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Federal reservoirs could help meet the country's solar energy needs, according to a new study. Geospatial scientists and senior legal and regulatory analyst quantified exactly how much energy could be generated from floating solar panel projects installed on federally owned or regulated reservoirs.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I have seen the Ring Nebula. It’s a favourite amongst stargazers around the globe and is surely one of the most well known objects in the night sky. The remains of a Sun-like star, its outer layers have drifted out into space leaving behind a the stellar corpse, a white dwarf. It looks like a giant smoke ring in the sky but what is its true shape? A team of astronomers have mapped carbon monoxide that surrounds the nebula and built a 3D model to reveal its shape. 

The Ring Nebula is a wonderful example of a planetary nebula. It’s located in the constellation Lyra, about 2,000 light-years from Earth and its progenitor star shed its outer layers 6,000 years ago leaving behind the core to become a hot white dwarf. Intense ultraviolet radiation from the white dwarf excites the surrounding gas, causing it to emit green and blue light due to ionized oxygen and nitrogen. It was discovered by Charles Messier who was hunting for comets and, as he spotted objects which clearly weren’t comets he cataloged them. The Ring Nebula is the 57th object in his catalogue so it has the designation M57.

JWST/NIRcam composite image of the Ring Nebula. The images clearly show the main ring, surrounded by a faint halo and with many delicate structures. The interior of the ring is filled with hot gas. The star which ejected all this material is visible at the very center. Courtesy JWST/University of Manchester.

A team of astronomers led by Chester F. Carlson from the Rochester Institute of Technology and Professor Joel Kastner from the Centre for Imaging Science and School of Physics and Astronomy have been exploring the shape of M57. They used the Submillimeter Array (SMA) to map the emission of carbon monoxide gas in the nebula. The carbon monoxide surrounds the hot gas and dust that appears in classic images we are all familiar with seeing. 

The Submillimeter Array (SMA) is a radio telescope located on top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii and was designed to observe the universe at submillimeter wavelengths. It is made up of eight 6-meter radio dishes arranged as an interferometer. It enables astronomers to capture high-resolution images of distant objects such as star-forming regions, galaxies, and molecular clouds by detecting the emission of faint submillimeter radiation.

This image shows two of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) 12-metre antennas. ALMA has 66 antennas that work together as an interferometer. (Credit : Iztok Bonina/ESO)

For decades, since the nebula was first photographed in 1886, astronomers have been wondering just what shape the nebula was. A dust ring shape or something resembling a soap bubble structure were the favourite models but the results from SMA observations reveal an ellipsoid structure. The team were able to draw this conclusion from analysing the velocity and location of carbon monoxide molecules from the SMA data. They would have been ejected by the star in its death-throws to reveal its shape to us today. 

The findings are similar reminiscent of observations of the Southern Ring Nebula in the constellation Vela. It was one of the first objects observed by the JWST and the results revealed more about its structure just like its more familiar northern counterpart. One slight difference is that the team observing M57 didn’t expect that the SMA data would also reveal the influence of a companion star to the progenitor red giant. They found high velocity concentrations of gas that were ejected out each end of the ellipsoidal nebula. 

Source : RIT professor leads research showing true structure of the iconic Ring Nebula

The post Astronomers Reveal the 3D Structure of the Ring Nebula appeared first on Universe Today.

From 2000 to 2022, the US legally imported almost 30,000 different species of plants and animals, from songbirds to reptiles

Climate scientists must fear sounding like a broken record when discussing new record temperatures yearly. But once again, last year was the hottest one ever recorded, according to a new study by NASA scientists.

Anyone paying close attention to climate news would not be surprised. From June 2023 through August 2024, every consecutive month broke a new monthly temperature record. That is 15 straight months of consistently high temperatures. 

Such a streak directly translates into the year’s overall temperature, but just how bad was it? The Paris Agreement on climate change, signed by 195 countries and the European Union, attempts to limit the global rise in temperatures to 1.5? over a baseline temperature from the middle of last century (1951-1980). 2024 was already 1.28? above it. 

That’s not a great start, but the data gets even more dire for the climate-conscious. Temperatures in 2024 were already 1.47? above a baseline of temperatures from 1850-1900, a time before the industrial revolution, or automobile transportation, had taken off. Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, says, “That’s halfway to Pliocene-level warmth in just 150 years.”, referring to a geological period where a baseline temperature of just 1.5? above the Earth’s 2024 average resulted in sea levels that were tens of meters higher than total.

