Nothing can go faster than light. It's a rule of physics woven into the very fabric of Einstein's special theory of relativity. The faster something goes, the closer it gets to its perspective of time freezing to a standstill.

Go faster still, and you run into issues of time reversing, messing with notions of causality.

But researchers from the University of Warsaw in Poland and the National University of Singapore have now pushed the limits of relativity to come up with a system that doesn't run afoul of existing physics, and might even point the way to new theories.

What they've come up with is an "extension of special relativity" that combines three time dimensions with a single space dimension ("1+3 space-time"), as opposed to the three spatial dimensions and one time dimension that we're all used to.

Rather than creating any major logical inconsistencies, this new study adds more evidence to back up the idea that objects might well be able to go faster than light without completely breaking our current laws of physics.

The ancient Romans were masters of building and engineering, perhaps most famously represented by the aqueducts. And those still functional marvels rely on a unique construction material: pozzolanic concrete, a spectacularly durable concrete that gave Roman structures their incredible strength.

Even today, one of their structures – the infamous Pantheon, still intact and nearly 2,000 years old – holds the record for the world's largest dome of unreinforced concrete.

The properties of this concrete have generally been attributed to its ingredients: pozzolana, a mix of volcanic ash – named after the Italian city of Pozzuoli, where a significant deposit of it can be found – and lime. When mixed with water, the two materials can react to produce strong concrete.

But that, as it turns out, is not the whole story. An international team of researchers led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that not only are the materials slightly different from what we may have thought, but the techniques used to mix them were also different.

The smoking guns were small, white chunks of lime that can be found in what seems to be otherwise well-mixed concrete.

On September 22, 2022 NASA and SpaceX announced that they were investigating the possibility of using a Dragon spacecraft—of the kind used to ferry NASA astronauts to the International Space Station—to go visit Hubble. On Dec. 22 NASA issued a request for other commercial space companies to get involved. //

The idea is that Hubble could be boosted to a higher orbit to continue its work for many more years. There’s also the tantalising prospect that it could also be serviced and refurbished—and its optics improved. //

A general servicing would be crucial because whether or not Hubble avoids re-entry this decade it is getting old. Launched in 1990 and last serviced by a space shuttle crew in 2009, it’s beginning to have technical problems. The latest was in July 2021 when it spent a month out of action because its payload computer failed before the problem was fixed.

However, from a science point of view an upgrade to its optics would be a game-changer. The reflecting telescope has a 2.4 meter mirror that can’t be upgraded, but its cameras could be. //

If the feasibility studies suggests it’s a go-er it would be the sixth time Hubble has been visited since its launch from Space Shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990. //

Almost immediately after its launch it was discovered that its mirror had an aberration causing images to be blurry, so it was visited in orbit by astronauts aboard NASA’s Space Shuttle Endeavour in 1993. They installed corrective optics. More servicing missions took place in 1997, 1999, 2002 and 2009 to upgrade various components, notably adding the telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3.

Hubble now has six cameras and sensors to gather data on and take spectacular images of deep sky targets previously beyond the reach of astronomers. There are larger ground-based telescopes, but their view of the cosmos is limited by Earth’s atmosphere, which blocks infrared and ultraviolet light.

Hubble remains valuable to astronomers—and continues to make incredible observations—because it sees the universe in ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared light. The new James Webb Space Telescope deals only in near and far-infrared light. Since Webb orbits the Sun a million miles from Earth it can likely never be serviced—despite repeated strikes by micrometeoroids already.

PORTLAND, Ore. – On January 1, 2023, NuScale Power Corporation (NYSE: SMR) completed submission of a Standard Design Approval (SDA) application to the U.S Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for its updated small modular reactor (SMR) design, which is based on a VOYGR™-6 (6-module) configuration powered by an uprated 250 MWt (77 MWe) module. The design features the same fundamental safety case and totally passive safety features approved by the NRC in 2020, with a power uprate and select design changes to support customers’ capacity needs and further improve economics.

