Science & Engineering

[RedFromMI]

Oxford's JET lab smashes nuclear fusion energy output record

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-60312633

Scientists say they have made a major breakthrough in their quest to develop practical nuclear fusion - the energy process that powers the stars.
The UK-based JET laboratory has smashed its own world record for the amount of energy it can extract by squeezing together two forms of hydrogen.
The experiments produced 59 megajoules of energy over five seconds (11 megawatts of power).
This is more than double what was achieved in similar tests back in 1997.

It's not a massive energy output - only enough to boil about 60 kettles' worth of water. But the significance is that it validates design choices that have been made for an even bigger fusion reactor now being constructed in France.
"The JET experiments put us a step closer to fusion power," said Dr Joe Milnes, the head of operations at the reactor lab. "We've demonstrated that we can create a mini star inside of our machine and hold it there for five seconds and get high performance, which really takes us into a new realm."

The ITER facility in southern France is supported by a consortium of world governments, including from EU member states, the US, China and Russia It is expected to be the last step in proving nuclear fusion can become a reliable energy provider in the second half of this century.
Operating the power plants of the future based on fusion would produce no greenhouse gases and only very small amounts of short-lived radioactive waste.
"These experiments we've just completed had to work," said JET CEO Prof Ian Chapman. "If they hadn't then we'd have real concerns about whether ITER could meet its goals.
"This was high stakes and the fact that we achieved what we did was down to the brilliance of people and their trust in the scientific endeavour," he told BBC News.
Fusion works on the principle that energy can be released by forcing together atomic nuclei rather than by splitting them, as in the case of the fission reactions that drive existing nuclear power stations.
In the core of the Sun, huge gravitational pressures allow this to happen at temperatures of around 10 million Celsius. At the much lower pressures that are possible on Earth, temperatures to produce fusion need to be much higher - above 100 million Celsius.
No materials exist that can withstand direct contact with such heat. So, to achieve fusion in a lab, scientists have devised a solution in which a super-heated gas, or plasma, is held inside a doughnut-shaped magnetic field.
The Joint European Torus (JET), sited at Culham in Oxfordshire, has been pioneering this fusion approach for nearly 40 years. And for the past 10 years, it has been configured to replicate the anticipated ITER set-up.

The walls of the JET reactor were changed to a material made from beryllium and titanium
The French lab's preferred "fuel" to make the plasma will be a mix of two forms, or isotopes, of hydrogen called deuterium and tritium.
JET was asked to demonstrate a lining for the 80-cubic-metre toroidal vessel enclosing the magnetic field that would work efficiently with these isotopes.
For its record-breaking experiments in 1997, JET had used carbon, but carbon absorbs tritium, which is radioactive. So for the latest tests, new walls for the vessel were constructed out of the metals beryllium and titanium. These are 10 times less absorbent.
The JET science team then had to tune their plasma to work effectively in this new environment.
"This is a stunning result because they managed to demonstrate the greatest amount of energy output from the fusion reactions of any device in history," commented Dr Arthur Turrell, the author of The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion And The Race To Power The Planet.
"It's a landmark because they demonstrated stability of the plasma over five seconds. That doesn't sound very long, but on a nuclear timescale, it's a very, very long time indeed. And it's very easy then to go from five seconds to five minutes, or five hours, or even longer."

JET can't actually run any longer because its copper electromagnets get too hot. For ITER, internally cooled superconducting magnets will be used.
Fusion reactions in the lab famously consume more energy to initiate than they can output. At Jet, two 500 megawatt flywheels are used to run the experiments.
But there is solid evidence that this deficit can be overcome in the future as the plasmas are scaled up. ITER's toroidal vessel volume will be 10 times that of JET. It's hoped the French lab will get to breakeven. The commercial power plants that come after should then show a net gain that could be fed into electricity grids.

