A New Carbon Renewal Program, NASA's Latest Project, & Sound In A Vacuum (Patreon)

US Launches Pilot Program for Carbon Removal

The US Department of Energy has announced it will spend $1.2 billion on two direct carbon capture facilities in Louisiana and Texas. This is a very interesting step because so far governmental efforts – if they exist at all – have focused on technologies that capture carbon dioxide at the source before it is released (known as carbon capture and storage). The two facilities will instead remove carbon dioxide from that atmosphere. I welcome this development because the way things are going we will need all carbon removal we can achieve to get to net zero by 2050.

Read more here.

NASA to Launch Streaming Service

NASA is about to revamp its website and launch its first ever on-demand streaming platform, NASA+. You can watch the trailer for the streaming platform here and visit a “beta” version of the updated website here to submit feedback.

NASA says the new streaming platform will serve as an information hotspot for updates about NASA’s research and missions including space exploration updates, climate studies, Artemis moon mission updates, and more.

For one example of what NASA’s platform will cover, you can view NASA’s recent coverage of the spacewalk with cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petellin who exited the International Space Station’s module on August 9 in order to attach debris shields to a module. Read more here and here.

Sound in Vacuum (Kind of)

If you’ve ever watched a scifi movie and groaned when an explosion in outer space was audible, this one’s for you. Two physicists from the University of Jyväskylä in Finland have found a way to transmit sound through a vacuum gap, kind of. Their trick was to use a piezoelectric material that converts pressure into electric energy. The sound impacts on the material, and converts it into electromagnetic waves, which can then travel through the vacuum gap, after which they’re converted back.  

They have demonstrated that the effect works the frequency range of audible sound (Hz-KHz), ultrasound (MHaz), and hypersound (GHz), as long as the vacuum gap is smaller than the wavelength of the transmitted waves. The team say that the idea may find application in smartphone technology though I recommend you don’t use your smartphone in vacuum. Press release here. Paper here.