#Science Channel

[troythecatfish]

[sciencespies]

Tracking air pollution disparities -- daily -- from space

https://sciencespies.com/environment/tracking-air-pollution-disparities-daily-from-space/

Tracking air pollution disparities -- daily -- from space

Studies have shown that pollution, whether from factories or traffic-snarled roads, disproportionately affects communities where economically disadvantaged people and Hispanic, Black and Asian people live. As technology has improved, scientists have begun documenting these disparities in detail, but information on daily variations has been lacking. Today, scientists report preliminary work calculating how inequities in exposure fluctuate from day to day across 11 major U.S. cities. In addition, they show that in some places, climate change could exacerbate these differences.

The researchers will present their results at the fall meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS).

Air pollution levels can vary significantly across relatively short distances, dropping off a few hundred yards from a freeway, for example. Researchers, including Sally Pusede, Ph.D., have used satellite and other observations to determine how air quality varies on a small geographic scale, at the level of neighborhoods.

But this approach overlooks another crucial variable. “When we regulate air pollution, we don’t think of it as remaining constant over time, we think of it as dynamic,” says Pusede, the project’s principal investigator. “Our new work takes a step forward by looking at how these levels vary from day to day,” she says.

Information about these fluctuations can help pinpoint sources of pollution. For instance, in research reported last year, Pusede and colleagues at the University of Virginia found that disparities in air quality across major U.S. cities decreased on weekends. Their analysis tied this drop to the reduction of deliveries by diesel-fueled trucks. On weekends, more than half of such trucks are parked.

Pusede’s research focuses on the gas NO2, which is a component of the complex brew of potentially harmful compounds produced by combustion. To get a sense of air pollution levels, scientists often look to NO2. But it’s not just a proxy — exposure to high concentrations of this gas can irritate the airways and aggravate pulmonary conditions. Inhaling elevated levels of NO2 over the long term can also contribute to the development of asthma.

The team has been using data on NO2 collected almost daily by a space-based instrument known as TROPOMI, which they confirmed with higher resolution measurements made from a similar sensor on board an airplane flown as part of NASA’s LISTOS project. They analyzed these data across small geographic regions, called census tracts, that are defined by the U.S. Census Bureau. In a proof-of-concept project, they used this approach to analyze initial disparities in Houston, and later applied these data-gathering methods to study daily disparities over New York City and Newark, New Jersey.

Now, they have analyzed satellite-based data for 11 additional cities, aside from New York City and Newark, for daily variations. The cities are: Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Seattle, St. Louis and Washington, D.C. A preliminary analysis found the highest average disparity in Los Angeles for Black, Hispanic and Asian communities in the lowest socioeconomic status (SES) tracts. They experienced an average of 38% higher levels of pollution than their non-Hispanic white, higher SES counterparts in the same city — although disparities on some days were much higher. Washington, D.C., had the lowest disparity, with an average of 10% higher levels in Black, Hispanic and Asian communities in low-income tracts.

In these cities, as in New York City and Newark, the researchers also analyzed the data to see whether they could identify any links with wind and heat — both factors that are expected to change as the world warms. Although the analysis is not yet complete, the team has so far found a direct connection between stagnant air and uneven pollution distribution, which was not surprising to the team because winds disperse pollution. Because air stagnation is expected to increase in the northeastern and southwestern U.S. in the coming years, this result suggests uneven air pollution distribution could worsen in these regions, too, if actions to reduce emissions are not taken. The team found a less robust connection with heat, though a correlation existed. Hot days are expected to increase across the country with climate change. Thus, the researchers say that if greenhouse gas emissions aren’t reduced soon, people in these communities could face more days in which conditions are hazardous to their health from the combination of NO2 and heat impacts.

Pusede hopes to see this type of analysis used to support communities fighting to improve air quality. “Because we can get daily data on pollutant levels, it’s possible to evaluate the success of interventions, such as rerouting diesel trucks or adding emissions controls on industrial facilities, to reduce them,” she says.

The researchers acknowledge support and funding from NASA and the National Science Foundation.

Video: https://youtu.be/SbQ87rZq9MA

#Environment

[professorcalculusstanaccount]

as newspapers today dont tend to hire children, a modern day Tintin would run a clickbait YouTube channel, except the clickbait is 100% real every single time

he starts off as an irritating conservative pundit at 14, meets Chang then leaves the think tank paying him and launches his own independent channel and blows up shortly after. Chang helps with video editing and managing his socials and they often chat on video calls between adventures. Haddock, his foster dad, has absolutely no knowledge of his earlier videos.

