John Young @jsy1001@qoto.org

For anyone who still thinks that biofuels are going to be better than electrification, here's a couple of statistics from the World Resources Institute:

- Producing just 2% of the world's energy needs from liquid biofuel would require agricultural production to increase by another 30% by 2050.
- Even on the best lands, a hectare of modern solar voltaics can generate 40-100 times more usable energy than biomass

Here's how we use our land already.There just isn't room for that.

#climate #energy

The death of Peter Higgs is sad news. I remember him being in the green room at the Cheltenham Science Festival years ago, and he was so humble and polite to everyone. Dara Ó Briain (the comedian) was there, and he'd brought an empty jam jar with a hand-written label that said "this jar contains 1 Higgs Boson. Certified by... " and he got Peter Higgs to sign the bottom. (apparently that's the average number present). The jam jar made everyone very happy.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/apr/09/peter-higgs-physicist-who-discovered-higgs-boson-dies-aged-94

This quote by Carl Sagan hangs in my office. #science

I'm giving a public talk on "When Worlds Collide!" at 13:00 today (monday) at the Tūranga Library as part of the #ExSSV Extreme Solar Systems - come for the animations and rampant speculation, stay to read books!

https://christchurch.bibliocommons.com/events/65f33bde2038232f007d6948

Physicists have begun to explore the #proton as if it were a #subatomic planet.

Cutaway maps display newfound details of the particle’s interior.

The proton’s core features pressures more intense than in any other known form of #matter.

Halfway to the surface, clashing vortices of force push against each other.

And the “planet” as a whole is smaller than previous experiments had suggested.

#physics #particle
https://www.quantamagazine.org/swirling-forces-crushing-pressures-measured-in-the-proton-20240314/

I love this picture comparing different telescopes. Space telescopes are sexy - but the really big telescopes are down here. The Overwhelmingly Large Telescope is so big you might miss it: 100 meters across. Unfortunately the European Southern Observatory wimped out and decided to build a merely Extremely Large Telescope instead.

Radio telescopes are even bigger. The 305-meter dish at Arecibo is famous. In November 2020 scientist decided to shut it down after it was damaged by a hurricane and two earthquakes, and two important cables snapped. In December of that year more cables snapped and the support structure, antenna, and dome assembly all fell into the dish, destroying the whole thing.

Luckily in 2016 the Chinese had built an even larger radio dish in Guizhou: the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope or FAST. It's the largest one shown here. But in Russia there's a radio telescope 576 meters across - not a dish, but a bunch of separate structures.

And then there's the xkcd cartoon....

(1/2)

I took this pic quite a few years ago at ESO's Paranal Observatory in #Chile. It shows the #MilkyWay arching over the entrance to the Residencia, the site's partially underground lodging and my home in the Atacama Desert for many hundreds of nights!

Right at the centre there's the Coalsack Nebula, known to the Mapuche people of south-central Chile as pozoko (water well) and to the Incas as yutu (a bird similar to a partridge).

#astrodon #astronomy #astrophotography

@astro_jcm @kilian_muller Sure! thanks, Juan... okay, so the two amazing pieces of tech are (i) Adaptive Optics, which is where 'take the twinkle out of the star' by measuring the distortion put in by the Earth's turbulent atmosphere with a fast frame rate camera and removing it with a deformable mirror in the instrument. The other tech is that we use 'polarization' to see the disk. Star light is unpolarized, but star light bouncing from the disk becomes strongly polarised....

#Ireland just got their first test match win, in their 8th match! By way of comparison, when #India got their first win it was their 16th match. I therefore conclude that Ireland are twice as good at #cricket as India are. 🏏

I worked on #Lemmings and am therefore old.

“It Was 33 Years Ago Today: Happy Birthday Lemmings! - The Scottish Games Network”

https://scottishgames.net/2024/02/14/it-was-33-years-ago-today-happy-birthday-lemmings/

The AI boom requires massive data centers that consume enormous amounts of water and energy.

Tech CEOs have plans for hundreds more hyperscale facilities in the coming years, but activists around the world are fighting back to protect their communities and force us to ask who really benefits from the future Silicon Valley is building.

https://disconnect.blog/ai-is-fueling-a-data-center-boom/

#tech #ai #chatgpt #openai #google

Librarians

Very impressive images of the International Space Station taken from the ground with a 0.8 metre telescope and a fast off-the-shelf CMOS camera.

Credit: Damien Peach & E. Enzmann

https://www.damianpeach.com/iss/iss_2024_01_29rgbeedp.jpg

H/T https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10161917230360934&set=a.483374755933

Please choose from the two contemporary design styles for your wifi hardware: “rounded soft box with white light” and “satanic death cult blood sacrifice altar”

Albuquerque, NM, has become the largest U.S. city to permanently make public transportation free for everyone. The city found that fares didn’t cover the administrative fees, so they actually save money by making public transportation free.

Inventor of NTP protocol that keeps time on billions of devices dies at age 85

Dave Mills created NTP, the protocol that holds the temporal Internet together, in 1985.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/inventor-of-ntp-protocol-that-keeps-time-on-billions-of-devices-dies-at-age-85/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

TOMORROW is the day... Rare Earth, BBC Radio 4's new climate and environment show, will start on 12-1pm on Friday January 19th, co-hosted by me and the ace Tom Heap. The first show is all about whether we can best help nature by just leaving it alone.

You can listen on the radio or on BBC Sounds: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001vbsp

#science #climate #podcasts #Earth

The first 18 segments of the primary mirror of ESO's Extremely Large #Telescope have arrived safely to #Chile !

Our engineers at Paranal Observatory checked that they hadn't suffered any damage during their 10000 km trip from France.

The ELT's 39-m mirror will be comprised of 798 of these segments, working together as a gigantic eye on the sky.

https://www.eso.org/public/announcements/ann24001/

#astrodon #astronomy #space #engineering #technology