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Environmental News Network -- Know Your Environment
Our ever-changing sun continuously shoots solar material into space. The grandest such events are massive clouds that erupt from the sun, called coronal mass ejections, or CMEs. These solar storms often come first with some kind of warning — the bright flash of a flare, a burst of heat or a flurry of solar energetic particles. But another kind of storm has puzzled scientists for its lack of typical warning signs: They seem to come from nowhere, and scientists call them stealth CMEs.
Tropical Cyclone Donna continues to move through the South Pacific Ocean as a major hurricane. NASA's Aqua satellite passed over the storm and captured an image of a clear eye as the storm was located between the island nations of Vanuatu and New Caledonia. The GPM satellite found that the powerful hurricane was generating very high amounts of rainfall.
Two-dimensional graphene consists of single layers of carbon atoms and exhibits intriguing properties. The transparent material conducts electricity and heat extremely well. It is at the same time flexible and solid. Additionally, the electrical conductivity can be continuously varied between a metal and a semiconductor by, e.g., inserting chemically bound atoms and molecules into the graphene structure – the so-called functional groups. These unique properties offer a wide range of future applications as e.g. for new developments in optoelectronics or ultrafast components in the semiconductor industry. However, a successful use of graphene in the semiconductor industry can only be achieved if properties such as the conductivity, the size and the defects of the graphene structure induced by the functional groups can already be modulated during the synthesis of graphene.
If they’re quick about it, “hot” electrons excited in a plasmonic metal can tunnel their way across a nanoscale gap to a neighboring metal. Rice University scientists said the cool part is what happens in the gap.
A Rice team discovered those electrons can create a photovoltage about a thousand times larger than what is seen if there is no gap. The finding shows it should be possible to create nanoscale photodetectors that convert light into electricity and can be used as sensors or in other sophisticated electronics.
A new process for water filtration using carbon dioxide consumes one thousand times less energy than conventional methods, scientific research published this week has shown.
The research was led by University of Limerick’s Dr Orest Shardt together with Dr Sangwoo Shin (now at University of Hawaii, Manoa), while they were post doctoral researchers at Princeton University last year.
A large nuclear cardiology laboratory has slashed its average radiation dose by 60% in eight years, according to new research presented today at ICNC 2017 and published in JACC: Cardiovascular Imaging.1,2 The study in over 18 000 patients shows dose reductions were achieved despite a large number of obese patients.
