That hot air rises is one of physics's most widely known principles. If you live in a house with more than one story you’ve felt how air conditioning can be almost essential for survival upstairs, but a luxury below. Yet the tops of mountains are the first places to get snow; that’s if they’re not ice-covered all year round. The apparent contradiction has no doubt occurred to many people, but usually when feeling the cold on a mountainside, making it an inconvenient time to seek an answer.Fortunately, however, access to the Internet now extends even to many hillsides, so allow us to answer it.Why Does Hot Air Rise?A gas’s temperature is a measure of the kinetic energy of the atoms or molecules that make it up. More energy means they move faster. If the gas is in a rigid container like a storage vessel, this translates to extra pressure. However, if the container is flexible – think a balloon – the extra pressure on the material will force it outwards, causing the balloon to expand.With the same amount of material in a larger space the balloon will the lighter, causing it to float on top of the surrounding gas.Without a balloon the hot air will do the same thing, expanding to fill more space and floating on the cooler air below.Unless the walls of your house are unusually flexible, the hot air won’t be able to cause them to expand. Instead, it will rise until trapped by the ceiling, creating a warmer layer in the uppermost story, with cooler air below.Why Does It (Usually) Get Cooler With Altitude?One might expect from this that outdoors the same thing would happen. After all, sunlight heats the ground, warming air nearby, which rises. You can see the effect of this on windless sunny days when birds of prey or glider pilots can circle for hours expending little energy, buoyed by the rising air.Yet it would be a bad idea indeed to take this as a sign one can soar or climb to high altitude without needing to rug up warmly.The reason is that outdoors there is nothing to constrain the air. Not only does the hot air expand as it would in an infinitely flexible balloon, but the air pressure overall falls as one gets further from the Earth’s surface. Gravity holds the bulk of the atmosphere close to the ground, so the further one rises towards space the sparser the molecules are and the lower the pressure. As hot air rises it encounters less and less pressure and expands accordingly. This expansion cools it down. There are a few ways to think of why this occurs. One is that when a gas expands it does work – an observation key to the workings of engines. It takes energy to do work, and doing it means losing some of that energy. Since, as we discussed before, temperature is a measure of kinetic energy, losing energy makes a gas cooler. Another perspective is that as the particles become more spread out those that are attracted to each other gain potential energy, like an object lifted higher off the ground. Since energy is not created or destroyed, this potential energy has to come from somewhere, and in this case that is a decline in the particle’s kinetic energy, ie temperature.But Not Always And Forever…The temperature does not fall endlessly as one rises through the atmosphere. If it did – at least at the rate it falls at first - we’d be down to absolute zero long before we reached space. Instead, once you reach the boundary between the troposphere and tropopause – usually around 12 km (7 miles) up  – temperatures stabilize and then start rising again. Since they do this at temperatures around – 60° C (-76° F) this is something best observed with instruments, not felt. Further up temperatures reverse again, twice. The reasons for these changes in direction are too complex to go into here, but have to do with factors like the changing mixture of gasses, and the wavelengths of radiation they absorb. Sometimes we get what is known as a “temperature inversion” where it gets warmer for a while as one goes up. High altitude air can sink, and act as a lid – somewhat replicating ceiling so that warmer air is trapped beneath it, and temperatures rise as you go higher. Such inversions can be dangerous. Most obviously they can they lull climbers into a false sense of security about the temperature, which can then fall rather suddenly if the “lid” is removed. A far more common  cause of death is when they trap pollution beneath them, which can sometimes last for days.Oh And Those Flat Earthers…There are much better proofs that the Earth is round. Nevertheless, air cooling with altitude is indirectly one of them. As you go up through the atmosphere during daytime you’re getting closer to the Sun. The story of Icarus shows the ancient Greeks thought this meant it would get hot. That doesn’t happen, however, because the distance to the Sun is so immense that getting a few hundred meters, or even a few kilometers, closer makes no appreciable difference.However, if you have the misfortune to be spammed by Flat Earthers, as sadly we do, many of their messages will tell you that the Sun is not the 150 million kilometers away, as measured by astronomers. Instead, they claim it is actually quite nearby (and small), an assessment necessary to deal with a few of the more obvious problems with their worldview. But if the Sun really was that close, then the higher altitudes would mean getting significantly closer, proportionally, and should result in higher temperatures. Sadly, if all the better evidence doesn’t convince them, it’s unlikely this will.