How significant is this? Does it place a viable fusion reactor squarely within a ten year time frame?
Why isn't the USA investing more in this technology? Oh never mind....I already know the answer to that one.

I would say not within ten years to get to commercial power - but you _might_ see something on a somewhat longer time scale. The joke when I was in college was that it took ~20 years to commercialize fission, so it would at least take that long for fusion - except you kept resetting the clock over and over again. Fusion is hard to scale down from the bomb given what you have to overcome. But if we get this one right, the fuel is essentially limitless at the scale we use energy today. So you keep plugging.

[youthathletics]

Breaking News: Astronomers captured the first image of the black hole at the center of our galaxy, using the powerful Event Horizon Telescope.

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1524 ... i9V3DKu9ig

[Kismet]

First image from the Webb telescope - WOW!!!



Light in the image originated 13 billion years ago.

[Kismet]

more Webb images from NASA today

https://www.nasa.gov/webbfirstimages
Stunning.

[Typical Lax Dad]

more Webb images from NASA today

https://www.nasa.gov/webbfirstimages
Stunning.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Cf_Mk7SDz8H ... MyMTA2M2Y=

[youthathletics]

more Webb images from NASA today

https://www.nasa.gov/webbfirstimages
Stunning.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Cf_Mk7SDz8H ... MyMTA2M2Y=

The one on the left looks like a granite counter top, the right looks like Hunter Biden.

BTW, great show on the science channel this past Sunday on Webb telescope construction and launch.

[44WeWantMore]

A Logarithmic Map of the Entire Observable Universe

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/map ... -universe/

[youthathletics]

Scientists Puzzled Because James Webb Is Seeing Stuff That Shouldn't Be There

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technolo ... ee5a983756

[Kismet]

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... o-fog.html

Fantastic piece on fog on the West Coast and its long-lasting effects on climate


Also check this out on what occurred after wolves were re-introduced into Yellowstone Nat Park

[44WeWantMore]

[Farfromgeneva]

Looked interesting so sharing (and oh my god someone will complain becuase Im adding the link and the piece here - part of the reason to do so is so many folks who drop shady links with little opacity as to what they are walking into - like some of my sarcastic youtube links which I know are funny but understand not everyone thinks like I do)

https://bigthink.com/hard-science/brain ... newsletter

Brain experiment suggests that consciousness relies on quantum entanglement
Maybe the brain isn't "classical" after all.

Credit: Annelisa Leinbach, local_doctor / Adobe Stock
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Most neuroscientists believe that the brain operates in a classical manner. However, if brain processes rely on quantum mechanics, it could explain why our brains are so powerful. A team of researchers possibly witnessed entanglement in the brain, perhaps indicating that some of our brain activity, and maybe even consciousness, operates on a quantum level.

Supercomputers can beat us at chess and perform more calculations per second than the human brain. But there are other tasks our brains perform routinely that computers simply cannot match — interpreting events and situations and using imagination, creativity, and problem-solving skills. Our brains are amazingly powerful computers, using not just neurons but the connections between the neurons to process and interpret information.

And then there is consciousness, neuroscience’s giant question mark. What causes it? How does it arise from a jumbled mass of neurons and synapses? After all, these may be enormously complex, but we are still talking about a wet bag of molecules and electrical impulses.

Some scientists suspect that quantum processes, including entanglement, might help us explain the brain’s enormous power, and its ability to generate consciousness. Recently, scientists at Trinity College Dublin, using a technique to test for quantum gravity, suggested that entanglement may be at work within our brains. If their results are confirmed, they could be a big step toward understanding how our brain, including consciousness, works.

Quantum processes in the brain
Amazingly, we have seen some hints that quantum mechanisms are at work in our brains. Some of these mechanisms might help the brain process the world around it through sensory input. There are also certain isotopes in our brain whose spins change how our body and brain react. For example, xenon with a nuclear spin of 1/2 can have anesthetic properties, while xenon with no spin cannot. And various isotopes of lithium with different spins change development and parenting ability in rats.

