfield" after dropping to the surface.

Ingenuity had been feeding off the Perseverance's power system but will now have to use its own battery to run a vital heater to protect its unshielded electrical components from freezing and cracking during the bitter Martian night.

"This heater keeps the interior at about 45 degrees F [7 degrees Celsius] through the bitter cold of the Martian night, where temperatures can drop to as low as -130F [-90 degrees Celsius]," Bob Balaram, Mars Helicopter Project chief engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, wrote in an update on Friday.

"That comfortably protects key components such as the battery and some of the sensitive electronics from harm at very cold temperatures."

Over the next couple of days, the Ingenuity team will check that the helicopter's solar panels are working properly and recharging its battery before testing its motors and sensors ahead of its first flight, Balaram said.

Ingenuity is expected to make its first flight attempt no earlier than April 11, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory tweeted.

Come fly with us. #MarsHelicopter is preparing to do something that's never been done: controlled, powered flight on another planet. Takeoff is now slated for no earlier than April 11, with data arriving on Earth on April 12. https://t.co/TNCdXWcKWE pic.twitter.com/JSep5lcKhR
- NASA JPL (@NASAJPL) April 1, 2021

Ingenuity will be attempting to fly in an atmosphere that is one percent the density of Earth's, which makes achieving lift harder - but will be assisted by gravity that is one-third of our planet's.

The first flight will involve climbing at a rate of about three feet (one meter) per second to a height of 10 feet (three meters), hovering there for 30 seconds, then descending back to the surface.

Ingenuity will be taking high-resolution photography as it flies.

Up to five flights of gradual difficulty are planned over the month.

The four-pound (1.8-kilogram) rotorcraft cost NASA around US$85 million to develop and is considered a proof of concept that could revolutionize space exploration.

Future aircraft could cover ground much quicker than rovers, and explore more rugged terrain.

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It's Happening! NASA's Mars Helicopter Has Touched Down on The Red Planet

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NASA's Ingenuity mini-helicopter has been dropped on the surface of Mars in preparation for its first flight, the US space agency said. The ultra-light aircraft had been fixed to the belly of the Perseverance rover, which touched down on the Red Planet on February 18. "MarsHelicopter touchdown confirmed!"

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Stars die in fire and fury.

They tremble and shake, erupting their viscera out into space; when the star explodes and the violence is done, a gorgeously glowing cloud of star guts remains.

Such an event is what created the Veil Nebula, a gossamer shred of a larger supernova remnant called the Cygnus Loop created when a star 20 times the mass of the Sun went supernova, about 10,000 years ago.

If you like space photos (and which science-lover doesn't?), you've probably seen it - the Hubble Space Telescope released a spectacular image in 2015, taken with its Wide Field Camera 3 instrument, a rainbow of filaments stretching across the darkness of space.

Now, researchers have reprocessed those data using new techniques, teasing out finer details in the threads of gas.

Located at a distance of around 2,100 light-years away, and spanning a length of around 110 light-years, the Veil Nebula is thought to have been shaped by a powerful stellar wind emitted before the star exploded.

The wind pushed into the gas that had already been ejected by the dying star, hollowing out cavities. When the supernova shock wave pushes into this region, it interacts with the cavity walls, shocking and energizing the gas therein, and creating the complex, filamentous structure of the Veil.

Images like this aren't just a spectacle - they help astronomers understand these interstellar processes. Here, for instance, different gases emit slightly different wavelengths of light, which have been color-coded - blue for doubly ionized oxygen and red for ionized hydrogen and ionized nitrogen.

The green gases haven't been disturbed by shock waves as recently as the blue, so they have had time to cool and diffuse into their fluffier chaotic forms.

Because the nebula is still expanding, studying these filaments and their compositions can help us better understand the structure of the cloud, and how the shock wave from the supernova is interacting with it. Such images taken at different times can also be compared against each other to see how fast the shock wave is moving.

Hubble's 2015 observations were compared with images of the nebula taken in 1997 - see the video above - and scientists were able to calculate that it is expanding at a rate of 1.5 million kilometers (932,000 miles) per hour. Earth's diameter, for reference, is 12,742 kilometers.

Eventually, the remains of the young, hot star that died in such a dramatic fashion will be all blown away, scattered into the interstellar medium. Even for stars, all things must come to an end.

You can download a wallpaper-sized version of the reprocessed image on the ESA's Hubble website.

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Hubble's Renewed Image of The Veil Nebula Will Take Your Breath Away

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Stars die in fire and fury. They tremble and shake, erupting their viscera out into space; when the star explodes and the violence is done, a gorgeously glowing cloud of star guts remains.

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Life can get a little blue beneath the ocean's surface. Warmer colors quickly fade the deeper you go, leaving a meager palette of just a few short wavelengths to light up the landscape.

To stand out in the gloom, many marine animals have evolved ways to make their skins and shells radiate hues of green, yellow, and red by soaking up shorter wavelengths and re-emitting them in a more stretched-out form.

The tropics are positively overflowing with countless examples of crustaceans, nudibranchs, anemones, and fish all using their own varieties of biofluorescent pigments to transform dull old aquamarine into something to be seen.

Approaching the Arctic Circle, life is anything but an octopus's garden of delight. After all, why go to the effort of dressing up if long winter months are just going to cloak you in darkness anyway?

American Museum of Natural History curator John Sparks and his colleague, marine biologist David Gruber, wondered if the summer's long days provided an incentive for any Arctic animals keen to give glowing a go.

"The light regime at the poles provides for winter months of near-total darkness, where biofluorescence would not be functional," says Gruber.

"But given the summer months with the midnight Sun, we hypothesized that it could be present."

An expedition to the coastal waters of eastern Greenland in 2019 provided a solid answer in the form of two juvenile specimens of variegated snailfish (Liparis gibbus).

These small, deep water animals are typically found in the dimly lit waters between 100 and 200 meters (330 to 660 feet) beneath the surface, chowing down on amphipods and crabs.

Placed under blue light back in the lab, specimens of the young snailfish shone in brilliant greens and deep reds, their eyes and parts of their body glowing profusely in ways never seen in any Arctic animal before.

You can check out one swimming about in the clip below.

It was the first example of a fluorescing Arctic animal, proving long periods of night were no obstacle to finding color for those that needed it.

That wasn't the only surprise, though.

In most cases, marine fish only tend to fluoresce in a single color, a fact that would clearly come as news to the young snailfish.
A juvenile Liparis gibbus pictured under white light (top) and under fluorescent lighting (bottom), showing red and green fluorescence.
"Overall, we found marine fluorescence to be quite rare in the Arctic, in both invertebrate and vertebrate lineages," says Sparks.

"So we were surprised to find these juvenile snailfish brightly fluorescing in not just one, but two different colors, which is very unusual in a single species."

In addition to the variegated snailfish in Greenland's waters, a separate expedition off the Bering Strait off of Little Diomede Island, Alaska, picked up an adult specimen of a kelp snailfish (Liparis tunicatus) - a species closely related species to the variegated snailfish - which Sparks and Gruber later found to exhibit red fluorescence in spots and patches down its body.

It's entirely possible that there are even more specimens in the cold depths to the far north or south, which are yet to have their fluorescence captured. Further expeditions and more intense searches could see this exclusive club grow in the future.

For now, two lonely examples of glowing fish just don't go far enough to disprove the generalization that the Arctic's long dark disfavors bioluminescence, even if it does demonstrate the possibility.

In fact, other examples of Arctic fish closely related to fluorescing tropical species, such as scorpionfish and flatfish, were found to glow very weakly (if at all), making it clear fluorescing is just not a worthwhile strategy for most life at the poles.

