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Scientists May Have Discovered How To Extract Power From the Earth's Rotation

2 months 2 weeks ago
Long-time Slashdot reader Baron_Yam writes: No more burning fossil fuels, playing with fissile material, damming rivers, erecting wind mills, or making solar panels. All of our energy needs could potentially be supplied by the angular kinetic energy of the Earth — and because of the mass of the planet, doing so would slow its rotation down by a mere 7ms per century. [Which is similar to speed changes caused by natural phenomena such as the Moon's pull and changing dynamics inside the planet's core."] Normally this would be considered impossible as the Earth's large and uniform field does not induce a current in conductors, but researchers believe that a hollow cylinder of manganese, zinc and iron can alter the interaction with our planetary magnetic field and allow the extraction of energy from it. So far, the results are positive but still below the level where they cannot be explained by multiple possible causes of experimental error. Further research is required to confirm the effect. "The effect was identified only in a carefully crafted device and generated just 17 microvolts," reports Scientific American, "a fraction of the voltage released when a single neuron fires — making it hard to verify that some other effect isn't causing the observations." But if another group can verify the results, the experiment's lead says the next logical step is trying to scale up the device to generate a useful amount of energy.

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EditorDavid

Scientists Create New Heavy-Metal Molecule: 'Berkelocene'

2 months 2 weeks ago
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Mercury News: After a year of fastidious planning, a microscopic sample of the ultra-rare radioactive element berkelium arrived at a Berkeley Lab. With just 48 hours to experiment before it would become unusable, a group of nearly 20 researchers focused intently on creating a brand-new molecule. Using a chemical glove box, a polycarbonate glass box with protruding gloves that shields substances from oxygen and moisture, scientists combined the berkelium metal with an organic molecule containing only carbon and hydrogen to create a chemical reaction... [Post-doc researcher Dominic] Russo, researcher Stefan Minasian, and 17 other scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory had created berkelocene, a new molecule that usurps theorists' expectations about how carbon bonds with heavy-metal elements. In the future, berkelocene may help humanity safely dispose of nuclear waste, according to a study published in the academic journal Science... The new molecular structure is, in the nomenclature of researchers, a "sandwich." In this formation, a berkelium atom, serving as the filling, lays in between two 8-membered carbon rings — the "bread" — and resembles an atomic foot-long sub. "It has this very symmetric geometry, and it's the first time that that's been observed," Minasian said. The researchers believe more accurate models for how actinide elements like uranium behave will help solve problems related to long-term nuclear waste storage.

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EditorDavid