#ionized

The Life "Grace" (CFCF Remix) released April 12, 2023 via Music Website (@musicwebsiteblog).

Stream it here: https://ffm.to/the-life-grace-cfcf-remix.PNJ

"pitch-perfect bloghouse" -@thefader

Written by Curtis Everett Pawley Remix by CFCF Mastered by Ryan Schwabe

It's easy to get lost following the intricate, looping, twisting filaments in this detailed image of supernova remnant Simeis 147 or, as it’s better known as, the Spaghetti Nebula. Seen about 3,000 light years away, toward the boundary of the constellations Taurus and Auriga, it covers nearly 3 degrees or 6 full moons on the sky- about 150 light-years wide. This composite image includes data taken through narrow-band filters where the reddish emission is from ionized hydrogen atoms and doubly ionized oxygen atoms is in faint blue-green hues. The supernova remnant has an estimated age of about 40,000 years, meaning light from the massive stellar explosion first reached Earth 40,000 years ago. But the expanding remnant is not the only aftermath. The cosmic catastrophe also left behind a spinning neutron star, or pulsar. It’s all that remains of the original star's core.

Happy new year everyone!

Energetic, charged fragments of air molecules can render dangerous airborne viruses harmless, research shows.

Researchers hope to one day harness this capability to replace a century-old device: the surgical mask.

The engineers have measured the virus-killing speed and effectiveness of nonthermal plasmas—the ionized, or charged, particles that form around electrical discharges such as sparks. A nonthermal plasma reactor was able to inactivate or remove from the airstream 99.9 percent of a test virus, with the vast majority due to inactivation.

Achieving these results in a fraction of a second within a stream of air holds promise for many applications where sterile air supplies are needed.

“The most difficult disease transmission route to guard against is airborne because we have relatively little to protect us when we breathe,” says Herek Clack, research associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Michigan.

To gauge nonthermal plasmas’ effectiveness, researchers pumped a model virus—harmless to humans—into flowing air as it entered a reactor. Inside the reactor, borosilicate glass beads are packed into a cylindrical shape, or bed. The viruses in the air flow through the spaces between the beads, and that’s where they are inactivated.

“In those void spaces, you’re initiating sparks,” Clack says. “By passing through the packed bed, pathogens in the air stream are oxidized by unstable atoms called radicals. What’s left is a virus that has diminished ability to infect cells.”

The experiment and its results appear in the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics.

Notably, during these tests researchers also tracked the amount of viral genome that was present in the air. In this way, Clack and his team were able to determine that more than 99 percent of the air sterilizing effect was due to inactivating the virus that was present, with the remainder of the effect due to filtering the virus from the air stream.

“The results tell us that nonthermal plasma treatment is very effective at inactivating airborne viruses,” says Krista Wigginton, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering. “There are limited technologies for air disinfection, so this is an important finding.”

This parallel approach—combining filtration and inactivation of airborne pathogens—could provide a more efficient way of providing sterile air than technologies used today, such as filtration and ultraviolet light. Traditional masks operate using only filtration for protection.

Ultraviolet irradiation can’t sterilize as quickly, as thoroughly, or as compactly has nonthermal plasma.

Clack and his research team have begun testing their reactor on ventilation air streams at a livestock farm near Ann Arbor. Animal agriculture, with its vulnerability to contagious livestock diseases such as avian influenza, has a demonstrated near-term need for such technologies.

Week 245: The Nighttime Sun

Even when the sun has fallen on the North Beach of Haida Gwaii, the sun’s rays still show themselves in the sky. On most nights on the rain soaked islands, the stars are hidden behind clouds in the earth’s atmosphere. Tonight they’re obscured behind ions from the sun’s atmosphere.