Science news of the day thread.

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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by Brian Peacock » Tue Jan 10, 2023 8:06 am

Oops :oops:
Disappointing end to UK space mission as satellites fail to reach orbit

A historic space mission that took off from Cornwall has ended in huge disappointment after a rocket carrying the first satellites launched from British soil failed to reach orbit.

To whoops and cheers from a crowd that had gathered at Spaceport Cornwall to watch the launch, a converted Boeing 747 took off and headed out across the Atlantic.

It successfully released a rocket, called LauncherOne, carrying a payload of nine satellites and Virgin Orbit, which is leading the mission, announced that it had reached Earth orbit.

The company tweeted: “LauncherOne has … successfully reached Earth orbit! Our mission isn’t over yet, but our congratulations to the people of the UK! This is already the first-ever orbital mission from British soil – an enormous achievement.”

Twenty-eight minutes later it tweeted: “We appear to have an anomaly that has prevented us from reaching orbit. We are evaluating the information."

The Start Me Up mission is the first launch of satellites from European soil and was heralded as the start of a new space era for the UK.

Cosmic Girl, flown by RAF test pilot Sqn Ldr Matthew Stannard, took off just after 10pm and carried out a “fin wiggle” to clear ice from LauncherOne. It reached its destination south of Ireland and followed a looping “racetrack” pattern as the crew waited for the final go/no-go call.

Back in Cornwall spectators did a “conga” dance around a replica of the rocket at the perimeter of the spaceport while up to 75,000 people watched a livestream of the flight.

When the “go” call came at 11.10pm, LauncherOne was released at 10,700 metres (35,000ft), falling for a few seconds before igniting and shooting southwards, gathering speed and altitude as it headed towards the Canary Islands.

Cosmic Girl banked sharply away, a stomach-turning manoeuvre. The spectators in Cornwall watching via a big screen whooped and the plane headed back towards the UK...

https://www.theguardian.com/science/202 ... m-cornwall
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Clinton Huxley » 21 Jun 2012 » 14:10:36 GMT
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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by Svartalf » Tue Jan 10, 2023 8:32 am

poor branson, it must be hard to look ridiculous and be compared to elon
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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by macdoc » Tue Jan 10, 2023 9:21 am

Elons early failures were a bit more spectacular but this is the right idea tho not so fond of thousands of micro-satellite
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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by Svartalf » Tue Jan 10, 2023 9:30 am

neither am I, we have enough crap flying up there, it's time we made a concerted effort to get rid of the debris and useless stuff, especially if parts or materials could be recycled, and to combine forces to make sure we don't have more flying junk than necessary, so, better combine satellites in bigger, multifunction ones, than multiply little things that will cause more clutter and be harder to get rid of when they are at the end of their usefulness.
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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by aufbahrung » Tue Jan 10, 2023 9:39 pm

Branson likes solid state rockets. In fact anything that puts soot in the upper atmosphere appears his game. Almost like he's doing some amateur geo-engineering whilst no body is looking. Does he know what he's doing? Find out later on the Virgin Snowpiercer Express...
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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by Scot Dutchy » Tue Jan 10, 2023 11:39 pm

Typical of the UK; all fur and no knickers. Wasting money. These micro satellites should be banned as they are space garbage. I bet you he got public funds.
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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by macdoc » Fri Jan 13, 2023 3:35 am

A big deal on the quantum level
JANUARY 12, 2023
New spin control method brings billion-qubit quantum chips closer
by UNSW Sydney
Image
How multiple qubits may be controlled using the new ‘intrinsic spin-orbit EDSR’ process. Credit: Tony Melov
Australian engineers have discovered a new way of precisely controlling single electrons nestled in quantum dots that run logic gates. What's more, the new mechanism is less bulky and requires fewer parts, which could prove essential to making large-scale silicon quantum computers a reality.

The serendipitous discovery, made by engineers at the quantum computing start-up Diraq and UNSW Sydney, is detailed in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.
more

https://phys.org/news/2023-01-method-bi ... loser.html
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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by Brian Peacock » Thu Mar 02, 2023 5:10 pm

James Webb spots super old, massive galaxies that shouldn't exist

In a new study, an international team of astrophysicists has discovered several mysterious objects hiding in images from the James Webb Space Telescope: six potential galaxies that emerged so early in the universe’s history and are so massive they should not be possible under current cosmological theory.

