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A new intelligence bulletin drafted by the FBI highlights the risk the QAnon conspiracy theory poses to the United States. The bulletin, obtained by NBC News, details followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory may commit political violence, after being radicalized by information shared online. The new strategy is being released just after NBC News obtained a new, unclassified FBI intelligence bulletin highlighting the risk that adherents of the conspiracy theory QAnon may commit political violence.

Seawater makes up about 96% of all water on earth, making it a tempting resource to meet the world’s growing need for clean drinking water and carbon-free energy. And scientists already have the technical ability to both desalinate seawater and split it to produce hydrogen, which is in demand as a source of clean energy. But existing methods require multiple steps performed at high temperatures over a lengthy period of time in order to produce a catalyst with the needed efficiency. That requires substantial amounts of energy and drives up the cost. Researchers from the University of Houston have reported...

A research team from Caltech and the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering has demonstrated a promising way to efficiently convert carbon dioxide into ethylene — an important chemical used to produce plastics, solvents, cosmetics and other important products globally. The scientists developed nanoscale copper wires with specially shaped surfaces to catalyze a chemical reaction that reduces greenhouse gas emissions while generating ethylene — a valuable chemical simultaneously. Computational studies of the reaction show the shaped catalyst favors the production of ethylene over hydrogen or methane. A study detailing the advance was published in Nature Catalysis. Currently, ethylene has a global...

I'm about to have to abandon my 2000 Toyota Avalon v6 3.0 (all Avalons have this and only this engine) with 78K miles because I can't get rid of a diagnostic "Cat not ready" message. Everything else passes fine. Car runs fine, rather better after changing the sensors. If I can't pass CA smog, I can't register the car and thus can't legally drive it. I have: changed both upstream 02 sensors. Changed downstream post-CAT) sensor. I have gone through the following reco'ed drive cycle. 1. Make Sure the Engine Light is Off 2. Check if your Vehicle has a...

CBS on Friday pledged to give $20 million to 18 organizations dedicated to eliminating sexual harassment in the workplace as the network tries to recover from a scandal that led to the ouster of its top executive, Les Moonves. The announcement comes as the network’s crisis deepens, with details emerging from an ongoing investigation into Moonves’ conduct and news surfacing of other instances of sexual misconduct at CBS. In the latest revelation, CBS acknowledged that it reached a $9.5 million confidential settlement last year with actress Eliza Dushku, who said she was written off the show “Bull” in March 2017...

Sixteen years ago was the last time that platinum was cheaper than palladium in 2001 (black vertical line). By then palladium had spent a year in the dominant position over platinum, and at that time the price of both metals had been fluctuating around $600 level. Since then platinum has returned to its usual upper position to palladium, and the gap was growing exponentially in favor of platinum until it reached the peak with the $1600 of supremacy in 2008. After that, the gap began to narrow and last month it entirely evaporated as a global shift in the automotive...

DENVER — The 27-year old vice president of Jet Pack International was released from the University of Colorado Hospital on Saturday afternoon after a his jet pack crash a day earlier. Nick Macomber was doing a test flight on the property of Go Fast, a Denver energy drink company in the 2600 block of West Eighth Avenue, when he lost control of the jet pack and fell Friday morning. “The guy was bleeding, he had head wounds where he had blood gushing on his face, he was spitting out blood. It looks like he had landed on his knees and...

It is a commentary on how adrift NASA space policy is when one considers that four years after President Obama made his "we choose not to return to the moon" speech that the space agency may be pivoting back to the moon. Paul Spudis, a planetary geologist and return to the moon advocate, has read the tea leaves and has seen the first, tentative steps toward a pivot back to the moon. Elon Musk, the space entrepreneur and political ally of Barack Obama, has recently conceded that expeditions to the moon would be useful. NASA is partnering with private companies,...

PLEASANT PRAIRIE – Surrounded by more than 50 supporters, including children and war veterans, Gov. Scott Walker on Sunday signed Wisconsin’s $70.1 billion, 2013-2015 budget into law. The Republican governor, put the executive pen to a Republican-led budget, signing the biennial spending plan beneath a banner that declared, “Working for Wisconsin.” Walker, appearing at Catalyst Exhibits Inc., a trade show booth design and marketing company that relocated to the state from Illinois in 2011, said that while the media would focus on his vetoes, the “real story is this is a budget built for the hard-working taxpayers of the state...

An inkjet printer has been repurposed to create a huge library of potential catalysts. To make the technology work with inorganic reagents that have different chemistries, a collaboration between chemists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, US, and Zhejiang University in China, has created special 'inks' made of colloidal nanoparticles of different metal precursors and polymers that direct the formation of the resulting nanoparticle structures.Different nanoparticle inks can then be loaded into seperate ink containers and combined in precise amounts, resulting in up to 1 million new formulations an hour, containing up to eight different components. That resulting...

