Cop Car's Beat

Week in Review - 12/10/2022

Wednesday - Physics

The last physics seminar of the semester was presented by my friend, Professor Nick Solomey (here, here, & here): Dark Matter Search Experiment Inside an Asteroid. I gave some consideration to actually driving up to Wichita State U for the presentation, but with COVID-19, the seasonal influenza, and some other bug on the increase decided against it and logged into the session via Zoom. That turned out to be a good decision as Nick had a horrid cold (two tests for COVID-19 had been negative, Nick said) and made his presentation from his home.

 

Professor Solomey is shown at the right end of the third graphic - in the green shirt.

 

Friday - AT&T Fiber Optics Cable Installation

Bright and early Friday morning, a crew of workers showed up on our street to begin installation of AT&T's fiber optic cable. Notably present were about eight men, each of whom was assigned to manually dig holes. They were hard workers and quickly completed the digging of four holes at the curb edge of our front lawn - each about four feet deep.

 

They worked until nearly sundown but had filled all but one of the holes in our lawn and removed the equipment at the end of the day and took off for the weekend.

Saturday - Finally, a good mowing

Our front lawn had not been free of the little flags that were installed to mark the paths of various utility lines across our lots, so the grass had not had a good mowing since the 8th of October. In addition, the leaves from neighbors' trees had accumulated within the areas that could not be mowed. Following the workers' having removed the little flags, I mowed - Saturday afternoon. I previously noted that our lawns needed major work. The first photo shows a bare spot that, presumably, resulted from our drought of late summer and fall. Nearly every year of the past dozen or so we've had to reseed large portions of our lawns. I decided not to have that done this year due to the dry conditions. I've not settled on what I want to do - and am not quite sure on what I can obtain concurrence from Hunky Husband. Later.

The orange "fencing" is warning people away from the hole that is still open in our front lawn.

Thank yous

Hunky Husband and I have, over the years, supported three institutions of higher learning, including endowing small scholarships at two of them. Each school has a way of telling their donors thank you. This past week we received hand-written thank you notes from four students who had benefited from the scholarship that we established at Missouri School of Science and Technology - with photographs of the youngsters. I wrote "hand-written", but they were hand lettered, one assumes because cursive is no longer taught in primary schools in many of our states. (I wonder if lettering is still taught in engineering drawing - called drafting in our day - classes or if they learn only to use software.)

I must say that the current crop of youngsters looks no dorkier than did their predecessors of HH's and my generation. 

Wandering far away

I have been exploring some of the websites with links included in my Typelist 4 FUN & ENLIGHTENMENT, mostly to assure that the links are still active. I found a short video from NASA to share.

From the Hubble page, I present the following:

On The Shoulders of a Giant

In 1675, famed physicist and mathematician, Isaac Newton, penned a letter to his contemporary and rival, polymath Robert Hooke. In that letter, Newton writes what would become one of his most famous remarks: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Over time, this simple statement has come to represent the process of science itself, each new discovery building upon previous work. The same is true for NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and its observing partner, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.

Since its 1990 launch, the Hubble Space Telescope has given humanity a unique perspective of the universe. From its vantage point above Earth’s light-distorting atmosphere, Hubble has provided us with clear, detailed views that reach farther out in space and further back in time than any of its predecessors. Hubble’s observations have charted the evolution of galaxies, stars, nebulae, comets, the outer planets, and their moons. Hubble’s discoveries have confirmed the existence of black holes in galaxy cores, measured the composition of exoplanet atmospheres, found the most distant galaxies to date, and verified the accelerating expansion of the universe – a 2011 Nobel Prize winning discovery in physics. Hubble’s findings have affected all aspects of astronomy, prompting further research and revisions to textbooks, but its observations have captured more than our scientific curiosity. Today we find Hubble’s iconic images on lunchboxes, coffee mugs, socks, neckties, and even moving vans. For more than 30 years, Hubble has spurred our imaginations, inspiring our desire to learn more. To do that, we need to see farther and deeper.

Note: The viewing experience of the following video is more satisfactory from the NASA page instead of viewing the embedded version, below or on YouTube. For some reason, I can't get away from double captioning in either of the latter versions.