[sauerkrauted]

Did y’all know the Science Channel on YouTube has How it’s Made??? It’s over. I’m never getting anything done now. This is all I will be watching.

[0firstlast1]

Tech educational toy:

In the video above a technological educational toy that any studious elementary school boy would like to have in his room at home.

When did occultists return my motorcycle that I bought? Nobody likes a bandit, nor a bandit likes a bandit.

[destiel-news-channel]

[Image ID: The Destiel confession meme edited so that Dean answers 'Seven 'Star Trek' frog species have been found!' to Cas' 'I love you'. /End ID]

The species have been named after seven Star Trek captains for their "'Star Trek'-esque calls'. Their high-pitched whistling sounds are reminiscent of 'Star Trek' sound effects like the Tricorder noises.

source link

Please welcome Boophis kirki, Boophis picardi, Boophis siskoi, Boophis janewayae, Boophis archeri, Boophis pikei, and Boophis burnhamae! Good to know scientists are just as nerdy as we all are.

[adastra-sf]

One of the all-time best opening lines

The sky above the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel.

- Neuromancer, by William Gibson (1984)

gif by @hainfulcupid

[meraxes-of-new-albion]

Reblogs = sample size etc etc

I'm aiming for informative, not funny - any context on how long is too long to bother watching would be nice as well so feel free to share in the tags

[fuckyeahfluiddynamics]

The Channel Tunnel

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Channel Tunnel, Practical Engineering takes a look back at the construction and operation of this incredible piece of infrastructure. (Image and video credit: Practical Engineering) Read the full article

[inbabylontheywept]

Someone had to go first.

In an odd first, I forgot to post this HFY story here until after it was voiced by BirbletonVA. Their channel actually did such an insanely good job that I would actually strongly recommend listening to it over reading it. Nonetheless, the text is provided below.

Please like and subscribe to their channel if you like their work.

The first ship that arrived was pretty matter of fact about its fate. The pilot introduced himself as Eric, and told us he was part of the first sublight resupply attempt in modern history. He then gave me and the ground control team his bad news.

“So,” he said. “Without real time telemetry, we weren’t even sure which half of your orbit you’d be in. That’s half a solar system’s worth of wiggle room. Decelerating enough to survive contact with your low orbit would take me two weeks, which, you know, it looks like we don’t have. That means that in order to get the second ship in before you lose orbital control to the Kresh, I’m gonna have to make a sacrificial flyby. Ten to the negative four torr is good enough for a lot of things, but at point-seven c it’s gonna be like sandblasting a soup cracker. Good news is that all the expensive toys are in the next ship, so this really ain’t costing you more than a ship and a pilot.”

“You knew,” I said. If they put the expensive toys in the second ship, they knew that the first was likely a sacrifice. No one smart enough to handle orbital physics would miss that.

“I did,” he said. “But someone had to go first.”

That was, of course, a lie. No one had to go first. No else had had, at least. When our connection to the FTL network was lost, we’d understood that as the end of our reinforcements. Doing resupplies via sublight was just too risky. It was a testament to Earth that it had accepted the risk and continued anyway.

“Is there anything we can do for you?” I asked. This man had come here to die for us. I wasn’t sure how much I could give, but what I had was his.

“I do have a few requests,” he said. “First up, I need as much high-orbital data as you got. The whole lot.”

I began directing tightbeam resources to him immediately. It was an easy resource to exchange - it wasn’t like there was anyone else out to talk to anymore. When we lost FTL, we found ourselves very, very alone.

“Second,” he said. “Right, I know I’m gonna sound like a princess right now, but I have been stuck in this stupid tin-can for almost two-years now, and I seriously overestimated how much I like synth music. If you have anything that’s analog - I don’t care what kind of string or drum or brass you play, but I’d kill to hear something without a beep in it.”

I jumped my own queue in the tightbeam, and added a short playlist that I ripped from the local web. Human Music, it was labeled. 3 Terabytes. I prayed there was something on it that he’d like.

“And third,” he said. “Third. The uh, next pilot is pretty mad at me. Turns out this will just be one of those things left unfinished. That’s all death really is, I guess - a lot of unfinished things. Let him know that he was right: He is a better pilot than me. But tell him that wouldn’t have made a difference here. Bad luck beats skill, and this luck was shit.”

I promised, and he went silent after that. We could see what data he was analyzing, and the short answer was all of it - everything from atmospheric density to troop positions and his own ship’s blueprints. He knew he had one shot at this, and that if the price wasn’t paid here, it would be paid by whoever came next.