Exactly why these two snailfish have evolved the talent, in stark contrast to virtually every other Arctic animal, isn't clear.

Manipulation of light and color has a litany of uses in the ocean, from signaling and communication to protecting the organism from fluctuations in sunlight.

In the ocean's twilight depths, producing light can help animals hide, attract prey, or distract predators.

Exactly how any of this might benefit life in different marine ecosystems is just one more mystery for biologists to solve.

"We are now focusing our efforts on determining the function of fluorescence in various fish groups, including catsharks, where we have shown that bright green fluorescence enhances contrast in their pigmentation pattern, making it easier for individuals to see each other at depth," says Sparks.

This research was published in the American Museum Novitates.

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Biofluorescent Fish Have Finally Been Spotted in Arctic Waters, And They're a Little Unusual

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Life can get a little blue beneath the ocean's surface. Warmer colors quickly fade the deeper you go, leaving a meager palette of just a few short wavelengths to light up the landscape.

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Have you ever thought to yourself, "Gosh, I sure wish I could feel extremely small and awed right now"? Do we ever have the solution for you!

After over a decade of painstaking work, Finnish astrophotographer J-P Metsavainio has released an absolutely jaw-dropping 1.7-gigapixel mosaic of the plane of the Milky Way galaxy.

Metsavainio has been publishing his astrophotography online since 2007, but his work on the mosaic started in 2009, with photographing various nebulae around the Milky Way as independent compositions.

The total exposure time between 2009 and 2021 is around 1,250 hours. (To load the full image in its 11.5 MB glory, click here.)

"It took almost twelve years to finalize this mosaic image," Metsavainio wrote on his blog, Astro Anarchy.

"The reason for a long time period is naturally the size of the mosaic and the fact that the image is very deep. Another reason is that I have shot most of the mosaic frames as individual compositions and publish them as independent artworks.

"That leads to a kind of complex image set which is partly overlapping with a lot of unimaged areas between and around frames. I have shot the missing data now and then during the years and last year I was able to publish many sub mosaic images as I got them ready first."

Stitching the images together was a matter of matching stars and overlaying them in Photoshop, with minor tweaking between the frames to match color balance and light curves, he explained.

The resulting image is around 100,000 pixels across, made up of 234 individual mosaic panels, covering an area of sky 125 by 22 degrees.

That's a significant swathe of the galactic plane, including about 20 million stars, and the full-size color image measuring 7,000 by 1,300 pixels is truly jaw-dropping. The colors you see represent the emission from ionized elements; hydrogen is shown in green, sulfur in red, and oxygen in blue.

"I think this is the first image ever showing the Milky Way in this resolution and depth at all three color channels," Metsavainio told photography website PetaPixel.

It makes for a magnificently dazzling view of our home galaxy, and one that we can't help but get lost in. If you are not sure where to start, or would like to know more about what you're looking at, Metsavainio has helpfully posted a series of frames from the mosaic on his blog, showcasing individual nebulae.

We can also most heartily recommend visiting his portfolio to take an awe-inspiring stroll through his body of work. His 3D animations of nebulae in particular will absolutely fill you with for interstellar space travel.

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A Photographer Spent 12 Years Making This Milky Way Pic. It Will Crush Your Tiny Heart

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Have you ever thought to yourself, "Gosh, I sure wish I could feel extremely small and awed right now"? Do we ever have the solution for you! After over a decade of painstaking work, Finnish astrophotographer J-P Metsavainio has released an absolutely jaw-dropping 1.7-gigapixel mosaic of the plane of the Milky Way galaxy.

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The menagerie of bacterial and fungal species living among us is ever growing - and this is no exception in low-gravity environments, such as the International Space Station (ISS).

Researchers from the United States and India working with NASA have now discovered four strains of bacteria living in different places in the ISS - three of which were, until now, completely unknown to science.

Three of the four strains were isolated back in 2015 and 2016 - one was found on an overhead panel of the ISS research stations, the second was found in the Cupola, the third was found on the surface of the dining table; the fourth was found in an old HEPA filter returned to Earth in 2011.

All four of the strains belong to a family of bacteria found in soil and freshwater; they are involved in nitrogen fixation, plant growth, and can help stop plant pathogens. Basically, good bacteria to have around if you're growing things.

You might wonder what such soil bacteria were doing all the way up on the ISS, but the astronauts living on the space station have been growing small amounts of food for years, so it's unsurprising that we've found plant-related microbes aboard.

One of the strains - the HEPA-filter find - was identified as a known species called Methylorubrum rhodesianum. The other three were sequenced and found to all belong to the same, previously unidentified species, and the strains were named IF7SW-B2T, IIF1SW-B5, and IIF4SW-B5.

The team, lead by University of Southern California geneticist Swati Bijlani, has proposed calling the new species Methylobacterium ajmalii after Ajmal Khan, a renowned Indian biodiversity scientist. This new find is also closely related to an already known species called M. indicum.

"To grow plants in extreme places where resources are minimal, isolation of novel microbes that help to promote plant growth under stressful conditions is essential," two of the team, Kasthuri Venkateswaran and Nitin Kumar Singh from NASA's JPL, explained in a press statement.

Considering we already know that these microbes can survive the harsh conditions of the ISS, the team put the four strains through genetic analysis to look for genes that could be used to help promote plant growth.

"The whole genome sequence assembly of these three ISS strains reported here will enable the comparative genomic characterization of ISS isolates with Earth counterparts in future studies," the team writes in their study.

"This will further aid in the identification of genetic determinants that might potentially be responsible for promoting plant growth under microgravity conditions and contribute to the development of self-sustainable plant crops for long-term space missions in future."

The researchers found that one of the ISS strains - IF7SW-B2T - had promising genes involved in plant growth, including a gene for an enzyme essential for cytokinin, which promotes cell division in roots and shoots.

There's much more research to be done here - the researchers acknowledge that they've barely scratched the surface of microbial diversity on the space station. Around 1,000 samples have already been collected on the ISS, but are still awaiting a trip back to Earth.

Just imagine the exciting space-faring microbes we are yet to discover!

The research has been published in Frontiers in Microbiology.

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Microbes Unknown to Science Discovered on The International Space Station

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The menagerie of bacterial and fungal species living among us is ever growing - and this is no exception in low-gravity environments, such as the International Space Station (ISS). Researchers from the United States and India working with NASA have now discovered four strains of bacteria living in different places in the ISS - three of which were, until now, completely unknown to science.

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When it comes to dieting, research shows the majority of people will regain some - if not most - of the weight they've lost.

While there are many reasons why this weight regain may happen, some popular claims online are that it's because dieting permanently wrecks your metabolism. But while it's true that dieting slows your metabolism, it also improves your metabolism in many positive ways.

When we talk about metabolism, we're typically referring to your metabolic rate. This is the number of calories your body burns at rest. Of course, the more activity we do, the more calories we burn.

In order to lose weight through dieting, you need to consume fewer calories than you're using. This forces the body to use its energy stores - like fat - to meet the shortfall. Your metabolic rate will also change as a result.

The loss of lean tissue (muscle) when you diet - which burns around 15-25 calories per kilogram each day - lowers resting metabolic rate, meaning you need fewer calories than you previously did. But the body also deliberately slows down metabolism to preserve energy stores and minimise weight loss.

When the body senses depleted fat stores it triggers adaptive thermogenesis, a process which further reduces resting metabolic rate - and may stunt weight loss despite strict dieting.

Adaptive thermogenesis can kick in within three days of starting a diet, and is suggested to persist way beyond dieting - even hampering weight maintenance and favouring weight regain.

