This is not the first time that Frank Hoogerbeets made bold earthquake prediction that turned out to be accurate Photograph:(Twitter)
Just days after a Dutch scientist predicted a massive quake in Pakistan, a temblor rocked South Asia, but well over a thousand of miles away in Nepal, and it was 6.2 on the Richter scale, making its tremors felt near Indian capital Delhi and adjoining areas in northern region.
Frank Hoogerbeets, a researcher of the Solar System Geometry Survey (SSGEOS) — an organisation based in The Netherlands — on September 29, claimed that Pakistan would face a catastrophic earthquake.
He claimed to have detected an unusual increase in electric charge fluctuations along the fault lines in Balochistan’s Chaman area.
He even predicted the date of the earthquake, anywhere between October 1 and 3, adding that this would be “critical” for Pakistan.
“Planetary geometry is difficult to interpret with four conjunctions spread out over the next 10 days. As far as I can tell, 1-3 October will be more critical,” he said on social media X on Sept 29.
Earthquake in Nepal and India
On Wednesday, that is October 3, this is exactly what happened. A major earthquake occurred in the afternoon, but not in Pakistan.
Rather the tremors were recorded well over a thousand miles away in neighbouring Nepal and in northern parts of India.
Nepal was jolted by four earthquakes that occurred in a span of one hour, leaving a trail of damage in western Bajhang district, and at least 12 injured.
So far, no reports of casualties have emerged either in India or Nepal.
Prediction came right yet again
Notably, this is not the first time that Hoogerbeets made a bold earthquake prediction which turned out to be accurate.
He earlier claimed that tremors would devastate Turkey and Syria, which in fact came true in February this year which killed more than 50,000 people.
He estimated ‘strong to major’ seismic activity of 7.1 magnitude on March 16 in the Kermadec Islands and a 6.8 magnitude earthquake near the coast of Ecuador on March 18. Both his predictions were accurate.
Scientists making the “Air-gen” device have discovered that any material can be used to generate electricity from the air.
IMAGE: DEREK LOVLEY/ELLA MARU STUDIO
Scientists have invented a device that can continuously generate electricity from thin air, offering a glimpse of a possible sustainable energy source that can be made of almost any material and runs on the ambient humidity that surrounds all of us, reports a new study.
The novel “air generator,” or Air-gen, is made from materials with holes that are under 100 nanometers in length, which is a scale thousand times smaller than a human hair. This design can pull electricity from water droplets in the air for much longer periods than previous concepts, the researchers report, suggesting that it could eventually provide a continuous and sustainable source of power. Researchers hope the technique could eventually help to fight climate change by serving as an alternative to fossil fuels.
If you’ve ever seen a bolt of lightning streak across the sky, you’ve already had a sneak peek of the untapped power that is hidden in ambient air. This energy is fueled by the electrical charges of water droplets in the air, a phenomenon that has inspired many attempts to harvest humidity by inducing imbalances in charged waters with special devices. Many of these techniques only work for short periods, or require expensive materials, which presents practical challenges for efficiency and scalability.
Now, researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, have developed an Air-gen device that yields electricity from contact with water droplets that pass through its porous material. In this way, the Air-gen technology creates “a spontaneous and sustained charging gradient for continuous electric output” that “opens a wide door for the broad exploration of sustainable electricity from ambient air,” according to a study published on Wednesday in Advanced Materials.
“One day we may get clean electricity literally anywhere, anytime by using Air-gen technology (i.e., the concept of ‘ubiquitous powering’), because air humidity is 24/7 continuous and everywhere,” Jun Yao, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at UMass Amherst and senior author of the study, said in an email to Motherboard.
“The basis for broad-scale power is that the air contains a huge amount of electricity,” he added. “So if we make Air-gen bigger, we can get larger-volume power—that volume can certainly extend to usage for daily-life functions.”