A research team at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland has announced they have come upon a new catalyst for electrolysis to split hydrogen out of water. In a serendipitous moment the team led by Xile Hu made this discovery during an electrochemical experiment. Hu said, “It’s a perfect illustration of the famous serendipity principle in fundamental research. Thanks to this unexpected result, we’ve revealed a unique phenomenon.” Being alert has rewards when lightning strikes, thanks to Professor Hu and his group the new hydrogen catalyst has been found. Splitting hydrogen is an energy expensive process. For industrial...

Researchers in the US have shown that perovskites - a class of mixed oxide minerals - can perform as well as platinum in certain types of catalytic converter for removing pollutants from diesel exhaust. The finding could eventually result in cheaper, more robust catalytic converters for diesel engines that do not rely on expensive and scarce platinum group metals. Vehicle exhaust is a major polluter One of the main pollutants that needs to be removed from vehicle exhaust is a mixture of NO and NO2, referred to as NOx, which can be rendered harmless by reducing the gases to nitrogen. But...

Sunlight can readily liberate hydrogen from water as a result of a novel solid catalyst that mediates that reaction with unprecedented efficiency, according to researchers in China who developed the catalyst. The study advances the decades-old search for an inexpensive way to produce hydrogen, a versatile fuel, from water, an abundantly available resource. A key challenge to tapping into solar energy on a broad scale is developing an effective way to store that energy. One strategy calls for using sunlight to produce fuels such as hydrogen, which in many ways is considered an ideal energy carrier. Using sunlight to evolve...

Unlike blinged-out rap stars dripping with platinum chains, fuel cell designers try to scrimp on the precious metal. Researchers have now come up with a new way to make do with less platinum and get even better performance from fuel cells. The finding, which appears online May 14 in Science, may provide a much-needed price chop for clean, efficient fuel cell technology. Fuel cells generate energy through chemical reactions between hydrogen and oxygen, emitting only water as waste. But the high cost of the materials needed to make these reactions happen — in particular, platinum — has prevented fuel cell...

New studies with different fuel cell catalysts show promising results As the automotive industry is betting that hydrogen can become the fuel of the future, technology is taking steps to bring that hope closer to reality. Three papers being published by the journal Science promise to fill some of the most significant gaps in what could someday be an environmentally friendly cycle of hydrogen production and consumption. --snip-- Platinum is also commonly used on the consumption side, in the fuel cells that turn hydrogen back into water and produce electric currents. In Science‘s August 1 issue, researchers at Monash University...

Ancient_antarctic_microbes_2_2 The unusual properties of frozen water may have been the ticket that made life possible. Over the decades, several notable scientists have began to suspect that life on Earth did not evolve in a warm primordial soup, but in ice—at temperatures that few living things can now tolerate. The very laws of chemistry may have actually favored ice, says Jeffrey Bada, at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. “We’ve been arguing for a long time,” he says, “that cold conditions make much more sense, chemically, than warm conditions.” If Bada and others are correct, it would...

WASHINGTON, Sept. 21, 2007 – The most encouraging recent development in Baghdad is the willingness of citizens to step forward and partner with Iraqi security forces in defeating terrorism, the U.S. commander in charge of coalition forces in the city said today. Almost 8,000 Iraqi security volunteers are currently employed around the city and are being trained and integrated into the Iraqi security forces, Army Maj. Gen. Joseph F. Fil Jr., commander of Multinational Division Baghdad, told Pentagon reporters via satellite. All over Baghdad, these volunteers are being trained by Iraqi security forces and are partnering with them in operations,...

Catalyst could help turn CO2 into fuel 18:00 15 March 2007 NewScientist.com news service Tom Simonite A new catalyst that can split carbon dioxide gas could allow us to use carbon from the atmosphere as a fuel source in a similar way to plants. "Breaking open the very stable bonds in CO2 is one of the biggest challenges in synthetic chemistry," says Frederic Goettmann, a chemist at the Max Planck Institute for Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam, Germany. "But plants have been doing it for millions of years." Plants use the energy of sunlight to cleave the relatively stable chemical...

PHOENIX (AP) -- An Arizona bookstore owner charged in the firebombing of a government wildlife lab in Washington committed suicide in his jail cell Thursday, officials said. William C. Rodgers, 40, of Prescott, Ariz., suffocated after placing a plastic bag over his head while in a one-person cell in Flagstaff, the Coconino County medical examiner said. Rodgers was one of six people arrested earlier this month in connection with ecoterror attacks in Oregon and Washington in recent years. He was accused of setting fire to the Agriculture Department's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services facility in Olympia, Wash., in 1998....

QuantumSphere, Inc., a manufacturer of metallic nanopowders, working toward catalyzing the future for fuel cells, batteries, and hydrogen generation, is moving forward with the collaboration of Robert Dopp, of Doppstein Enterprises, Inc. (DSE). Together they are testing QuantumSphere's new line of nano-catalysts in functioning air electrodes to better identify significant parameters in the development cycle. Mr. Dopp has developed a cathode manufacturing process expressly designed to manufacture small "coupons" of highly uniform, very active and reproducible gas diffusion electrodes. These are typically used in metal air batteries, alkaline fuel cells, other air breathing systems as well as hydrogen generation...