One example of adaptive thermogenesis's effect was seen in a widely publicised 2016 study which looked at former contestants of US reality TV show The Biggest Loser.

It showed that participants had a significant decrease in their metabolic rate, even several years after initial weight loss. Participants needed to eat up to 500 calories less than expected daily.

Other studies have also shown metabolic slowing with weight loss, but with much smaller decreases ( around 100 calories fewer a day to maintain weight). However, there's less certainty whether this slowing persists once people are weight stable.

Research seems to show that most adaptive thermogenesis happens in the actual dieting phase as a temporary response to the amount of weight being lost. Overall, we don't have conclusive evidence to support the notion that metabolic rate remains slowed over the long term (over a year post-diet).

It's worth noting many factors can affect metabolic rate, so changes to it after dieting may vary between people. For example, one study on fasting diets showed metabolic rate indeed decreases as a result - but those who had the the greatest decrease in metabolic rate already had a higher metabolic rate to begin with.

Overestimaing metabolic rates at the start of a study or errors in predicting metabolic rate after weight loss could both also affect study results.

It's agreed that metabolic rate slows because of weight loss, due to both decreasing body size, and as a way of preserving key tissues and fuel reserves. But there's currently no consensus on how much it slows by.

Quantifying and predicting this slowing is something we're currently researching at the University of Surrey.

Metabolic changes

A decrease in metabolic rate is just one change that occurs with weight loss, however.

When we lose weight, the main change we see is a decrease in body fat. This decrease is actually our fat cells shrinking in size - they don't actually disappear. This shrinking of fat cells signals the body's fuel stores are emptying, causing a drop in the hormone leptin.

Ordinarily leptin inhibits appetite and increases metabolic rate - but when leptin levels plummet, metabolic rate slow and hunger increases.

The gut also releases fewer incretins (hormones which regulate appetite) when we lose weight, which could persist beyond dieting. Less leptin and fewer incretins may make us feel hungrier and can lead to over eating.

When fat cells shrink, they're able to take up glucose and store fat more efficiently to help restore lost fuel. Your body also creates more fat cells so that you can store more fat in the future to better cope with this calorie "crisis" the next time it happens.

But as contradictory as it sounds, all these changes actually result in a more efficient and ultimately healthier metabolism.

For example, smaller fat cells are better for our health, as over-inflated "sick" fat cells don't work as well in getting rid of surplus sugar and fat. This can lead to high levels of sugar and fat in the blood, increasing risk of insulin resistance, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.

So dieting doesn't technically ruin your metabolism but rather improves it by helping it work better. But without care, this metabolic improvement can conspire against you to regain the weight, and even overshoot your original weight.

Studies show exercise (or simply physical activity) may be one way to prevent weight regain, by improving our ability to maintain our weight and can potentially minimise metabolic slowing. Exercise can also help regulate appetite and fuel burning in the short term, and may make weight loss more sustainable in the long term.
Adam Collins, Principal Teaching Fellow, Nutrition, University of Surrey and Aoife Egan, PhD Researcher, Mathematical Modelling of Weight-loss, University of Surrey. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Adam Collins & Aoife Egan, The Conversation

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Here's What Dieting Actually Does to Your Metabolism, According to Scientists

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When it comes to dieting, research shows the majority of people will regain some - if not most - of the weight they've lost. While there are many reasons why this weight regain may happen, some popular claims online are that it's because dieting permanently wrecks your metabolism.

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High-protein diets are having a moment. In any grocery store you can now buy a protein bowl, pick up a protein box of eggs and nuts for lunch, or snack on a protein bar.

But there's evidence that restricting which proteins you eat - particularly cutting back on meat - could be important for healthy aging. The surprising reason: it forces the tissues to make hydrogen sulphide (H2S), a gas that's poisonous if inhaled and smells like rotten eggs, but promotes health inside the body.

As a physiology researcher, I have long been interested in the strange role of H2S in the body. This is not a gas anyone wants around. It stinks, is a component of flatulence, and its toxicity has been linked to at least one mass extinction.

And yet, the body naturally produces small amounts of it as a signalling molecule to act as a chemical messenger. Now, we are starting to understand the link between diet and H2S production.

Diet restrictions that increase longevity

Less can be more when it comes to food. When scientists have put organisms on carefully balanced but restricted diets, these organisms have substantially increased healthy lifespans.

This holds true for yeasts, fruit flies, worms and monkeys. In mice, such diets reduce cancer risk, strengthen the immune system and improve cognitive function.

But because aging and longevity are complex processes, it has been difficult for researchers to pin down the mechanisms at work. Recent studies have shed new light, and it is apparent that H2S plays a crucial role.

Studies since the 1990s have shown that reducing intake of certain sulphur-containing amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, can increase longevity in rats by around 30 per cent. More recently, a collaborative team involving me and led by scientists at Harvard, performed a series of animal studies in which we restricted the intake of two sulphur amino acids - cysteine and methionine - to study what effects this had.

It caused the animals to ramp up production of H2S in their tissues, which triggered a cascade of beneficial effects. These included increased new blood vessel generation, which promotes cardiovascular health, and better resistance to oxidative stress in the liver, which is linked to liver disease.

But it remained to be seen whether similar effects would occur in humans. Earlier this year, a study using data from the 11,576 adults in NHANES III, the US national nutrition survey, delivered evidence that they do. It found that reduced dietary intake of these sulphur amino acids is linked to lower cardiometabolic risk factors, including lower levels of cholesterol and glucose in the blood. Cardiometabolic risk factors are those linked to heart disease, stroke and diabetes.

Eat less meat, live longer?

The upshot of this research is that there's good evidence that limiting intake of foods containing high levels of sulphur amino acids can reduce the risk of chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease, and promote healthy aging.

In North America, most of us are a long way from achieving this. Because these sulphur amino acids are abundant in meat, dairy and eggs, which feature prominently in our shopping carts, we eat on average 2.5 times our daily requirement of them.

Red meat is particularly high in sulphur amino acids, but fish and poultry white meat also contain a lot (the dark meat has less). Switching to plant-based proteins would help reduce this intake.

Beans, lentils and legumes are good sources of protein that are also low in sulphur amino acids. But beware: soy protein, which is the basis of foods like tofu, is surprisingly high in sulphur amino acids. Meanwhile, vegetables like broccoli contain lots of sulphur but not in amino acid form.

One important caveat is that sulphur amino acids play vital roles in growth, so children should not adopt diets that are low in them.

Other roles for H2S

It might seem odd that a toxic gas can help maintain health, but it may reflect the origins of life on early Earth when the atmosphere was much richer in sulphur gas than it is today. Indeed, we are starting to appreciate how fundamental H2S signalling may be.

For example, it has also been shown to reduce inflammation, opening the door to potential new treatments for arthritis or potential use as a painkiller.

The trick is delivering H2S where it's needed - safely. Several pharmaceutical companies are working on compounds that bind it while in transit through the body, and release it in tiny doses in the tissues. In time, these could be used as preventive measures to support healthy aging. This would be useful because the drawback of a low-sulphur amino acid diet is that humans are notoriously bad at sticking to such plans long-term.

In the lab, we can control experimental diets. In the real world, people snack or grab a burger when they don't want to cook. If delivery mechanisms can be made reliably and cheaply enough, it could be possible to gain the health effects of increased tissue H2S without dictating what people eat.
Rui Wang, Dean, Faculty of Science, York University, Canada. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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There's a Surprising, Smelly Reason Why Eating Less Meat Is Linked to Healthy Aging

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High-protein diets are having a moment. In any grocery store you can now buy a protein bowl, pick up a protein box of eggs and nuts for lunch, or snack on a protein bar. But there's evidence that restricting which proteins you eat - particularly cutting back on meat - could be important for healthy aging.