Concrete is, to put it mildly, really bad for the environment. It’s the most-consumed product on the planet, outside of water, and its carbon footprint bears that out: on its own, the production of cement and concrete accounts for a whole eight percent of global CO2 emissions, or more than four billion tonnes of the greenhouse gas per year.But a new material developed by researchers at MIT might be able to help counter that problem. By combining water, cement, and a sooty substance called carbon black, they’ve constructed an energy storage device known as a supercapacitor – similar to a giant, concrete battery.“The material is fascinating,” said Admir Masic, an MIT scientist and one of the researchers behind the invention, in a statement released last year. “You have the most-used manmade material in the world, cement, that is combined with carbon black, that is a well-known historical material – the Dead Sea Scrolls were written with it,” he explained. “You have these at least two-millennia-old materials that when you combine them in a specific manner you come up with a conductive nanocomposite, and that’s when things get really interesting.”The material’s incredible properties are thanks to the particular nature of carbon black – both highly conductive, and also water repelling. This means that, as the mixture sets, the carbon black essentially rearranges itself into a branching network of wires threading through the cement.It’s not only a huge potential step in the global transition towards renewable energy, the researchers say, but it also has intrinsic advantages over more traditional batteries thanks to its recipe. The carbon cost of cement notwithstanding, the new material is made from just three components, all cheap and plentiful; the lithium that standard batteries rely on, meanwhile, is finite and CO2-expensive – “particularly in hard rock mining, for every tonne of mined lithium, 15 tonnes of CO2 are emitted into the air,” MIT’s Climate Portal notes.Since cement is unlikely to go anywhere soon, combining it with an easy and efficient energy storage system seems like an obvious win, then. “Given the widespread use of concrete globally, this material has the potential to be highly competitive and useful in energy storage,” Damian Stefaniuk, one of the researchers behind the invention, told BBC Future this week.“If it can be scaled up, the technology can help solve an important issue – the storing of renewable energy,” he said.How might that be achieved? One potential solution: use it to pave roads, allowing the highways themselves to harvest solar energy and then wirelessly charge electric vehicles that drive along them. Capacitors release energy much faster than normal batteries – that’s why they’re not that useful for everyday power storage, despite having other advantages such as higher efficiency and lower levels of degradation in performance – making it close to ideal for giving moving cars a power boost in this way.Another tantalizing idea, though, is to use it as a building material. In their paper on the material, the team calculated that a block of just 45 cubic meters of the carbon back-cement mix – to put that in perspective, you could fit around 55 of them in an Olympic swimming pool – would be able to store enough energy to power the average US household.“Since the concrete would retain its strength, a house with a foundation made of this material could store a day’s worth of energy produced by solar panels or windmills and allow it to be used whenever it’s needed,” the team suggests.“That’s where our technology is extremely promising, because cement is ubiquitous,” said MIT structural engineer Franz-Josef Ulm.“[It’s] a new way of looking toward the future of concrete.”The paper is published in the journal PNAS.

This week, an “alien” signal from Mars received just over a year ago has finally been decoded, with just eight confirmed individuals, polar-grizzly bear hybrids are “extremely rare”, and it turns out a trip to space could (temporarily) reverse aging. Finally, we meet (literally) the enormous and stinky corpse flower, Amorphophallus titanium.Subscribe to the IFLScience newsletter for all the biggest science news delivered straight to your inbox every Wednesday and Saturday. Internet Panics After Hearing Leaked Audio From The ISS They Were Not Supposed To HearThe Internet was briefly sent into a panic this week after a NASA audio feed from the International Space Station (ISS) was accidentally "misrouted" to a public feed. The ISS broadcasts its view live, including footage from cameras inside and outside the station. While very cool, mishaps with the feed can happen, as evidenced on Wednesday when the public heard what appeared to be a medical emergency going down in real time.  Read the full story here    African Elephants Call Each Other By "Names", Just Like Humans DoNames are universal throughout human cultures and across different languages. They form a huge part of our identity and help us communicate with each other, but personal names are considered a uniquely human thing. Now, new research has suggested that wild African elephants could address each other with individual specific calls – the equivalent of a name – with fascinating implications for the evolution of language. Read the full story here"Alien" Signal From Mars Has Finally Been Decoded One Year OnJust over a year ago, people across this planet received a challenge from the heavens: Solve an encoded message. The message was created by Daniela de Paulis, Artist in Residence at the SETI Institute. The goal was to simulate an alien signal – and despite its earthly creation, it really came from another planet. Read the full story hereGrolar Bear Hybrids Are “Extremely Rare”, With Just 8 Confirmed IndividualsGrizzly bears in the Arctic are becoming an increasingly common occurrence as the planet warms, which means that they are beginning to encroach on polar bear territory more regularly. As a result, scientists have found evidence of polar-grizzly hybrids, but new research has confirmed that these “grolar bears” remain extremely rare. Read the full story hereTurns Out, Billionaires Can Go To Space To (Temporarily) “Benjamin Button” ThemselvesAmongst the super-rich, it’s almost a requirement at this point to try some wacky way of halting the irrepressible march of time. Anti-aging strategies range from the positively vanilla – drink lots of water and wear sunscreen – to the still-quite-tame cosmetic surgery options, to the extremely expensive and bizarre (penis rejuvenation, anyone?). But what if all you had to do was take a quick trip into space? Read the full story hereTWIS is published weekly on our Linkedin page, join us there for even more content.Feature of the week: Extraordinary "Corpse Flower" Blooms In Kew Gardens And We Were There To See ItThere’s something rotten in the kingdom of Great Britain. One of the smelliest plants on Earth is about to bloom in London. Not in the street, but in the tropical rainforest glasshouse of Kew Gardens, which hosts the "largest and most diverse botanical and mycological collections in the world". Among the gems of this collection is an absolute stinker (said with love), so we popped down to see it for ourselves, and to ask the experts about this one-of-a-kind plant. Read the full story here More content:Catch up on all the fascinating talks that took place on May 31 at CURIOUS Live. Recordings of the event are available to view at your leisure, so join us for discussions on nuclear war, the connection between mental and physical health, insect detectives, and the search for life elsewhere in the universe.Have you seen our e-magazine, CURIOUS? Issue 23 June 2024 is out now. Check it out for exclusive interviews, book excerpts, long reads, and more.PLUS, the entire season 3 of IFLScience's The Big Questions Podcast is available now, and season 4 launches on June 27.