Just before the end of the year, Ethiopian investigators published their final report on the crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight ET302. Flight 302 crashed shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa Bole Airport on 10 March 2019. Operated by Boeing 737-8 MAX ET-AVJ, it was the second crash of a 737 MAX in just over four months and led to a worldwide 20 month grounding of the MAX while Boeing and regulators made changes to the aircraft.

Following the publication of the final report, both the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and French Bureau d’Enquêtes et d’Analyses (BEA) took the highly unusual step of publishing separate comments on the report.
Ethiopian investigators’ probable cause: MCAS

In their final report, Ethiopian investigators solely focus on the activation of the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System as the probable cause of the accident.

There have been some positive aspects of this fight over the Speaker of the House.

It’s shown us who is willing to fight for rules that are more favorable for the members to fight for their constituents as opposed to just shoving bills through without any thought or discussion. We’ve seen Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) hold that banner high, as well as some of the other 20 who are fighting for that cause. That’s an important thing to fight for, to bring some sanity back to the decision-making.

Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-MT) laid it out and it’s disturbing how little discussion and input from the individual members there are. This isn’t what the American people think is going on and he’s right.

Matt Rosendale @RepRosendale
·
We have had more discussion and debate over the last 3 days than I have participated in, on this floor, for the last two years.

We cannot restore a functioning legislative body under current rules and leadership.

4:15 PM · Jan 5, 2023

Noncompetes are "an unfair method of competition" and violate US law, FTC says. //

The US Chamber of Commerce said it is considering a lawsuit against the FTC if the noncompete ban is adopted. "We don't believe they have the statutory authority," Sean Heather, the group's senior VP for international regulatory affairs and antitrust, told The Wall Street Journal. "They know they are on very tenuous ground." //

The FTC also disputed employers' arguments that noncompete clauses are needed to protect trade secrets. The "record to date shows that in California, North Dakota and Oklahoma—three states in which employers can't enforce noncompete clauses—industries that depend on trade secrets and other key investments have still flourished. This shows that employers have other ways of protecting these investments," the FTC said.

90% of people living with long COVID initially experienced only mild illness. //

We found that a staggering 90 percent of people living with long COVID initially experienced only mild illness with COVID-19. After developing long COVID, however, the typical person experienced symptoms including fatigue, shortness of breath, and cognitive problems such as brain fog—or a combination of these—that affected daily functioning. These symptoms had an impact on health as severe as the long-term effects of traumatic brain injury. Our study also found that women have twice the risk of men and four times the risk of children for developing long COVID.

Stoltz told Ars that EFF considers copyright trolling a major issue, especially since "the opening of the 'Copyright Claims Board,' a quasi-court for copyright infringement claims run out of the US Copyright Office in Washington DC." Stoltz told Ars that this board "created a new, more streamlined forum for copyright trolling. So the demise of Malibu Media doesn’t mean the end of the troll problem."

Structure of Water and Ice

Water is a covalent compound. It consists of two hydrogen atoms covalently bonded with the oxygen atom at the centre. In water molecule, the central atom goes SP3 hybridization. According to VSEPR theory, it should have tetrahedral structure but the presence of two lone pair of electron in oxygen increases the repulsion between the H atoms and its shape becomes distorted tetrahedral. The HOH bond angle decreases from 109.5o to 104.5o.

Due to the strong electronegative character of oxygen, water molecule is highly polarized. Therefore, there is a formation of intermolecular hydrogen bonding between oxygen of one molecule and hydrogen of another molecule. The extra energy is required to break this molecular bond. Due to this strong association between the hydrogen and oxygen, water molecules become liquid and solid at room temperature. In the absence of hydrogen bond, water would be in gaseous state as that of H2S. This is the reason for H2O being liquid at room temperature while H2S is gas at same temperature while both of the compounds have similar bonding. This is also the reason for anomalous behaviour of water.

Scientist studied that water molecules in ice are arranged in such a way that they form open cage like structure with vacant space due to hydrogen bonding as shown in figure below. With the vacant space, the volume of ice increases. So, as volume has inverse relation with density. Ice has lesser density in compared to water and hence float in water. The figure above shows the arrangement of molecules in ice and water respectively.

This is a head scratcher. Well, not really, but one wonders who is paying whom, or who is threatening whom, in order to keep this particular circus stocked with monkeys.

