Lifeboat Foundation

Hydrogel boosts motor function:

Hydrogel made with hyaluronic acid-graft-dopamine and a designer peptide improved motor function in animals after spinal cord injury.

One of the most common problems is spills of the salty brine that’s a toxic byproduct of pumping oil. Another is over-or under-pumping that can lead to machine failure and methane leaks. (The oil and gas industry is the largest industrial emitter of methane in the U.S.) Then there are extreme weather events, which range from winter frosts to blazing heat, that can put equipment out of commission for months. One of the wildest problems Sebastien Mannai SM ’14, PhD ’18 has encountered are hogs that pop open oil tanks with their snouts to enjoy on-demand oil baths.

Mannai helps oil field owners detect and respond to these problems while optimizing the operation of their machinery to prevent the issues from occurring in the first place. He is the founder and CEO of Amplified Industries, a company selling oil field monitoring and control tools that help make the industry more efficient and sustainable.

Amplified Industries’ sensors and analytics give oil well operators real-time alerts when things go wrong, allowing them to respond to issues before they become disasters.

The Tesla Model Y has topped Sweden’s automotive registrations regardless of powertrain type in the first half of 2024, as shown in new data.

The Model Y was the most-registered vehicle in Sweden in the first six months of this year, according to data from Mobility Sweden reported by Carup on Monday. The Model Y topped the charts overall with 7,386 units registered, despite a 20 percent decline in overall EV sales. The Model 3 landed 14th overall in the six-month period, while electric options from Volvo, Toyota, Polestar, and Volkswagen were also some of the most registered.

“It is gratifying that the proportion of electric cars reached the best for the year in June, but at the same time we see a stagnant market, which leads to a gradually aging vehicle fleet,” said Mattias Bergman, CEO of Mobility Sweden. “In order to meet the climate goals and strengthen Sweden’s competitiveness, it is crucial that electrification is accelerated.”

Researchers achieved high-vacuum levitation of a silica nanoparticle on a photonic-electric chip, revolutionizing nanotechnology.

One county in Texas has issued a voluntary evacuation notice for some residents, as Hurricane Beryl hurtles towards the state.

The Category 4 storm that has killed at least seven people in the Caribbean, according to the Associated Press’ latest death toll, is forecast to hit Texas by this weekend.

Just a year ago, Fervo Energy successfully demonstrated the effectiveness of its horizontally oriented geothermal system. Now the company has landed a massive contract for providing its clean, virtually endless power to the California grid.

It’s only been one year since Fervo Energy unveiled a novel concept in geothermal energy harvesting at its Project Red pilot plant in Nevada. Instead of drilling vertical bores that deliver water into the hot rocks lying beneath the Earth’s surface, it used techniques from the oil and gas industry to break up rocks, drive water through them horizontally, and collect the resultant steam to drive turbines at the surface.

The company said that its new method was set to change the geothermal landscape because it could work in many locales – not just those where hot rocks are close to the surface like in Iceland and New Zealand. And a new contract proves that it was right.

Sophisticated spacecraft often run on shockingly outdated computing systems: consider that the Perseverance rover runs on a PowerPC 750, the processor famous for running on iMacs in the late 1990s.

San Francisco-based Aethero is aiming to bring more powerful computing systems to orbit, and their first payload launches this month on SpaceX’s Transporter-11 rideshare mission. The computer, a small, stackable MVP called AetherNxN that’s built on an Nvidia Orin processor, will be getting extra protection from a new radiation shielding material that the product’s developers, Cosmic Shielding Corporation (CSC), say could help unlock a new era for computing in space.

Today, electronics in space are protected from harmful radiation in two ways. They’re physically shielded, using some combination of materials like aluminum and tantalum, and they’re radiation hardened, which generally means that they’re designed in ways that increase their tolerance to radiation exposure. The AetherNxN computer is rad-hardened, but adding CSC’s shielding “enables us to bring that AI-capable of hardware into space and have it operate under these very hostile conditions,” Aethero cofounder Edward Ge said in a recent interview.

Mysterious dark matter could slosh over our planet like a wave. If it does, it may produce telltale radio waves in Earth’s atmosphere, new theoretical research suggests.

RPTU University of Kaiserslautern-Landau has shown for the first time, in a joint study with BOKU University, that permaculture brings about a significant improvement in biodiversity, soil quality and carbon storage.

In view of the challenges of climate change and species extinction, this type of agriculture proved to be a real alternative to conventional cultivation—and reconcile environmental protection and high yields.

Permaculture uses natural cycles and ecosystems as blueprint. Food is produced in an agricultural ecosystem that is as self-regulating, natural and diverse as possible. For example, livestock farming is integrated into the cultivation of crops or the diversity of beneficial organisms is promoted in order to avoid the use of mineral fertilizers or pesticides.