Tokyo 2020 shows off Olympic medals made from old phones

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Tokyo 2020 shows off Olympic medals made from old phones

Japan’s Tokyo 2020 has unveiled its Olympic medals made from recycled mobile phones. The Tokyo Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games said its Tokyo 2020 Medal Project sourced small electronic devices from all over Japan to create 5,000 gold, silver and bronze medals.
Tokyo 2020 had first announced it would be making its medals out of recycled electronics way back in February 2017, asking the public to donate its old or unwanted phones. Gold, silver and bronze were extracted from the phones, with the same method used in the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games.
“We hope that our project to recycle small consumer electronics and our efforts to contribute to an environmentally friendly and sustainable society will become a legacy of the Tokyo 2020 Games,” Tokyo 2020 said.
The medals symbolize the energy of athletes, as well as the diversity of the games, Tokyo 2020 said, while their brilliant “signifies the warm glow of friendship.”
The design of the medals also represents Japanese culture, with the ribbon showing off modernized ichimatsu moyo (checkered patterns) and kasane no irome (kimono layering techniques). The Tokyo 2020 colors are added to the ribbon through more co2-friendly chemically-recycled polyester fibers.
The medal cases are being created by Japanese craftworkers “with a blend of traditional and modern techniques.”
In another effort to infuse its culture into the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games, Japanese artists are also re-creating flags of countries participating in the event as anime characters, though the project is not officially affiliated with the games.

The Smallest Computer in the World Fits On a Grain of Rice

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Researchers at the University of Michigan just created the world’s smallest computer (again). Their previous micro-computer, the Michigan Micro Mote, measured 2x2x4mm. It was a complete, functioning system powered by solar cell batteries. But in March this year, IBM announced a new, smaller computer, which measured 1×1 mm, and was smaller than a grain of salt. It “raised a few eyebrows at the University of Michigan.”
After all, it’s unclear if the IBM computer even count as an actual microcomputer. The IBM device lost all its programming and data as soon as it turns off, unlike the Michigan Micro Mote, which retained its programming even when it wasn’t externally powered. “It’s more of a matter of opinion whether they have the minimum functionality required,” said David Blaauw, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at University of Michigan who helped develop the University of Michigan’s newest tiny device. If the IBM machine constituted a computer, then University of Michigan would work to gain back their title: their latest microdevice measures 0.3mm per side (1/10th the size of IBM’s computer), and is smaller than a grain of rice.
The device was designed to be a precision temperature sensor that can report temperatures in clusters of cells with an error of about 0.1 degrees Celsius. “When we first made our millimeter system, we actually didn’t know exactly all the things it would be useful for. But once we published it, we started receiving dozens and dozens and dozens of inquiries,” Blaauw said. It could, for instance, measure the temperature of tumors and conduct other cancer studies, monitor oil reservoirs, conduct audio or visual surveillance, or help in “tiny snail studies.”

Anti-Solar Cells Could Keep the Power Going at Night

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Anti-Solar Cells Could Keep the Power Going at Night



Solar panels that work at night? The idea isn’t as far-fetched as it might seem.

A University of California (UC), Davis engineering professor is developing prototypes of an “anti-solar” cell that would work in the opposite way from a typical solar panel. Instead of being cooler than the air and absorbing sunlight, it would be warmer than the air and give off infrared light.

“A regular solar cell generates power by absorbing sunlight, which causes a voltage to appear across the device and for current to flow,” the professor, Jeremy Munday, explained in a UC Davis press release. “In these new devices, light is instead emitted and the current and voltage go in the opposite direction, but you still generate power. You have to use different materials, but the physics is the same.”

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While this might sound high tech, Euronews explained that the principle behind it has been used to cool homes at night for centuries:

You are using the same theory when you open your windows and doors after a hot day to cool down your house. Essentially this form of passive cooling uses the night sky as a massive heat sink, drawing warmth away from the earth once it gets dark.
Munday, who published a concept paper of his idea in the January 2020 issue of ACS Photonics, said that his device could generate around a quarter of the energy a traditional solar panel can during the day — that’s up to 50 watts of power per square meter. While less powerful, his device can be used at any time.


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Solar cells are limited in that they can only work during the day, whereas these devices can work 24/7, which is the real advantage,” Munday told CNN. “Nobody wants to lose power once the sun sets.”

His “thermoradiative cell” would also work during the day if it were pointed away from the sun or otherwise blocked from direct sunlight, the press release explained.

Munday told CNN that the device could be used to achieve carbon neutrality, because it could run on waste heat generated by industry.

“While these panels can produce carbon-free power […] when attached to waste heat sources, they can also produce carbon-free power by just sitting on your roof, like a solar panel,” he said.

Munday is working on prototypes of these cells with the hopes of improving their efficiency and the amount of power they can generate, according to the press release. However, he acknowledged to CNN that traditional solar panels have “decades of development” on his idea.
Munday isn’t the only researcher to seek to generate renewable energy from the heat difference between Earth and space. In May of 2019, a team of international researchers announced that it was possible to generate electricity by pointing an infrared semiconductor at the sky.

“The vastness of the universe is a thermodynamic resource,” paper author Shanhui Fan said in an American Institute of Physics press release published by EurekAlert! at the time.

A New Way To Remove Contaminants From Nuclear Wastewater

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Nuclear power continues to expand globally, propelled, in part, by the fact that it produces few greenhouse gas emissions while providing steady power output. But along with that expansion comes an increased need for dealing with the large volumes of water used for cooling these plants, which becomes contaminated with radioactive isotopes that require special long-term disposal.