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Let's admit it: It's been a pretty rough year for our neck of the Solar System. But it's been a great year for scientists studying more distant reaches of the Universe. From a colossal explosion to mystery burps deciphered, here were some of the top stories in physics in 2020.

10. Boom!

What might have been the Universe's most powerful known explosion was detected back in 2016 - but it really happened over 390 million years ago. While the first four-legged critters crawled onto land, a supermassive black hole in the Ophiuchus cluster launched a jet that blew a gargantuan cavity in the surrounding gas.

In 2020, astronomers revisited the old data and realized just how powerful that explosion was: five times 10^54 joules of energy. For perspective, that's enough energy to literally rip apart all 300 billion stars in the Milky Way and a hundred more galaxies.

9. I can see my Solar System from here

If you want to navigate among the stars, you're going to need a map. And that's exactly what the European Space Agency's Gaia space observatory created, using data on over 1.8 billion cosmic objects.

The haul includes stars near and far, asteroids, comets and more. Want to know the position, velocity, spectrum and more for 0.5 percent of the population of our galaxy? You're in luck. Over 1,600 papers have already been published with Gaia data, and astronomers will be sure to mine the database for years to come. And here's the best part: There's even more data to come.

8. Loss of a legend

In 2020, the world lost one of its foremost and celebrated supersmart folks, Freeman Dyson. A man of unbounded imagination, he is perhaps best known in popular science circles for his conception of the Dyson sphere. (He didn't name it after himself; that came later.)

A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure that completely encloses a star to harvest 100 percent of its solar energy - exactly the energy a hyper-advanced civilization might need to do hyper-advanced things.

So far, astronomers have not detected any Dyson spheres in our galaxy or any others, but Freeman's dream lives on.

7. We found life on Venus, and then we didn't

It was too good to be true: claims of solid evidence for life in the cloud tops of Venus, an otherwise hellhole of a world. The reasoning was based on phosphine, a peculiar (and stinky) chemical emitted on Earth by anaerobic bacteria.

To get as much phosphine in the atmosphere as was claimed, scientists proposed, Venus would need a large population of airborne microbes. Alas, further analysis reduced the observed amount of the stinky stuff (to levels barely considered noteworthy, let alone a sign for life), and in some analyses, removed it altogether as just another noisy signal.

Don't worry, alien life: If you're out there, we'll keep looking.

6. 2020's hottest new toy: FRBs

Everyone loves a good fast radio burst ( FRB), right? The source of these enigmatic, energetic signals has been an annoying puzzle to astronomers for more than a decade. FRBs are fast, high-powered, frequency-hopping radio signals coming from all over the sky, which makes it hard to pinpoint their origin.

But finally, in 2020, astronomers got lucky: They found an FRB source in our own cosmic backyard. Follow-up observations revealed the culprit: an exotic star known as a magnetar (a super-magnetized dead stellar core).

Apparently, magnetars sometimes burp out a tremendous amount of pent-up energy, which appears to Earthbound observers as a quick blast of radio emission.

5. Wet Mars after all

Mars has liquid water. No, it's bone-dry. No, wait; it sometimes has water. No, nope, never mind. The Red Planet has been teasing astronomers for decades on the vital question of whether it's home to any liquid water at all.

Astronomers care because, where there's water, there's a potential home for life. Earlier this year, astronomers claimed that there isn't just one, but four lakes of liquid water on Mars. The catch?

They're incredibly salty - more like a briny sludge than something to take a dip in - and buried under a mile of frozen carbon dioxide at the southern polar cap. Not everybody is convinced, though, so don't pack your Martian swimsuit just yet.

4. Taking it home

2020 was surely the year of the Solar System. Three independent spacecraft have successfully acquired samples and sent them on their way back to Earth.

NASA launched its OSIRIS-REx mission to the asteroid Bennu, which collected so much material that its sample container leaked. The Japanese Hayabusa2 mission took a poke at the asteroid Ryugu and landed the material safely back to Earth.

And the Chinese Chang'e 5 lander went on a mission to the Moon, managing to launch a sample back to Earth before the lander broke down.

3. That's a big black hole!

Astronomers have used gravitational waves (ripples in the fabric of space-time) to observe so many black hole collisions that by now, it's hardly newsworthy.

But in 2020, astronomers announced the discovery of the biggest collision yet: a titanic merger of an 85-solar-mass black hole and a 66-solar-mass black hole. Post-merger, the resulting black hole tipped the scales at 142 times the mass of the Sun. (About nine Suns' worth of mass was converted into pure energy.)

In other black hole news, the Universe's ultimate Pandora's box was the subject of this year's Nobel Prize in physics.

2. Is it getting hot in this superconductor?

Superconductors are super-neat. Due to the weirdness of quantum mechanics, under very special conditions, electrons can buddy up, with the pairs traveling together without losing energy. That means a game-changing technology where electricity can flow forever without resistance.

Unfortunately, to make superconductors work, physicists have had to make everything super-cold. But in 2020, researchers announced the discovery of a superconductor at nearly room temperature, just 59 degrees Fahrenheit (15 degrees Celsius). The catch? You need to re-create the pressures found in Earth's center.

1. Take that, COVID-19

The novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has devastated humanity, reaching pandemic levels in only a couple of months and washing across the globe. But we're fighting back with one of our most powerful weapons: vaccines.

The current vaccines target a very specific part of the virus, a "spike" protein that it uses to invade our cells. One of the first steps in the war against COVID-19 was to identify and map that protein, which researchers accomplished earlier this year, using a physics-based technique called cryogenic electron microscopy.

Using this map, drugmakers could target this feature of the virus for vaccines to mimic, giving our immune systems a fighting chance.
This article was originally published by Live Science. Read the original article here.

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These 10 Amazing Physics Stories Were Massive News in 2020

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Let's admit it: It's been a pretty rough year for our neck of the Solar System. But it's been a great year for scientists studying more distant reaches of the Universe. From a colossal explosion to mystery burps deciphered, here were some of the top

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The way things behave in microgravity may seem obvious to us now, after humans have been venturing into space for over 50 years.

But we haven't always been certain how space might affect certain things. Like fire. Or planarian worms. Or even plants. It's only by conducting experiments that we can learn the answers to these burning questions.

That has led to some pretty fascinating, sometimes upsetting, and sometimes downright wacky experiments conducted in space.

A spacesuit gets shoved out an airlock

The video above plays out like something out of a nightmare. A spacesuit floats, untethered, away from the International Space Station ISS), the vast black void of space yawning before it.

You may be relieved to learn that no humans were harmed in the making of this experiment - there's no one in the Russian Orlan spacesuit, nicknamed Ivan Ivanovitch or Mr Smith - it's stuffed with a bunch of old clothes and a radio transmitter.

The idea was that old spacesuits could be used as satellites. SuitSat-1 - officially designated AMSAT-OSCAR 54 - was deployed on 3 February 2006, but the experiment was only partially successful; reports vary, with NASA claiming the transmitter had died shortly after release and Russia reporting a final transmission a whole fortnight later. The last confirmed signal was received on 18 February.

SuitSat-1 went on to spend several months in silent orbit, before entering Earth's atmosphere and burning up on 7 September 2006.

The hammer and the feather

In the late 16th century, Galileo Galilei dropped two spheres of unequal mass from the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy. When both arrived on the ground at the same time, he'd countered classically established views, by showing mass had no bearing on gravitational acceleration. All objects, no matter the mass, should fall at the same rate - even if it's a feather and a hammer.

