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Scientists in Germany have switched on the world’s largest “artificial Sun” for the first time, which could be used to create useful hydrogen in the future.
Located in Jülich, Germany, and operated by the German Aerospace Center (DLR), “Synlight” uses 149 xenon lamps to recreate the light from the Sun onto a single point, vaporizing water and producing hydrogen and oxygen.
The huge machine towers 14 meters (45 feet) high and 16 meters (52 feet) across, and produces temperatures of up to 3,000°C (5,400°F) focused on a single spot 20 by 20 centimeters (8 by 8 inches). This particular test lasted just 15 to 20 minutes, producing a tiny amount of hydrogen, but the lamps can theoretically be run continuously for hours or even a day.
“We’ve been testing it for the last two months, and this is the first public event,” Dmitrij Laaber, a research engineer involved on the project, told IFLScience.
The lamps have an output of 350 kilowatts, and supposedly produce 10,000 times the intensity of solar radiation on Earth. Its spectrum of UV radiation is similar to that of the Sun. When focused onto a metal sheet in a small reactor device, it splits water up into hydrogen and oxygen.

There are 149 lamps in total. DLR
Hydrogen is an incredibly useful element, being a source of fuel with no carbon emissions. But it does not occur naturally (edit for clarification: it does not occur naturally on Earth by itself, it appears in other compounds but must be separated), and so must be created synthetically with machines like this.
Synlight is a proof of concept for now, with the lamps using as much electricity in four hours as a four-person household would do in a year. The heat they generate is enough to incinerate a person if you were standing in the same room.
But the goal in the future is to replicate this process using sunlight, possibly scaling up the operation to produce usable amounts of hydrogen.
“The next step would be to get this reactor to a real solar plant, where it can be tested under real conditions,” Laaber said. “Our facility is mainly for testing of the components.”

The World's Largest "Artificial Sun" In Germany

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President Trump has egged on a new arms race. Russia violated weapons treaties to upgrade its nuclear arsenal. North Korea is developing long-range missiles and practicing for nuclear war — and the US military is considering preemptive attacks on the isolated nation's military facilities.
Meanwhile, nuclear terrorism and dirty bombs remain a sobering threat.
Though these events are unlikely to trigger the last-ditch option of nuclear war, let alone a blast in your neighborhood, they are very concerning.
So you might be wondering, "If I survive a nuclear-bomb attack, what should I do?"
Michael Dillon, a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher, crunched the numbers and helped figure out just that in a 2014 study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical and Physical Sciences.
Likewise, government agencies and other organizations have also explored the harrowing question and came up with detailed recommendations and response plans.
The scenario

You are in a large city that has just been subjected to a single, low-yield nuclear detonation, between 0.1 and 10 kilotons.
This is much less powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima — about 15 kilotons. However, it's not unlikely when looking at weapons like the new B61-12 gravity bomb, which is built by the US, maxes out at 50 kilotons, and can be dialed down to 0.3 kilotons. (Russia and Pakistan are working on similar so-called "tactical" nuclear weapons.)
Studieshave shown that you and up to 100,000 of your fellow citizens can be saved — that is, if you keep your wits about and radiation exposure low enough.
One of your biggest and most immediate goals is to avoid nuclear fallout.
How to avoid fallout radiation
Fallout is a mess of bomb material, soil, and debris that is vaporized, made radioactive, and sprinkled as dust and ash across the landscape by prevailing winds. (In New York City, for example, a fallout zone would spread eastward.)

The best thing to do is to find a good place to hide — the more dense material between you and the outside world, the better — then wait until the rescuers can make their way to help you.
The US government recommends hiding in a nearby building, but not all of them provide much shelter from nuclear fallout.
Poor shelters, which include about 20% of houses, are constructed of lightweight materials and lack basements. The best shelters are thick brick or concrete and lack windows. Like a bomb shelter.
This infographic from a government guide to the aftermath of nuclear attacks gives a rough idea on what makes a building a good or bad place to hide from fallout:

Levels of protection from radiation that various buildings and locations offer. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory/FEMA
Hiding in the sub-basement of a brick five-story apartment building, for example, should expose you to just 1/200 of the amount of fallout radiation outside.
Meanwhile, hanging out in the living room of your one-story, wood-frame house will only cut down the radiation by half, which — if you are next to a nuclear explosion — will not do much to help you.
So, what do you do if there isn't a good shelter right near you? Should you stay in a "poor" shelter, or risk exposure to find a better one? And how long should you wait?
Should you stay or should you go?


