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A filamentary dark cloud, a possible “bone in the skeleton of the Milky Way,” as seen in the infrared wm2m cellular routerith the Spitzer Space Telescope’s IRAC camera. This filament stretches over about 45 light-years.

Using infrared surveys from the Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers have identified ten new filamentary dark clouds in the Milky Way and are looking for more in order to study the “skeletal” makeup of the galaxy.

Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is a typical barred spiral galaxy, a flattened disk of about a hundred billion stars, gas, and dust that is roughly one hundred thousand light-years in diameter. The galactic disk is surrounded by a large spherical, diffuse halo roughly about five hundred thousand light-years in diameter. Although it is our home, many fundamental quest IIoT  ions remain about the Milky Way’s structure. For instance, how many major spiral arms does it have, two or four? What are the precise locations and shapes of these arms? What is the nature of the inter-arm structures —are they well-defined spurs of star and gas or more web-like in form? And not least, does it even make sense to describe the Milky Way as a typical spiral?

One difficulty astronomers encounter in answering these and similar questions is the fact that we are embedded within the very galaxy we are attempting to disentangle. The current understanding of the Milky Way’s three dimensional structure stems largely from measurements of the velocity of its gas clouds. Like all spirals the Milky Way rotates, and knowing the general plan of rotation enables astronomers to relate the line-of-sight velocities into distances and hence to construct a rough, three-dimensional model (although it is often difficult to disentangle features at different distances but along the same line-of-sight).

CfA astronomers Catherine Zucker, Cara Battersby and Alyssa Goodman have been trying to trace the “skeletal structure” of the Milky Way as defined by dense, filamentary, and very elongated cold, dark clouds of gas and dust. These structures can stretch over as much as a thousand light-years in length yet are only a few light-years across. The scientists argue that they are part of a kind of spine for the spiral arms in which they reside. The first one was spotted in mid-infrared surveys about five years ago, and the team set out to discover other skeletal features with the aim of using them to help resolve some of the outstanding puzzles of the Milky Ways structure.

The astronomers used infrared surveys to identify ten new, candidate features, all of which lie parallel to and very close to the mid-plane of the Galaxy. Six have aspect ratios of more than about fifty-to-one, and masses of thousands of solar masses (perhaps even up to ten thousand solar-masses). Analysis of the results supports the i Industrial Wireless M2M products dea that these filaments mark the locations of significant features in the spiral arms. The team hopes to be able to identify hundreds of similar Milky Way “bones,” and to combine these skeletal structures with other tracers of the Galactic framework in order to piece together a much better view of the Milky Way’s architecture.

PDF Copy of the Study: The Skeleton of the Milky Way

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A false color image shows the grand design spiral galaxy NGC 3359, which is about 50 million light years from us. NGC 3359 appears to be devouring a much smaller gas rich dwarf galaxy, nicknamed the Little Cub, which contains 10,000 times fewer stars than its larger companion. The contours show where the gas is being stripped from the Little Cub, whose stars are located in the central blue circle. Credit: SDSS Collaboration.

Astronomers view a primitive galaxy that is about to be consumed by a gigantic neighboring galaxy. The discovery could provide clues about the early Universe.

The Little Cub galaxy – so called because it sits in the Ursa Major or Great Bear constellation – is being stripped of the gas needed to continue forming stars by its larger companion.

The find means scientists now have a rare opportunity to observe a dwarf galaxy as its gas is removed by the effects of a nearby giant galaxy to learn more about how this process happens. As the Little Cub has remained almost 4g LTE routerpristine since its formation, scientists also hope its elements will reveal more about the chemical signature of the Universe just minutes after the Big Bang.

The Little Cub and its larger neighbour, a grand design spiral galaxy called NGC 3359, are about 200 to 300 thousand light years apart, and approximately 50 million light years from Earth. Gas from the Little Cub is being stripped away by its interaction with NGC 3359, which has up to 10,000 times as many stars as the Little Cub and is similar to our Milky Way. By observing this cosmic feast, scientists hope to understand more about how and when gas is lost from smaller galaxies.

