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The promising salt battery is officially in mass production. The battery is made with salt instead of lithium, making it cheaper and much easier to scale than current batteries.
The salt batteries are particularly promising as a kind of buffer tank for wind and solar farms, or as a backup for data centers. The batteries are made by the American Natron Energy and the factory is even in Holland. Holland, Michigan, where from now on 600 megawatts of storage capacity must be created every year. The major advantage of salt batteries is the raw material: salt is cheap and widely available. Furthermore, aluminum and iron are needed, which are also widely available in the US. This means that the batteries can be developed without hassle about international raw material prices. According to Natron, this can also be done very quickly and it would be cheaper than traditional lithium-ion batteries. More benefits: more sustainable and faster The salt batteries also last much longer than lithium-ion. Natron claims that its batteries last 50,000 deep charge cycles, while lithium only lasts 3,500 times. The salt batteries do not need to cool down between charges to prevent damage or wear. Moreover, little can go wrong, because salt is not easily flammable. Moreover, they can be loaded very heavily, and are therefore full in 5 to 15 minutes, while large lithium batteries can take several hours, especially without special cooling measures. As for cooling: the salt batteries would also be usable from -20 to 50 degrees Celsius, while lithium is a bit more finicky. Particularly suitable as a 'buffer vessel' There are also disadvantages: the energy density is even lower than with lithium-ion. In other words, you need more battery to store the same amount of energy. That's not attractive for portable devices and cars, but it doesn't matter if you just want to use the battery for a lot of energy storage. The attractive characteristics of the battery make it particularly suitable for situations where lithium is currently in short supply. So for energy storage: next to a large solar park or wind farm, the salt batteries can quickly store a lot of energy, so that it can be supplied back to the grid just as quickly later. That is ideal, because then you smooth out the peaks and valleys of green energy. The battery is full when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, and supplies energy when it is dark and we need power. The startup Aquabattery is also working on a salt battery in the Netherlands. That company is still in the testing phase. But this first factory is also a kind of test for Natron, which should form the blueprint for many more factories that will make many more of these types of batteries. The Blog Tags Widget will appear here on the published site.
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The strongest solar storm in more than two decades struck Earth on Friday, triggering spectacular auroras worldwide. According to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center, the first of several coronal mass ejections (CME) occurred shortly after 1600 GMT.It was later upgraded to an "extreme" geomagnetic storm. It was the first such storm since the Halloween storms of October 2003, which caused blackouts in Sweden and damaged power infrastructure in South Africa. The green and blue lights — which are expected to continue for a few days — were seen from Britain to Tasmania, with officials in the US saying sightings might be possible as far south as Alabama and Northern California. Meanwhile, people from all over Germany posted photos of the aurora on social media. Scientists say the best views of the aurora may come from cell phone cameras, which are better at capturing light than the naked eye. What are the CMEs? Each eruption, known as a CME, can contain billions of tons of plasma and magnetic field from the sun's outer atmosphere, or corona. More CMEs are expected to hit the planet in the coming days. Unlike solar flares, which travel at the speed of light and take about eight minutes to reach Earth, CMEs travel at a more leisurely pace. Officials say the current average is 800 kilometers (500 miles) per second. The CMEs come from a massive sunspot cluster that is 16 times larger than our planet. The sun is nearing the peak of an 11-year cycle that brings with it heightened levels of activity. Authorities warned satellite operators, airlines and the power grid to take precautions in preparation for possible disruptions due to changes in the Earth's magnetic field. How dangerous are geomagnetic storms?
Fluctuating magnetic fields associated with geomagnetic storms induce currents in long wires, including power lines. These currents can potentially cause power outages. Long pipelines can also become electrified, causing technical problems. Spacecraft are also at risk from high doses of radiation. NASA said the storm posed no serious threat to the seven astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Its crew could move to a better-shielded part of the station if necessary The atmosphere prevents this radiation from reaching the Earth. The Blog Tags Widget will appear here on the published site.
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Does zero Exist?5/7/2024
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Cancer ‘is our new Covid’5/6/2024 American drug manufacturer Pfizer has its sights set on the cancer treatment market now that the Covid-19 pandemic is over and global demand for its vaccines and Covid-19 drugs is falling, CEO Albert Bourla told Fox Business on May 1.