Such a sea level rise would devastate population centers home to literally billions of people and have such a dramatic effect on sea and wildlife that it’d be hard to predict the consequences. But it’s not like any of this information is new—it’s just worth reinforcing.

Even with reinforcement, more action is needed to solve the problem. The last ten years have been the warmest on record. While there is some variability between years, the trend in warming temperatures is obvious. Despite that, in 2022 and 2023, there were record releases of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels.

Even 12 years ago, Fraser and Pamela were discussing climate change and what it meant for the planet.

Additional effects could have impacted such a hot year in 2024. A NASA press release mentions everything from El Niño to volcanoes in Tonga to improved sulfur dioxide emissions from cargo ships. All undoubtedly impact the climate, but the contribution of each is difficult to tease out.

NASA’s global temperature assessment is based on data from thousands of weather stations scattered throughout the globe, both on land and sea. The same data was analyzed by other organizations, such as the US’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Berkeley Earth, the Hadley Centre, and Copernicus Climate Services. Each used slightly different methodologies and models to determine the Earth’s temperature last year. Still, each showed a trend toward hotter temperatures – which most scientists take as unambiguous proof that the planet is getting hotter.

However, many naysayers still can’t see the forest for the trees, as a nasty cold snap could convince them of the illusion of “global warming” in general. However, the world’s overall temperature shift is getting drastic enough that local areas are literally starting to feel the heat. Schmidt said, “When changes happen in the climate, you see it first in the global mean, then you see it at the continental scale, and then at the regional scale. Now we’re seeing it at the local level.”

The fires currently threatening NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena are just one symptom of the ongoing environmental challenges facing the world. This NASA report is just the most recent in a long line of reports that all point to the same conclusion—the world is getting warmer, and we humans are likely the ones causing it. 

Learn More:
NASA – Temperatures Rising: NASA Confirms 2024 Warmest Year on Record
UT – NASA Confirms that 2023 was the Hottest Year on Record
UT – NASA Confirms That 2023 was the Hottest Summer on Record
UT – Global Temperatures Continue to Rise

Lead Image:
This map of Earth in 2024 shows global surface temperature anomalies, or how much warmer or cooler each region of the planet was compared to the average from 1951 to 1980. Normal temperatures are shown in white, higher-than-normal temperatures in red and orange, and lower-than-normal temperatures in blue. An animated version of this map shows global temperature anomalies changing over time, dating back to 1880. Download this visualization from NASA Goddard’s Scientific Visualization Studio: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5450.
Credit: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio

The post It’s Official, 2024 Was the Hottest Year on Record appeared first on Universe Today.

Carbon-rich cosmic dust comes from different sources and spreads out into space, where it’s necessary for life and for the formation of rocky planets like ours. When astronomers aim their telescopes at objects in the sky, they often have to contend with this cosmic dust that obscures their targets and confounds their observations.

One reason the JWST was built is to see through some of this dust with its infrared vision and unlock new insights into astrophysical processes. In new work, the JWST was tasked with observing the dust itself.

The Wolf–Rayet binary WR 140 is about 5,000 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. In 2022, researchers published results in Nature Astronomy revealing details about the binary star. The results showed that the stellar winds from both stars regularly collide, producing rings of carbon-rich dust that expand outward from the stars.

“We are used to thinking about events in space taking place slowly, over millions or billions of years. In this system, the observatory is showing that the dust shells are expanding from one year to the next.”

Jennifer Hoffman, co-author, University of Denver

“Massive colliding-wind binaries that host a Wolf–Rayet (WR) star present a potentially important source of dust and chemical enrichment in the interstellar medium,” the authors wrote, noting that the dust’s chemical composition and how it survives are still not understood. “The carbon-rich Wolf–Rayet binary WR 140 presents an ideal astrophysical laboratory for investigating these questions, given its well-defined orbital period and predictable dust-formation episodes every 7.93?years around periastron passage,” the authors explained in their research.

The environment near these stars when they’re close to one another is chaotic, even hostile. The winds from these evolved stars are chemically rich, and when the stronger wind from the WR star collides with the wind from the OB star, the gas is compressed, and dust is produced. Since the dust is only produced at periastron, the dust forms discrete rings. “Galactic colliding-wind WC (Wolf-Rayet stars of the carbon sequence) binaries with resolvable circumstellar dust nebulae, therefore, provide important laboratories to study this dust-formation process, where observations over the past few decades have demonstrated how dust formation is regulated by the orbit of the binary system,” the authors of the 2022 paper explain.

