North Carolina State Highway Patrol. The highway patrol said the truck collided with a passenger van along the I-95 in Cumberland County late in the morning.
No injuries were reported but two of the truck’s four 1,000-gallon containers of uranium hexafluoride fell on the ground as the southbound semi-trailer overturned. None of the material leaked and the cleanup was not hazardous, the
North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) said.
“We are proceeding to get equipment in place to right-side the tractor-trailer, then haul it away, off the interstate and reopen it,” the department added.
Uranium hexafluoride is commonly used to make fuel for nuclear power plants and is said to present minimal risk during traffic accidents. However, it can react with water and moisture to form highly corrosive chemicals.
imageBROKER/Alamy
Sponges can live for thousands of years, grow continuously and lack an immune system, so they should be particularly prone to cancers. But sponges exposed to X-rays have survived 100 times the lethal dose for humans without tumours.
“They seem to be extraordinarily resistant to radiation,” says Angelo Fortunato at Arizona State University. In fact, sponges have the highest level of radiation resistance ever observed in any animal whose cells keep dividing throughout its lifetime – as opposed to creatures like tardigrades whose cells stop dividing.
Fortunato’s team has been studying … Continue reading Subscribe now for unlimited access
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New condenser makes water from air, even in hot sun
Access to clean water is a pressing issue for many people around the world. Even in areas with ample water resources, a lack of infrastructure or reliable energy means purifying that water is sometimes extremely difficult.
That’s why a water vapor condenser designed by University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers could be revolutionary. Unlike other radiative vapor condensers which can only operate at night, the new design works in direct sunlight and requires no energy input.
“Water sustainability is a global issue,” says Zongfu Yu, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at UW-Madison. “You can’t set out to solve the water problem without addressing energy.”
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Studying plankton with a digital holographic camera will help ecology Scientists from the Laboratory of Radiophysical and Optical Methods for Studying the Environment (TSU Faculty of Radiophysics) have found a way to determine the pollution of water bodies by studying plankton. The main tool is a digital holographic camera, which, placed in the water, can determine the size and shape of plankton and other particles, their speed, the number of individuals, and other parameters. Conclusions about the state of the reservoir and its biological diversity can be drawn from the data obtained. – To record a hologram, you need to pass a laser beam through the volume of the medium and register it on a charge-coupled-device (CCD) camera. This will be the axial hologram of this volume of the medium, – explained Viktor Dyomin, TSU First Vice-Rector, head of the laboratory. – It differs from ordinary photography in that we can completely restore information about the wave that