Now, a method developed at MIT provides a way of substantially reducing the volume of contaminated water that needs to be disposed of, instead concentrating the contaminants and allowing the rest of the water to be recycled through the plant’s cooling system. The proposed system is described in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, in a paper by graduate student Mohammad Alkhadra, professor of chemical engineering Martin Bazant, and three others.
The method makes use of a process called shock electrodialysis, which uses an electric field to generate a deionization shock wave in the water. The shock wave pushes the electrically charged particles, or ions, to one side of a tube filled with charged porous material, so that concentrated stream of contaminants can be separated out from the rest of the water. The group discovered that two radionuclide contaminants — isotopes of cobalt and cesium — can be selectively removed from water that also contains boric acid and lithium. After the water stream is cleansed of its cobalt and cesium contaminants, it can be reused in the reactor.
The shock electrodialysis process was initially developed by Bazant and his co-workers as a general method of removing salt from water, as demonstrated in their first scalable prototype four years ago. Now, the team has focused on this more specific application, which could help improve the economics and environmental impact of working nuclear power plants. In ongoing research, they are also continuing to develop a system for removing other contaminants, including lead, from drinking water.
Not only is the new system inexpensive and scalable to large sizes, but in principle it also can deal with a wide range of contaminants, Bazant says. “It’s a single device that can perform a whole range of separations for any specific application,” he says.
In their earlier desalination work, the researchers used measurements of the water’s electrical conductivity to determine how much salt was removed. In the years since then, the team has developed other methods for detecting and quantifying the details of what’s in the concentrated radioactive waste and the cleaned water.
“We carefully measure the composition of all the stuff going in and out,” says Bazant, who is the E.G. Roos Professor of Chemical Engineering as well as a professor of mathematics. “This really opened up a new direction for our research.” They began to focus on separation processes that would be useful for health reasons or that would result in concentrating material that has high value, either for reuse or to offset disposal costs.
The method they developed works for sea water desalination, but it is a relatively energy-intensive process for that application. The energy cost is dramatically lower when the method is used for ion-selective separations from dilute streams such as nuclear plant cooling water. For this application, which also requires expensive disposal, the method makes economic sense, he says. It also hits both of the team’s targets: dealing with high-value materials and helping to safeguard health. The scale of the application is also significant — a single large nuclear plant can circulate about 10 million cubic meters of water per year through its cooling system, Alkhadra says.
For their tests of the system, the researchers used simulated nuclear wastewater based on a recipe provided by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which sponsored the research and is a major builder of nuclear plants. In the team’s tests, after a three-stage separation process, they were able to remove 99.5 percent of the cobalt radionuclides in the water while retaining about 43 percent of the water in cleaned-up form so that it could be reused. As much as two-thirds of the water can be reused if the cleanup level is cut back to 98.3 percent of the contaminants removed, the team found.
While the overall method has many potential applications, the nuclear wastewater separation, is “one of the first problems we think we can solve [with this method] that no other solution exists for,” Bazant says. No other practical, continuous, economic method has been found for separating out the radioactive isotopes of cobalt and cesium, the two major contaminants of nuclear wastewater, he adds.
While the method could be used for routine cleanup, it could also make a big difference in dealing with more extreme cases, such as the millions of gallons of contaminated water at the damaged Fukushima Daichi power plant in Japan, where the accumulation of that contaminated water has threatened to overpower the containment systems designed to prevent it from leaking out into the adjacent Pacific. While the new system has so far only been tested at much smaller scales, Bazant says that such large-scale decontamination systems based on this method might be possible “within a few years.”
The research team also included MIT postdocs Kameron Conforti and Tao Gao and graduate student Huanhuan Tian.

Lost Mobile Phone Tracker Portal CEIR

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CEIR lost mobile phone tracker portal: The Central Equipment Identity Register portal for blocking stolen mobiles will now be available to users in Delhi NCR and help them with lost or stolen mobiles or smartphones.
If you have lost your smartphone or mobile phone, there is now an official government portal to help you block the use of the device, and get some peace of mind. The Central Equipment Identity Register or CEIR, which was launched for Mumbai in September 2019, is now officially open for those residing in Delhi-NCR region.
The idea is that if your mobile gets stolen or lost, you will be able to take some steps on this website in order to ensure that it is blocked. So someone else who stole the mobile or perhaps found it, will be unable to use it. The facility will be extended to other parts of the country in 2020, according to reports. it relies on the International Mobile Equipment Identity or IMEI number to help with tracking. Do keep in mind that one has to file a First Information Report (FIR) after the device is lost or stolen, in order to carry out the steps.
First, they have to submit an FIR with the police about their smartphone or mobile being lost or stolen. A copy of that report should be kept by the concerned user as this will be required for filling up the form on the website eventually. Users should also get their duplicate SIM card from the telecom service provider.
The form requires your primary mobile phone number, and the second one as well if you have one. If you have a dual-SIM phone, you will have to enter the IMEI  number for both as well. You can check the IMEI number from the retail box of the device if you still have it.
IMEI number can be checked from the mobile by dialing *#06# from your device. It is best to note down the number someplace safe for future, in case you do lose the mobile and you don’t have the retail box.

World Biggest Air Purifier

An experimental tower over 100 metres (328 feet) high in northern China – dubbed the world’s biggest air purifier by its operators – has brought a noticeable improvement in air quality, according to the scientist leading the project, as authorities seek ways to tackle the nation’s chronic smog problem.
The tower has been built in Xian in Shaanxi province and is undergoing testing by researchers at the Institute of Earth Environment at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The head of the research, Cao Junji, said improvements in air quality had been observed over an area of 10 square kilometres (3.86 square miles) in the city over the past few months and the tower has managed to produce more than 10 million cubic metres (353 million cubic feet) of clean air a day since its launch. Cao added that on severely polluted days the tower was able to reduce smog close to moderate levels.