Wood Stove

Caucasian Born

 

Fighter Take Off

Einstein's First Wife

A photograph of Mileva Marić and her husband, Albert Einstein in 1912.

While Mileva Marić was married to Albert Einstein, many believe she greatly contributed to his world-changing discoveries — only to be denied credit later on.


In 1896, a young Albert Einstein walked into the Polytechnic Institute in Zurich. The 17-year-old student was beginning a four-year program in the school’s physics and mathematics department. Of the five scholars admitted to the department that year, only one of them — Mileva Marić — was a woman.


Soon, the two young physics students were inseparable. Mileva Marić and Albert Einstein conducted research and wrote papers together, and soon began falling in love. “I’m so lucky to have found you,” Einstein wrote to Marić in a letter, “a creature who is my equal, and who is as strong and independent as I am! I feel alone with everyone else except you.”

But Einstein’s family never approved of Mileva Marić. And when their relationship soured, Einstein turned against his wife, and may have robbed her of crucial credit for her work on “his” groundbreaking discoveries.


Who Was Mileva Marić?

Mileva Marić was born in Serbia in 1875. A bright student from her early years, she quickly moved to the top of hlber class. According to Scientific American, in 1892, Marić became the only woman allowed to attend physics lectures at her Zagreb high school after her father petitioned the Minister of Education for an exemption.

According to her classmates, Marić was a quiet but brilliant student. Later, she became just the fifth woman at the Polytechnic Institute to study physics.  READ MORE...

Top of the World

 

Supersonic Experimental Aircraft

This artist’s concept of NASA’s QueSST jet reflects the airplane’s final configuration following 

years of research and design engineering. The jet was constructed by Lockheed Martin at the 

company’s Skunk Works facility in Palmdale, California. Credit: Lockheed Martin.

The X-59, NASA’s quiet supersonic experimental aircraft, has arrived back at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works facility in Palmdale, California, following several months of critical ground tests in Ft. Worth, Texas.

NASA’s X-59 Quiet SuperSonic Technology aircraft, or QueSST, is designed to fly faster than the speed of sound without producing a loud, disruptive sonic boom, which is typically heard on the ground below aircraft flying at such speeds. 

Instead, with the X-59, people on the ground will hear nothing more than a quiet sonic thump – if they hear anything at all. The X-59 will fly over communities around the United States to demonstrate this technology, but first, NASA needed to validate the X-plane’s acoustic signature, using a ground recording system.

Ground tests on the X-59 were done to ensure the aircraft’s ability to withstand the loads and stresses of supersonic flight – or flight at speeds faster than Mach 1. The vehicle’s fuel systems were also calibrated and tested at Lockheed Martin’s Ft. Worth facilities. 

With its return to California, the X-59 will undergo further ground tests as it approaches full completion of its development and continues to make progress on its way to first flight.  READ MORE...

Floating

 

Recycling Lithium Batteries

Electric vehicles, power tools, smartwatches—Lithium-ion batteries are everywhere now. However, the materials to make them are finite, and sourcing them has environmental, humanitarian, and economic implications. Recycling is key to addressing those, but a recent study shows most Lithium-ion batteries never get recycled.

Lithium and several other metals that make up these batteries are incredibly valuable. The cost of raw lithium is roughly seven times what you'd pay for the same weight in lead, but unlike lithium batteries, almost all lead-acid batteries get recycled. So there’s something beyond pure economics at play.

It turns out that there are good reasons why lithium battery recycling hasn’t happened yet. But some companies expect to change that, which is a good thing since recycling lithium batteries will be an essential part of the renewable energy transition.
Lead-acid lessons

How extreme is the disparity between lithium and lead batteries? In 2021, the average price of one metric ton of battery-grade lithium carbonate was $17,000 compared to $2,425 for lead North American markets, and raw materials now account for over half of battery cost, according to a 2021 report by the International Energy Agency (IEA).