Yao and his colleagues initially stumbled upon the potential of the Air-gen effect a few years ago during an experiment with biologically synthesized nanowires. After successfully producing electricity from the tiny wires, the team began to explore the possibility of repeating the same technique with a host of other materials.
“The initial discovery was made back in 2020 and was really a serendipitous one—we found that Air-gen made from a specific material called protein nanowires synthesized by a type of bacterium called Geobacter can continuously produce electricity from air humidity,” Yao said.
“But that time, we considered the effect exclusive to this specific material (although we had some initial intuition/indication that the effect may expand to other materials as well),” he continued. “The current work is based on our initial intuition, which then leads to the discovery of this ‘generic’ Air-gen effect working with literally all kinds of materials. So it turns an initially narrow window to a wide-open door for broad potential/impact.”
Indeed, the results revealed that practically any material could become an Air-gen device provided it was perforated with tiny holes measuring 100 nanometers or fewer. At this scale, the holes are big enough to allow water to pass through an upper chamber into a lower chamber, but are small enough that the droplets make contact with the material as they move down through the holes. As a consequence, a charge imbalance is created in the device because the water droplets increase the charge of the upper layer by soaking it as they move into the lower chamber.
The microscale device was able to produce continuous energy equivalent to several hundred millivolts for a test period of a week, which is much longer than other air generator concepts that had a one-time power output that lasted no more than 48 hours. Its material versatility opens up the possibility of scaling the idea up to meet commercial or industrial energy demands.
“A general understanding is that the energy density is low (which can be intuitively understood that the air is very thin), so a single-layer of Air-gen has no way to compete with other power sources (e.g., solar, wind) for matched power volume,” Yao explained. “However, the beauty is that air is diffusive and filled in the entire vertical space, which means that we can stack many layers of air-gen devices in the vertical space to improve power (without taking up additional space footprint).”
“So in principle, Air-gen can be more space efficient” than other power sources, he continued. “Moreover, they can be engineered into varied form factors and neatly blend into the environment (even without one’s notice)” versus the example of “a solar panel that exclusively takes up space.”
It’s wild to imagine a future where homes, factories, and perhaps whole cities might be powered by the electricity that is concealed in the air. For now, the Air-gen concept remains in a developmental phase, though Yao and his colleagues are already working to scale up the concept and optimize the structure of their materials to boost energy efficiency.
“Importantly, since air humidity is ubiquitous and continuous 24/7, Air-gen can be deployed almost anywhere for continuous energy harvesting, transcending the inherent intermittence of existing harvesters restricted to time or location,” the researchers said in the study.
“The sustainable Air-gen technology holds promising prospects” that make it “a possible ‘greener’ energy technology for the future,” they concluded.
What if you could attend your own funeral in a new body? According to a former Google engineer, humans could achieve immortality by 2030 through the use of age-reversing nanobots. This article explores the wildest ways scientists are trying to attain eternal life, including preserving the brain and uploading the mind to a computer, cryogenically freezing the brain, rejuvenating cells with stem cells, and even reanimating the brain. Nectome, a US-based startup, is working on a way to preserve the human brain using a high-tech embalming process so that its memories can be uploaded to the cloud, but the key to recreating a person’s consciousness lies in accessing the organ’s “connectome,” the complex web of neural connections in the brain.
• An ex-Google engineer said he thinks humans will achieve immortality by 2030
• These include reanimating the brain and uploading our minds to the cloud
Would you like to live forever? Well, some experts say you might.
Last week, a former Google engineer said he believes that humans will achieve immortality within the next eight years.
Ray Kurzweil – who has an 86 per cent success rate with his predictions – thinks that advances in technology will quickly lead to age-reversing ‘nanobots’.
While it sounds far-fetched, scientists have been looking for years into ways we can regenerate our cells, or upload our minds to a computer.
This article takes a look at the strangest ways humanity could attain eternal life.
HOW HUMANS COULD ACHIEVE IMMORTALITY
Electronic immortality – Preserving brain after death and uploading the mind to a computer.
