Today we are discussing new sustainable fuels for airplanes, creating other worldly heat at home, and a new record for quantum entanglement.
Today we are discussing new sustainable fuels for airplanes, creating other worldly heat at home, and a new record for quantum entanglement.
Fry Flying
Gas Giants at Home
Entangled Atoms
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Find episode transcripts here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/fry-flying-gas-giants-at-home-entangled-atoms
[SFX: INTRO MUSIC/WHOOSH]
NATE: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Discovery. Time flies when you’re learnin’ super cool stuff. I’m Nate.
CALLI: And I’m Calli. If you’re dropping in for the first time, welcome to Curiosity, where we aim to blow your mind by helping you to grow your mind. If you’re a loyal listener, welcome back!
NATE: Today, you’ll learn about new sustainable fuels for airplanes, creating other worldly heat at home, and a new record for quantum entanglement.
CALLI: Without further ado, let’s satisfy some curiosity!
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Calli, have you ever heard of those cars that run on recycled fryer oil?
CALLI: Oh yeah! I actually had a friend in high school, super smart guy sort of like our town’s “mad scientist,” who converted his own car to run on biodiesel! You could smell him coming down the road, it was just like hot french fries
NATE: Well those vehicles might be flying overhead soon as well. Airbus, the largest aviation company in the world, is hoping to have zero-emission planes in its fleet by 2035. Meeting this goal means investing in new planes and fuel technologies, like recycled cooking oil, and the results could make for quieter aircraft, and help offset, or eliminate, airplane emissions, a major contributor to greenhouse gasses.
CALLI: Airbus, they’ve been in the news a lot recently, haven't they been doing some pretty big innovation already?
NATE: Totally, for 15 years or so they’ve been making the A380, the largest commercial passenger aircraft ever; it holds 525 passengers. It is also one of the planes Airbus is hoping to make zero-emission. And there have already been signs of success; in March they had two flights out of France where the planes ran on 100% waste fats including recycled cooking oil, from things like commercial restaurant fryers.
CALLI: French-Flies if you will.
NATE: Ha thats pretty good!
CALLI: Are they only using used cooking oils for that? Wouldn’t we run out of fryer oil pretty quickly?
NATE: Well some researchers argue that using these cooking oils competes with ground vehicles, like your buddy’s Mercedes, that can also use cooking oil. The gains in aviation could eliminate the gains elsewhere. But there is some hope that we might be able to do a similar process to convert biomass like corn waste or wood pieces into fuel!
CALLI: How do you turn used fryer juice into fuel? Or bits of corn? Especially for something as important as an airplane?
NATE: It's called hydroprocessing. The process uses high temperature and pressure to convert waste vegetable oil into what is considered green diesel or what is known in the aviation industry as sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF. These would have the double benefit of being more sustainable than current aviation fuel, and eliminating the waste of unprocessed cooking oil and biomass waste.
CALLI: That's so cool! Two birds, one stone
NATE:(Haha) Right. The widespread use of this fuel is an enormous goal for the industry, and those trying to fight climate change. In fact, many Airbus planes are currently capable of using a mix of half kerosene and half SAF, but the hope is to make it to 100% SAF.
CALLI: So the future of flight is all…in food?
NATE: Well waste to be sure. A 2022 study even showed promise of converting sewage sludge into fuel. Airbus isn’t betting the farm on just these methods though. We’ve talked about hydrogen as a plane fuel source before, and Airbus is pursuing that as well. Hydrogen has obvious benefits, it's quieter, more efficient, and releases less greenhouse gas emissions, but like we’ve talked about before, it also requires pretty massive infrastructure investments to keep the liquid hydrogen cold.
CALLI: So, we’ve got options, and we are trying them out, but what does the future look like?
NATE: Well SAF seems like the easiest transition, but creating the infrastructure of hydrogen is promising, if still challenging. Advancements that we’ve also talked about in the past are also giving us hope for full-blown electric airplanes, how cool would that be? So for now, the experiments continue.