On Earth, this is tricky to demonstrate due to air resistance. But nearly 400 years later, a human standing on the Moon repeated the experiment.

On 2 August 1971, Commander David Scott of Apollo 15 took a geological hammer in one hand, and a falcon feather in the other. He raised them to a height of about 1.6 metres off the ground, and dropped them. Because the astronaut was essentially in a vacuum, without air resistance the two objects fell in sync.

"Within the accuracy of the simultaneous release, the objects were observed to undergo the same acceleration and strike the lunar surface simultaneously," wrote NASA astronaut Joe Allen, "which was a result predicted by well-established theory, but a result nonetheless reassuring considering both the number of viewers that witnessed the experiment and the fact that the homeward journey was based critically on the validity of the particular theory being tested."

The hammer and feather are both still up there.

Fizzy tablet in a water blob

In microgravity, if you squirt a bit of water out of a nozzle, it just hangs there, all blobby and wobbling.

This can result in a lot of fun. Experiments and demonstrations have included popping water balloons in the vomit comet (the plane that makes parabolic flights to create brief periods of free-fall) and the ISS, attaching a blob of water with a large bubble inside to a speaker to observe the vibrations, and putting a GoPro camera in a water blob to film it from the inside (you'll want stereoscopic 3D glasses for that one).

In 2015, astronaut Scott Kelly coloured a water blob with food colouring, then inserted effervescent tablets, watching them dissolve and release gases into the water. It was filmed using the space station's new 4K camera, so you can view the whole alien-algae-spawning... thing in gloriously crisp resolution.

Fire in space

( ESA/NASA)

Just as water behaves differently in microgravity, so too does fire. The Mir space station fire of 1997 has thankfully been a one-off event so far, but working out how fire behaves in microgravity can help plan for fire safety for future long-term missions such as the crewed mission to Mars, and the permanent Moon base. It can help to inform fire safety protocols down here on Earth, too.

To that end, a number of ongoing research projects have studied what happens to flames in space. The Burning and Suppression of Solids experiments aboard the ISS have investigated the burning and extinction characteristics of a broad range of fuel types in microgravity. Data from these experiments can be used to build more complex models to understand the finer details of combustion in Earth gravity.

Aboard the Cygnus cargo spacecraft, scientists investigated how flames behave under different spacecraft conditions in the Saffire experiments. And NASA's Flame Design investigation - part of the Advanced Combustion via Microgravity Experiments - is exploring the production and control of soot.

All of which is very useful and interesting, sure. But it's also insanely beautiful, and we bet there are some astronauts having an absolute blast playing with fire in space.

Space spiders

In 2011, scientists set about answering the burning question: Can spiders adapt to space travel? They sent two golden silk orb-weaver spiders ( Trichonephila clavipes), Esmeralda and Gladys, for a 45-day sojourn aboard the ISS.

They were kept in a nice habitat (can you imagine spiders loose on a space station), with light conditions to simulate a night-day cycle, temperature and humidity control, and a healthy diet of juicy fruit flies.

Both spiders adapted beautifully, continuing to spin their webs and hunt their food. Orb weavers eat their webs at the end of each day to regain protein, and spin them again in the morning; this, too, the spiders continued to do right on schedule, which was interesting, since different orb weaver species on the ISS just spun their webs at any old time of day.

But not everything was totally normal. In microgravity, the spiders spun their webs differently - flatter and rounder, compared to the more three-dimensional, asymmetrical structures the orb-weavers spin on Earth.

The two spiders returned to Earth at the end of their stay in space. Esmeralda perished on the return journey, having lived a normal spider lifespan. Gladys returned home hale, but turned out to be a boy. He was renamed Gladstone.

Tortoises go round the Moon

Back in the 1960s, before humans had been to the Moon, it wasn't clear exactly how - if at all - getting up close and personal with the Moon would affect us physically. So, in 1968, the Soviet space program sent two Russian tortoises ( Agrionemys horsfieldii) up for a trip round Earth's companion.

Actually, it wasn't just tortoises. Included in the flight were wine flies, mealworms, seeds, plants, algae and bacteria. There was also a dummy fitted with radiation sensors, since none of the living organisms aboard were remotely analogous to humans. Tortoises, according to a 1969 report, seem to have been chosen because they're relatively easy to strap down.

The two unnamed reptilian cosmonauts were placed onboard the Zond-5 spacecraft on 2 September 1968, at which point they were no longer fed. They were launched into space on 15 September 1968, returning back to Earth (in the Indian ocean) on 21 September. They finally returned to Moscow on 7 October.

Their journey included seven days of spaceflight, several days in tropical climates (including bobbing about in the ocean while they waited for retrieval) and transportation back to Russia. Ultimately, they spent 39 days without food. It would try anyone.

Control tortoises that remained on Earth were also deprived of food for the same time period. A comparison of the two sets of tortoises revealed that any changes in the space-faring reptiles were mostly the result of starvation, with a small contribution from spaceflight-related atrophy.

We'd like to say that no one ever sent tortoises to space again, but sadly, two more tortoise missions took place. Zond 7 in 1969 carried tortoises. In 1975, the Soyuz 20 spacecraft ferried a tortoise around for 90 days. And two tortoises flew on the Salyut-5 space station in 1976.

Moon Trees

Just as we once didn't know how space would affect animals, so too were we unaware of its effects on plants. So when the Apollo 14 mission launched on 31 January 1971, its cargo contained something we might now consider a bit peculiar: roughly 500 seeds.

Scientists from the US Forest Service wanted to know if tree seeds that had flown in microgravity and been subjected to space radiation would sprout, grow and look the same as seeds that had never left Earth.

Five species of tree were included in the cannister: loblolly pine (Pinus taeda), California redwood (Sequoia sempervirens), American sycamore (Platanus occidentalis), Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii), and American sweet gum (Liquidambar styraciflua). They accompanied command module pilot Stuart Roosa on 34 orbits of the Moon before returning to Earth.

The seeds were then planted and tended, and most of them survived to grow into saplings, alongside controls that had never left Earth. Unsurprisingly to us now, there was no discernible difference between the two.

By 1975, the Moon Trees, as they had come to be known, were large enough to be transplanted, and they were shipped all over America. According to this NASA website, less than 100 Moon Trees can be accounted for today, and of those, only 57 were living when the page was put together.

That means there could potentially be hundreds of Moon Trees hiding across the US, a lost relic of a time when our curiosity sent tiny seeds whizzing around space. And we think that's beautiful.

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These Are 7 of The Strangest Experiments Humans Have Ever Done in Space

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The way things behave in microgravity may seem obvious to us now, after humans have been venturing into space for over 50 years. But we haven't always been certain how space might affect certain things. Like fire. Or planarian worms. Or even plants.

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It's a common dieter's lament: "Ugh, my metabolism is so slow, I'm never going to lose any weight."

When people talk about a fast or slow metabolism, what they're really getting at is how many calories their body burns as they go about their day. The idea is that someone with a slow metabolism just won't use up the same amount of energy to do the same task as does someone with a fast metabolism.

But does the speed of metabolism really vary all that much from person to person? I'm a nutrition scholar who focuses on the biological, environmental and socioeconomic factors that influence body composition.

-This question is trickier than it might first seem - and whatever the current speed of your metabolism, there are things that will nudge it into lower or higher gears.

Your body's energy needs

Metabolism is a biological term that refers to all the chemical reactions needed to maintain life in an organism. Your metabolism accomplishes three main jobs: converting food into energy; breaking down food into its building blocks for protein, lipid, nucleic acid and some carbohydrate; and eliminating nitrogen wastes.

