(3 articles) These moisture-sucking materials could transform air conditioning | $1 Million Will Go to the Mathematician Who Busts the ' ABC Conjecture' Theory | Is it really hotter now than any time in 100,000 years?

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Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium These moisture-sucking materials could transform air conditioning    A surprising set of materials could soon help make more efficient air conditioners that don’t overtax the electrical grid on hot days. As extreme heat continues to shatter records around the globe, electricity demand for air conditioning is expected to triple in the next few decades—an increase of about 4,000 terawatt-hours between 2016 and 2050, according to the International Energy Agency, or roughly the same electricity demand as the entire US electrical grid in 2022.  That’s why the race to build more efficient air conditioners has become increasingly urgent. While some companies are focused on improving existing designs, others are looking to entirely new systems that use materials called desiccants. These systems could cool more efficiently, even in extreme heat and humidity, reducing stress on the grid.    Continued here You Might Like � � � � � � � � � $1 Million Will Go to the Mathematician Who Busts the ‘ ABC Conjecture’ Theory    The founder of a Japanese media company has offered a large cash prize to anyone who can find a flaw in an unusual proof  For number theorists, 2012 was like a roller-coaster ride. Renowned mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki of Kyoto University in Japan published a proof of the abc conjecture, one of the most important open puzzles in the field. But disillusionment quickly set in: Mochizuki had spent 20 years single-handedly developing no fewer than 500 pages of a completely new formalism that other experts needed to decipher. In the past decade these experts have been gnashing their teeth at his proof. Even several conferences could not clarify the status of the abc conjecture. To change that, Nobuo Kawakami, founder of the Japanese media and telecommunications company DWANGO, has offered up to $1 million in prize money to the first person to write a paper that shows an inherent flaw in Mochizuki’s proof. At first glance, the abc conjecture seems innocuous. It deals with two natural numbers, a and b, and their sum, a + b = c. As is common in number theory, the conjecture deals with prime numbers that exactly divide a given number—what mathematicians call prime divisors. Any number can be represented as a product of prime numbers—for instance, 15 = 3 x 5 or 324 = 22 x 34. The latter is an example of a “rich” number because it has many equal prime divisors (the 2 occurs twice, and the 3 occurs four times). Such rich numbers are rare. Even more rarely, the sum of two rich numbers is rich again. This unusual occurrence is what the abc conjecture, which mathematicians Joseph Oesterlé and David Masser formulated in 1985, is all about. The conjecture gives a kind of measure of how “rich” the sum of two numbers can be. The special thing about the conjecture is that it combines the additive and multiplicative properties of natural numbers. Continued here Is it really hotter now than any time in 100,000 years?    As scorching heat grips large swaths of the Earth, a lot of people are trying to put the extreme temperatures into context and asking: When was it ever this hot before? Globally, 2023 has seen some of the hottest days in modern measurements, but what about farther back, before weather stations and satellites? As a paleoclimate scientist who studies temperatures of the past, I see where this claim comes from, but I cringe at the inexact headlines. While this claim may well be correct, there are no detailed temperature records extending back 100,000 years, so we don’t know for sure. Continued here

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