Each of the candidate galaxies may have existed at the dawn of the universe roughly 500 to 700 million years after the Big Bang, or more than 13 billion years ago. They’re also gigantic, containing almost as many stars as the modern-day Milky Way Galaxy.

“It’s bananas,” said Erica Nelson, co-author of the new research and assistant professor of astrophysics at the University of Colorado Boulder. “You just don’t expect the early universe to be able to organize itself that quickly. These galaxies should not have had time to form.”

Nelson and her colleagues, including first author Ivo Labbé of the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, published their results Feb. 22 in the journal Nature.

The latest finds aren’t the earliest galaxies observed by James Webb, which launched in December 2021 and is the most powerful telescope ever sent into space. Last year, another team of scientists spotted four galaxies that likely coalesced from gas around 350 million years after the Big Bang. Those objects, however, were downright shrimpy compared to the new galaxies, containing many times less mass from stars.

The researchers still need more data to confirm that these galaxies are as big as they look, and date as far back in time. Their preliminary observations, however, offer a tantalizing taste of how James Webb could rewrite astronomy textbooks.

“Another possibility is that these things are a different kind of weird object, such as faint quasars, which would be just as interesting,” Nelson said...
As I understanding, these galaxies shouldn't be able to form in this way in the early universe if the dark energy/matter cosmological paradigm is true. In fact, the existence of the galaxies falsifies cosmological theories which integrate dark energy/matter. However, the cosmological theory based on Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MONDS) predicted the existence of these kinds of galaxies, and the JWST observations confirm it.

This vid has a bit about JWST and MONDS...

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Clinton Huxley » 21 Jun 2012 » 14:10:36 GMT
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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by JimC » Thu Mar 02, 2023 7:50 pm

Early days yet...
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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by Brian Peacock » Thu Mar 02, 2023 7:52 pm

Aye. More data needed, but intriguing nonetheless - and the standard model of cosmology might want to watch its back a bit.
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"This is how humanity ends; bickering over the irrelevant."
Clinton Huxley » 21 Jun 2012 » 14:10:36 GMT
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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by rainbow » Thu Mar 09, 2023 1:55 pm

Brian Peacock wrote:
Thu Mar 02, 2023 7:52 pm
Aye. More data funding needed, but intriguing nonetheless - and the standard model of cosmology might want to watch its back a bit.
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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by rasetsu » Thu Mar 09, 2023 1:59 pm

Scientists announced this week a tantalizing advance toward the dream of a material that could effortlessly convey electricity in everyday conditions. Such a breakthrough could transform almost any technology that uses electric energy, opening new possibilities for your phone, magnetically levitating trains and future fusion power plants.

Usually, the flow of electricity encounters resistance as it moves through wires, almost like a form of friction, and some energy is lost as heat. A century ago, physicists discovered materials, now called superconductors, where the electrical resistance seemingly magically disappeared. But these materials only lost their resistance at unearthly, ultracold temperatures, which limited practical applications. For decades, scientists have sought superconductors that work at room temperatures.

This week’s announcement is the latest attempt in that effort, but it comes from a team that faces wide skepticism because a 2020 paper that described a promising but less practical superconducting material was retracted after other scientists questioned some of the data.

The new superconductor consists of lutetium, a rare earth metal, and hydrogen with a little bit of nitrogen mixed in. It needs to be compressed to a pressure of 145,000 pounds per square inch before it gains its superconducting prowess. That is about 10 times the pressure that is exerted at the bottom of the ocean’s deepest trenches.

But it is also less than one one-hundredth of what the 2020 result required, which was akin to the crushing forces found several thousand miles deep within the Earth. That suggests that further investigations of the material could lead to a superconductor that works at ambient room temperatures and at the usual atmospheric pressure of 14.7 pounds per square inch.

(New York Times)

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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by aufbahrung » Fri Mar 10, 2023 8:54 am

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/scie ... vive-quest

Cold fusion remains elusive—but these scientists may revive the quest



(continued)
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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by macdoc » Fri Mar 10, 2023 11:10 am

Little old :coffee:
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Re: Science news of the day thread.

Post by aufbahrung » Fri Mar 10, 2023 12:39 pm

macdoc wrote:
Fri Mar 10, 2023 11:10 am
Little old :coffee:
Relevant with red matter coming to everyones rescue
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