Nuclear Newswire is back with the final #ThrowbackThursday post honoring the 80th anniversary of Chicago Pile-1 with offerings from past issues of Nuclear News. On November 17, we took a look at the lead-up to the first controlled nuclear chain reaction and on December 1, the events of December 2, 1942, the day a self-sustaining nuclear fission reaction was created and controlled inside a pile of graphite and uranium assembled on a squash court at the University of Chicago’s Stagg Field.

On December 16 the Department of Energy reversed a decision made nearly 70 years ago by leaders of its predecessor agency, the Atomic Energy Commission, to revoke the security clearance of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who led the first group of scientists and engineers at what would eventually become Los Alamos National Laboratory as they built the first atomic bomb. While it comes far too late for Oppenheimer, his family, and his colleagues to appreciate, the McCarthy-era campaign to discredit Oppenheimer is now itself officially discredited as “a flawed process that violated the Commission’s own regulations,” in the words of the DOE’s recent announcement.

Oppenheimer’s story has been told many times by biographers and chroniclers of the Manhattan Project; a new feature film is expected in July 2023. Today, we offer a #ThrowbackThursday post that examines the scant coverage of Oppenheimer’s life and work in the pages of Nuclear News to date and draws on other historical content—and the DOE’s recent move to correct the record—to fill a few of the gaps.

When it comes to choosing which types of energy technology to prioritize and build in order to address climate, we need to stay focused on low-carbon sources, or what we now call “clean” energy. Many people may not realize that all of what is “renewable” is not “clean.”

Renewable energy is defined to focus on types of energy that come from “sources that cannot be depleted or which naturally replenish,” an appealing concept but actually a red herring with respect to carbon emissions. Clearly, some types of renewables are low and non-carbon-emitting energy sources, such as wind and solar. But some renewables are highly emitting sources of energy, namely bioenergy, which includes burning ancient forests, also called biomass energy. //

Lately, the large and growing bioenergy industry has been seen as contributing massively to deforestation. Yet, bioenergy has the burnish of appearing to be “green” because it’s made the political cut and is included as “renewable.” This means that companies cutting down trees have benefitted from the subsidies and incentives intended to increase clean energy. Fortunately, many are starting to be more discerning and are specifically excluding ecologically-damaging types of bioenergy as unsustainable and not worthy of prioritization with climate-focused subsidies.

Politics, lobbying and powerful ideologic preferences are what have brought the term “renewable” into vogue in the first place. This also means that what’s included as renewable differs from place to place. California specifically excludes large hydro power but includes small hydropower stations. Not because large hydro emits more carbon or doesn’t rely on the renewing resource of rain but rather because California policymakers decided dams posed too great an ecologic impact and didn’t want to prioritize building more large dams. In other places, renewables includes large hydro. The fact that the definition of what’s renewable varies from place to place, contributes to confusion and lack of clarity. When folks in California hear that there are Canadian provinces running almost entirely on renewable energy, they may think that means they’ve succeeded in building out lots of wind and solar. In fact, it’s predominantly large hydro—which isn’t counted as “renewable” in California.

Nuclear’s Contributions to Clean Energy are Sidelined

The biggest problem by far with using the term renewable, however, is that it is invariably defined to exclude nuclear power. This causes the entire nuclear industry—which for decades has produced more clean energy than all other low-carbon sources combined—to be discounted and even sometimes excluded. Not surprising since nuclear has long been maligned and even demonized. Even so, the omission of nuclear as a renewable energy source, whether intentional or not, causes significant problems for those trying to use good data to address climate change.

