Show Notes 10 February 2023
Story 1: Recent experiment shows lasers can direct lightning strikes
Source: The Guardian Story by Ian Sample
Source: Institut Polytechnique de Paris
Link: https://www.polytechnique.edu/en/news/deflecting-lightning-laser-lightning-rod
- Lightning bolts are huge electrical discharges that typically spark over two to three miles. The charge carried in a bolt is so intense that it reaches 30,000C, about five times hotter than the surface of the sun.
- More than a billion lightning bolts strike the Earth each year, causing thousands of deaths, 10 times as many injuries, and damage that runs into tens of billions of dollars.
- Lightning rods are a great safety tool, but what if you could direct the path of lightning?
- Scientists at the Polytechnical School in Paris this month announced the results of their successful tests between July and September of last year to redirect lightning bolts using a terawatt laser for the first time.
- On the top of a the Säntis mountain in Switzerland they positioned a powerful laser near a 124 meters-high [400-foot-high] telecommunications tower that is struck by lightning about 100 times a year.
- The scientists waited for storms to gather and then fired rapid laser pulses at thunderclouds for a total of more than six hours.
- Instruments set up to record lightning strikes showed that the laser pulses diverted the course of four upward lightning discharges during the experiment – which helped protect the telecoms tower.
- Time out: what are “upward lightning discharges”? Upward lightning is the development of a self-propagating lightning leader from a tall object that travels upward toward the overlaying electrified storm cloud. Upward lightning can initiate without any preceding lightning activity, herein classified as self-initiated upward lightning. Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-46122-x
- Okay reality check:
- The laser is powerful enough to potentially damage the eyes of overflying pilots, and during the experiments air traffic was closed over the test site.
- But the scientists believe the technology could still be useful to help protect, for example, rocket launchpads and strategic buildings where no-fly restrictions apply.
Story 2: The Pentagon wants a drug that will heat your body ASAP
Source: Popular Mechanics Story by Tim Newcomb
Link: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a42537862/drug-that-will-heat-your-body-asap/
- A Rice University bioengineer [Jerzy Szablowski] recently won a grant from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [that’s DARPA] to work on a proposed new drug to help humans temporarily withstand extreme cold.
- The goal of the proposed drug is to reduce cold adaptation for soldiers from weeks to hours by enhancing the body’s chemical reaction to cold temperatures.
- First, a little background – Our bodies respond to cold in one of two ways:
- The fastest includes shivering which raises your body temperature.
- The other is generating heat through a chemical reaction when the body’s brown fat cells break down blood sugar and fat molecules to generate heat.
- Time out, what are brown fat cells? Brown fat is a type of body fat that regulates your body temperature in cold conditions. Brown fat activates right before you start to shiver. Brown fat also burns calories and stores energy. You have a small percentage of brown fat in your body compared to white fat.
- But the problem with brown fat cells breaking down blood sugar and fat molecules to generate heat – that’s a very slow process that generally doesn’t generate enough heat to withstand extreme cold temperatures
- The Rice University bioengineer plans to develop a drug that makes brown fat cells more active, so instead of having to spend weeks adapting to cold, a soldier could perform better within hours.
- I need this for my dog walks in the morning!
Story 3: Recent breakthrough dramatically cuts the time and cost of making “green” hydrogen from seawater
Source: InterestingEngineering.com Story by Jajo Malayil
Link: https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/hydrogen-from-sea-water-for-cheap
- Before we dive into this, I need to explain a bit about “green” hydrogen, and electrolysis which plays a role in this story…
- For the past few years researchers have been working on systems to create green hydrogen from seawater using electrolysis.
- Green hydrogen refers to hydrogen created without the use of a fossil fuel such as natural gas.
- And hydrogen is a big deal because engines that use it as a fuel have an exhaust of only water vapor and warm air!
- Electrolysis [and warning this is geeky] involves passing an electric current through a liquid containing ions to induce a chemical breakdown of elements – in this case, we’re talking about oxygen and hydrogen in seawater.
- Methods to date to extract green hydrogen from ocean water require using energy-intensive and time-consuming saltwater treatment steps before an electrolysis system can break seawater down into oxygen and green hydrogen.
- Those preparation processes include:
- Reverse osmosis desalination
- Purification
- Or alkalization
- With all this in mind, finally here’s the big news:
- Recently an international team of scientists headed by the University of Adelaide in Australia announced they have figured out a way to eliminate all the preparation treatment steps and directly split seawater into oxygen and green hydrogen using a commercially available electrolysis machine with nearly 100 percent efficiency.
- And to further reduce cost, the electrolysis machine they’re using can work with a cheap and readily available, low-cost catalyst made of cobalt oxide coated with chromium oxide on its surface.
- Time out – What is a catalyst? What is the role of catalyst?
- A catalyst is a substance that speeds up a chemical reaction, or lowers the temperature or pressure needed to start one, without itself being consumed during the reaction. Source: https://www.energy.gov/science/doe-explainscatalysts
- The electrolysis process needs catalysts to work – and the best current industrial electrodes use the precious metals iridium, ruthenium, and platinum. Source: https://cosmosmagazine.com/science/chemistry/hydrogen-electrolysis-precious-metals-catalyst/
- The bottom line – this is a big breakthrough!
Story 4: Improved cancer treatment inspired by the foam on your latte
Source: MedicalXpress.com Story by Jennifer Brown, University of Iowa
Link: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-02-cancer-treatment-foam-latte.html
- Inspired by the foam on top of lattes [as well as gummy bears and Pop Rocks candies], researchers at the University of Iowa [with help from an international team of colleagues] are creating new, biocompatible gas-entrapping materials which can be formulated as foams, solids, or hydrogels.
- These new gas-entrapping materials are designed to carry high concentrations of a variety of therapeutic gases directly into tissues, including cancer tumors.
- The new experimental foam the University of Iowa team has created is highly enriched with oxygen.
- Oxygen has been shown to boost the effectiveness of standard chemotherapy and radiation treatments in mouse models of prostate cancer and a type of sarcoma.
- The researchers are now conducting experiments injecting their oxygen-enriched foam directly into cancer tumors to see how this can help boost chemotherapy and radiation.
- Other collaborators in this ingenious effort include:
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
- Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center,
- and Harvard Medical School.
- Hopefully, this will become another weapon in the fight against cancer!