More from News for Nerds -

Here comes the next 3D printer:

Physicists Detect Strongest Evidence Yet of Matter Generated By Collisions of Light (sciencealert.com)99

Posted by BeauHD on Wednesday August 11, 2021 @03:00AM from the highly-compelling-stuff dept.

omfglearntoplay shares a report from ScienceAlert: According to theory, if you smash two photons together hard enough, you can generate matter: an electron-positron pair, the conversion of light to mass as per Einstein's theory of special relativity. It's called the Breit-Wheeler process, first laid out by Gregory Breit and John A. Wheeler in 1934, and we have very good reason to believe it would work. But direct observation of the pure phenomenon involving just two photons has remained elusive, mainly because the photons need to be extremely energetic (i.e. gamma rays) and we don't have the technology yet to build a gamma-ray laser. Now, physicists at Brookhaven National Laboratory say they've found a way around this stumbling block using the facility's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) -- resulting in a direct observation of the Breit-Wheeler process in action. The research has been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

 

 

World's Strongest Glass That's As Hard As Diamond Discovered (independent.co.uk)152

Posted by BeauHD on Monday August 09, 2021 @10:20PM from the lost-and-found dept.

Hmmmmmm shares a report from The Independent: Scientists in China have developed the hardest and strongest glassy material known so far that can scratch diamond crystals with ease. The researchers, including those from Yanshan University in China, noted that the new material -- tentatively named AM-III -- has "outstanding" mechanical and electronic properties, and could find applications in solar cells due to its "ultra-high" strength and wear resistance. Analysis of the material, published in the journal National Science Review, revealed that its hardness reached 113 gigapascals (GPa) while natural diamond stone usually scores 50 to 70 on the same test.

According to the scientists, AM-III has tunable energy absorption properties comparable to semiconductors commonly used in solar cells such as hydrogenated amorphous silicon films. While in diamond crystals, the organized internal structure of its atoms and molecules contribute to their immense strength and hardness, in AM-III the researchers found that a combination of order and disorder of its molecules give rise to its strange properties. Using fullerenes, which are materials made of hollow football-like arrangements of carbon atoms, the researchers produced different types of glassy materials with varying molecular organization among which AM-III had the highest order of atoms and molecules. Increasing the order further, the scientists observed, could potentially kill the semiconductivity and other properties that required the atoms and molecules to be chaotic.

Why, yes, there IS something new in physics, thanks for asking.

An artist’s impression of Tcc+, a tetraquark composed of two charm quarks and an up and a down antiquark. Credit: CERN

The graphic, above, and the excerpt, below, are extracted from an article that was recently posted on Physics.org (link also included as "Physics News" in "4 FUN & ENLIGHTENMENT" in the right hand sidebar.

JULY 29, 2021

New exotic matter particle, a tetraquark, discovered

by CERN

Today, the LHCb experiment at CERN is presenting a new discovery at the European Physical Society Conference on High Energy Physics (EPS-HEP). The new particle discovered by LHCb, labeled as T_cc⁺, is a tetraquark—an exotic hadron containing two quarks and two antiquarks. It is the longest-lived exotic matter particle ever discovered, and the first to contain two heavy quarks and two light antiquarks.

Professor Nicholas Solomey

A friend in the physics department of Wichita State University received big-time publicity, this morning, at the top of the front page of The Wichita Eagle newspaper. I've previously posted about Nick's work with/on neutrinos and the grants that he has been awarded by NASA in Elusive Neutrino, in So far this week...., and probably in other postings long-since forgotten.

From later in the newspaper article, the writer says, "Current methods of studying neutrinos require building giant detectors in the hopes that a neutrino will interact with one of the particles in the detector and scientists can detect that interaction." Amusingly, the writer quotes another professor from Kansas State University, Tim Bolton [Director of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE)], "...neutrino detectors tend to be very, very large. Basically these detectors are about the size of small naval warships.”

Nick's logic was that the difficult-to-detect but abundant neutrinos could be detected within a smaller chamber if that chamber were positioned much closer to the nearest great neutrino source, our sun - say 3 million miles away, the distance at which NASA has orbiting satellites that study the sun, where the neutrino density is about 1,000 times the density on earth.

Artist’s depiction of what a future mission using Solomey’s detector might look like. NASA

More from News for Nerds - High-res photo of a crystal

Image shows an electron ptychographic reconstruction of a praseodymium orthoscandate (PrScO₃) crystal, zoomed in 100 million times. Credit: Cornell University

From News for Nerds:

See the Highest-Resolution Atomic Image Ever Captured (scientificamerican.com)38

Posted by BeauHD on Tuesday June 29, 2021 @09:00AM from the record-breaking dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Behold the highest-resolution image of atoms ever seen. Cornell University researchers captured a sample from a crystal in three dimensions and magnified it 100 million times, doubling the resolution that earned the same scientists a Guinness World Record in 2018. Their work could help develop materials for designing more powerful and efficient phones, computers and other electronics, as well as longer-lasting batteries. The researchers obtained the image using a technique called electron ptychography. It involves shooting a beam of electrons, about a billion of them per second, at a target material. The beam moves infinitesimally as the electrons are fired, so they hit the sample from slightly different angles each time -- sometimes they pass through cleanly, and other times they hit atoms and bounce around inside the sample on their way out. Cornell physicist David Muller, whose team conducted the recent study, likens the technique to playing dodgeball against opponents who are standing in the dark. The dodgeballs are electrons, and the targets are individual atoms. Though Muller cannot see the targets, he can see where the "dodgeballs" end up, thanks to advanced detectors. Based on the speckle pattern generated by billions of electrons, machine-learning algorithms can calculate where the atoms were in the sample and what their shapes might be.

Previously, electron ptychography had only been used to image extremely flat samples: those merely one to a few atoms thick. The new study, published in Science, now allows it to capture multiple layers tens to hundreds of atoms thick. That makes the technique much more relevant to materials scientists, who typically study the properties of samples with a thickness of about 30 to 50 nanometers. (That range is smaller than the length your fingernails grow in a minute but many times thicker than what electron ptychography could image in the past.) "They can actually look at stacks of atoms now, so it's amazing," says Andrew Maiden, an engineer at the University of Sheffield in England, who helped develop ptychography but was not involved with the new study. "The resolution is just staggering."

 

By visiting the Materials Project website, one may access an interactive presentation of the PrScO₃ crystal. As demonstrated in the screenshot, below, PrScO₃ is "Orthorhombic Perovskite structured and crystallizes in the orthorhombic Pnma space group. The structure is three-dimensional. Pr3+ is bonded in a 8-coordinate geometry to eight O2- atoms. There are a spread of Pr-O bond distances ranging from 2.37-2.89 Å. Sc3+ is bonded to six O2- atoms to form corner-sharing ScO6 octahedra."

Gee. I wish that website had been around when I studied crystallography in a solid state physics class (1958). It took me "forever" to figure out the primitive cell of the crystal assigned to me - iron alpha.

Refueling by drone

It's been 34 years since I was mustered out of the US Navy Reserve; but, Hunky Husband makes sure I keep somewhat in touch with what's happening with the Navy by asking frequent Navy-related questions - usually about ships or boats, expecting anyone with any affiliation to know all about them. Of course, I was a part of NAVAIR.

HH had a special interest in the article from which the following excerpts were taking. The drone involved is from Boeing - his home-away-from-home for 35 years.

Fueling the Future: MQ-25 first to conduct unmanned aerial tanking

07 June 2021

From NAVAIR Public Affairs

​​​​​​​NAVAL AIR SYSTEMS COMMAND, PATUXENT RIVER, Md. - The MQ-25™ program successfully conducted the first ever aerial refueling operations between a manned receiver aircraft and unmanned tanker June 4 from MidAmerica Airport in Mascoutah, Illinois.

....

During the flight, the receiver Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet approached the Boeing-owned MQ-25 T1 test asset, conducted a formation evaluation, wake survey, drogue tracking and then plugged with the unmanned aircraft. T1 then successfully transferred fuel from its Aerial Refueling Store (ARS) to the F/A-18.

....

 

The US Navy posted a 30-second video on Twitter.

 

The photo, below, and a 2:05 minute video are posted on the Boeing Media Room webpage.

 

So far this week....

So far this week there have been two things keeping me occupied: nursing Hunky Husband (see previous posting) and dealing with a request from the Wichita State University Foundation concerning the small physics scholarship that HH and I have funded at WSU. The WSU Foundation wished to change one of the guidelines that we had established for our fund. Before answering the request, I conferred by email with a friend on the physics faculty, Professor Nicholas Solomey (Nick). I ended up denying the WSU Foundation's request for the change while conceding to an exception that would allow another (newish) physics faculty member to use the Summer 2021 expenditure from our fund for a non-complying graduate student. To change the guideline would have been to instantly thwart the original intent which was to lure new graduate students to WSU for their physics research program.

Physics

In exchanging emails with Nick, I learned that his wife's mother (who has lived with them since she was my age, five years ago) had emergency surgery last November. She had returned from the hospital with COVID-19, promptly sharing it with the family. Fortunately, no one succumbed to their bout with the virus and Nick wrote, "Covid-19 is the worst 2 weeks ever in bed every symptom of flu for two solid weeks and 6 weeks to recover and from my sick bed I wrote the grant! Someday I should reread it and see what delusions I said but too scared! Best just to work hard over next two years to get this done." NASA's announcement of the grant to which Nick referred is given, below. The graphics are from previous proposals that Nick had written to get him into Phases I and II of research under the NIAC grant program.