“We may be witnessing the quenching of a near-pristine galaxy as it makes its first passage about a Milky Way-like galaxy,” said lead author Tiffany Hsyu, a graduate student in the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz.

“It is rare for such a tiny galaxy to still contain gas and be forming stars when it is in close proximity to a much larger galaxy so this is a great opportunity to see just how this process works.” “Essentially the larger galaxy is removing the fuel that the Little Cub needs to form stars, which will eventually shut down star formation and lead to the smaller galaxy’s demise.”

The researchers also hope to gain an insight into the make-up of the very early Universe, by studying the hydrogen and helium atoms that are being illuminated by the small number of very bright stars within the Little Cub – which also has the less romantic name SDSS J1044+6306. Since this galaxy is so primitive, it may still preserve the hydrogen and helium atoms that were created minutes after the Big Bang.

Research co-author Dr Ryan Cooke, Royal Society University Research Fellow, in Durham University’s Center for Extragalactic Astronomy, said: “We know by studying the chemistry of the Little Cub that it is one of the most primitive objects currently known in our cosmic neighborhood.”

“Such galaxies, which have remained dormant for most of their lives, are believed to contain the chemical elements forged a few minutes after the Big Bang.” “By measuring the relative number of hydrogen and helium atoms in the Little Cub we might be able to learn more about what made up the Universe in the moments after it began 13.7 billion years ago.”

The researchers hope further observations will find more pristine galaxies where the chemical signature of the early Universe might be found. The Little Cub was initially identified as a potentially pristine dwarf galaxy in data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Follow-up observations were conducted using the 3-meter Shane Telescope at Lick Observator Remote Diagnostics  y and the 10-meter telescope at the WM Keck Observatory.

“The Little Cub’s discovery is a terrific example of using the smaller 3-meter-class Lick Observatory to scan through hundreds of candidates before focusing on the best sources with UC’s 10-meter Keck telescope,” said co-author J Industrial 3G Router  . Xavier Prochaska, Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz.

A paper describing the discovery of Little Cub has been submitted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. The research was funded by the WM Keck Foundation, Google, The Royal Society, NASA, the Science and Technology Facilities Council and the National Science Foundation (USA).

The Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting is taking place at the University of Hull, UK, until Thursday, 6 July, 2017.

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Glimpse of the Milky Way: this artist’s view shows the location of the Sun and the star forming region G007.47+00.05 at the opposite side of the galaxy, in the Scutum-Centaurus spiral arm. © Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF; Robert Hurt, NASA.

Using the Very Long Baseline Array, astronomers achieve record measurement for an improved picture of the Milky Way.

Astronomers from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, using the Very Long Baseline Array, have directly measured a distance of more than 66,000 light-years to a star-forming region. This region, known as G007.47+00.05, is on the opposite side of our Milky Way 4g lte modemGalaxy from the Sun. The researchers’ achievement reaches deep into the Milky Way’s terra incognita and nearly doubles the previous record for distance measurement within our Galaxy.

Distance measurements are crucial for an understanding of the structure of the Milky Way. Most of our Galaxy’s material, consisting principally of stars, gas, and dust, lies within a flattened disk, in which our Solar System is embedded. Because we cannot see our Galaxy face-on, its structure, including the shape of its spiral arms, can only be mapped by measuring distances to objects elsewhere in the Galaxy.

The astronomers used a technique called trigonometric parallax, first applied by Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel in 1838 to measure the distance to the star 61 Cygni in the constellation of the Swan. This technique measures the apparent shift in the sky position of a celestial object as seen from opposite sides of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. This effect can be demonstrated by holding a finger in front of one’s nose and alternately closing each eye — the finger appears to jump from side to side.

Measuring the angle of an object’s apparent shift in position this way allows astronomers to use simple trigonometry to directly calculate the distance to that object. The smaller the measured angle, the greater the distance is. In the framework of the Bar and  LTE cat 1 ConnectvitySpiral Structure Legacy (BeSSeL) Survey, it is now possible to measure parallaxes a thousand times more accurate than Friedrich Bessel. The Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), a continent-wide radio telescope system, with ten dish antennas distributed across North America, Hawaii, and the Caribbean, can measure the minuscule angles associated with great distances. In this case, the measurement was roughly equal to the angular size of a baseball on the Moon.