Despite such intriguing findings, the brain is largely assumed to be a classical system.

If quantum processes are at work in the brain, it would be difficult to observe how they work and what they do. Indeed, not knowing exactly what we are looking for makes quantum processes very difficult to find. “If the brain uses quantum computation, then those quantum operators may be different from operators known from atomic systems,” Christian Kerskens, a neuroscience researcher at Trinity and one of the authors of the paper, told Big Think. So how can one measure an unknown quantum system, especially when we do not have any equipment to measure the mysterious, unknown interactions?

Lessons from quantum gravity
Quantum gravity is another example in quantum physics where we do not yet know what we are dealing with.

There are two main realms of physics. There is the physics of the tiny microscopic world — the atoms and photons, particles and waves that interact and behave very unlike the world we see around us. Then there is the realm of gravity, which governs the motion of planets and stars and keeps us humans stuck to Earth. Unifying these realms under an overarching theory is where quantum gravity comes in — it will help scientists understand the underlying forces that govern our universe.

Since quantum gravity and quantum processes in the brain are both big unknowns, the researchers at Trinity decided to use the same method other scientists are using to try to understand quantum gravity.

Taking entanglement to heart
Using an MRI that can sense entanglement, the scientists looked to see whether proton spins in the brain could interact and become entangled through an unknown intermediary. Similar to the research for quantum gravity, the goal was to understand an unknown system. “The unknown system may interact with known systems like the proton spins [within the brain],” Kerskens explained. “If the unknown system can mediate entanglement to the known system, then, it has been shown, the unknown must be quantum.”

The researchers scanned 40 subjects with an MRI. Then they watched what happened, and correlated the activity with the patient’s heartbeat.

The heartbeat is not just the motion of an organ within our body. Rather, the heart, like many other parts of our body, is engaged in two-way communication with the brain — the organs both send each other signals. We see this when the heart reacts to various phenomena such as pain, attention, and motivation. Additionally, the heartbeat can be tied to short-term memory and aging.

As the heart beats, it generates a signal called the heartbeat potential, or HEP. With each peak of the HEP, the researchers saw a corresponding spike in the NMR signal, which corresponds to the interactions among proton spins. This signal could be a result of entanglement, and witnessing it might indicate there was indeed a non-classical intermediary.

“The HEP is an electrophysiological event, like alpha or beta waves,” Kerskens explains. “The HEP is tied to consciousness because it depends on awareness.” Similarly, the signal indicating entanglement was only present during conscious awareness, which was illustrated when two subjects fell asleep during the MRI. When they did, this signal faded and disappeared.

Seeing entanglement in the brain may show that the brain is not classical, as previously thought, but rather a powerful quantum system. If the results can be confirmed, they could provide some indication that the brain uses quantum processes. This could begin to shed light on how our brain performs the powerful computations it does, and how it manages consciousness.

[Farfromgeneva]

The smartest AI is dumb without people

Ina Fried
It's easy to see the latest algorithms write a story or create an image from text and think that they are ready to take on a whole range of human tasks. But experts insist that AI systems' growing power makes it more important than ever to keep humans in the loop.

Why it matters: AI-based computer systems are being used to handle an array of increasingly consequential tasks. While machine learning-trained systems do many things well, they can also be confidently wrong — a dangerous combination.

Many of today's most powerful AI systems aim to offer a convincing response to any question, regardless of accuracy.
"If you don’t know, you should just say you don’t know rather than make something up," says Stanford researcher Percy Liang, who spoke at a Stanford event Thursday.
Liang has launched a project to evaluate the latest machine learning models on a range of factors, from accuracy to transparency.

The goal, he said, is to create something equivalent to Consumer Reports, where people can go to understand the strengths and weaknesses of foundational AI models, such as those from Meta, Google and OpenAI.
Factuality is just one part of this picture. It also matters a great deal what basis an AI system has for providing an answer, and who benefits.