The company expects to score big on “blockbuster” cancer drugs, Bourla said, as the pharma giant seeks to reverse its post-Covid business decline. The pandemic brought record revenue to the company. In 2022 alone, Pfizer’s total sales amounted to $157 billion, with its Covid vaccine accounting for $37.8 billion and its antiviral treatment pill, Paxlovid, bringing in another $18.9 billion. In 2023, sales were down by more than half and accounted for $71 billion. The company’s shares have also fallen by 42% since the end of 2022, amid the rapid decline in demand for its Covid-related products. This forced it to launch a major cost-cutting campaign, including hundreds of layoffs at its UK, US, and Irish facilities. In his interview with Fox Business, Bourla praised the measures as a “very good cost containment” campaign, crediting it for the “very good results” his company showed in early 2024. Pfizer is also on the verge of striking gold again with its new strategy, he said. “Oncology, it is our new Covid,” the Pfizer CEO said. “We did what we did with Covid. We are very proud to have saved the world but it is behind us now. We want to do [it] once more and I think oncology is our best chance to do it.” In late 2023, the US drug manufacturer completed a $43 billion acquisition of Seagen (formerly, Seattle Genetics, Inc.) – a biotechnology company specializing in monoclonal antibody-based drugs, also known as antibody-drug conjugates, or ADCs. They are designed to kill tumor cells while leaving healthy tissues relatively unaffected. Seagen was previously known for its flagship product Adcetris, which is used to treat lymphoma and Hodgkin's lymphoma. According to drugs.com, the medicine costs around $11.910 for a 50-mg dose. Another drug in the company’s portfolio that demonstrated “phenomenal performance” in Pfizer’s hands was Padcev, according to Bourla. Padcev is used to treat bladder cancer, and its sales “had a growth of 164%” since the US pharma giant got its hands on the drug, he said. The average price for Padcev is $4,446 per 30-mg dose, according to drugs.com. “That demonstrates how well we’ve invested the money,” Bourla said, commenting on Padcev’s performance. He also promised blockbuster drugs in the future that “will have a significant impact on cancer patients.” Pfizer announced its shift toward cancer treatment in late 2023. “Nothing scares people all over the world more than cancer, because it affects everyone,” Bourla said at the time. “I hope we will be successful in our mission. I am optimistic that in the next 10 years, we will see significant advancement,” he added. In January 2024, the company said it plans to have at least eight blockbuster cancer treatment drugs by 2030 and double the number of patients treated with its innovative medicines, up from 2.3 million in 2023. The Blog Tags Widget will appear here on the published site.
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American journalist Tucker Carlson has released a 20-minute interview with high-profile Russian philosopher and political commentator Aleksandr Dugin. The conversation was published on Carlson’s YouTube channel on Monday. Western media have described Dugin as “Putin’s brain” due to his supposed influence on President Vladimir Putin and the Russian elite. A fervent critic of the West and a foreign policy hawk, Dugin passionately supports Russia’s military operation in Ukraine and has stated that an independent Ukrainian state “should not exist.” In 2022, his daughter Darya was killed in a car bombing, which the Russian authorities said had been orchestrated by Ukrainian agents. Several US media outlets subsequently cited unnamed US intelligence officials as saying that Washington believes that the Ukrainian authorities were indeed involved in the assassination. Carlson introduced Dugin as “a writer who writes about big ideas,” claiming that his books have been “banned by the Biden administration” in the US. “You cannot buy them on Amazon,” he said. During the conversation with Carlson, Dugin argued that liberal ideology, which became de facto uncontested in the West since the fall of the Soviet Union, is leading to the demise of the concept of families. “Family is [being] destroyed in favor of this individualism,” he said, adding that the natural progression of liberalism will lead to “abandoned human identity.” “Next phase: new liberalism. Now it is not about the rule of a majority, but it is about the rule of minorities. It is not about individual freedom, but it is about woke-ism,” Dugin said. “It is not democracy. It is totalitarianism.” The Blog Tags Widget will appear here on the published site.
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China sent off a new three-person crew to its Tiangong space station in low Earth orbit on Thursday, while remaining on track to put astronauts on the moon by 2030, according to Chinese space authorities.