Highly complex observations: The calculation of distances is principally simple, but requires highly accurate measurements of the angle of apparent shifts in an object’s position – only the VLBA has the capability to deliver such measurements. © Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF; Robert Hurt, NASA.

“Using the VLBA, we now can accurately map the whole extent of our Galaxy,” says Alberto Sanna, of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany (MPIfR).

The new VLBA observations, made in 2014 and 2015, measured a distance of more than 66,000 light-years to the star-forming region G007.47+00.05 on the opposite side of the Milky Way from the Sun, well past the Galaxy’s center in a distance of 27,000 light-years. The previous record for a parallax measurement was about 36,000 light-years.

“Most of the stars and gas in our Galaxy are within this newly-measured distance from the Sun. With the VLBA, we now have the capability to measure enough distances to accurately trace the Galaxy’s spiral arm intelligent traffic enforcement  s and learn their true shapes,” Sanna explains.

The VLBA observations measured the distance to a region where new stars are being formed.

Such regions include areas where molecules of water and methanol act as natural amplifiers of radio signals — masers, the radio-wave equivalent of lasers for light waves. This effect makes the radio signals bright and readily observable with radio telescopes.

The Milky Way has hundreds of such star-forming regions that include masers. “So we have plenty of ‘mileposts’ to use for our mapping project. But this one is special: Looking all the way through the Milky Way, past its center, way out into the other side”, says the MPIfR’s Karl Menten.

The astronomers’ goal is to finally reveal what our own Galaxy looks like if we could leave it, travel outward perhaps a million light-years, and view it face-on, rather than along the plane of its disk. This task will require many more observations and much painstaking work, but, the scientists say, the tools for the job now are in hand. How long will it take?

“Within the next 10 years, we should have a fairly complete picture,” predicts Mark Reid of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Publication: Alberto Sanna, et al., “Mapping spiral structure on the far side of the Milky Way,” Science 13 Oct 2017: Vol. 358, Issue 6360, pp. 227-230; DOI: 10.1126/science.aan5452

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Deforestation and a changin Distribution Power Line Monitoring System  g climate high in the Andes can adversely impact Colombia’s cities far below. Credit: Flickr/Matthew Rutledge

At more than 11,000 feet above sea level, very important ecosystems known as páramos exist. These kinds of ecosystems are only found in Central and South America and resemble a sort of alpine archipelago, each a link between distinct island ecosystems that exist nowhere else on the planet.

These páramos play a crucial role in maintaining a reliable water supply for millions of people in Bogotá and Medellín. And along with the forests below, they also protect the cities from intelligent vending machineflooding. Colombia’s second rainy season of the year began in September. Some parts of the country have had little respite from the deluge. Scientists believe that climate change is a factor in the flooding, and it has affected three quarters of Colombia in the past two years.

The degradation of the high Andean ecosystems is accelerating and there are growing concerns that the floods will become a chronic problem. Páramos and cloud forests are a part of the ecological engineering that manages the flow of water from the high mountains to the lakes and rivers below. They act like a sponge, absorbing and releasing water down the mountainside to the cloud forests. From there, the water is filtered and directed into rivers and reservoirs that supply the cities.

This system supplies 80% of the drinking water in Bogotá. The annual precipitation reaches 13 feet in some areas. The extreme, prolonged rainy season in 2010 and 2011 could offer a preview of the damage climate shifts may have on urban areas in the future. In Medellín, heavy rains have created rivers in the city center that have led to landslides. The Bogotá River is overflowing and flooding low-lying neighborhoods. Thr telemeter  ee million Colombians, about 7% of the total population, were displaced or suffered damage in 2011 as a result of flooding.

