Scientists break down cheap plastic using the air — and turn it into something far more valuable

"The U.S. is the number one plastic polluter per capita, and we only recycle 5% of those plastics," co-corresponding author Yosi Kratish, a research assistant professor of chemistry at Northwestern University, said in a statement. "What's particularly exciting about our research is that we harnessed moisture from air to break down the plastics, achieving an exceptionally clean and selective process. By recovering the monomers, which are the basic building blocks of PET [polyethylene terephthalate], we can recycle or even upcycle them into more valuable materials."

Plastic waste is an increasingly important issue. Over half of the plastic ever made has been produced since 2000, and annual production is projected to double by 2050, according to the European Environment Agency.

To date, only 9% of the plastics ever produced have been recycled. The remainder, with lifetimes often lasting generations, can have serious environmental and health impacts. For example, they wash out to sea to form floating blobs of trash, harm wildlife, and break down into microplastics that can enter the human brain and other parts of our bodies.

Related: 

• Will we ever be able to stop using plastic?

To find a new method to break down some of this waste, the researchers applied a molybdenum catalyst — a silver, ductile metal — and activated carbon to PET, the most common type of polyester plastic. The researchers then heated the mixture. After a short time, this broke the polyethylene's chemical bonds.

Then, when the team exposed the material to air, the mixture transformed into TPA, a valuable polyester precursor; and acetaldehyde, an industrial chemical that is also valuable and is easy to lift from the mixture.

When they tested the method on mixed plastics, the researchers found that it had an effect only on the polyester materials. That meant they didn't have to presort the plastics. It worked onlastic bottles, T-shirts and colored plastics, breaking them down into pure, colorless TPA.

"It worked perfectly," Kratish said. "When we added extra water, it stopped working because it was too much water. It's a fine balance. But it turns out the amount of water in air was just the right amount."

The team's next steps will be to adapt the process to large-scale industrial applications.

"Our technology has the potential to significantly reduce plastic pollution, lower the environmental footprint of plastics and contribute to a circular economy where materials are reused rather than discarded," study first author Naveen Malik, who was a researcher at Northwestern University at the time, said in the statement. "It's a tangible step toward a cleaner, greener future, and it demonstrates how innovative chemistry can address global challenges in a way that aligns with nature."

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{ https://www.livescience.com/technology }

01-06-2025 om 21:34 geschreven door peter  

The 12 strangest objects in the universe

Weirdo universe 

There's no questioning the fact that the universe is weird. Just look outside and you'll see all manner of strange, self-reproducing flora and fauna, crawling upon a blue ball of semimolten rock covered in a thin, hard shell and blanketed by a tenuous film of gases. Yet our own planet represents a tiny fraction of the peculiar phenomena that can be found lurking throughout the cosmos, and every day astronomers turn up new surprises. In this gallery, we take a look at some of the most outlandish objects in space.

1. Mysterious Radio Signals

Since 2007, researchers have been receiving ultrastrong, ultrabright radio signals lasting only a few milliseconds. These enigmatic flashes have been called fast radio bursts (FRBs), and they appear to be coming from billions of light-years away (they're not aliens, it's never aliens). Recently, scientists managed to capture a repeating FRB, which flashed six times in a row, the second such signal ever seen and one that could help them unravel this mystery.

2. Nuclear Pasta

The strongest substance in the universe forms from the leftovers of a dead star. According to simulations, protons and neutrons in a star's shriveled husk can be subject to insane gravitational pressure, which squeezes them into linguini-like tangles of material that would snap — but only if you applied to them 10 billion times the force needed to shatter steel.

3. Haumea Has Rings

The dwarf planet Haumea, which orbits in the Kuiper Belt out beyond Neptune, is already unusual. It has a strange elongated shape, two moons and a day that lasts only 4 hours, making it the fastest-spinning large object in the solar system. But in 2017, Haumea got even weirder when astronomers watched it pass in front of a star and noticed extremely thin rings orbiting around it, likely the result of a collision sometime in the distant past.

4. A Moon with a Moon

What's better than a moon? A moon orbiting a moon, which the internet has dubbed a moonmoon. Also known as submoons, moonitos, grandmoons, moonettes and moooons, moonmoons are still only theoretical, but recent calculations suggest that there's nothing impossible about their formation. Perhaps astronomers may one day discover one.

