Solar Probes, Carbon-Friendly AI, & A Cyclic Nova
Two Solar Probes Pass Close to Sun at Near Maximum
ESA’s Solar Orbiter just passed its (periodically occurring) closest approach to the sun at “merely” 42 million kilometres. The mission was launched in 2020 and its task is to collect high-resolution images of the surface of the sun, which is particularly interesting now that the sun is reaching its phase of peak activity. This approach is special because, coincidentally, NASA's Parker Solar Probe also just passed its closest approach. The Parker Probe has been orbiting the sun since 2019 on an even closer orbit, sometimes getting as close as 7 million kilometres. It measures the solar corona and the solar wind. The agencies expect the coincidental occurrence, which happens at almost a right angle of the spacecrafts’ positions to the sun, to provide valuable data about correlations in the two measurements.
Read more about the ESA mission here and here, and watch a video about the mission here.
Is AI More Carbon Friendly than Humans?
Move over, human writers, scribes, and artists – AI isn't just here to take your job, it's here to save the planet! Researchers at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas recently released a study showing that artificial intelligence doesn’t just make our lives easier; it also emits just a fraction of the carbon dioxide produced by us mere mortals when it comes to writing and illustration. The team made a life cycle assessment of the environmental impact of four distinct AI systems (ChatGPT, DALL-E2, Midjourney, and BLOOM) compared to human creators and found that AI emits at least 100 times less carbon emissions per page of text and at least 300 times less per illustration.
This story comes in the wake of news that American universities are apparently considering replacing graduate student workers with AI after students went on strike. The future is bright. Press release here, paper here.
Smart Fluid Changes Properties On Demand
Harvard scientists have developed a metafluid that can be designed so that it changes properties at a specific pressure or temperature. The innovative fluid is made of small, malleable elastomer capsules that are filled with air and suspended in silicon oil. When pressure in the liquid goes down, the elastomer capsules expand into spheres, and when the pressure inside the liquid increases, the capsules collapse, forming folded crescents. Depending on the shape and density of the capsules, the fluid changes its resistance to pressure, optical properties, and mechanical characteristics at different pressure strengths. It’s a simple and cheap way of customizing fluid properties.
The researchers say their metafluid could be used in everything from hydraulics to gripping robots to shock absorbers and optical devices. Press release here, paper here.
Comments (7)
Okay I don’t think I’ll disturb anybody here. You people are the only thinking people I know… What am I missing in the following back-of-napkin assumptions??? Suppose global GDP is running about $100 trillion, as of 2024… Suppose we can spare 1% or $1 trillion, globally. Calcium costs about $188/ton. Coal costs $45/ton and doesn’t need cleaning. BETTER…but wait… With coal then: Let’s suppose it costs about $8/ ton to distill CO2 out of air using fossil fuels. Just a place holder. It takes a little while to build solar plants. Looks like you can put Co2 into a coal mine for about $50/ton. In that case you wouldn’t even have to mine coal. —- nevermind calcium —- Say, 2 tons calcium for every one ton of co2. 2 trillion tons of calcium is $400 trillion. I’m rounding up to include the cost of getting the co2 into the calcium. (This doesn’t seem to be very costly or dangerous.) —— revised to use coal —— 1 trillion tons of CO2 at $50/ ton is $50 trillion. That’s 50 years for full remediation, assuming 1% of GDP per year, or 5 years at $10 trillion per year. (Coal beats calcium.) —- calculation for calcium —- It would take 400 years to get all the co2 out of the air at a budget of $1 trillion per year. Or $10 trillion per year to do it in 40 years.
Where does calcium come from? You get it by burning limestone (CaCO3), and that produces a large amount of CO2. It´s the probelm with cement industry as well. It´s not only a financial issue.
There has to be a focus on seeking out less problematic materials to experiment with: We have a huge plastic pollution problem, so it seems that this will simply add more plastics to those already "in the wild" if it proves successful. What are the elastomers made of? Silicone oil is a hazard as shown by this safety data sheet (https://www.farnell.com/datasheets/3202112.pdf).
Wait: aren’t those fluid properties using similar inputs as molecular behavior, esp in biochemistry? I’m thinking we’ll want to use that right away for modeling how “supramolecular “ stuff works. Note: I hesitate to use the word “supramolecular” because the first few searches I’ve done seem to show pseudoscience-y moneymaking … Also, it looks a lot like somebody trying to carve out a new mountain to be king of, rather than a good build on what has gone before… just my intuition though.
That fluid could be an advantage for the motoric skills of robots, I think.
My first thought with the "smart fluid" was that we've had engine oil that changes viscosity based on temperature for a very long time now. Then I wised up and realized that the smart fluid changes its properties extremely rapidly at specific pressures and temperatures, unlike engine oil. Completely off topic, but YouTube just offered up this video for viewing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xGwdUCYzgw This is an interview Sabine gave at a recent IAI festival.
Thank you for the link, this was last year in September in London, backstage obviuosly. There she also discussed with Eric Verlinde and Priya Natarajan about gravity. https://youtu.be/1j0Xh9XM34M?si=gk0TbhaepMBWg_yQ Sabine´s video about the failures in the administration and financing of academia from last week is becoming more famous. Now the german minister of health, prof. Karl Lauterbach, recommended it to watch.