CALLI: Aviation is competitive though, is there money in trying to find these new fuel sources? I always worry if there isn’t money to be made, researchers might run out of funding.
NATE: Airbus may not have made back the $25 billion it invested in developing the A380 and trying to find different fuels for, but they might be alright with that. They call it their “flying testbed for future technologies.” There is value in showing the world what your motivations are, and that you care about global issues like climate change. And on top of that, going zero-emission might even save them money in the long term!
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CALLI: Nate, did you know that we’re starting to explore such extreme places in space, that it's getting difficult to test our equipment? It's hard to replicate the other worldly environments!
NATE: What kind of conditions are we worried about?
CALLI: I’m talking about the extreme temperatures spaceships will have to tolerate if they want to explore other planets! If they want to see the surface of other planets deep in space, they’ll first have to fly through their atmospheres. And flying through those atmospheres will make our spaceships hot, like insanely hot. So hot that we’ve actually been having troubling testing new spaceship materials on Earth, because those super high temps are so hard to replicate. But researchers might have finally found a promising new technology: nuclear fusion.
NATE: Fusion?! Hasn’t that been the dream for decades?
CALLI: Yes! But first let's take a few steps back. When we want to explore our Solar System’s gas giants like Saturn or Jupiter, our spacecraft will have to enter their atmospheres at blisteringly high speeds, like a hundred-thousand miles an hour. Bombing through the atmosphere at those speeds will turn the atmospheric gas surrounding the spacecraft into insanely hot plasma around ten thousand degrees Fahrenheit.
NATE: That would have to be one tough spacecraft to endure that!
CALLI: Exactly, and we want to make sure they survive! In order to protect the technology and payload inside our spacecraft, we equip them with heat shields made of materials that can burn under control to keep heat from making its way inside. But it's been nearly impossible to run any good tests for our equipment because it is so hard to sustain temperatures like that.
NATE: So how do we go about making the depths of space, at home?
CALLI: Well we may have just figured out exactly what we need: A nuclear fusion reactor.
NATE: Nuclear fusion? Like combining multiple smaller atoms to create a new, larger atom? If we can even figure out how to make electricity from it, it’ll change how we efficiently create power.
CALLI: Right. Thankfully we have the D-three-D National Fusion Facility! This facility in San Diego is under the umbrella of the Department of Energy and has been working on the goal of creating electricity from nuclear fusion since 1986! It's the largest magnetic fusion research experiment in the U.S, and they can do some very impressive things with their tokamaks.
NATE: Didn’t we talk about those a while ago?
CALLI: Yes! A few months ago. But to refresh- a tokamak is a donut shaped reactor that uses a magnetic field to contain plasma. The D-three-D facility has developed multiple groundbreaking tokamaks to enhance the ways we can stabilize plasma. It might be crucial for electricity generation in the future, but right now, for space travel, we can really use that plasma.
NATE: Well, what do we do with the plasma?
CALLI: Researchers use a system called the “Diverter Materials Evaluation System” or its more common acronym - DiMES. This system can not only test materials by exposing them to the plasma, but it can also launch pellets of different materials through it.
NATE: Is going through plasma like going through an atmosphere?
CALLI: Exactly, the reactor at D-three-D is able to closely mimic the heat and movement of atmospheric plasma on our heat shield materials without having to launch test materials at extreme speeds.
NATE: So they finally found a testing ground! So what kind of things are we testing for this next generation of heat shield?
CALLI: The primary materials are carbon-based, but now that we have a good test, we can experiment with way more materials. It's going to drastically advance materials sciences.
NATE: Whatever gets us closer to the surface of planets, is something I can get excited about. Nuclear fusion to the rescue.
CALLI: And if we can ever figure out how to make power from it, well then we’ll have enormous solutions at home too.