In his 2014 study, Dillon developed models to determine your best options. While the answer depends on how far away you are from the blast, since that will determine when the fallout arrives, there are some general rules to follow.
If you are immediately next to or in a solid shelter when the bomb goes off, stay there until the rescuers come to evacuate you to less radioactive vistas.
If you aren't already in a bomb shelter, but know a good shelter is about five minutes away — maybe a large apartment building with a basement that you can see a few blocks away — his calculations suggest hoofing it over there quickly and staying in place.
But if the nice, thick-walled building would take about 15 minutes travel time, it's better to hole up in the flimsy shelter for awhile — but you should probably leave for a better shelter after roughly an hour (and maybe pick up some beers and sodas on the way: A study in the '50s found they taste fine after a blast).
This is because some of the most intense fallout radiation has subsided by then, though you still want to reduce your exposure.
Other fallout advice
Below are some other guidelines that Dillon compiled from other studies and are based on how decent your first and second shelters are:

One of the big advantages of the approach that this paper uses is that, to decide on a strategy, evacuation officials need to consider only the radiation levels near shelters and along evacuation routes — the overall pattern of the radioactive death-cloud does not factor into the models. This means decisions can be made quickly and without much communication or central organization (which may be spare in the minutes and hours after a blast).
Other researchers have analyzed other similar scenarios in papers, whose findings are summarized in the chart below:


Jennifer Welsh wrote a previous version of this post with Andy Kiersz.
Read the original artice on Tech Insider. Copyright 2017.

If A Nuclear Bomb Is Dropped On Your City, Here's Where You Should Run And Hide

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On Wednesday, February 22 at 1pm EST (6pm GMT), NASA is going to hold a news conference to announce a major finding relating to planets outside the Solar System.
In the few details released to the public, the agency said they would “present new findings on planets that orbit stars other than our Sun, known as exoplanets.” A paper detailing the findings will be published in the journal Nature on Wednesday. 
The event will be taking place in Washington DC for media only, but you'll be able to watch live on NASA TV, which we've embedded for you below.


Several experts will take part in the conference, including the paper's lead author, Michaël Gillon from the University of Liège in Belgium, and Dr Sara Seager, a renowned planetary scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
After the conference at 3pm EST (8pm GMT), there will be an Ask Me Anything (AMA) Q&A session on Reddit with some of the scientists involved in the discovery.
What's it all about? Well, you'll have to wait and see. Tune in on Wednesday to find out.

NASA To Announce A Huge Discovery Outside The Solar System This Wednesday

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Astronomers have made a huge discovery in the search for life beyond our Solar System, describing a whopping seven Earth-sized worlds in orbit around a nearby star. At least three of them may be habitable – and we could find out if they are inhabited within a decade.
The system is around a star called TRAPPIST-1, a small ultra-cool dwarf star 40 light-years away that’s about 8 percent the mass of our Sun and 11 percent its radius, similar in size to Jupiter. Last year, it was revealed that three potentially rocky worlds orbited this star, and now this new study has found four more.
A paper describing the incredible findings, led by Michaël Gillon of the University of Liège in Belgium, was published today in Nature. The discovery was made using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and a variety of ground-based telescopes, including TRAPPIST-South in Chile, to observe the transits of the planets relative to us as they passed across their star.
“The star is so small and cold that the planets are temperate, which means that they could have some liquid water and maybe life by extension on the surface,” Gillon said in a press briefing.


 A video summary of the findings is above.
In order of their distance from the star, the planets are called TRAPPIST-1b (the innermost), c, d, e, f, g, and h (the planets d, e, f, and g are newly discovered). The researchers were able to work out the mass, radius, and orbital periods of all seven of the planets, save for the outermost, TRAPPIST-1h, of which only one transit was seen.
TRAPPIST-1b orbits just 0.011 AU from its star (1 AU, or astronomical unit, is the Earth-Sun distance). As such, it completes an orbit in just 1.51 days. The next six planets orbit from 2.42 to about 20 days, and all are similar in size to Earth, ranging from 0.76 times our radius to 1.13.
Being such a cool and dim star, its habitable zone is much closer in than our own Solar System. The planets e, f, and g all orbit in this zone, suggesting they could support liquid water oceans on their surface.
The finding is particularly exciting because, being so close to Earth, we will be able to study the planets of this star in detail. And not just in the future, but right now. Follow-up observations are already underway, and it’s possible we could know if life exists on one or more of these planets very soon by studying the molecular composition of their atmospheres.