If you're agonising over the speed of your metabolism, you're probably focused on how much energy you're getting from the foods you eat and how much your body is using. The energy value of a food is measured in calories.

Your caloric needs can be divided into two categories.

Basal metabolic rate is the minimum amount of calories required for basic functions at rest. Resting energy expenditure is the amount of calories you use while resting or sleeping - about 60 percent - 65 percent of your total energy expenditure.

It doesn't take into account the calories you'd need to power everything else you do - moving around, or activity energy expenditure (25 percent - 30 percent), thinking, even digesting food (5 percent -10 percent). So your total energy expenditure combines the two: your resting energy expenditure plus your energy expenditures for other activities.

Coming up with a number

The estimated daily caloric intake needs for an adult woman of 126 pounds (57 kg) range from 1,600 to 2,400 calories per day. For a man of 154 pounds (70 kg), daily calorie needs can range from about 2,000 to 3,000 calories per day. That's about 13 calories per pound of body weight.

In contrast, infants burn about 50 calories per pound of weight per day. This requirement continuously decreases as the child ages. So infants have the highest metabolism of all. This extra calorie requirement is necessary for growth.

So if two women of the same weight can have caloric needs that vary by as much as 30 percent, does that mean the woman whose body uses up more calories has a faster metabolism than the woman whose body uses fewer calories? Not necessarily. One woman might spend more of her day physically active and thus need more energy to power her walking commute and after-work kickboxing class, for instance.

Beyond those rough guideline ranges, there are many ways to estimate resting and total energy expenditure if you want to figure out your body's specific calorie needs.

One common and easy method is to use predictive formulas such as the Mifflin-St. Jeor or Harris-Benedict equations which are based on your age, height, weight and gender to figure out how much energy your body needs just to be alive. To calculate total energy expenditure, you also need to add the activity factor.

Indirect calorimetry is another way to estimate metabolic rate. Energy expenditure is calculated by measuring the amount of oxygen used, and carbon dioxide released by the body.

Your body relies on oxygen to perform all its jobs of metabolism. For every litre of oxygen you use, you use about 4.82 calories of energy from glycogen or fat. Respiratory indirect calorimetry is typically done at a doctor's office, though small, portable, more affordable devices are increasingly being brought to market.

Factors that influence metabolic rate

Metabolic rate and calorie requirements vary from person to person depending on factors such as genetics, gender, age, body composition and amount of exercise you do.

Health status and certain medical conditions may also influence metabolism. For example, one regulator of metabolism is the thyroid gland, located at the front of the neck just below the Adam's apple. The more thyroxin a person's thyroid gland produces, the higher that person's basal metabolic rate will be.

Having a fever can also affect a person's basal metabolic rate. For each increase of 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit (0.5 C) in a person's internal body temperature, their basal metabolic rate increases by approximately 7 percent.

Other medical conditions that influence basal metabolic rate can include muscle wasting (atrophy), prolonged starvation, low oxygen levels in the body (hypoxia), muscular disorders, depression and diabetes.

Another important factor is body composition. For example, an overweight woman with a body composition of 40 percent body fat and 75 pounds (34 kg) of muscle mass will burn fewer calories while resting than a woman with 30 percent body fat and 110 pounds (50 kg) of muscle mass; muscle tissue is more metabolically active than fat tissue in the body.

This is also why basal metabolic rate decreases with age. As people get older, they typically lose muscle mass and gain fat tissue - which equates to a decrease in basal metabolic rate of approximately 1 percent to 2 percent per decade.

If you really want to give your metabolism a jolt, the easiest way is to bump up your muscle mass and activity level. By increasing muscle mass, you'll also increase the base number of calories needed to maintain those muscles. Instead of complaining about a slow metabolism, you can try to turn it up to be at least a bit quicker.
Terezie Tolar-Peterson, Associate Professor of Food Science, Nutrition & Health Promotion, Mississippi State University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Think Your Metabolism Is Slow? Here's What Affects How Many Calories You Burn Daily

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It's a common dieter's lament: "Ugh, my metabolism is so slow, I'm never going to lose any weight." When people talk about a fast or slow metabolism, what they're really getting at is how many calories their body burns as they go about their day.

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It's been one heck of a year, but we're on the home stretch. Now, let's celebrate by looking at something very strange that seems to make no sense whatsoever to my poor befuddled brain.

What we have here is the winner of this year's Best Illusion of the Year Contest for 2020, and it is indeed a worthy mind-boggler, taking one of the best-known traditional 2D optical illusions and realising it perplexingly in three-dimensional space.

Designed by the mischievous mathematician Kokichi Sugihara - a celebrated Japanese illusionist and repeat winner whose work we've featured more than once on the site - this is called the 3D Schröder Staircase.

The classic Schröder Staircase, published in 1858 by the German scientist Heinrich G. F. Schröder, would later evolve into other forms in the work of Dutch artist M. C. Escher, but the striking simplicity of the original is still a stunner.

In the illustration, what at first appears to be an unambiguous depiction of a single staircase seen from above turns out to be two staircases (the other seen from below).

If you can't visualise it, simply turning Schröder's Staircase upside-down tends to make the alternative perspective visible... but maybe only for a fleeting second, before your mind undergoes the psychological phenomenon of the Gestalt Shift, in which your perception switches back to its earlier interpretation.

In his new twist on this already twisted topic, Sugihara has now reverse-engineered the same 2D staircase illusion into a 3D form, devising a cardboard cut-out that does the exact same trick when viewed from a certain perspective - even though the actual physical shape of what you're looking at is nothing like what it seems.

"The present 3D object also has two interpretations, both of which are staircases seen from above, and the interpretations switch from one to the other when we rotate the object by 180 degrees around the vertical axis," Sugihara says.

But just because that's what it looks like doesn't mean that's what it is.

On his website, Sugihara teases how the illusion is actually constructed, going as far as to provide a free 'construction kit' diagram for the impossible steps, in case you feel like making a set to keep at home.

At the heart of the illusion is a simple trick: the stairs might look like stairs, but they're actually a flat surface, making clever use of angles and shading to fool your brain.

To make the job of visual perception easier, our brains make convenient assumptions wherever they can. Dark tones mean shadows, hinting at depth; converging lines are usually a measure of distance. Throw them together and your lazy brain will do its best to find a familiar story to fit the shapes. Sure it's wrong, but usually these shapes do in fact make up staircases.

"This object is an example of my experimental material to investigate the behaviour of the brains, which are apt to misperceive 2D pictures as 3D objects when they are embedded in real 3D structures," Sugihara explains, noting that the addition of real 3D side walls and support columns fills out the bewitching illusion.

"As the result, we perceive new ambiguity, which is different from that of the original Schröder Staircase."

In addition to turning the 3D Schröder Staircase around (the 3D equivalent of turning the 2D illustration upside-down), careful positioning with a mirror reveals something uncanny: both perspectives seen simultaneously, and there's not a thing the Gestalt Shift can do about it.

Marvellous. Congratulations, Kokichi Sugihara!

For more mind-bending illusions from this year's competition, all of the finalists can be seen at the Best Illusion of the Year Contest web site.

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This Brain-Bending 3D Staircase Just Won Best Illusion of The Year For 2020

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It's been one heck of a year, but we're on the home stretch. Now, let's celebrate by looking at something very strange that seems to make no sense whatsoever to my poor befuddled brain.

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The emergence of a new variant of coronavirus has sparked renewed interest in the part of the virus known as the spike protein.

The new variant carries several peculiar changes to the spike protein when compared to other closely related variants - and that's one of the reasons why it's more concerning than other, harmless changes to the virus we have observed before. The new mutations may alter the biochemistry of the spike and could affect how transmissible the virus is.