Climate models predict that warming in the Andes will contribute to more flooding and drought as mountain environments change. High altitude ecosystems like páramos are sensitive to warming, much like coral reefs and glaciers. One páramo research station showed increases in minimum temperatures that were almost twice that of lower elevations, while increases in maximum temperatures jumped to nearly three times the average at lower elevations.

Extreme rains are likely to cause more runoff and soil erosion, which is a recipe for more flooding. Dry periods are getting longer and wet seasons are getting more extreme. The conversion of mountain forest to pasture and croplands has raised temperatures in the region, prompting a lifting of the cloud level, enough to leave some cloud forests and páramos below the fog, increasing solar radiation. This causes plants found at lower elevations to move higher, which disrupts the delicate biological machinery that makes páramos and high forests function as a water storage and distribution system.

Páramos are receiving more precipitation as rain instead of fog. This affects plants adapted to collect moisture from fog and the soil. The heavier raindrops also compact the soil, causing it to absorb less water, increasing runoff and sediment, clogging rivers and contributing to lowland flooding.

[via Scientific American]

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Composite aerial photograph of Area A, showing Building 101. (Photographs by Sky-View and Griffin Aerial Imaging; dividing lines not marked.)

Over the last 25 years many scholars have questioned the existence of the kingdom of David and Solomon, which was supposed to have existed in the 10th century BCE. This was based to a large extent on the lack of evidence of royal construction at the heart of the region in which the kingdom supposedly existed. As a result, it was assumed that the rulers at the time were just local chiefs who ruled only over Jerusalem and its immediate surroundings.

Now researchers from Bar-Ilan University in Israel have uncovered new evidence that supports the existence of Israel’s united monarchy and indicate that the Kingdom extended beyond Jerusalem’s vicinity. The findings were recently published by Pr Vending Telemetry  of. Avraham Faust and Dr. Yair Sapir in the journal Radiocarbon.

Over the past decade Prof. Avi Faust, of the Martin (Szusz) Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology at Bar-Ilan University, excavated a large residence of the type, known as a “four-room house,” which was destroyed in massive conflagration in the 8th century BCE, during one of the Assyrian campaigns. The residence is located at Tel ‘Eton in the Shephelah (20 km. southeast of the city of Qiryat Gat). This large building had at least two stories and its ground floor extended over some 225 sq. m. Large, high quality ashlar stones were placed in the building’s corners and entrances. The structure was built on the highest part of the mound, on top of deep foundations, using high quality building materials and according to a meticulous plan. Hundreds of vessels and additional finds were discovered within the conflagration. “Surprisingly, radiocarbon dates from within the floor make-up and from within a foundation deposit that was placed MV smart grid sensorbelow the floor indicate that the building had already been erected in the 10th century BCE, between the late 11th century and the third quarter of the 10th century BCE. This date is in line with other finds related to the construction, like the foundation deposit itself,” says Prof. Faust. Faust and Sapir say that construction of such a large residence on the top of the mound, visible from a great distance, along with the significant growth of the size of the city at the same time, was an important event in the history of Tel ‘Eton.

But who initiated the change? The researchers say that the evidence hints at the identity of the builders. The mere fact that the residence was built as a classical four-room house, a style that was very dominant in Israelite sites and missing or rare at Canaanite and Philistine sites, seems to send a clear message regarding the identity of the builders – the emerging Israelite polity in the highlands.

Interestingly, however, the site was not destroyed during the changes, and new construction and development were apparently not a result of a conquest and the arrival of new population. Thus, while the transformations were inspired by the highland kingdom, the development was done in cooperation with the local population. This is also indicated by the combination of the highland, Israelite-inspired architectural style, along with the use of the Canaanite tradition of placing foundation deposits below the floors.

The finds are indicative of impressive public construction underway already in the 10th century BCE, and even on the use of ashlar stones in the region of Judah at this early stage. When the finds from Tel ‘Eton are combined with those at other sites in the region, the process in which the highland polity took over the Shephelah, and gradually colonized it, can be reconstructed.

