Coffee House Musing

I wonder if the James Webb Space Telescope deserves its own topic. It was often mentioned in this thread. Here's a recent image of the Pillars of Creation: Wow!--Percy

interesting that the little "trapezium" of 4 white stars at the bottom of the 3rd leg (the small one at the right half way down) in the JWST is INVISIBLE in the Hubble version due to them being so far in the Red end. the Hubble view:i call it a "trapezium" because it's like the Trapezium at the center of the Orion nebula, M42.

Well, back on the road again tomorrow morning. I managed to get up a nice stream flowing out of the Wasatch Mountains and got a few dragonflies including a female I was hoping for and she seems to be depositing eggs for me.My wife went with her brother all week to his radiation treatments. They seem to make him pretty tired and he has lost his appetite. Yesterday his blood pressure was quite low. I'm glad we came to visit now.There are winter storm alerts for tomorrow, but I think we can slide into Oregon's lower elevations before the snow hits the mountain passes.

We woke up in Baker City with about 2 inches of snow on our car, and lots in the surrounding mountains, but we had clear roads all the last 300+ miles and made it home without mishap, My specimens all made it home alive also, so tomorrow will be spent shooting portraits and taking care of the eggs the female oviposited for me.

Science is cool.
Scientists Find Ancient Critters Alive After 24,000 Years in Permafrost | WIRED

YECs will explain it away.

It's a miracle! Rotifer Jesus, risen from the grave!

when Elon's Space X in its station
attempts its bold annexiation
   of the big asteroid,
   it will fail to avoid
creating world asphyxiation

- 11/13/2022

Scientists Create “Reddmatter” – Game-Changing Room-Temperature SuperconductorI'm hoping this will lead to the revolution in technology that has been promising ever since superconductivity was discovered.

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“With this material, the dawn of ambient superconductivity and applied technologies has arrived,” according to a team led by Ranga Dias, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and of physics. In a paper published on March 8 in the journal Nature, the researchers describe a nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride (NDLH) that exhibits superconductivity at 69 degrees Fahrenheit and 10 kilobars (145,000 pounds per square inch, or psi) of pressure.

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Although 145,000 psi might still seem extraordinarily high (pressure at sea level is about 15 psi), strain engineering techniques routinely used in chip manufacturing, for example, incorporate materials held together by internal chemical pressures that are even higher.

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Scientists have been pursuing this breakthrough in condensed matter physics for more than a century. Superconducting materials have two key properties: electrical resistance vanishes, and the magnetic fields that are expelled pass around the superconducting material. Such materials could enable:

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• Power grids that transmit electricity without the loss of up to 200 million megawatt hours (MWh) of the energy that now occurs due to resistance in the wires
• Frictionless, levitating high-speed trains
• More affordable medical imaging and scanning techniques such as MRI and magnetocardiography
• Faster, more efficient electronics for digital logic and memory device technology
• Tokamak machines that use magnetic fields to confine plasmas to achieve fusion as a source of unlimited power

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Previously, the Dias team reported creating two materials—carbonaceous sulfur hydride and yttrium superhydride—that are superconducting at 58 degrees Fahrenheit/39 million psi and 12 degrees Fahreneheit/26 million psi respectively, in papers in Nature and Physical Review Letters.

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Given the importance of the new discovery, Dias and his team went to unusual lengths to document their research and head off criticism that developed in the wake of the previous Nature paper, which led to a retraction by the journal’s editors. That previous paper has been resubmitted to Nature with new data that validates the earlier work, according to Dias. The new data was collected outside the lab, at the Argonne and Brookhaven National Laboratories in front of an audience of scientists who saw the superconducting transition live. A similar approach has been taken with the new paper.

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quote:

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Hydrides created by combining rare earth metals with hydrogen, then adding nitrogen or carbon, have provided researchers a tantalizing “working recipe” for creating superconducting materials in recent years. In technical terms, rare earth metal hydrides form clathrate-like cage structures, where the rare earth metal ions act as carrier donors, providing sufficient electrons that would enhance the dissociation of the H2 molecules. Nitrogen and carbon help stabilize materials. Bottom line: less pressure is required for superconductivity to occur.