The spike protein is also the basis of current COVID-19 vaccines, which seek to generate an immune response against it. But what exactly is the spike protein and why is it so important?

Cell invaders

In the world of parasites, many bacterial or fungal pathogens can survive on their own without a host cell to infect. But viruses can't. Instead, they have to get inside cells in order to replicate, where they use the cell's own biochemical machinery to build new virus particles and spread to other cells or individuals.

Our cells have evolved to ward off such intrusions. One of the major defences cellular life has against invaders is its outer coating, which is composed of a fatty layer that holds in all the enzymes, proteins and DNA that make up a cell.

Due to the biochemical nature of fats, the outer surface is highly negatively charged and repellent. Viruses must traverse this barrier to gain access to the cell.

Like cellular life, coronaviruses themselves are surrounded by a fatty membrane known as an envelope. In order to gain entry to the inside of the cell, enveloped viruses use proteins (or glycoproteins as they are frequently covered in slippery sugar molecules) to fuse their own membrane to that of cells' and take over the cell.

The spike protein of coronaviruses is one such viral glycoprotein. Ebola viruses have one, the influenza virus has two, and herpes simplex virus has five.

The architecture of the spike

The spike protein is composed of a linear chain of 1,273 amino acids, neatly folded into a structure, which is studded with up to 23 sugar molecules. Spike proteins like to stick together and three separate spike molecules bind to each other to form a functional "trimeric" unit.

The spike can be subdivided into distinct functional units, known as domains, which fulfil different biochemical functions of the protein, such as binding to the target cell, fusing with the membrane, and allowing the spike to sit on the viral envelope.

The spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 is stuck on the roughly spherical viral particle, embedded within the envelope and projecting out into space, ready to cling on to unsuspecting cells. There are estimated to be roughly 26 spike trimers per virus.

One of these functional units binds to a protein on the surface of our cells called ACE2, triggering uptake of the virus particle and eventually membrane fusion. The spike is also involved in other processes like assembly, structural stability and immune evasion.

Vaccine vs spike protein

Given how crucial the spike protein is to the virus, many antiviral vaccines or drugs are targeted to viral glycoproteins.

For SARS-CoV-2, the vaccines produced by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna give instructions to our immune system to make our own version of the spike protein, which happens shortly following immunisation. Production of the spike inside our cells then starts the process of protective antibody and T cell production.

One of the most concerning features of the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 is how it moves or changes over time during the evolution of the virus. Encoded within the viral genome, the protein can mutate and changes its biochemical properties as the virus evolves.

Most mutations will not be beneficial and either stop the spike protein from working or have no effect on its function. But some may cause changes that give the new version of the virus a selective advantage by making it more transmissible or infectious.

One way this could occur is through a mutation on a part of the spike protein that prevents protective antibodies from binding to it. Another way would be to make the spikes "stickier" for our cells.

This is why new mutations that alter how the spike functions are of particular concern - they may impact how we control the spread of SARS-CoV-2. The new variants found in the UK and elsewhere have mutations across spike and in parts of the protein involved in getting inside your cells.

Experiments will have to be conducted in the lab to ascertain if - and how - these mutations significantly change the spike, and whether our current control measures remain effective.
Connor Bamford, Research Fellow, Virology, Queen's University Belfast. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Will The New Coronavirus Mutation Affect The Vaccine? Here's What You Need to Know

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The emergence of a new variant of coronavirus has sparked renewed interest in the part of the virus known as the spike protein. The new variant carries several peculiar changes to the spike protein when compared to other closely related variants - and that's one of the reasons why it's more concerning than other, harmless changes to the virus we have observed before.

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For the first time, scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have formally identified a new species of undersea creature based solely on high-definition video footage captured at the bottom of the ocean.

And what an undersea creature it is. Meet Duobrachium sparksae - a strange, gelatinous species of ctenophore, encountered by the remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Deep Discoverer during a dive off the coast of Puerto Rico.

That encounter took place back in 2015, but when you're laying claim to discovering a wholly new species - based solely on video evidence, for that matter, with no physical specimens to help make your case - it helps to do your due diligence.

Luckily, Deep Discoverer's cameras - the footage of which you can see here - were up to the job, capable of picking up subtle details on D. sparksae's body less than a millimetre long.

Subsequent analysis of the organism - now detailed in a new paper - indicates it's easily distinguishable from all other known ctenophore species, the researchers say.

"It's unique because we were able to describe a new species based entirely on high-definition video," explains NOAA marine biologist Allen Collins.

"We don't have the same microscopes as we would in a lab, but the video can give us enough information to understand the morphology in detail, such as the location of their reproductive parts and other aspects."

Those aspects are manifold. From a distance, D. sparksae's most notable feature is its bulbous, balloon-like body, but it also features two prominent tentacle arms.

In total, three different individuals were filmed by the ROV at depths of around 3,900 metres (almost 2.5 miles down), with one of the animals appearing to perhaps be using its tentacles to anchor itself to the seabed.

"It was a beautiful and unique organism," says oceanographer Mike Ford.

"It moved like a hot air balloon attached to the seafloor on two lines, maintaining a specific altitude above the seafloor. Whether it's attached to the seabed, we're not sure. We did not observe direct attachment during the dive, but it seems like the organism touches the seafloor."

The other specimens might not have been touching the seabed, but all three of the animals were spotted within two metres of it, in a feature called the Arecibo Amphitheater, which lies within an underwater trench known as the Guajataca Canyon.

It's in these very deep parts of the ocean where ctenophores are found, but the extreme depth of their natural habitat means we don't encounter these mysterious animals - let alone new species - very often.

Ctenophores go by a number of common names, many of which seem almost comical: comb jellies (named after their 'combs' of fine cilia) is the most popular, but they have also been referred to as sea gooseberries, sea walnuts, and Venus's girdles.

While the animals can superficially resemble jellyfish, they are not closely related. Ctenophores, which are carnivorous, subsist on small arthropods and various kinds of larvae.

Up to about 200 species have been described to date, with about one new species being found each year on average, and most discoveries rely on video capture methods for the basis of physical descriptions, given the difficulties of collecting specimens.

"This presents somewhat of a conundrum because taxonomy relies heavily upon physical type specimens preserved in museums to serve as references to which other material can be compared," the researchers explain in their paper.

"Indeed, the idea of using photographic evidence to establish new species has been highly contentious in recent decades."

Luckily, given the high-definition footage the team got of these three fine specimens of D. sparksae, the researchers say they didn't get "any pushback" about their species discovery.

While the team hopes to collect specimens on future dives for physical analysis, they say it might be decades before they have the chance to run into the comb jelly again.

For D. sparksae's sake, that might be for the best: bringing a gelatinous blob up to sea level, when it normally resides about 4 kilometres under the ocean's surface, can be a messy affair.

"Even if we had the equipment, there would have been very little time to process the animal because gelatinous animals don't preserve very well," Collins says.

"Ctenophores are even worse than jellyfish in this regard."

The findings are reported in Plankton and Benthos Research.

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Scientists Confirm Entirely New Species of Gelatinous Blob From The Deep, Dark Sea

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For the first time, scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have formally identified a new species of undersea creature based solely on high-definition video footage captured at the bottom of the ocean. And what an undersea creature it is.

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There's never been a radio silence quite like this one. After long months with no way of making contact with Voyager 2, NASA has finally reestablished communications with the record-setting interstellar spacecraft.

The breakdown in communications - lasting since March, almost eight months and a whole pandemic ago - wasn't due to some rogue malfunction, nor any run-in with interstellar space weirdness ( although there's that too).