We cannot make good decisions about how to invest in new energy generation if we don’t get good information about where our clean energy is coming from. Most energy agencies now include reports on levels of Renewables, because they are politically potent. They don’t create reports based on carbon intensity (such as by grouping the low-carbon energy technologies and the high-carbon energy technologies). Thus, people are not shown that their nuclear power plants are contributing to the clean energy being produced. This may induce them to think that nuclear is carbon-emitting—which it isn’t. They will think biofuels are a good thing for the climate—they aren’t. They will also think we have less clean energy than we actually do and agree to pay for more renewables. In certain areas, nuclear power plants are not even credited with producing carbon-free energy that counts towards the region’s clean energy goals! //

We need clear and accurate information on climate impacts as we make increasingly large investments in transitioning our energy systems, commiting us to energy projects that will have 20, 30, 50-year and longer life-spans. For this, we definitely should avoid anything that hints at ambiguity and stick with what we mean: clean energy. So, in 2023, let’s work to reject use of the word “renewable” and demand that we focus on the distinction that does matter: carbon intensity. Without clear language and understanding, neither the public nor those negotiating our future world agreements can be expected to make good decisions.

CBS "60 Minutes" sacrifices its credibility in selling apocalyptic pseudoscience

Narrated by James Golden, Limbaugh’s long-time call screener and “official show observer” known to listeners as “Bo Snerdley”, the 12-episode series will detail legendary radio host Rush Limbaugh’s award-winning, 30-plus year career in radio that revitalized the spoken-word format, and provided a platform for him to develop and lead modern conservatism in America. Featuring Limbaugh’s own words and never-before-heard stories shared by colleagues, friends and family, the series will give listeners a guided tour of the five-time Marconi Award winner’s historic journey from Cape Girardeau, Mo., to becoming the No. 1 talk radio host in America

Give The Gift Of A Story Told Through Letters This Winter
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The SOURCE® Hydropanel is a technology that incorporates multiple patented inventions alongside proprietary trade secrets, making it a one-of-a-kind renewable water technology that uses the power of the sun to extract clean, pollutant-free drinking water from the air. Collected water is then mineralized for ideal composition and taste, making premium-quality drinking water a readily available resource.

1. Solar energy powers the panel completely off-grid

2. Fans draw in ambient air and push it through a hygroscopic, or water-absorbing material, that traps water vapor from the air

3. The water vapor is extracted and passively condenses into liquid that is collected in the reservoir

4. Minerals are added to make perfect drinking water

This is an FAQ about El Al’s recently introduced in-flight zmanim system that uses the KosherJava zmanim code. This FAQ is almost identical to what you will see on El Al flights, but it is slightly expanded and includes links to articles that are not available on the in-flight system.

By: Rabbi Dovid Heber

Published Summer 2007

Refer to attached map

For a further discussion on this topic see Sefer Shaarei Zmanim –  Siman 11 here.

There was a time not long ago when kosher food was available only in major Jewish metropolitan areas. Finding kosher certified products on the road was a daunting task. “Kosher Tours” were limited to a few select areas. Today, the Star-K and other kosher symbols appear on thousands of food products. Kosher food is available from Fairbanks to Fiji, and from New Zealand to Norway. Kosher tours are now available to Alaska and Antarctica. With so many north and south destinations easily accessible to kosher consumers, the observant Jew now faces an array of fascinating questions. In parts of Alaska, and other locations north of the Arctic Circle, there are periods of time during the summer when the sun never sets and during the winter when the sun never rises. When does Shabbos begin in the land of the midnight sun? Can one daven Shachris if the sun doesn’t rise? When does Shabbos start and end in Anchorage on a day that does not get dark? A similar question is, when does an astronaut daven and begin and end Shabbos in outer space? A description of the Arctic Circle is necessary to understand the halachos that relate to these unique circumstances.

The Arctic Circle

The Arctic Circle (located at 66.56° N Latitude, see map) is an imaginary line that runs through Canada, Greenland, Scandinavia, Russia, and Alaska1. From this general area and northward, there are days in the summer when the sun does not set and days in the winter when the sun does not rise.2 For example, in Longyearbyen, the northernmost town in the world located on the Svalbard Islands north of Norway,3 the sun remains above the horizon from April 20 through August 25.  During this time the midnight sun is visible for over four months.  Between October 27 and February 15, the sun never peaks above the horizon.4  In Alert, Nunavut in Canada,5 the sun does not set for almost five months of the year.  At the North Pole, the sun rises in March and stays up for six months until it sets in September, when it remains below the horizon for six months. At the South Pole6, the sun also stays up for six months (September through March) and stays below the horizon for six months (March through September).