The Shenzhou-18 spacecraft successfully lifted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in northeastern China’s Gobi Desert at 8.59pm, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) announced shortly after the launch. On board the spacecraft are mission commander Ye Guangfu, a veteran of the 2021 Shenzhou-13 mission, and crewmates Li Cong and Li Guangsu, who are both former fighter pilots and on their first space flight mission. The trio will take about six and a half hours to arrive at Tiangong after the spacecraft reaches orbit and performs an automated rendezvous to dock with the space station some 400km (250 miles) above Earth, CMSA deputy director Lin Xiqiang told the media at Jiuquan on Wednesday. The crew will be greeted by the three Shenzhou-17 astronauts who have lived and worked on Tiangong since October and are scheduled to return to Earth in about a week. During the Shenzhou-18 crew’s six-month-long stay in orbit, they will mainly be tasked with conducting scientific experiments and spacewalks as well as routine maintenance and management of the space station, according to Lin. For instance, they are expected to use zebrafish and hornwort to build a stable “self-circulating aquatic ecosystem” and cultivate vertebrates in orbit, a first for China, he said. During the press conference, Lin also provided an update on China’s crewed lunar programme, noting that the building of systems and the timeline were on target to put Chinese astronauts on the moon before the end of the decade. The Blog Tags Widget will appear here on the published site.
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Particles of bird flu have been found in samples of consumer milk in the US, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said in a report on Tuesday, revealing the extent of the outbreak of the H5N1 strain of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI).
The virus has previously been detected in raw milk, the agency wrote, adding that while “pasteurization is likely to inactivate the virus,” the process is not expected to fully remove the presence of viral particles. The FDA national survey further discovered traces of bird flu in “milk from affected animals, in the processing system, and on the shelves.” “To date, we have seen nothing that would change our assessment that the commercial milk supply is safe,” the agency claimed, insisting that if the testing process finds “genetic material” from the virus, this “does not mean that the sample contains an intact, infectious pathogen.” While the FDA insists there is no real concern about the safety of pasteurized dairy products, other agencies said the produce from sick cows shouldn’t be on the shelves. “Only milk from healthy animals is authorized for distribution into interstate commerce for human consumption,” the National Milk Producers Federation wrote on its website. Meanwhile, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has revealed that bird flu has been found in 33 herds of dairy cows in eight states as of Monday. Although Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza has been going around for more than 20 years, its spread to bovine livestock is of substantial concern, the Washington Post wrote on Tuesday. The concern “is that it’s showing up in a lot more samples, meaning the infection is more widespread in dairy herds than we thought,” a US public health official told the paper on the condition of anonymity. Both the USDA and the FDA have urged consumers to avoid drinking raw milk as the situation evolves. Further results are expected in the coming days and weeks, authorities said. The Blog Tags Widget will appear here on the published site.
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German authorities have arrested a staff member of a far-right party’s lead candidate in the coming European elections on suspicion of spying for Chinese intelligence services.
The accused has been identified in the German press as an assistant to Maximilian Krah, who tops the candidate list for Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right party that has been riding high in the polls.Krah identified the employee in question as a man named Jian Guo in a post on X on Tuesday. It is the second German spy scandal involving China to emerge in as many days, after three people were arrested on Monday on suspicion of passing hi-tech secrets to China’s Ministry of State Security. A statement released by Germany’s federal prosecutor’s office on Tuesday said the suspect “is an employee of a Chinese secret service. Since 2019, he has been working for a German member of the European Parliament”. “He also spied on Chinese opposition figures in Germany for the intelligence service,” it continued, adding that he would appear before the Federal Court of Justice later in the day. Krah said he learned about his assistant’s arrest in the media on Tuesday, but had no further information. “Espionage for a foreign state is a serious accusation. If the allegations prove to be true, this would result in the immediate termination of his employment,” he wrote on X. In a statement, the AfD described the arrest of “one of Mr Krah’s employees on suspicion of espionage” as “very worrying”. “The party will do everything possible to support the clarification,” read the statement. At a press conference in Beijing on Tuesday, the Chinese foreign ministry said the accusations were “hype”. “We are aware of the reports and related hype,” foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said. “The intention of this kind of hype is very obvious … it is to smear and suppress China and to destroy the atmosphere of cooperation between China and Europe,” he added. Krah has become a controversial figure in the European Parliament for his pro-China remarks and his regular appearances in Chinese state media. He has also built an enormous presence on the Chinese-owned short video platform TikTok. In 2022 Krah told the Global Times, a nationalist paper affiliated with People’s Daily, that “decoupling from China would serve only the interests of America and damage our own industry severely. This is not about democracy or human rights, it is about the future conflict between Washington and Beijing.” Earlier in the year, he told Guancha, a platform popular with Chinese nationalists, that the country should not “seek reconciliation” with the West on the issue of human rights. “There are so many outstanding scholars in China, and I know you are studying the theories of the great German jurist Carl Schmitt. It seems to me that studying his views will lead you to the right conclusions,” Krah told Guancha, referring to the prominent Nazi who helped facilitate Hitler’s rise to power. Last year, media reports swirled about his links to Chinese intelligence organs through his assistant, who was hired when Krah was elected to the European Parliament in 2019 and accompanied him on a trip to China that year. The Blog Tags Widget will appear here on the published site.