The known data on each of the planets compared to the rocky worlds in our Solar System. NASA/JPL-Caltech
“I am personally convinced that if there is biological activity on a scale similar to what see on Earth, then we should get to know that fairly soon,” co-author Amaury Triaud from the University of Cambridge told us, adding that within a decade “sounds reasonable.”
It’s highly likely that all seven planets are tidally locked to the star, meaning the same face always points towards it. This means that, if water does exist on some of the worlds, it may be liquid on just the star-facing side, with the other being ice.
All seven of the planets are also thought to have migrated from further out in the system to their inner positions, where ice on their surfaces has melted.
If there is life on any of the worlds, conditions likely wouldn’t be that similar to here. For one thing, the star itself would appear salmon-like in color, according to the researchers, with most of the solar radiation being infrared – which would still warm the planets, but would not be visible to creatures like us.
“The amount of light in your eye would be about 200 times less than the Sun,” Triaud said in the press briefing. “So think of the amount of light you receive at the end of sunset. It’s still much brighter than the Moon, but dimmer than the Sun.
“The spectacle would be beautiful, because every now and then you would see another planet about twice the size of the Moon in the sky.”
This amount of infrared light makes the planets an especially good target for upcoming telescopes like NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), due to launch in October 2018, which will observe the cosmos in infrared wavelengths. It could work out their atmospheric compositions by looking at the star’s light passing through, and hunt for signs of life.

The seven planets may have migrated further into the system. NASA/JPL-Caltech
Exactly how habitable these planets might be is up for debate. Recent studies have suggested that cool, dim stars like this undergo frequent and powerful solar flares, which could be detrimental to life.
But the researchers say this particular star is fairly quiet, especially compared to a star such as Proxima Centauri, the closest star to Earth around which the potentially habitable world Proxima b orbits. And it’s thought that solar activity could also help replenish an atmosphere, rather than destroying it.
This star is 10 times further away than Proxima, however, so we don’t have much hope of sending a spacecraft to this system through a project like Breakthrough Starshot. “I think we are far from being able to send a robotic probe to TRAPPIST-1,” Triaud told IFLScience. But the potential for further astronomical study is huge.
Being able to discover life on one of the planets will depend on a number of factors, particularly whether they have atmospheres, and if these atmospheres allow water to remain as liquid. Any life would also have to be producing enough gas to alter the chemical composition of one of the planets’ atmospheres.
It’s easy to get excited, though, and rightly so. This is the most number of Earth-sized planets we’ve ever found in one system, and while this may turn out to be common around other stars, TRAPPIST-1 is certainly one of the closest for us to study.
Being so close to their star, it will be almost impossible to directly image these worlds. But the transit method, used to find them, will prove vital in studying them as we watch light come through their atmospheres. Keep your eyes peeled, because you can be sure there’ll be plenty more news about TRAPPIST-1 in the coming months and years.
“We’ve made a crucial step towards finding if there is life out there,” Triaud said in the briefing.

Breakthrough In Search For Life As Seven Earth-Sized Worlds Found Orbiting Nearby Star

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Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and… breakthroughs in wireless power transfer? Yep, scientists at a branch of the Walt Disney Company called Disney Research have found a way to charge devices on a room-scale without using any wires.
Wireless power is an idea that goes back to the 19th century, with Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla perhaps being its most famous proponent. But getting it to work has been a bit of a problem, with the extent of modern wireless power coming mostly in the form of electric toothbrushes or flat charging pads for phones.
A team at Disney Research, though, showed how they were able to transmit power in an entire room, powering a variety of devices while remaining relatively safe for humans. They published their findings in the journal PLOS ONE.
“Wireless power delivery has the potential to seamlessly power our electrical devices as easily as data is transmitted through the air,” they wrote in a brief statement. “However, existing solutions are limited to near contact distances and do not provide the geometric freedom to enable automatic and un-aided charging.”



To solve this, the team came up with “quasistatic cavity resonance (QSCR)”, where magnetic fields are generated to deliver kilowatts of power to receivers. These receivers can be connected to a device, like a phone or fan, to supply it with power.
The room built by Disney Research was lined with aluminum panels. In its center was a copper tube between the floor and the ceiling, with a current running through it. Fifteen capacitors in the pole are used to set a resonant frequency in the room and isolate electric fields from a signal generator, which outputs at 1.32 MHz. A uniform magnetic field is then run through the room at the same frequency.
The receivers use a coil of wire to resonate at the same frequency, providing power to a device. The researchers were able to deliver about 1,900 watts with an efficiency of 40 to 95 percent.
There are a couple of issues, though. First is obviously the need for an aluminum-encased room, although they note their design – 54 cubic meters (1,900 cubic feet) – can easily be scaled up or down. Also, the circular nature of the magnetic field produced means receivers only work when at right angles to it, although this can be solved with three coils pointing in different directions.
It's safe for the most part too, although the researchers note people shouldn't stand closer than 46 centimeters (18 inches) to the pole, which exceeds federal guidelines for how much energy a human can be subjected to, known as specific absorption rate (SAR). Oh, and if you're pumping 1,900 watts into the room, you also need devices to be using this to remain safe.