The pair of massive stars, one a Wolf-Rayet and one an OB star, orbit one another and reach periastron every 7.93 years. That’s when the powerful stellar winds from both stars collide. Astronomers think that evolved Wolf-Rayet stars and their colliding winds might be responsible for some of the first carbonaceous dust grains and organic material in the Universe.

The JWST captured the original 2022 images about 5.5 years after the last periastron in 2016. Now, about 14 months after the JWST’s initial look at WR 140, the space telescope has taken another long look at the interacting binary and its concentric rings of expanding carbon-rich dust. The images show how much the rings have expanded in less than two years time.

“The telescope confirmed that these dust shells are real, and its data also showed that the dust shells are moving outward at consistent velocities, revealing visible changes over incredibly short periods of time,” said Emma Lieb, the lead author of the new paper and a doctoral student at the University of Denver in Colorado.

Compare the two mid-infrared images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope of Wolf-Rayet 140, a system of dust shells ejected by two massive stars that are in an elongated orbit. In the top right of the first two images, two triangles are matched up to show how much the rings have moved in 14 months. The dust is moving away from the stars at more than 2,600 km per second, about 1% of the speed of light. The rings of carbon-rich dust are created for a few months every eight years. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, E. Lieb (University of Denver), R. Lau (NSF NOIRLab), J. Hoffman (University of Denver)

It’s relatively rare to see astronomical objects exhibit change on short timescales like this. For only 14 months, every eight years, the stellar winds collide and produce the visible carbon-rich dust rings. While WR binaries are known to produce carbon-rich dust, most pairs aren’t this active and their periastrons are much further apart in time.

“We are used to thinking about events in space taking place slowly, over millions or billions of years,” added Jennifer Hoffman, a co-author and a professor at the University of Denver. “In this system, the observatory is showing that the dust shells are expanding from one year to the next.”

“Seeing the real-time movement of these shells between Webb’s observations that were taken only 13 months apart is truly remarkable,” said Olivia Jones, a co-author at the UK Astronomy Technology Centre, Edinburgh. “These new results are giving us a first glimpse of the potential role of such massive binaries as factories of dust in the Universe.”

Astronomers have spotted other WC stars producing dust rings. However, WR 140 exceeds them all. “The extent of these distant circumstellar shells detected around WR 140 exceeds that of all other known dust-forming WC systems by factors of 4 or greater,” the authors of the 2022 paper explain.

The stars follow wide, elongated orbits, and when their winds collide every eight years, they produce carbon-rich dust for several months. The JWST’s powerful MIRI imaged dust rings that date back more than 130 years. Shells older than that have dissipated into interstellar space and are no longer coherent and visible. Some of that material may have already been taken up in star formation.

Thanks to MIRI, the researchers learned that WR 140 will likely generate tens of thousands of dust shells over hundreds of thousands of years.

“Mid-infrared observations are absolutely crucial for this analysis, since the dust in this system is fairly cool. Near-infrared and visible-light observations would only show the shells that are closest to the star,” explained Ryan Lau, a co-author and astronomer at NSF NOIRLab in Tucson, Arizona. Lau led the initial research on this system in 2022. “With these incredible new details, the telescope is also allowing us to study exactly when the stars are forming dust — almost to the day.”

These JWST images don’t show it, but not all of the dust is in the form of rings. Some of it is in clouds larger than our entire Solar System. Some of it floats freely as individual dust particles, each one only one-hundredth the width of a human hair. In all cases, the dust is carbon-rich and moving at the same speed.

One estimate says that the rings are about 1.4 trillion km apart. For comparison, if our Sun were creating these shells, one shell would be about five percent of the distance to Alpha Centauri, our nearest neighbour, before the next shell was created.

Eventually, the creation of carbon-rich dust shells will cease. Most WR stars end their lives as supernovae, with some possibly collapsing directly into black holes.

But that’s in the distant future. In humanity’s direct future, WR 140 will keep producing these carbon-rich dust shells, and the JWST will keep watching this natural laboratory to see how it all happens.