Toxic gas used in petrochemical manufacturing has been detected at levels a thousand times higher than what is considered safe in Louisiana.The chemical in question is ethylene oxide, an extremely flammable and colorless gas with a slightly sweet smell. It has a variety of industrial uses, including the production of products like antifreeze, detergents, fibers, and bottles. It’s also used to sterilize medical and food production equipment.Researchers at Johns Hopkins University recently tested levels of ethylene oxide in the air of southeastern Louisianna using two vans fitted with different but highly sensitive technologies to measure the gas in real-time. This part of the state includes “Cancer Alley,” a stretch along the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge that has very high rates of cancer and other health issues among its residents. By coincidence, it also has a significant number of petrochemical plants that pump out all kinds of industrial chemicals, including ethylene oxide. Long-term exposure to concentrations of ethylene oxide over 11 parts per trillion is considered problematic to human health due to its ability to directly damage DNA and increase the risk of cancer.Shockingly, this study found levels as high as 40 parts per billion in areas close to industrial facilities. The concentrations were also found to be way higher than the estimates created by the Environmental Protection Agency.A map of southeast Louisiana showing concentrations of ethylene oxide in the ambient air.IMAGE CREDIT: KHAMAR HOPKINS/JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY“We expected to see ethylene oxide in this area. But we didn’t expect the levels that we saw, and they certainly were much, much higher than EPA’s estimated levels,” Peter DeCarlo, senior author and an associate professor of Environmental Health and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, said in a statement. “We’d drive through the industrial areas and saw concentrations hitting 40 parts per billion, which is more a thousand times higher than the accepted risk for lifetime exposure,” DeCarlo said.The researchers warned that people living near facilities that manufacture and use ethylene oxide could be at a higher risk of cancer. “Our findings have really important implications for community residents, especially infants and children. Ethylene oxide has been shown to directly damage DNA, meaning that exposures that occur in early life are more dangerous,” said Keeve Nachman, associate professor of Environmental Health and Engineering and the co-director of the Risk Sciences and Public Policy Institute.The new study was published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. 

Scientists have spotted a mysterious hole on Mars where, in theory, ancient alien life could survive. The entrance to this depression is located on the edge of a volcano in the Tharsis region and appears to be a crater approximately 150 feet (46 m) in size. Researchers say it can protect living beings from radiation and harsh conditions on the Red Planet. Scientists do not yet know how deep the dungeon found is, but they suggest that it is most likely an underground lava tube formed during the explosion of a volcano. “We’ve seen more than one of these pits on Mars. They’re very interesting for research because that’s where astronauts can protect themselves from radiation,” Brandon Johnson of Purdue University, who studies impact craters throughout the solar system, tells Business Insider. Since the atmosphere of Mars is very thin and there is no magnetic field there that would reflect the harmful effects of solar winds, there is a level of radiation dangerous for humans on the surface of the planet. This poses a serious health problem for astronauts who might land there. The first colonists risked cataracts, heart disease, cancer, and a number of genetic pathologies. “On the Earth, these lava tubes can be large enough to walk around in, but they can also be small or the voids can be discrete or discontinuous,” Ross Beyer, a planetary scientist with the SETI Institute, told Business Insider. “So these pits we see could open into larger caves, or they could just be isolated pits.” However, such missions are not planned in the near future. “The presence of such mines on Mars does not guarantee that there is life there, but it is a good place to look,” Brandon Johnson added. Recall that lava tubes on Mars and the Moon can accommodate entire cities. The height of such underground tunnels reaches the size of the tallest skyscrapers on Earth. The post Mars holes could unlock discoveries, including Extraterrestrial Life appeared first on Anomalien.com.

The baked clay tablet tells the tale of an epic flood.

[unable to retrieve full-text content]A LOT MORE. And if there were, blogs like this one would never have had a reason to exist.   

Tren de Aragua, a criminal gang from Venezuela that is said to be as serious a threat as the Salvadoran gang MS-13, is quietly operating in unsuspected neighborhoods and communities across the country.…

[unable to retrieve full-text content]So-called “Palestinian” Muslims are asked if their pre-Islam ancestors were Jewish or Christian?   

This is incredible.