The imbalance of recycling is counterintuitive in terms of fresh material supply as well. Global sources of lithium amount to 89 million tons, most of which originate in South America, according to a recent United States Geological Survey report. In contrast, the global lead supply at 2 billion tons was 22 times higher than lithium.

Despite the smaller supply of lithium, a study earlier this year in the Journal of the Indian Institute of Science found that less than 1 percent of Lithium-ion batteries get recycled in the US and EU compared to 99 percent of lead-acid batteries, which are most often used in gas vehicles and power grids. According to the study, recycling challenges range from the constantly evolving battery technology to costly shipping of dangerous materials to inadequate government regulation.  READ MORE....

Following Momma

Skateboard Jump

Death Spiraling Moon

Mars' moon Phobos crosses the face of the sun, captured by NASA’s Perseverance rover with its Mastcam-Z camera. The faint black specks to the bottom left are sunspots. 

(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS/SSI)

NASA’s Perseverance rover has captured the clearest ever footage of a solar eclipse over Mars, and the results are out of this world.

The rover snapped the ethereal video of Mars’ potato-shaped moon, Phobos, moving across the face of the sun on April 2. During the eclipse, Phobos projected its uneven shadow over the Martian surface — appearing almost as though it was the pupil of a gigantic eyeball rolling in its socket.

Perseverance recorded the footage midway through its journey to a river delta on Mars’ 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero Crater, where it will search for evidence of life on the Red Planet. Training its state-of-the-art Mastcam-Z camera on the sky, the rover recorded the misshapen moon’s solar transit with the greatest zoom and at the highest framerate ever.

"I knew it was going to be good, but I didn't expect it to be this amazing," Rachel Howson, a mission operations specialist at Malin Space Science Systems and one of the Mastcam-Z team members who operates the camera, said in a statement.

Phobos, named after the Greek god of fear, is roughly 157 times smaller than Earth's moon and is one of Mars' two natural satellites, alongside the even smaller Deimos (whose name comes from the Greek god of dread).

Scientists believe that the brother moons were once roaming asteroids that were snared into Mars’ orbit by the planet’s gravitational field. The orbits of these captive asteroids are unstable, according to researchers, and scientists predict that in a few tens of millions of years' time Deimos will spin out into space while Phobos will slam into Mars’ surface.  READ MORE...

Transformation

 

Making Skin Cells 30 Years Younger

Stock photo of fibroblasts (skin cells) labeled with fluorescent dyes. 

(Image credit: iStock / Getty Images Plus)

Researchers in the U.K. have developed a way to reverse the aging process in skin cells, turning back the biological clock by about 30 years.


De-aging cells has become increasingly common in the last decade, with researchers reprogramming multiple mouse, rat and human cell types. But never before have cells been de-aged by so many years and still retained their specific type and function.


The method, developed by Diljeet Gill, a postdoctoral candidate at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, and his colleagues, was published April 8 in the journal eLife, and has been dubbed "maturation phase transient reprogramming."


The researchers applied this technique to fibroblasts (a common type of skin cell) from three middle-aged donors — who averaged at about 50 years old — then compared them to younger cells from donors aged 20 to 22. The researchers found that the middle-aged cells were similar to the younger cells, both chemically and genetically. When explored further, the team even noticed that the technique had affected genes related to age-related diseases, like Alzheimer's disease and cataracts.

last
In addition, Gill and his colleagues looked at the behavior of the fibroblasts to determine if they could also act like younger skin cells. When they wounded a layer of the cells, they found that the rejuvenated cells quickly moved to fill the gap — the same way that younger cells behave when healing wounds.


This study is not the first to de-age skin cells. That title goes to Nobel prize winner Shinya Yamanaka, who genetically reprogrammed mouse skin cells and turned them into so-called induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPSCs, back in 2006. These iPSCs resemble cells in early development, and have the potential to form any cell type in the body.  READ MORE...