The post The Webb Shows Us Where Cosmic Dust Comes From appeared first on Universe Today.

A huge number of ultracold atoms have been corralled into a grid that could form the basis of the next largest quantum computer

Jupiter’s clouds aren’t what we thought they were. Planetary atmosphere experts have studied them for many years, uncovering new and puzzling mysteries. Recently, several researchers banded together to solve a long-standing mystery about those clouds. It turns out they aren’t made of ammonia ice, which is what everyone has thought for years. Instead, they seem to be largely a mix of smog and ammonium hydrosulfide. That compound forms in the atmosphere as hydrogen sulfide gas passes through ammonia.

Most of us are familiar with the Jovian clouds and know that ammonia and water are involved in their formation. There’s precipitation, meaning that ammonia and other substances “rain out.” Then, they evaporate. Most of the clouds we do see are thought to be mainly ammonia ice, contaminated with other materials that lend color to the clouds. Ammonia is an important “tracer” of activity in Jupiter’s atmosphere and scientists have studied its presence for years. Most of those measurements come from spacecraft instruments and large ground-based telescopes outfitted with special filters and spectroscopes. Even those observations, however, are limited when it comes to determining their positions in the atmosphere. Also, temporal coverage is limited.

Getting observation time to track the presence of ammonia, and there are only so many spacecraft to go around. Plus, the methods for analyzing the observations are complex and time-consuming. What if there was a quick and cost-effective way to get continual observations of the Jovian clouds? Could smaller telescopes used by amateur astronomers be effective enough to chart variations in the amounts of ammonia in and above Jupiter’s clouds over time? If so, that would fill in a huge gap in Jupiter atmospheric observations.

Measuring Those Clouds

The saga of the Jovian clouds began when Dr. Steven Hill, a space weather forecasting expert, tried a fresh approach and made backyard observations of the gas giant’s clouds in 2020-2021 and 2022-2023. He was able to compare images that show absorption in the atmosphere due to ammonia and methane gases. He also determined variations in the amount of ammonia in and above the cloud tops.

With time on big observatory scopes at such a premium, Hill used a 0.28-meter Celestron Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope, outfitted with a ZWO ASI120MM CMOS camera. He used a 647-nm ammonia band filter first. Later on he applied a 619-nm methane band filter. The idea was to detect individual ammonia abundance features. “I always like to push my observations to see what physical measurements I can make with modest, commercial equipment,” said Hill. “The hope is that I can find new ways for amateurs to make useful contributions to professional work. But I certainly did not expect an outcome as productive as this project has been!”

Applying Hill’s Approach to Jupiter’s Clouds

It turns out Hill’s technique is easier and less expensive than the more complex observational and statistical methods scientists use to map clouds. It can be used in professional research to zero in on specific regions of the atmosphere. The approach also gives citizen scientists with backyard-type telescopes a way to track ammonia and cloud-top pressure variations across features in Jupiter’s atmosphere. That includes Jupiter’s cloud bands, its fast-moving small storms, and even the larger features such as the Great Red Spot.

Planetary atmosphere expert Professor Patrick Irwin at the University of Oxford in England, who co-wrote a paper with Hill about the observations, emphasized the advantage of doing such observations. “I am astonished that such a simple method is able to probe so deep in the atmosphere and demonstrate so clearly that the main clouds cannot be pure ammonia ice,” he said. “These results show that an innovative amateur using a modern camera and special filters can open a new window on Jupiter’s atmosphere and contribute to understanding the nature of Jupiter’s long-mysterious clouds and how the atmosphere circulates.”

Insights into Jupiter’s Clouds

Hill’s initial results showed that the clouds he studied lay in a region of Jupiter’s warm atmosphere that doesn’t allow ammonia ice to exist. In their follow-up study, Irwin and his colleagues applied Hill’s method to observations using the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer on the Very Large Telescope in Chile. Doing spectroscopy allows scientists to measure the visible light fingerprints of the gases in the Jovian atmosphere and chart the distribution of ammonia and the height of its clouds. They also simulated how light interacts with those gases and clouds using a computer model.

Projected variations of ammonia abundance in Jupiter’s clouds, as well as cloud-top pressure near the Great Red Spot and the North Equatorial Dark features. These were made following Hill’s methodology. Courtesy Irwin, et al./JGR.