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NASA wants a Time zone on the Moon4/22/2024 The United States government has tasked its space agency, NASA, with establishing a standard time zone for the moon, which will be known as Coordinated Lunar Time (CLT). In a memo issued on April 2, the US Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) stated: “Federal agencies will develop celestial time standardisation with an initial focus on the lunar surface and missions operating in Cislunar space [the area within the moon’s orbit], with sufficient traceability to support missions to other celestial bodies.” “Traceability” means that CLT can be kept in sync with time zones on Earth. The memo outlined the following features for the new CLT:
Why does the moon need its own time zone? In layman’s terms, we need a reliable “lunar time” earth-syncing system because lower gravity on the moon causes time to move slightly faster there than on Earth – by just 58.7 microseconds (there are 1 million microseconds in a single second) faster within every 24 Earth hours. This is not science fiction, even though it is a main feature of Hollywood blockbusters such as Interstellar. Known as “gravitational time dilation”, the passage of time is impacted by gravity. Although small, these time discrepancies can cause issues with syncing satellites and space stations in lunar orbit. An unnamed OSTP official told Reuters: “Imagine if the world wasn’t syncing their clocks to the same time – how disruptive that might be and how challenging everyday things become.” How would we tell time on the moon? Earth uses UTC or Coordinated Universal Time to sync time zones around the world. UTC is determined by more than 400 atomic clocks that are maintained in national “time laboratories” in about 30 countries around the world. An atomic clock uses the vibrations of atoms to achieve extreme precision in keeping track of time. Similar atomic clocks would be placed on the moon to get an accurate time reading. Known as Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT), this precision-timing system allows communications systems to measure and keep accurate timing. The Ordnance Survey, the British organisation that has been producing maps since 1791, explains that PNT has three core elements:
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Heavy rainfall on Tuesday brought the desert city of Dubai to a standstill and flooded portions of its major highways and international airport.
Operations at the Dubai airport were suspended for 25 minutes in the afternoon before resuming. Cars drive through a flooded street during a rain storm in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, April 16, 2024. Visuals shared on social media showed planes taxiing across the airport flooded with standing water. According to the Associated Press, which cited the meteorological data collected at Dubai International Airport, the city received a year and a half's worth of rain within 24 hours. The rains began late Monday, soaking the sands and roadways of Dubai with some 20 millimetres (0.79 inches) of rain. It further intensified on Tuesday and by the end of the day, more than 142 millimetres (5.59 inches) of rainfall had soaked Dubai. An average year sees 94.7 millimetres (3.73 inches) of rain at Dubai International Airport. The UAE government had issued warnings ahead of the heavy rains, urging people to stay at home and only leave “in cases of extreme necessity.” It later announced remote working until Wednesday for all federal employees. What caused the heavy rainfall in Dubai? According to CNN, the rain that plunged Dubai underwater is associated with a larger storm system traversing the Arabian Peninsula and moving across the Gulf of Oman. This same system is also bringing unusually wet weather to nearby Oman and south-eastern Iran. At least 18 people have died in recent days as the heavy rains caused flooding in Oman. "It is highly likely that the deadly and destructive rain in Oman and Dubai was made heavier by human-caused climate change," Otto, of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London, told AFP. Meanwhile, Bloomberg reported that the heavy rains stemmed partly from cloud seeding. Cloud seeding a method to make rain by spraying clocks with chemical to make water drops more heavier to fall down to earth. It's called geo-engineering. The Blog Tags Widget will appear here on the published site.
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