Faust and Sapir stress that “the association with David is not based on direct archaeological evidence, but solely on circumstantial grounds”. The source of the changes at Tel ‘Eton (i. Vending PC  e,. the erection of the four-room residency and the growth in size of the site) appears to be in the highlands, and since these changes took place at the time when David was supposed to have existed in the highland, the link is plausible.” They add that “if someone thinks that there was no king by the name of David, we should find another name to call the highland king in whose time the region was incorporated into the highland kingdom.”

Beyond the identification of social complexity in Judah already in the 10th century BCE, the study has broader implications for archaeology. “The finds from Tel ‘Eton indicate that structures can exist for centuries, but the finds reflect their last period of usage. From their long lives – sometimes centuries – very little will be found, and even less will be reported,” says Faust. One of the negative implications of this, he says, is that a series of destructive events following a long period of peace will lead to extensive information on the time of the destruction, but very little on the era that preceded it. “Archaeologists should therefore be careful when they conclude that the rarity of finds from these eras indicates that society was poor, and lacked social complexity.”

Publication: Avraham Faust and Yair Sapir, “The “Governor’s Residency” at Tel ‘Eton, The United Monarchy, and the Impact of the Old-House Effect on Large-Scale Archaeological Reconstructions,” Radiocarbon, 2018; doi:10.1017/RDC.2018.10

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This photo shows an array of 1-mm-wide by 2-cm-long single-crystal organic semiconductors. The neatly aligned blue strips are what provide greater electric charge mobility. The Stanford logo shown here is the same size as a dime. Credit: Y. Diao, B. C-K. Tee, et al.

Using a new a printing process called FLUENCE (fluid-enhanced crystal engineering), researchers have developed highly aligned single-crystalline organic semiconductor thin films that are capable of conducting electricity 10 times more efficiently than those created using conventional methods.

Menlo Park, California — Through innovations to a printing process, researchers have made major improvements to organic electronics—a technology in demand for lightweight, low-cost solar cells, flex wireless atm  ible electronic displays and tiny sensors. The printing method is fast and works with a variety of organic materials to produce semiconductors of strikingly higher quality than what has so far been achieved with similar methods.

Organic electronics have great promise for a variety of applications, but even the highest quality films available today fall short in how well they conduct electrical current. The team from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have developed a printing process they call FLUENCE—fluid-enhanced crystal engineering—that for some materials results in thin films capable of conducting electricity 10 times more efficiently than those created using conventional methods.

“Even better, most of the concepts behind FLUENCE can scale up to meet industry requirements,” said Ying Diao, a SLAC/Stanford postdoctoral researcher and lead author of the study, which appeared today in Nature Materials.

Stefan Mannsfeld, a SLAC materials physicist and one of the principal investigators of the experiment, said the key was to focus on the physics of the printing process rather than the chemical makeup of the semiconductor. Diao engineered the process to produce strips of big, neatly aligned crystals that electrical charge can flow through easily, while preservin Industrial Wireless M2M Router g the benefits of the “strained  Industrial IoT Router/Gateway  lattice” structure and “solution shearing” printing technique previously developed in the lab of Mannsfeld’s co-principal investigator, Professor Zhenan Bao of the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences, a joint SLAC-Stanford institute.

This image shows a simulation, called a “streamline representation,” of the organic semiconductor solution flowing around the micropillars and mixing in the spaces below. The colors indicate different speeds for the solution as it passes the micropillars and gets mixed behind them: deep blue is 0 mm/s, all the way up to red for 1.3 mm/s. Credit: Y. Diao et al.

To make the advance, Diao focused on controlling the flow of the liquid in which the organic material is dissolved. “It’s a vital piece of the puzzle,” she said. If the ink flow does not distribute evenly, as is often the case during fast printing, the semiconducting crystals will be riddled with defects. “But in this field there’s been little research done on controlling fluid flow.”

Diao designed a printing blade with tiny pillars embedded in it that mix the ink so it forms a uniform film. She also engineered a way around another problem: the tendency of crystals to randomly form across the substrate. A series of cleverly designed chemical patterns on the substrate suppress the formation of unruly crystals that would otherwise grow out of alignment with the printing direction. The result is a film of large, well-aligned crystals.