It turns out that the Jovian clouds observed through Hill’s backyard telescope had to be much deeper than previously thought. They lie in an atmospheric region with higher pressures and higher temperatures. That means the region is too warm to allow ammonia to condense. Chemical reactions created by sunlight’s effect on the gases are very active in Jupiter’s atmosphere. In small regions, where convection (heat transport from one region to another) is especially strong, the updrafts may be fast enough to form fresh ammonia ice. Such regions do exist and have been spotted by spacecraft over the years.

Irwin’s team suggests that when moist, ammonia-rich air gets raised upwards, ammonia gets destroyed. It could also be mixed with photochemical products faster than ammonia ice can form. That means the main cloud deck may actually be composed of ammonium hydrosulphide mixed with photochemical, smoggy products. That’s what produces the red and brown colors we see in Jupiter images. And, this method also works for observations of ammonia clouds in Saturn’s atmosphere. Further work should help determine if the same photochemical processes exist there.

For More Information

Citizen Science Reveals Insight into Jupiter
Clouds and Ammonia in the Atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn Determined From a Band-Depth Analysis of VLT/MUSE Observations
Spatial Variations of Jovian Tropospheric Ammonia via Ground-Based Imaging

The post Jupiter’s Clouds Contain Smoggy Ammonium Hydrosulphide, Not Ammonia Ice appeared first on Universe Today.

There is a gravitational monster at the heart of our galaxy. Known as Sagittarius A*, it is a supermassive black hole with a mass of more than four million Suns. Long-term observations of the stars closely orbiting Sag A* place it at about 4.3 solar masses, give or take 100,000 or so. Observations of light near its horizon by the Event Horizon Telescope pin the mass down to 4.297 solar masses, give or take about 10,000. Those results are astoundingly precise given how difficult the mass is to measure, but suppose we could determine the mass of our galaxy’s black hole to within a single solar mass. That might be possible with gravitational wave astronomy.

Gravitational wave astronomy is still in its infancy. Presently, our gravitational wave observatories are only sensitive enough to detect the mergers of stellar-mass black holes and neutron stars within the Milky Way. We aren’t able to detect the mergers of supermassive black holes, nor the gravitational waves when a star is consumed by a supermassive black hole. But in the not-too-distant future, we will have space-based gravitational observatories such as LISA. They will be orders of magnitude more sensitive than what we currently have. And as a recent study shows, these new observatories should be sensitive enough to give us ultra-precise measurements of a black hole’s mass and rotation.

The idea behind this work is to focus on brown dwarfs. These objects straddle the mass range between planets and stars. Too large to be a planet, but too small to ignite core fusion like a star. Brown dwarfs have masses between 13 and 78 Jupiters and tend to be roughly the size of our Jovian neighbor. They aren’t quite as common as red dwarf stars, but should be fairly common within the center of our galaxy. That means some brown dwarfs should approach very close to Sag A*. Some of them will surely be gravitationally trapped by the black hole, slowly spiraling ever closer to its event horizon and oblivion. These are the ones the article focuses upon.

The gravitational chirp of a black hole merger. Credit: LIGO

Even the largest brown dwarfs have less than a hundredth the mass of the Sun. They are like specks of dust compared to Sag A*. This means the gravitational dance between a brown dwarf and black hole is an example of an extremely large mass-ratio inspiral (XMRI). The gravitational waves produced by this dance would be small perturbations of the black hole, and as such would be critically dependent on the precise mass and spin of the black hole.

To show just how precise those measurements might be, the team looked at the estimated statistics for brown dwarfs near Sag A* as well as the strength of their gravitational signals. They found that within a typical range of mass and orbital eccentricity, an observatory such as LISA should be able to observe about 20 inspiraling brown dwarfs. This would allow us to determine the mass of Sag A* to better than one part in a million and its spin to one part in 10,000. Those estimates are at the best-case end of what is likely, but it shows that as gravitational wave astronomy improves, we are going to make some outstanding observations.

Reference: Vázquez-Aceves, Verónica, Yiren Lin, and Alejandro Torres-Orjuela. “SgrA* spin and mass estimates through the detection of multiple extremely large mass-ratio inspirals.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.20738 (2024).

The post Here's How We Could Measure the Mass of SgrA* to Within One Solar Mass appeared first on Universe Today.