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NATE: Calli, I’ve got a really cool story today about something we’ve talked about in the past: quantum entanglement! Researchers have made a major advancement in entanglement that is pushing us closer to quantum computing.
CALLI: Oh, awesome! That has to do with subatomic particles, right?
NATE: Yes! Quantum entanglement is a scientific phenomenon where the particles of two atoms become so linked together that looking at one will tell you things about the other! If you change something about one particle, it will instantly change its partner, no matter how far apart they are. Some say it’s like a form of teleportation, and it's faster than the speed of light. Einstein even once called it “spooky action at a distance.” And just recently, researchers in Germany demonstrated quantum entanglement of two atoms separated by a new record distance: 33 kilometers, or nearly twenty and a half miles, Calli!
CALLI: That’s so far! But what's the practical purpose of doing something like this?
NATE: It’s a really bizarre phenomenon, but researchers say it is great for quickly transmitting data over long distances, which is what they were looking to do in this experiment.
CALLI: Wow. So how did the experiment work?
NATE: Well the researchers had two atoms trapped in different buildings across from one another on their campus. They connected these atoms with fiber optic cables. Even though the buildings were only about 700 meters apart, they added coils of fiber optic cable to increase the distance between the two buildings to miles. They then shot each atom with lasers to “excite” them. As the excited atoms returned to normal, they released a photon, a particle of light. These photons still have a connection to the atom they came from, though, called an entanglement. Researchers then shot the photon from each atom toward each other down that fiber optic cable! When they met, the two photons became “entangled” themselves. Because each photon was entangled with its original atom, when the two photons became entangled, the original atoms did too!
CALLI: This sounds like a big deal, Nate! Have we ever entangled atoms before?
NATE: Well, we have, but 33 kilometers is a big record for this kind of work.
CALLI: So why were they able to make such a longer connection? What was the big advancement?
NATE: Photons, as particles of light, have a wavelength, in this case of about 780 nanometers, which usually means they can travel for a few kilometers. But in this study, researchers were able to convert their wavelength to 1,517 nanometers, which is really close to the 1,550-nm wavelength often used in fiber optic telecommunication. This meant they were able to travel way further down the cable than standard photons. This could be a huge step forward in using these quantum systems for communication and information transfer.
CALLI: Wow, but what would that look like?
NATE: Because stationary atoms are connected over great distances, it could be possible to create quantum networks where changing one atom could affect its entangled atom many many miles away. This could be huge for quickly transmitting a ton of data, and it would be way more secure. A quantum internet relies on something called quantum cryptography, which uses photons as sort of secret code “keys.” These are completely secure against being compromised because trying to crack the system would collapse the quantum entanglement. This keeps your information secure and anonymous.
CALLI: What would that look like in daily life?
NATE: It could practically eliminate loading times for data transfer anywhere. You could get a movie on a streaming service with no buffering whatsoever. And the security of the connection will be a huge help in the financial sector. More secure data is a good thing for banks and even people just sending each other money.
CALLI: This all sounds great, but it does also sound like science fiction far off in the future.
NATE: That's what's so cool about this experiment, it shows we can do this with EXISTING infrastructure. Pair this with something like, say, a satellite, and we could beam entangled photons over many many MANY miles.
CALLI: Oh wow, so we are finally closing in on a quantum internet?
NATE: Everyday we are getting closer and with experiments like this going so well, it's only a matter of time.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up.
CALLI: Airbus is on a mission to create zero-emission commercial aircraft by 2035. There is a long way to go, but recent developments are giving researchers hope that creating aviation fuel from cooking oil, feedstock, and even sewage, could limit or eliminate emissions in aviation.
NATE: New developments in nuclear fusion science are helping researchers finally create tests to mimic extreme environments in space. Creating stable plasma, and shooting small bits of heat shield through it, could give us the perfect testing ground for space exploration.
CALLI: Researchers have set a new record for the longest distance to entangle two atoms. This is a huge step toward the future of the quantum internet, which could one day give us unprecedented speed and security online.