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In addition to yttrium, researchers have used other rare earth metals. However, the resulting compounds become superconductive at temperatures or pressures that are still not practical for applications.

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Lutetium looked like “a good candidate to try,” Dias says. It has highly localized fully-filled 14 electrons in its f orbital configuration that suppress the phonon softening and provide enhancement to the electron-phonon coupling needed for superconductivity to take place at ambient temperatures. “The key question was, how are we going to stabilize this to lower the required pressure? And that’s where nitrogen came into the picture.”

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Nitrogen, like carbon, has a rigid atomic structure that can be used to create a more stable, cage-like lattice within a material and it hardens the low-frequency optical phonons, according to Dias. This structure provides the stability for superconductivity to occur at lower pressure.

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Dias’s team created a gas mixture of 99 percent hydrogen and one percent nitrogen, placed it in a reaction chamber with a pure sample of lutetium, and let the components react for two to three days at 392 degrees Fahrenheit.

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The resulting lutetium-nitrogen-hydrogen compound was initially a “lustrous bluish color,” the paper states. When the compound was then compressed in a diamond anvil cell, a “startling visual transformation” occurred: from blue to pink at the onset of superconductivity, and then to a bright red non-superconducting metallic state.

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“It was a very bright red,” Dias says. “I was shocked to see colors of this intensity. We humorously suggested a code name for the material at this state—‘reddmatter’—after a material that Spock created in the popular 2009 Star Trek movie.” The code name stuck.

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The 145,000 psi of pressure required to induce superconductivity is nearly two orders of magnitude lower than the previous low pressure created in Dias’s lab.

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Hope springs eternal...My initial impression is this seems more likely to be real than the Pons/Fleishman debacle. I wonder how much lutetium is available and what are the costs of extraction and refining. Could this breakthrough perhaps be the magic bullet humanity needs to avoid the global warming that threatens Planet Earth?Reference: “Evidence of near-ambient superconductivity in a N-doped lutetium hydride” by Nathan Dasenbrock-Gammon, Elliot Snider, Raymond McBride, Hiranya Pasan, Dylan Durkee, Nugzari Khalvashi-Sutter, Sasanka Munasinghe, Sachith E. Dissanayake, Keith V. Lawler, Ashkan Salamat and Ranga P. Dias. 8 March 2023. Nature.
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-05742-0

wikipedia:

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Occurrence and production of Lutetium

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Monazite
Found with almost all other rare-earth metals but never by itself, lutetium is very difficult to separate from other elements. Its principal commercial source is as a by-product from the processing of the rare earth phosphate mineral monazite (Ce,La,...)PO
4, which has concentrations of only 0.0001% of the element, not much higher than the abundance of lutetium in the Earth crust of about 0.5 mg/kg. No lutetium-dominant minerals are currently known. The main mining areas are China, United States, Brazil, India, Sri Lanka and Australia. The world production of lutetium (in the form of oxide) is about 10 tonnes per year. Pure lutetium metal is very difficult to prepare. It is one of the rarest and most expensive of the rare earth metals with the price about US$10,000 per kilogram, or about one-fourth that of gold.

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It's hard to see how a technology breakthrough based on lutetium, considering it rarity and cost, could be practical.

Obviously their evaluations of time are way off. Organisms surviving for 24,000 years in ice ... that's pretty funny.

Why is it not possible?

For starters, no one can count to 24,000.

If you want to be taken seiously you need to actually try.

He might also want to try not being so error prone. From Highest number counted out loud | Guinness World Records:

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In 2007 Jeremy Harper, of Birmingham, Alabama, verbally counted every number up to a million, in a series of live internet broadcasts spanning four months – highlights of which are still available on YouTube (Bitly | Page Not Found | 404). Starting on 18 June 2007, he counted for approximately 16 hours a day, finally reaching one million on 14 September that year – a total duration of 89 days, and averaging just over 11,200 numbers per day.

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--Percy