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A report produced by Oxford University and Imperial College London for the UK Government reveals that all airports will be ordered to close, eating beef and lamb will be made illegal, and construction of new buildings will not be permitted to meet the legal commitment of zero emissions by 2050.The report states that all airports must close between 2020 and 2029 excluding Heathrow, Glasgow and Belfast airports, which can only stay open on the condition that transfers to and from the airport are done via rail.All remaining airports must then close between 2030 and 2049 because to meet the legal...

A chunk of copper became the coldest cubic meter (35.3 cubic feet) on Earth when researchers chilled it to 6 millikelvins, or six-thousandths of a degree above absolute zero (0 Kelvin). This is the closest a substance of this mass and volume has ever come to absolute zero. Researchers put the 880-lb. (400 kilograms) copper cube inside a container called a cryostat that is specially designed to keep items extremely cold. This is the first cryostat built that is capable of keeping substances so close to absolute zero.

It may sound less likely than hell freezing over, but physicists have created an atomic gas with a sub-absolute-zero temperature for the first time1. Their technique opens the door to generating negative-Kelvin materials and new quantum devices, and it could even help to solve a cosmological mystery. Lord Kelvin defined the absolute temperature scale in the mid-1800s in such a way that nothing could be colder than absolute zero. Physicists later realized that the absolute temperature of a gas is related to the average energy of its particles. Absolute zero corresponds to the theoretical state in which particles have no...

White House adviser on Solyndra: '*#~@ show' By: Dan Berman October 7, 2011 04:53 PM EDT When Solyndra hit the fan in August, White House energy adviser Heather Zichal may have summed it up best. "*#~@ show," Zichal wrote in an email Aug. 25. Zichal’s email is one of dozens showing Obama administration officials were planning on how to handle a Solyndra bankruptcy days before the solar company went under. On Aug. 17, Dan Utech, an energy special assistant in the White House, wrote in an email that DOE had learned Solyndra was beginning to shut down operations. “It’s unclear...

Scientists have laid the foundations for a high-performance 'molecular fridge' capable of reaching temperatures within a few thousandths of a degree of absolute zero (0K) with a high degree of efficiency. Such ultracoolers could have applications in areas such as ultra-low temperature physics, where alternative technologies such as those that rely on expensive and rare helium-3 could be unsuitable or too costly.The system relies on a phenomenon called the magneto-caloric effect, where the removal of a magnetic field from a ferromagnetic material causes a drop in temperature. The key to achieving a high magneto-caloric effect is to have a material...

Super cool. Researchers have developed a technique to cool this dime-sized mirror (small circle suspended in the center of metal ring) to within one degree of absolute zero.Credit: Christopher Wipf/MITIf you want to really see quantum mechanics in action, you've got to turn the temperature down so low that even atoms stop moving. Physicists have come close to achieving this "absolute zero" state by using precision-tuned lasers, but the technique has only allowed researchers to freeze small groups of atoms at a time. Now members of an international team say they have managed to cool a dime-sized mirror to within...