5. Dark-Matter-Less Galaxy?

Dark matter — the unknown substance comprising 85 percent of all matter in the universe — is strange. But researchers are at least sure about one thing: Dark matter is everywhere. So team members were scratching their heads over a peculiar galaxy they spotted in March 2018 that seemed to contain hardly any dark matter. Subsequent work suggested that the celestial oddity did in fact contain dark matter, though the finding paradoxically lent credence to an alternative theory positing that dark matter doesn't exist at all. Get it together, astronomers!

6. The Most Bizarre Star

When astronomer Tabetha Boyajian of Louisiana State University and her colleagues first saw the star known as KIC 846285, they were flummoxed. Nicknamed Tabby's star, the object would dip in brightness at irregular intervals and for odd lengths of time, sometimes by as much as 22 percent. Different theories were invoked, including the possibility of an alien megastructure, but nowadays, most researchers believe the star to be surrounded by an abnormal ring of dust that's causing the darkening.

7. Highly Electric Hyperion

The title of weirdest moon in the solar system could go to many celestial objects — Jupiter's overly volcanic Io, Neptune's geyser-spewing Triton. But one of the strangest looking is Saturn's Hyperion, a pumice-stone-like irregular rock pockmarked with numerous craters. NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which visited the Saturn system between 2004 and 2017, also found that Hyperion was charged with a "particle beam" of static electricity flowing out into space.

8. A Guiding Neutrino

The single, high-energy neutrino that struck Earth on Sept. 22, 2017, wasn't, on its own, all that extraordinary. Physicists at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica see neutrinos of similar energy levels at least once a month. But this one was special because it was the first to arrive with enough information about its origin for astronomers to point telescopes in the direction it came from. They figured out that it had been flung at Earth 4 billion years ago by a flaring blazar, a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy that had been consuming surrounding material.

9. The Living Fossil Galaxy

DGSAT I is an ultradiffuse galaxy (UDG), meaning it is as big as a galaxy like the Milky Way but its stars are spread out so thinly that it is nearly invisible. But when scientists saw the ghostly DGSAT 1 in 2016, they noticed that it was sitting all alone, quite unlike other UDGs, which are typically found in clusters. Its characteristics suggest that the faint object formed during a very different era in the universe, back just 1 billion or so years after the Big Bang, making DGSAT 1 a living fossil.

10. Double Quasar Image

Massive objects curve light, enough so that they can distort the image of things behind them. When researchers used the Hubble Space Telescope to spot a quasar from the early universe, they used it to estimate the universe's expansion rate and found that it is expanding faster today than it was back then — a finding that disagrees with other measurements. Now physicists need to figure out if their theories are wrong or if something else strange is going on.

11. Infrared Stream from Space

Neutron stars are extremely dense objects formed after the death of a regular star. Normally, they emit radio waves or higher-energy radiation such as X-rays, but in September 2018, astronomers found a long stream of infrared light coming from a neutron star 800 light-years away from Earth — something never before observed. The researchers proposed that a disk of dust surrounding the neutron star could be generating the signal, but the ultimate explanation has yet to be found.

12. Rogue Planet with Auroras

Drifting through the galaxy are rogue planets, which have been flung away from their parent star by gravitational forces. One particular peculiarity in this class is known as SIMP J01365663+0933473, a planet-size object 200 light-years away whose magnetic field is more than 200 times stronger than Jupiter's. This is strong enough to generate flashing auroras in its atmosphere, which can be seen with radio telescopes.

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{ https://www.livescience.com/space }

01-06-2025 om 17:51 geschreven door peter  

Physicists capture 'second sound' for the first time — after nearly 100 years of searching

An artist's illustration of particles moving inside a box. 

(Image credit: Getty Images)

"It's as if you had a tank of water and made one half nearly boiling," study co-author Richard Fletcher, an assistant professor of physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said in a statement. "If you then watched, the water itself might look totally calm, but suddenly the other side is hot, and then the other side is hot, and the heat goes back and forth, while the water looks totally still."

Typically heat spreads from a localized source, slowly dissipating across an entire material as it raises the temperature across it.

But exotic materials called superfluids needn't play by these rules. Created when clouds of fermions (which include protons, neutrons and electrons) are cooled to temperatures approaching absolute zero, atoms inside superfluids pair up and travel frictionlessly throughout the material.

Related: 

• Physicists make record-breaking 'quantum vortex' to study the mysteries of black holes

As a result, heat flows differently through the material: instead of spreading through the movements of particles within the fluid, as it typically flows, heat sloshes back and forth within superfluids like a sound wave. This second sound was first predicted by the physicist László Tisza in 1938, but heat-mapping techniques have, until now, proven unable to observe it directly.