Historically, computer systems have been designed mostly for the people using them.
But an algorithm choosing a criminal sentence, for example, needs not only to serve the judge it's advising but also crime victims, perpetrators and society as a whole.
Many Americans would feel, for example, that it should take into account the impact of incarcerating a significant portion of the African American adult male population.
This doesn't mean "asking a neural network to understand racism," James Landay, the co-founder of Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered AI, told a daylong gathering with reporters on Thursday.

"It's asking the team building a system to understand racism. That’s not a question computer scientists who are generally building these systems are equipped to handle."
The big picture: For years, AI researchers have talked theoretically about responsible ways to design such systems and divide the future of work between humans and computers. However, a flood of powerful new systems is giving these questions practical urgency.

Between the lines: For all the talk of computers replacing or even replicating human activity, the most powerful use of them may be to help humans do their jobs better.

"Just simply mimicking human beings is meager," Stanford professor Erik Brynjolfsson said at the event. "Paradoxically It’s also too hard."
That's because computers excel at tasks where humans falter, from processing vast amounts of data to spotting patterns that even a skilled researcher might miss.
At the same time, computers and robots still can't match humans at everything from gauging the delicate pressure needed to pick a blueberry to walking on a bumpy trail.
Zoom out: An equitable distribution of the fruits of AI will depend on whether it's used to replace humans, which tends to drive down pay, or to augment them, which drives it up, Brynjolfsson argues.

Over the past century, we've largely used technology to make individual workers more productive, and that's raised the standard of living, he says.
In recent years, though, we've been building more machines that substitute for humans. That's concentrated wealth further in fewer hands, while those with a high school education or less face higher rates of despair, drug abuse and suicide.
"For most of us that’s probably not the world we want to live in," Brynjolfsson said.
Be smart: Pairing humans and computers may have advantages for society, Brynjolfsson said, but it can also get better results for businesses.

In automating call centers, Brynjolfsson points out, you can substitute machines for people and frustrate customers. Or you can take the path of a company he is advising, Cresta, whose system monitors calls and offers suggestions to human call center workers.
That saves companies money, maintains jobs and leads to happier customers, Brynjolfsson says: "Keeping the human in the loop seems to work a lot better."

[44WeWantMore]

[Farfromgeneva]

For second I was like, the Irish union leader went to space, the Big Fellah? Then I realized I’m out of my mind and reading is fundamental.

[Kismet]

The Orion spacecraft splashed down off the coast of Baja California at 12:40 p.m. Eastern Dec. 11, ending the 25.5-day Artemis 1 uncrewed test flight
https://spacenews.com/orion-splashes-do ... artemis-1/

Capsule currently being towed back to USS Portland, amphibious transport dock ship nearby. Once aboard, will proceed back to Naval Base San Diego where it will be then transported back to Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral Florida.

Next up - The first crewed Orion mission, Artemis 2, is projected to take place no earlier than late 2024. It will take four astronauts, including one from the Canadian Space Agency, on a flight around the moon and back identical to the unmanned test mission.

[10stone5]

First image from the Webb telescope - WOW!!!



Light in the image originated 13 billion years ago.

Check out all that gravitational lensing going on in the middle
of that photo.

[Typical Lax Dad]

First image from the Webb telescope - WOW!!!



Light in the image originated 13 billion years ago.

Check out all that gravitational lensing going on in the middle
of that photo.

Just remarkable

[youthathletics]

0-60 in <1.5 seconds seconds, over a 1000 HP. Insane

https://fb.watch/hz4T2TbkBU/

[Typical Lax Dad]

This is remarkable technology. My wife mentioned this type of technology may have been used for the Idaho suspect. A woman interviewed was mentioned as being with a company at the forefront of this technology. She was stunned.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/0 ... m-dna/amp/

[youthathletics]

Sped up trip to space and back: https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/16110 ... FmVazgGOKw