---

Ground control didn’t get a verbal warning that he’d entered atmosphere. Just a ping. A little here-I-am, whispered in the dark.

After that, we could keep track with visuals alone.

He hit the outskirts of the exoatmosphere in his first pass, burning bright enough to be seen with the naked eye. He caught the sparse particles like a kite, trying to shed enough speed to hit actual low orbit. Automatic telemetry updates gave us the grim news for the ship: Thermals were holding up decently, but the ablative was wearing out fast.

The entire descent brought us more than two hour’s reprieve. The Kresh hadn’t expected to see a resupply, but they knew what one meant: Get it now, get it fast, or deal with a stream of new troops. They could buy themselves ten days' time by shooting this one ship down now. That was an eternity during a siege.

The first loop lowered the speed by about a twentieth of light. The pilot responded by pulling the ship in tighter, burning trying to preserve more ablative plating by trading off with thermal. Seven fighters were close enough to fire off heat seekers. I don’t think the Kresh had ever anticipated shooting down a craft coming in that hot - the missile's decoy avoidance countermeasure actually made it steer around the thing, chasing down loose pieces of shrapnel. Cooled fragments, still hotter than an engine, should be at full blast. The simple mistakes bought it enough time to enter pre-orbit, and the fighters had to stop their pursuit. They weren’t willing to die to stop the ship.

Our man, on the other hand, was already committed to that course.

A third loop followed a fourth. Ablative coating went from 65% integrity, to 30%, to 5%. Telemetry scans were exceptionally detailed - the pilot was making the flyby count. The last message we got from him was simple:

Are you EMP shielded? he asked, not even bothering to encrypt the text stream. He didn’t have time to process more than that.

Yes, we replied. We knew what he was thinking, but it was still a shock to see it. The fusion torch flared hot, burning through the nozzle and feeding directly into the craft’s dueterium supply. The reaction went super critical, and the resulting neutron pulse set off everything in the ship with a z-count higher than iron. Three continuous seconds of EM interference screamed through the comms as the hulk burned through orbit.

The explosion itself wasn’t powerful enough to kill the Kresh ships still in high orbit, but it made enough broadband radiation to blind both sides LADAR. The man must have been a hell of a pilot - half the shrapnel went down and got burned up as it entered the standard atmosphere, traded as the cost of moving the other half past lagrange. Standard evasion would’ve made the pieces easy to dodge, but with LADAR down, all the Kresh could do was sit still and cower as the wrath of a dead man riddled them full of holes. Our best ace had managed to shoot down seven ships before this before getting shot down himself. The wreckage of the freighter took down six.

---

The second ship came in stealth. One second, we were holding attrition in high orbit, the next, something the size of a small station came ripping through the atmosphere.

It did the same trick as the former - swapping between ablative and thermal loads, coming down at a speed that the Kresh fighters didn’t even try to match. Armies could be built in years, but skills like this took decades.

Telemetry connection was established almost as an afterthought. The way the ship casually ate through ablative armoring made my eyes water, but the pilot himself seemed pretty non-plussed.

“You’re down to fifteen percent coverage. You need-

“What I need,” he said, “is to see the previous ship’s telemetry. If there’s one thing you can trust, it’s that this bird is going to come down gentle.”

He cut off my chance to reply by flicking the channel off. We watched, and we wrang our hands, but sure enough he came in six minutes later with 4% of the ablative left.

I met him on the landing pad. Under normal circumstances, we’d have needed twenty-four hours for the craft to cool enough to even approach, but we’d had cryo ready just in case. Three tankers of nitrogen, and the loading area, at least, was cool enough to touch. Safety would have to take a backseat to speed here - we needed the supplies fast.

But those both would take a backseat to a promised conversation with the second pilot. He was out of the craft as soon as the air was cool enough to avoid scalding his lungs, picking through the workers to try and find who had the telemetry data.

I found him first. The drive went into his hands, but I needed to keep my promise with Eric before letting go.

“You’re better than the first pilot,” I said, and I wasn’t lying. If the previous flier had been a saint, this one was a god. “But you wouldn’t have been able to manage the landing either. There just wasn’t time.”

“Let me see,” he said, tugging on the drive. “Just let me see. I have to know I couldn’t do it either. I have to know that someone had to die.”

I let go of the drive and he stalked back into his ship. I didn’t follow. I figured I’d pushed things far enough as it was.

---

The second pilot left the ship six hours later. He looked bleary in a way that put me at ease. I’d been up the last six hours directing supplies from the ship. Everything from ground-to-orbit rails to AGI targeting systems was inside, and to say it was gamechanging would be an understatement. It was good work, but I was tired, and I didn’t want to have to pretend otherwise. Seeing the other man with bags under his eyes meant we could just be frank with each other.