In this instance, it was more a case of routine maintenance. And yet, when you're one of the farthest-flying spacecraft in history - leaving Earth and even the entire Solar System behind you - nothing much is ever truly routine.

In March, NASA announced that Deep Space Station 43 (DSS-43) in Australia, the only antenna on Earth that can send commands to Voyager 2, required critical upgrades and would need to shut down for approximately 11 months for the work to be completed.

During this window, Voyager 2, which is currently over 18.7 billion kilometres (11.6 billion miles) away from Earth and getting farther all the time, wouldn't be able to receive any communications from Earth, although its own broadcasts back to us would still be received by scientists.

As it stands, DSS-43's renovation is still underway and on track to be finalised in February 2021, but enough of the upgrades have been installed for preliminary testing to start.

Last week, mission operators sent their first communications to Voyager 2 since March, issuing a series of commands, and NASA reports that Voyager 2 returned a signal confirming it had received the instructions, and executed the commands without issue.

For the past 8-months, Deep Space Station 43 has been undergoing upgrades. @NASAVoyager-2 has been waiting for us to be able to send it commands once again.
On Friday 30th October, we sent those commands & after a 34hour 48 min round trip time, a "hello" came back! #DSS43 @CSIRO pic.twitter.com/qyMEc9Jkxc
- CanberraDSN (@CanberraDSN) November 2, 2020

Successful pings between radio antennas and spacecraft aren't usually newsworthy events, but Voyager 2 is such a storied and historic probe ( NASA's longest-running space mission in fact), it rightfully gets special attention - especially in situations like this, involving a period of one-way radio silence so long, it's effectively unprecedented.

According to NASA, DSS-43 hasn't been offline for this long in over 30 years. The old radio antenna that needed replacing - the only one in the world capable of broadcasting to Voyager 2 - had been in use for over 47 years.

As part of the refurb, DSS-43 is getting two new antennas, upgraded heating and cooling equipment, power supply equipment, and other electronics to support the new transmitters. When the work is complete, the upgrades will provide longevity to a cornerstone of a facility that's already legendary.

"What makes this task unique is that we're doing work at all levels of the antenna, from the pedestal at ground level all the way up to the feedcones at the centre of the dish that extend above the rim," says NASA Deep Space Network project manager Brad Arnold.

"This test communication with Voyager 2 definitely tells us that things are on track with the work we're doing."

As for why DSS-43 is the only dish in the world that can reach Voyager 2, the reason isn't purely technological. As a result of the probe's flyby of Neptune's moon Triton in 1989, Voyager 2's trajectory steered significantly southward relative to the Solar System's plane of planets, meaning earthbound antennas in the northern hemisphere have no way of reaching it.

For antennas Down Under, though, it's no biggie - unless you get taken offline for almost a year of critical upgrades. Even then, though, scientists never stopped thinking about Voyager 2, and kept a close eye on its vitals.

"We've always been talking to the spacecraft. We've been doing that daily," Suzanne Dodd, the project manager for the Voyager Interstellar Mission, told CNN.

"We can see the health of it. If it wasn't healthy, we would have known."

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NASA Finally Makes Contact With Voyager 2 After Longest Radio Silence in 30 Years

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There's never been a radio silence quite like this one. After long months with no way of making contact with Voyager 2, NASA has finally reestablished communications with the record-setting interstellar spacecraft. The breakdown in communications - lasting since March, almost eight months and a whole pandemic ago - wasn't due to some rogue malfunction, nor any run-in with interstellar space weirdness ( although there's that too).

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Nuclear power is often promoted as one of the best ways to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels to generate the electricity we need, but new research suggests that going all-in on renewables such as wind and solar might be a better approach to seriously reducing the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Based on an analysis of 123 countries over a quarter of a century, the adoption of nuclear power did not achieve the significant reduction in national carbon emissions that renewables did - and in some developing nations, nuclear programmes actually pushed carbon emissions higher.

The study also finds that nuclear power and renewable power don't mix well when they're tried together: they tend to crowd each other out, locking in energy infrastructure that's specific to their mode of power production.

Given nuclear isn't exactly zero carbon, it risks setting nations on a path of relatively higher emissions than if they went straight to renewables.

However, it's too early to rush to a judgement on nuclear just yet.

It's important to note that the study looked specifically at data from 1999-2014, so it excludes more recent innovations in nuclear power and renewables, and the scientists themselves say they have found a correlation, rather than cause and effect. But it's an interesting trend that needs further investigation.

"The evidence clearly points to nuclear being the least effective of the two broad carbon emissions abatement strategies, and coupled with its tendency not to co-exist well with its renewable alternative, this raises serious doubts about the wisdom of prioritising investment in nuclear over renewable energy," says Benjamin Sovacool, a professor of energy policy at the University of Sussex in the UK.

"Countries planning large-scale investments in new nuclear power are risking suppression of greater climate benefits from alternative renewable energy investments."

The researchers suggest the tighter regulations and longer lead times associated with nuclear power are responsible for some of the statistics explored here, while the large-scale development that nuclear requires tends to leave less room for renewable projects that work on a smaller scale.

There are also broader considerations to weigh up - nuclear and renewables will be two factors among many in the policies put together by governments when it comes to reducing carbon emissions.

Plus, given the time frame, a lot of the nuclear power plants covered by this study are likely to have been getting towards the end of their lifespans, which means more energy is required to maintain them.

Whatever the ins and outs of the nuclear policies, the study does show a clear link between greater adoption of renewable projects and lower carbon emissions overall.

The study authors propose that by cutting out nuclear altogether, these renewable gains could be even greater.

"This paper exposes the irrationality of arguing for nuclear investment based on a 'do everything' argument," says researcher for technology policy Andrew Stirling at the University of Sussex.

"Our findings show not only that nuclear investments around the world tend on balance to be less effective than renewable investments at carbon emissions mitigation, but that tensions between these two strategies can further erode the effectiveness of averting climate disruption."

It's a more contentious issue than you might think.

Many scientists (and Bill Gates) say that nuclear energy is our only option at this point, maintaining a view that it can replace fossil fuels with efficiencies that renewables can't match right now.

A study from 2018 also concluded that nuclear power has to be an essential part of the mix if we're going to reduce the temperature of the planet by as much as we need to - at least until options like wind and solar have had time to scale up.

Work continues to make nuclear a leaner, more agile source of energy that can better operate alongside renewable projects, which will help it improve on the figures in this study.

In the meantime, the study authors are asking for more detailed reports from the nuclear industry, in order to better understand its benefits.

"While it is important to acknowledge the correlative nature of our data analysis, it is astonishing how clear and consistent the results are across different time frames and country sets," says Patrick Schmid, from the ISM International School of Management in Germany.

"In certain large country samples the relationship between renewable electricity and CO2-emissions is up to seven times stronger than the corresponding relationship for nuclear."

The research has been published in Nature Energy.

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25-Year Study of Nuclear vs Renewables Says One Is Clearly Better at Cutting Emissions

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Nuclear power is often promoted as one of the best ways to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels to generate the electricity we need, but new research suggests that going all-in on renewables such as wind and solar might be a better approach to serious

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Sains Tingkatan 3 KSSM I Bab 7 Tenaga & Kuasa I 7.1 Kerja, Tenaga & Kuasa

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[eTuisyen] TINGKATAN 3 SAINS : Bab 7 - Tenaga & Kuasa (PART 1)

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[eTuisyen] TINGKATAN 3 SAINS : Bab 7 - Tenaga & Kuasa (PART 1)

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[eTuisyen] TINGKATAN 3 SAINS : Bab 7 - Tenaga & Kuasa (PART 1)