X-ray studies of the group’s organic semiconductors at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) allowed them to inspect their progress and continue to make improvements, eventually showing neatly arranged crystals at least 10 times longer than crystals created with other solution-based techniques, and of much greater structural perfection.

The group also repeated the experiment using a second organic semiconductor material with a significantly different molecular structure, and again they saw a notable improvement in the quality of the film. They believe this is a sign the techniques will work across a variety of materials.

Principal investigators Bao and Mannsfeld say the next step for the group is pinning down the underlying relationship between the material and the process that enabled such a stellar result. Such a discovery could provide an unprecedented degree of control over the electronic properties of printed films, optimizing them for the devices that will use them.

“That could lead to a revolutionary advance in organic electronics,” Bao said. “We’ve been making excellent progress, but I think we’re only just scratching the surface.”

Other study co-authors included researchers from Stanford University’s departments of chemistry and chemical and electrical engineering and Nanjing University. The research was supported by SLAC’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development program. SSRL is a national user facility operated by Stanford University on behalf of the DOE’s Office of Science.

Cross-polarized optical micrograph comparing a sample of an organic semiconducting film created without micropillars (top) and with micropillars (bottom) at scales of both one millimeter and 50 micrometers. Note the uniformity of the crystals in the bottom image as compared to the images in the top. Credit: Y. Diao et al.

SLAC is a multi-program laboratory exploring frontier questions in photon science, astrophysics, particle physics and accelerator research. Located in Menlo Park, California, SLAC is operated by Stanford University for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. To learn more, please visit www.slac.stanford.edu.

DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.

Publication: Ying Diao, et al., “Solution coating of large-area organic semiconductor thin films with aligned single-crystalline domains,” Nature Materials (2013); doi:10.1038/nmat3650

Images: Y. Diao et al.

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MIT chemistry professor Yogesh Surendranath and three colleagues have found a way to use electricity, which could potentially come from renewable sources, to convert methane into derivatives of methanol. The researchers developed a low-temperature electrochemical process that would continuously replenish a catalyst material that can rapidly carry out the conversion.

Scientists at MIT have developed a new way to harness wasted methane that could help curb needless DIN-Rail router   “flaring” of potent greenhouse gas.

Methane gas, a vast natural resource, is often disposed of through burning, but new research by scientists at MIT could make it easier to capture this gas for use as fuel or a chemical feedstock.

Many oil wells burn off methane — the largest component of natural gas — in a process called flaring, which currently wastes 150 billion cubic meters of the gas each year and generates a staggering 400 million tons of carbon dioxide, making this process a significant contributor to global warming. Letting the gas escape unburned would lead to even greater environmental harm, however, because methane is an even more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide is.

Why is all this methane being wasted, when at the same time natural gas is touted as an important “bridge” fuel as the world steers away from fossil fuels, and is the centerpiece of the so-called shale-gas revolution? The answer, as the saying goes in the real estate business, is simple: location, location, location.

The wells where methane is flared away are primarily being exploited for their petroleum; the methane is simply a byproduct. In places where it is convenient to do so, methane is captured and used to generate electrical power or produce chemicals. However, special equipment is needed to cool and pressurize methane gas, and special pressurized containers or pipelines are needed to transport it. In many places, such as offshore oil platforms or remote oil fields far from the needed infrastructure, that’s just not economically viable.

But now, MIT chemistry professor Yogesh Surendranath and three colleagues have found a way to use electricity, which could potentially come from renewable sources, to convert methane into derivatives of methanol, a liquid that can be made into automotive fuel or used as a precursor to a variety of chemical products. This new method may allow for lower-cost methane conversion at remote sites. The findings, described in the journal ACS Central Science, could pave the way to making use of a significant methane supply that is otherwise totally wasted.

“This finding opens the doors for a new paradigm of methane conversion chemistry,” says Jillian Dempsey, an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of North Carolina, who was not involved in this work.