“I couldn’t have managed it,” he said, half-ashamed, half-relieved.

“It just wasn’t possible,” I agreed.

We sat there a moment longer. I didn’t mind the break. This was time well spent.

“Did it hurt?” he asked finally.

“Ablative failed before heating,” I said, which was the technical way of saying no. “He overloaded the reactor before the ship actually broke up and did some kind of slingshot maneuver - hit the main body of the Kresh fleet with half a space station’s worth of shrapnel.”

“Good,” he said.

I knew the signs. The tremor in his cheek, the way his jaw clenched - it wasn’t professional, but I hugged him anyway. Let him have the dignity of choosing to weep instead of having it wrenched out of him.

It was a gift we’d all been given at some point in this war. At least now, there was the hope it could be over soon.

[sciencespies]

Quantum magnet is billions of times colder than interstellar space

https://sciencespies.com/physics/quantum-magnet-is-billions-of-times-colder-than-interstellar-space/

Quantum magnet is billions of times colder than interstellar space

A magnet made out of ytterbium atoms is only a billionth of a degree warmer than absolute zero. Understanding how it works could help physicists build high temperature superconductors

Physics 1 September 2022

By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

Ytterbium atoms have been used to make a very cold magnet

Carlos Clarivan/Science Photo Library

A new kind of quantum magnet is made out of atoms only a billionth of a degree warmer than absolute zero – and physicists are not sure how it behaves.

Regular magnets repel or attract magnetic objects depending on whether electrons inside the magnet are in an “up” or a “down” quantum spin state, a property analogous to saying where their north and south poles would be if the particles were tiny bar magnets. However, this isn’t the only property that can be used to build a magnet.

Kaden Hazzard at Rice University in Texas and his colleagues used ytterbium atoms to make a magnet based on a spin-like property that has six options each labelled with a colour.

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The researchers confined the atoms in a vacuum in a small glass and metal box then used laser beams to cool them down. The push from the laser beam made the most energetic atoms release some energy, which lowers the overall temperature, similar to blowing on a cup of tea.

They also used lasers to arrange the atoms in different configurations to produce magnets. Some were one-dimensional like a wire, others were two-dimensional like a thin sheet of a material or three-dimensional like a piece of a crystal.

The atoms arranged in lines and sheets reached about 1.2 nanokelvin, more than 2 billion times colder than interstellar space. For the atoms in three-dimensional arrangements, the situation is so complex the researchers are still figuring out the best way to measure the temperature.

“Our colleagues achieved the coldest fermions in the universe. Thinking about experimenting on this ten years ago, it looked like a theorist’s dream,” says Hazzard.

Physicists have long been interested in how atoms interact in exotic magnets like this because they suspect that similar interactions happen in high temperature superconductors – materials that perfectly conduct electricity. By better understanding what happens, they could build better superconductors.

There have been theoretical calculations about such magnets but they have failed to predict exact colour state patterns or how magnetic exactly they can be, says co-author Eduardo Ibarra-García-Padilla. He says that he and colleagues carried out some of the best calculations yet while they were analysing the experiment, but could still only predicted the colours of eight atoms at a time in the line and sheet configurations out of the thousands of atoms in the experiment.

Victor Gurarie at the University of Colorado Boulder says that the experiment was just cold enough for atoms to start “paying attention” to the quantum colour states of their neighbours, a property that does not influence how they interact when warm. Because computations are so difficult, similar future experiments may be the only method for studying these quantum magnets, he says.

Reference: Nature Physics, DOI: 10.1038/s41567-022-01725-6

More on these topics:

#Physics

[giveamadeuschohisownmovie]

Underrated actor spotlight: David Hewlett

I’m so used to seeing him as David Worth in “Cube” that it was so weird seeing him play someone who actually smiled and was having fun, that character being Rodney McKay in “Stargate Atlantis”.

Here he is in Cube:

Here he is in SGA:

[0firstlast1]

Science Channel - How It's Made

[sillylilyposting]

This your source?

Ya know what the long term negative effects of WEED addiction according to video

WoW TEENAGERS SHOULDN'T DO DRUG WHAT A FUCKING DISCOVERY!

[utopianscholastic]

Edutainment Smackdown: Round 2, Poll 3

Round 2 Masterpost

[90s-2000s-barbie]

Disney’s Bill Nye The Science Guy (1994 - 1999) 🔬🧪