NASA encourages researchers to develop and study unexpected approaches for traveling through, understanding, and exploring space. To further these goals, the agency has selected seven studies for additional funding – totaling $5 million – from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. The researchers previously received at least one NIAC award related to their proposals.

“Creativity is key to future space exploration and fostering revolutionary ideas today that may sound outlandish will prepare us for new missions and fresh exploration approaches in the coming decades,” said Jim Reuter, associate administrator for NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD).

NASA selected the proposals through a peer-review process that evaluates innovation and technical viability. All projects are still in the early stages of development, with most requiring a decade or more of technology maturation. They are not considered official NASA missions.

Among the studies is a neutrino-detecting mission concept that will receive a $2 million Phase III NIAC grant to mature related technology over two years. Neutrinos are one of the most abundant particles in the universe but are challenging to study since they rarely interact with matter. Therefore, large and sensitive Earth-based detectors are best suited to detect them. Nikolas Solomey from Wichita State University in Kansas proposes something different: a space-based neutrino detector.

“Neutrinos are a tool to ‘see’ inside stars, and a space-based detector could offer a new window into the structure of our Sun and even our galaxy,” said NIAC Program Executive Jason Derleth. “A detector orbiting close to the Sun could reveal the shape and size of the solar furnace at the core. Or, by going in the opposite direction, this technology could detect neutrinos from stars at the center of our galaxy.”

Solomey’s previous NIAC research showed the technology could work in space, explored different mission flight paths, and developed an early prototype of the neutrino detector. With the Phase III grant, Solomey will prepare a flight-ready detector that could be tested on a CubeSat.

Asimov & Heinlein would be proud at baby steps in robotics

If you watched today's 60 Minutes, you've seen Boston Dynamics' robots dancing the mashed potato and the twist. (The link to 60 Minutes leads to a page with a further link to tonight's show - a 13.5-minute video.)

For those who didn't catch the program, a 3-minute video is embedded, below. Sheer fun! BTW: The quadruped, Spot, is for sale for about 75K USD per copy. 

 

Next is a video with demos of gymnastics & useful work sequences.

 

 

Just to show that I don't play favorites, below is a 12-minute video that demonstrates capabilities of robots made by various companies.

 

 

Then, there's an update from News for Nerds.

Boston Dynamics' New Robot Doesn't Dance. It Has a Warehouse Job (wired.com)51

Posted by msmash on Monday March 29, 2021 @04:41PM from the closer-look dept.

It can't do back flips like Atlas the humanoid robot, nor can it dance or open doors for its friends, like Spot the robotic dog can. Instead, Boston Dynamics' new robot, named Stretch, is going straight to work in a warehouse. Wired:Rolling around on a wheeled base, it's basically a large robotic arm that grabs boxes using vacuum power, and it's designed for tasks like unloading trucks or stacking pallets. If Spot and Atlas are the show-offs in the family, Stretch is the straight-up workhorse. But while these machines all look and move in wildly different ways, they actually share a lot of DNA. Stretch may seem familiar to you, because it's a sort of descendant of another machine that debuted a few years back: Handle. That robot had a similar suction arm, but it balanced on two wheels, like a Segway scooter. Handle would grab a box, scoot backward, turn 90 degrees, and roll away to stack the box somewhere else. It looked neat on video, but in practice the robot needed a lot of room to operate. It could manage unloading boxes from a truck, sure. "But it took a long time," says Kevin Blankespoor, lead of warehouse robotics at Boston Dynamics. "The truck is a pretty confined space. And so for Handle, every time it grabbed the box, it would need to roll back into some space where it could rotate freely without collisions."

Which is all to say: If Handle were a human, it'd be let go. So Boston Dynamics pivoted (sorry) to a new form factor for Stretch that slapped a similar robotic vacuum arm on a base with four wheels. Each wheel can move independently, so the robot can shift side to side or forward and backward to orient itself in, say, the back of a truck. This new base granted Stretch two powers. For one thing, resting on four wheels is a whole lot more energy efficient than trying to constantly balance on two. The same is true for animals: A dog or cat is inherently more stable than a human. (Stretch will get 8 hours of battery life, and clients will have the option to upgrade to a double battery that holds 16 hours of charge.) The second advantage is that Stretch's arm can now pivot around its base, while Handle had to pivot its whole body to turn. Stretch can shift up to 800 boxes an hour.