"Second sound is the hallmark of superfluidity, but in ultracold gases so far you could only see it in this faint reflection of the density ripples that go along with it," study senior-author Martin Zwierlein, a professor of physics at MIT, said in the statement. "The character of the heat wave could not be proven before."

To capture second sound, the researchers had to solve a daunting problem in tracking the flow of heat inside ultracold gases. These gases are so cold that they do not give off infrared radiation, upon which typical heat-mapping, or thermography, techniques rely.

Instead, the physicists developed a method to track the fermion pairs through their resonant frequencies. Lithium-6 atoms resonate at different radio frequencies as their temperatures change, with warmer atoms vibrating at higher frequencies.

By applying resonant radio frequencies corresponding to warmer atoms, the scientists made these atoms ring in response, enabling them to track the particles’ flow frame by frame.

"For the first time, we can take pictures of this substance as we cool it through the critical temperature of superfluidity, and directly see how it transitions from being a normal fluid, where heat equilibrates boringly, to a superfluid where heat sloshes back and forth," Zwierlein said.

The physicists say that their groundbreaking technique will enable them to better study the behaviors of some of the universe's most extreme objects, such as neutron stars, and measure the conductivity of high-temperature superconductors to make even better designs.

"There are strong connections between our puff of gas, which is a million times thinner than air, and the behavior of electrons in high-temperature superconductors, and even neutrons in ultradense neutron stars," Zwierlein said. "Now we can probe pristinely the temperature response of our system, which teaches us about things that are very difficult to understand or even reach."

{ https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth }

01-06-2025 om 17:07 geschreven door peter  

{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

01-06-2025 om 15:58 geschreven door peter  

“Startled” UFO in Classified Video: Whistleblower Reveals Shocking Pentagon Program

A former U.S. national security official, Matthew Brown, has come forward with startling revelations about a secret Pentagon program dubbed Immaculate Constellation, which allegedly gathers classified videos and images of UFOs. In a recent interview on the Weaponized podcast with journalist Jeremy Corbell, Brown described previously unseen footage — and shared a theory that’s raising eyebrows in the UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) research community.

“Startled” Disc Captured on Military Footage

According to Brown, one particular video stood out: a disc-shaped UFO flying over what appeared to be an ocean. The object behaved unusually — gliding playfully through the clouds, it suddenly stopped, seemingly noticing the camera, and then darted away as if startled.

“It’s like it knew it was being watched,” said Brown. “It scoots out of frame, like someone caught it.”

Brown emphasized he doesn’t know whether the object was extraterrestrial, adversarial, or experimental U.S. technology. However, the reaction of the object — intelligent and evasive — suggests an awareness that is difficult to dismiss.

Leaked Footage Confirmed by Corbell

Corbell confirmed he had also seen this same video years earlier and noted that the footage is known within the intelligence community. He stated that while the video is still classified, many such clips have circulated internally for years. He and fellow journalist George Knapp have reviewed a large archive of military-captured UFO videos, most of which remain unpublished due to security restrictions.

Are UFOs Already Here?

During the podcast, Brown went beyond just reporting. He speculated that UFOs — or their occupants — may have been here for much of recorded history, possibly living among us or operating from hidden bases on Earth.

Corbell elaborated that this theory is not new but gaining traction due to “hot spots” — areas on Earth where UFO activity appears to be concentrated. One such region is off the coast of California, where U.S. naval activity and advanced sensor equipment have produced a higher-than-usual volume of strange sightings.

Skepticism vs. Evidence

When asked about skeptics who accuse Corbell and others of fueling conspiracy theories, Corbell pushed back, stating:

“Reality needs to catch up with actual reality. What we’re seeing is verifiable. This isn’t fantasy — it’s documentation.”

He emphasized that the abundance of data — thermal imaging, radar, infrared footage — supports a serious investigation, not science fiction.

The testimony of Matthew Brown, if accurate, suggests a significant cover-up within government circles regarding non-human technologies or entities. While no physical evidence has yet been released publicly, the consistency in eyewitness reports and internal documentation builds a compelling case.

Whether you’re a believer or a skeptic, one thing is clear: something is being hidden — and it’s not nothing.

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{ https://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

01-06-2025 om 13:16 geschreven door peter