Turin, Italy

 

NASA Teleports Physician to Space Station

NASA flight surgeon Dr. Josef Schmid gives a space greeting Oct. 8, 2021, as he is holoported 

on to the International Space Station.  ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Thomas Pesquet

What's happening  --  A NASA flight surgeon was holoported beyond Earth and shook hands with astronaut Thomas Pesquet

Why it matters  --  "It is a brand new way of human exploration where our human entity is able to travel off the planet," according to NASA flight surgeon, Josef Schmid.

I have a new noun to add to your vocabulary: holoportation. It's an amalgam of "hologram" and "teleportation," and it isn't a niche sci-fi term buried somewhere in Isaac Asimov novels and Star Trek episodes.

In October, NASA used this mind-boggling, futuristic mechanism to bring NASA flight surgeon Dr. Josef Schmid onto the International Space Station while he was safely planted on our planet. No rockets necessary.

Schmid was joined on this transdimensional journey by Fernando De La Pena Llaca, the CEO of AEXA Aerospace, an organization that helped develop the holoportation equipment, and a few other team members.

"It is a brand new way of human exploration where our human entity is able to travel off the planet," Schmid said in a statement earlier in April. "Our physical body is not there, but our human entity absolutely is there."  READ MORE...

Lightbulbs

Bird Shower

 

Starlink and Hawaiian Airlines

Under the terms of the agreement, Hawaiian Airlines will offer SpaceX's high-speed, low-latency broadband internet service to its guests free of charge onboard flights between the islands and the continental U.S, Asia and Oceania. (Hawaiian Airlines)

Under the terms of the agreement, Hawaiian Airlines will become the first major airline to offer Starlink's high-speed, low-latency broadband internet service to its guests free of charge onboard flights between the islands and the continental United States, Asia and Oceania.


Hawaiian Airlines offers approximately 130 daily flights within the Hawaiian Islands, daily nonstop flights between Hawaii and 16 U.S. gateway cities, and service connecting Honolulu and American Samoa, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea and Tahiti.


Hawaii’s largest and longest-serving carrier will equip its Airbus A330 and A321neo aircraft, as well as an incoming fleet of Boeing 787-9s, with Starlink's service. Hawaiian does not currently plan to deploy Starlink on its Boeing 717 aircraft that operate short flights between the Hawaiian Islands.


Hawaiian and Starlink are in the initial stages of implementation and expect to begin installing the service on select aircraft next year.  READ MORE...

Speaking Out

 

Disney's Prices

An impassioned Guest took to social media to discuss their issues with the Walt Disney World Resort currently.

While some Guests have been able to ignore certain issues while in the Parks, many are starting to feel frustrated about the Resort in Orlando, Florida, claiming it’s getting too crowded and too expensive. One of the biggest complaints we’ve seen from Guests lately has been caused by the new Disney Genie+ and Lightning Lane systems which were introduced in late 2021.

This replacement for Disney’s FastPass system has seen much criticism and frustration, leaving many Guests feeling confused by the service. In theory, this paid service should enhance Guests’ experience at the Parks, but in practice, it seemed to just be an expensive itinerary planner for some, while others love using the system. These paid services allow Guests to skip lines for a price, meaning Disney now has a financial incentive to have long lines. At Disney World, for $15.00 per day per Guest, you can skip the long standby queue by making a Lightning Lane reservation (new FastPass) and returning at that time.

In a post shared on Reddit, one Guest discussed the expensive nature of the Disney Parks at the moment:


Disney World. Instead of pricing people out of your parks, invest in your customers and build a 5th and maybe 6th park. Invest in your employees by paying them a better than living wage and emphasize training and retaining world class employees. Increase guest and employee experience

I love Disney, and I want as many people to experience it as possible. I understand supply and demand. I understand scarcity. I understand that certain people due to economic circumstances should not have access to this place. I understand profit is king. I get it. I love WDW though and I feel that the stewards charged with protecting it have taken a very wrong turn.  READ MORE...