Disney Researchers Make Wireless Power Transfer Breakthrough

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Humans beings appear to be hardwired to have a sense of fairness. This is puzzling from an evolutionary perspective, which you would have thought would mean we were predisposed to seek advantage for ourselves and our families wherever possible. But in fact a sense of fairness is important for humans to be able to help each other. Human cooperation is based on reciprocal altruism – we help people because they’ve either helped us in the past or they may help us in the future.
This form of cooperation is only possible when individuals are able to keep track of other individuals’ efforts and payoffs – and a sense of fairness helps with this. But what about non-human animals? Is sense of fairness unique in differentiating humans from other animals or has it evolved in other non-human animals too?
There’s a way of testing for this in animals using an “inequity aversion task”. One test subject receives a reward for completing a task, while an experimental partner gets a “booby prize” – something they don’t particularly like. You’d imagine that individual animals that have a strong sense of fair play would either stop taking part in the experiment or refuse the treat.
One of the first species that was tested for inequity aversion were brown capuchin monkeys. In a task where the monkeys had to exchange a token for a treat, one individual was given a piece of cucumber in exchange for a token, whereas a model individual – another monkey not the focus of the experiment – in an adjacent cage got a grape for the same action. Capuchin monkeys prefer grapes to cucumbers – and the individual receiving the cucumber soon started to “protest” by throwing the unloved vegetable back at the experimenter.


Capuchin monkeys also showed an awareness of what’s fair. orangecrush, Shutterstock
The capuchin monkeys were also well aware of unfairness in the amount of effort they had to expend to receive a reward. When they had to “work” for a reward – and could see that their experimental partner received the reward as a “gift”, they stopped participating.
A number of other primate species, including chimpanzees, rhesus macaques and long-tailed macaques, have been shown to express some form of behavioural responses to inequity. Apart from primates, two further highly social mammalian species, dogs and rats, have also been shown to be sensitive to unfairness.
Bird brains
But what about non mammalian species? In recent years, the family of corvids has become one of the prime models when it comes to studying cognition in birds. Corvids are a large family of more than 120 species – including ravens, crows, magpies and jays. Corvids are highly social and have flexible social systems. Adult ravens for example live in territorial pairs, whereas jackdaws live in large community groups. In some species, such as the carrion crow, sociability depends on the environment – they might breed in male-female pairs in some environments as well as cooperative groups in others.
Various forms of naturally occurring cooperation can be observed in different corvid species. They help each other in aggressive encounters and share resources such as food or information about predators. So, given the extent to which corvids have been seen to cooperate in the wild, we expected them to have a sense of fairness and unfairness.
We decided to put them to the same test as the primates. The test subjects were four common ravens and six carrion crows. The birds received a piece of cheese as their reward (they like cheese) and a piece of grape as the booby prize. In one experiment, both individuals received the same food reward for exchanging a token with a human experimenter, while in another, one bird received only grapes for exchanging, whereas the other was given cheese. We also tried what’s called an “effort control” experiment in which the test subject had to exchange its token either for a piece of cheese or a piece of grape while the other bird was given the same reward, but got it as a gift and did not have to exchange for it.
In the “inequity” condition the subject crow – the bird that was being unfairly treated – stopped taking the lesser reward. In the “effort control” they stopped exchanging their token for the reward when they saw the other bird getting its reward for no effort. In both cases they could see how they were being treated unfairly and decided not to cooperate.
So in this respect, corvids are like some mammals – and a high complexity and flexibility in cooperation may have driven the evolution of this awareness of what is fair and what isn’t. The fact that inequity aversion is present not only in a number of primate species but also corvids suggests that this idea of fairness and cooperation is something that cooperative species have got in common which has enabled them to evolve sociability.
Claudia Wascher will be giving a talk: Unfairness ruffles crows’ feathers as part of the Cambridge Science Festival from March 13 to 26.
The Conversation
Claudia Wascher, Lecturer in Animal and Environmental Biology, Anglia Ruskin University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article

Animals Know When They Are Being Treated Unfairly (And They Don’t Like It)

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