Freezing the brain – Cryogenically freezing the brain until technology advances to allow it to be brought back to life.
Cell rejuvenation – Rejuvenating ageing or damaged cells in the body by injecting them with stem cells.
Reanimating the brain – Pumping the brain with artificial blood to keep it alive.
The idea of uploading your mind to a computer has been theorised for many years now, but it has mostly remained the stuff of science fiction.
Nectome, a US-based startup, is trying to change that by devising a way to preserve the human brain so that its memories can be uploaded to the cloud.
The firm has figured out a way to preserve the human brain in microscopic detail using a ‘high-tech embalming process,’ according to the MIT Technology Review.
It uses a chemical solution that can keep the body intact for hundreds or thousands of years as a statue of frozen glass.
‘You can think of what we do as a fancy form of embalming that preserves not just the outer details but the inner details,’ said Robert McIntyre, Nectome’s cofounder.
Speaking to prospective customers, Nectome positions its service as: ‘What if we told you we could back up your mind?’
But the key to being able to recreate a person’s consciousness involves accessing the organ’s ‘connectome.’
A connectome is the complex web of neural connections in the brain, often referred to as the brain’s wiring system.
Nectome, which has been referred to as a ‘preserve-your-brain-and-upload-it’ company, has figured out a way to embalm the connectome as well.
Fifty years since the first mobile phone call, the technology we carry around in our pocket is helping to create the world’s biggest earthquake detection system.
On 25 October 2022, a 5.1-magnitude earthquake jolted California’s Bay Area. Fortunately, it was more of a than a violent shake, but reports from residents across the region flooded into the United States Geological Survey (USGS) from those who had felt it. There was no damage reported, but the earthquake was significant in another way – many people in the area received alerts on their phones before the shaking started.
More crucially still, many of these phones helped detect the earthquake in the first place, too.
Google has been working with USGS and academics at a number of universities in California to develop an early warning system that alerts users a few seconds before tremors arrive. It is a brief window of warning, but a few seconds can give enough time to shelter under a table or desk. It can also be enough time to slow trains, stop planes from taking off or landing and keep cars from entering bridges or tunnels. As such, this system is likely to save lives when stronger quakes hit.
It uses data from two sources. Initially, the system relied upon a network of the 700 seismometers – devices that detect earth tremors – installed across the state by seismologists at USGS, the California Institute of Technology and University of California Berkeley and the state government. (Seismometers in two other US states – Oregon and Washington – also feed into the system, known as ShakeAlert.) But Google has also been creating what is the world’s largest earthquake detection network through phones owned by members of the public.
Most smartphones running Google’s Android operating system have on-board accelerometers – the circuitry which detects when a phone is being moved. These are most commonly used to tell the phone to re-orientate its display from portrait to landscape mode when it is tilted, for example, and also helps provide information about step-count for Google’s onboard fitness tracker.
But the sensors are surprisingly sensitive, and can also act like a mini seismometer.
Google has introduced a function that allows users to allow their phone to automatically send data to the Android Earthquake Alerts System, if their device picks up vibrations that are characteristic of the Primary (P) waves of an earthquake. By combining data from thousands or even millions of other phones, the system can work out whether an earthquake is happening and where. It can then send out alerts to phones in the area where the seismic waves are likely to hit, giving an early warning.
And because radio signals travel faster than seismic waves, the alerts can arrive before the shaking starts in areas away from the epicentre.
Marc Stogaitis, a software engineer at Android, put it like this: “We’re essentially racing the speed of light (which is roughly the speed at which signals from a phone travel) against the speed of an earthquake. And lucky for us, the speed of light is much faster!”
As most of the data is crowdsourced, the technology opens up the possibility of monitoring for earthquakes in areas where there aren’t extensive networks of expensive seismometers. It means raises the possibility of providing earthquake alerts in even remote and poorer regions of the world.
In October 2022, engineers at Google saw phones across the San Francisco Bay Area light up with earthquake detection data as the seismic waves travelled outwards from the epicentre.
