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When fresh water rivers flow into the sea the concentration difference leads to a change in entropy. US researchers have developed a battery that generates power from that entropy difference.Yi Cui's team at Stanford University, California, extract energy with 74 per cent efficiency using manganese dioxide nanorods and silver electrodes1. 'What we have really demonstrated that this idea can work,' says Cui.Cui's team estimate that if the technology was used on all world's rivers this renewable energy technology would hypothetically generate 2 TW, or approximately 13 per cent of current global consumption.Entropy based power generation has been done before but is most reliably done today...

<p>The universe was in chaos after the Big Bang kick-started the cosmos, a new study suggests.</p> <p>While one might expect the explosion that began the universe to wreak some havoc, scientists mean something very specific when they refer to chaos. In a chaotic system, small changes can cause large-scale effects. A commonly cited example is the "butterfly effect" — the idea that a butterfly beating its wing in Brazil can bring about a tornado in Texas.</p>

Perfect liquids suggest theory’s math mirrors something real Shadows live in a simple world. They glide effortlessly across any sort of surface, oblivious to the higher dimension of space in which 3-D bodies move, collide and sometimes block the paths of rays of light. Shadows have no idea how important that third dimension is, and how objects in it endow those very shadows with their quasi-physical existence. Indeed, the laws of shadow physics all depend on the third dimension’s presence. And just as the clueless inhabitants of the shadow world require an extra dimension to explain how they exist and...

The Last Embers of the Fire by Anthony Esolen 11/24/08 We Catholics are commonly urged to "engage the culture"; not to flee for monasteries of our own making, but to work within the institutions of mass media, mass education, mass marketing, and mass entertainment to advance the banners of Christ, our King. I do not wish to criticize those who toil at that thankless task. Nor will I suggest that their work will be futile; no true service of the Lord can be without fruit. But I do believe we have mistaken the signs of the times. We seek to...

Many years ago our new nation, under God, was conceived and formed to embody and nuture liberty, equality and freedom from tyranny and religious oppression. Several years later, our nation established specific rules and laws which would help govern us down through the ages. One could make the argument that America, at the time of the Constitution, was a newly ordered system. An imperfect system? Perhaps. But at least one filled with hope and optimism for a better life. 230 years later we have moved from a newly created ordered social and political state to one of societal disorder, seemingly...

Mark Warner announced this morning that he's not running for president. As Prince Metternich asked when informed that the Russian ambassador had suddenly dropped dead, "What can have been his motive?" I suppose it was a calculation that he was just not going to overtake Hillary Rodham Clinton. And that the time, money, and effort required over the next 27 months or so were just not worth it. Warner has a fortune, made after he won a cellphone lottery, but not, I think, a big enough fortune to finance a presidential campaign. A year ago I thought the Democratic field...

News Discussions?

Pat Buchanan describes it in terms of the fall of the West. "Rome conquered the barbarians, then the barbarians conquered Rome." Pat often dons his twenty league boots, these days, but it is he, not the West, who has seen his best days. Rome, whose senate from time to time officially declared this or that caesar a god, will never select Buchanan for the pantheon. Paris is a tourist destination, these days, nothing more. Eastern liberal college students traditionally spend some time there, casting about for culture and trying out their skill with the lingua franca. Painters pay homage visits...

Autocatakinetics, Evolution, and the Law of Maximum Entropy Production By Rod Swenson An Excerpt: Ecological science addresses the relations of living things to their environments, and the study of human ecology the particular case of humans. There is an opposing tradition built into the foundations of modern science of separating living things, and, in particular, humans from their environments. Beginning with Descartes’ dualistic world view, this tradition found its way into biology by way of Kant, and evolutionary theory through Darwin, and manifests itself in two main postulates of incommensurability, the incommensurability between psychology and physics (the “first postulate of...

Black holes may define the perfect fluid, suggests a study of black holes that only exist in a theoretical 10-dimensional space. The finding may have spawned a new universal law in physics, which puts constraints on the way fluids behave in the real world. Dam Thanh Son from the University of Washington, US, and his colleagues used string theory to model a 10-dimensional black hole as a liquid. String theory tries to explain fundamental properties of the universe by predicting that seven more spatial dimensions exist on top of the known three. While the concept is currently unproven as a...

Can the Monist View Explain “What Is Life? by Alamo-Girl and betty boop In this article we would like to address the soundness and adequacy of the monist view of reality which conceives of “all that there is” as ultimately reducible to the concept of “matter in its motions.” This view holds that there is no essential difference between living and non-living systems in nature since both ultimately are expressions of the workings of the physical laws and only the physical laws. This insight or expectation leads one to presume that the laws of physics and chemistry are entirely sufficient...

The crucial final piece to the puzzle that provides the nomological basis for spontaneous order production, for dissolving the postulates of incommensurability between physics and psychology and physics and biology, between thermodynamics and evoluton, is the answer to a question that classical thermodynamics never asked. The classical statement of the second law says that entropy will be maximized, or potentials minimized, but it does not ask or answer the question of which out of available paths a system will take to accomplish this end. The answer to the question is that the system will select the path or assembly of...

This hour, Michael Medved is talking with a guest who believes that only the theory of evolution should be taught in school to children.

Beads of doubt: Second Law of Thermodynamics untrue? - By Dr David Whitehouse BBC News Online science editor One of the most important principles of physics, that disorder, or entropy, always increases, has been shown to be untrue. This result has profound consequences for any chemical or physical process that occurs over short times and in small regions ANU team Scientists at the Australian National University (ANU) have carried out an experiment involving lasers and microscopic beads that disobeys the so-called Second Law of Thermodynamics, something many scientists had considered impossible. The finding has implications for nanotechnology - the design...

What did hillary clinton know and when did she know it?And was she part of it?Q ERTY3BUMP THE CLINTON RAPES, LIVING HISTORY, USEFUL IDIOTS AND ENTROPY by Mia T, 6.11.03 The seemingly endless string of leftist co-rapist clinton puffery seems to defy not only the laws of logic and decency but the first law of thermodynamics -- conservation of energy… that is, if one fails to considers entropy. The second law of thermodynamics states that the quality of energy in a closed system is degraded irreversibly. Physical, chemical, and electrical energy transform into thermal energy --heat. Reversing the process,...

The Second Law Can be Beat One of the most important principles of physics, that disorder, or entropy, always increases, has been shown to be untrue. .... A few years ago, a tentative theoretical solution to this paradox was proposed - the so-called Fluctuation Theorem - stating that the chances of the Second Law being violated increases as the system in question gets smaller. This means that at human scales, the Second Law dominates and machines only ever run in one direction. However, when working at molecular scales and over extremely short periods of time, things can take place in...

Going against the flowHeat can flow without temperature differences - but thermodynamics remains intact.25 June 2002PHILIP BALL With the right rachet, heat can flow from one hot place to another © Getty Images Physicists have devised a way to dodge one of the most fundamental laws of nature: the fact that heat flows only from hot to cold. At face value, it implies they have invented a never-ending source of energy. Well they haven't - but it could provide a method for carrying out unheard-of chemical reactions.By imagining two chambers containing particles, Souvik Das of St Stephen's College in...

Life can go on foreverAn accelerating universe does not have to fry life.27 May 2002PHILIP BALLLife can carry on indefinitely. Physicists in the United States have come to the comforting conclusion that just because the universe is accelerating as it expands, this does not necessarily sound the death knell for life in the far future1, as some have claimed2. There's a limit to how cool an accelerating universe can get. © Getty Images In the right kind of accelerating universe "life can go on indefinitely", say Katherine Freese of the University of Michigan and William Kinney of Columbia University...