Diamond, often celebrated for its unmatched hardness and transparency, has emerged as an exceptional material for high-power electronics and next-generation quantum optics. Diamond can be engineered to be as electrically conductive as a metal, by introducing impurities such as the element boron. Researchers have now discovered another interesting property in diamonds with added boron, known as boron-doped diamonds. Their findings could pave the way for new types of biomedical and quantum optical devices -- faster, more efficient, and capable of processing information in ways that classical technologies cannot.

Diamond, often celebrated for its unmatched hardness and transparency, has emerged as an exceptional material for high-power electronics and next-generation quantum optics. Diamond can be engineered to be as electrically conductive as a metal, by introducing impurities such as the element boron. Researchers have now discovered another interesting property in diamonds with added boron, known as boron-doped diamonds. Their findings could pave the way for new types of biomedical and quantum optical devices -- faster, more efficient, and capable of processing information in ways that classical technologies cannot.

How can we ensure that life-saving drugs or genetic therapies reach their intended target cells without causing harmful side effects? Researchers have taken an important step to answer this question. They have developed a method that, for the first time, enables the precise detection of nanocarriers -- tiny transport vehicles -- throughout the entire mouse body at a single-cell level.

AI applications like ChatGPT are based on artificial neural networks that, in many respects, imitate the nerve cells in our brains. They are trained with vast quantities of data on high-performance computers, gobbling up massive amounts of energy in the process. Spiking neurons, which are much less energy-intensive, could be one solution to this problem. In the past, however, the normal techniques used to train them only worked with significant limitations. A recent study has now presented a possible new answer to this dilemma, potentially paving the way for new AI methods that are much more energy-efficient.

Carbon fiber-reinforced polymers (CFRPs) are used in the aerospace, automotive, and sports equipment industries. However, their recycling remains a major problem. In a recent study, researchers demonstrated a novel direct discharge electrical pulse method for the efficient, effective, and environmentally friendly separation of CFRPs to recover high-quality carbon fibers. This work is expected to pave the way for a more sustainable world.

Engineers have demonstrated a well-known quantum thought experiment in the real world. Their findings deliver a new and more robust way to perform quantum computations and they have important implications for error correction, one of the biggest obstacles standing between them and a working quantum computer.

Engineers have demonstrated a well-known quantum thought experiment in the real world. Their findings deliver a new and more robust way to perform quantum computations and they have important implications for error correction, one of the biggest obstacles standing between them and a working quantum computer.

Scientists are working to produce plant-based cheese with all the characteristics of real cheese, but with better health benefits. To create a cheesy product with the same texture as the real thing, they looked at a variety of physical attributes such as the melting, stretching, and oil-release upon grilling and heating and studied isolates from three proteins and how they interacted with the oil and with the starch matrix of the cheese alternative. Using a blend of sunflower and coconut oil decreased the saturated fat content of the cheese, creating a healthy and sustainable alternative to dairy cheeses and other plant-based cheeses.

Using advanced imaging techniques and precise microfluidics control to stretch out curly DNA into a straight line, new research demonstrates techniques for stretching and immobilizing DNA with minimum thermal fluctuation to enable detailed analysis. A team at Nagoya University experimented with ways to uncurl a DNA molecule using pressure applied to liquid flowing in a channel, with the pressure flow providing shear force that uncurled the DNA molecule. They found that controlling the flow velocity of the liquid helps fine-tune the shear force applied and allows precise adjustments of the stretch ratio of the DNA.

In recent years, more than 60 countries have developed strategies to stimulate the market ramp-up of hydrogen, particularly in the industrial sector. However, in 2023, less than ten percent of the originally announced green hydrogen production was realized, shows a new study. The main reason: hydrogen remains expensive and there is little willingness to pay the cost.

Are humans or machines better at recognizing speech? A new study shows that in noisy conditions, current automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems achieve remarkable accuracy and sometimes even surpass human performance. However, the systems need to be trained on an incredible amount of data, while humans acquire comparable skills in less time.

Water droplets under freezing conditions do not spontaneously detach from surfaces as they do at room temperature due to stronger droplet-surface interaction and lack of an energy transformation pathway. Since accumulated droplets or ice have to be removed manually or with mechanical equipment, which is costly and inefficient, preventing droplet accretion on surfaces is both scientifically intriguing and practically important. Researchers have now invented a ground-breaking self-powered mechanism of freezing droplet ejection that allows droplets to shoot themselves away, paving the way for cost-efficient and promising technological applications.