Existing industrial processes for converting methane to liquid intermediate chemical forms requires very high operating temperatures and large, capital-intensive equipment. Instead, the researchers have developed a low-temperature electrochemical process that would continuously replenish a catalyst material that can rapidly carry out the conversion. This technology could potentially lead to “a relatively low-cost, on-site addition to existing wellhead operations,” says Surendranath, who is the Paul M. Cook Career Development Assistant Professor in MIT’s Department of Chemistry.

The electricity to power such systems could come from wind turbines or solar panels close to the site, he says. This electrochemical process, he says, could provide a way to do the methane conversion — a process also known as functionalizing — “remotely, where a lot of the ‘stranded’ methane reserves are.”

Already, he says, “methane is playing a key role as a transition fuel.” But the amount of this valuable fuel that is now just flared away, he says, “is pretty staggering.” That vast amount of wasted natural gas can even be seen in satellite images of the Earth at night, in areas such as the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota that light up as brightly as big metropolitan areas due to flaring. Based on World Bank estimates, global flaring of methane wastes an amount equivalent to approximately one-fifth of U.S. natural gas consumption.

When that gas gets flared off rather than directly released, Surendranath says, “you’re reducing the environmental harm, but you’re also wasting the energy.” Finding a way to do methane conversion at sufficiently low cost to make it practical for remote sites “has been a grand challenge in chemistry for decades,” he says. What makes methane conversion so tough is that the carbon-hydrogen bonds in the methane molecule resist being broken, an 3g router d at the same time there’s a risk of overdoing the reaction and ending up with a runaway process that destroys the desired end-product.

Catalysts that could do the job have been studied for many years, but they typically require harsh chemica inhand network  l agents that limit the speed of the reaction, he says. The key new advance was adding an electrical driving force that could be tuned precisely to generate more potent catalysts with very high reaction rates. “Since we’re using electricity to drive the process, this opens up new opportunities for making the process more rapid, selective, and portable than existing methods,” Surendranath says. And in addition, “we can access catalysts that no one has observed before, because we’re generating them in a new way.”

The result of the reaction is a pair of liquid chemicals, methyl bisulfate and methanesulfonic acid, which can be further processed to make liquid methanol, a valuable chemical intermediate to fuels, plastics, and pharmaceuticals. The additional processing steps needed to make methanol remain very challenging and must be perfected before this technology can be implemented on an industrial scale. The researchers are actively refining their method to tackle these technological hurdles.

“This work really stands out because it not only reports a new system for selective catalytic functionalization of methane to methanol precursors, but it includes detailed insight into how the system is able to carry out this selective chemistry. The mechanistic information will be instrumental in translating this exciting discovery into an industrial technology,” Dempsey says.

The research team included postdoc Matthew O’Reilly and doctoral students Rebecca Soyoung Kim and Seokjoon Oh, all in MIT’s Department of Chemistry. The work was supported by the Italian energy company Eni S.p.A. through the MIT Energy Initiative.

Publication: Matthew E. O’Reilly, et al., “Catalytic Methane Monofunctionalization by an Electrogenerated High-Valent Pd Intermediate,” ACS Cent. Sci., 2017; DOI: 10.1021/acscentsci.7b00342

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Here’s a bit of good news for renewable energy from Germany. The German Solar Industry Association (BSW) says that the nation’s solar power producers have now produced 60% more e ethernet switch  lectricity in 2011 than they did in all of 2010, producing 18 billion kWh. That’s very impressive growth.

19.9% of Germany’s energy was produced from low-carbon sources in  Vending Touchscreen  2011, up from 16.4% in 2010. BSW’s managing director Carsten Koe Smart Vending rnig stated that “solar energy has become an indispensable ingredient of a successful energy strategy shift.” The solar sector alone has produced enough electricity to power about 5.1 million homes. That’s about one-eighth of all homes in Germany.

Due to unfavorable weather conditions, some say that the solar sector’s production remains volatile and unsustainable, relying on a subsidy-driven situation. That leads to high cost for consumers. Koernig isn’t worried about that and says that the solar industry stands by its commitments to cut costs, which have already dropped by 50 percent since 2007. Lower costs and growth paint a nice picture for the country’s energy situation.