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Category: chemistry – Page 336

The Rise of Supersoldiers — How AI Changes Everything

Artificial Intelligence is touching almost every aspect of our lives. It’s reasonable to expect AI influence will only increase in the future. One of many fields heavily influenced by AI is the military. Particularly in the development of Supersoldiers. The notion of super-soldiers enhanced with biotechnology and cybernetics was once only possible in the realm of science fiction. But it may not be too long before these concepts become a reality.

A new worldwide arms race is pitting countries against each other to be the first to successfully create real genetically modified super soldiers by using tools such as CRISPR. Understandably many of these human enhancement technologies raise health and safety questions and it is more likely these enhancements will first gain traction in countries that do not place as much weight on ethical concerns.

According to US Intelligence, China has conducted “human testing” on members of the People’s Liberation Army in hope of developing soldiers with “biologically enhanced capabilities.

This has made the U.S. military’s top intelligence agencies increasingly worried but the Pentagon has significantly invested in its own research in AI and in the extension of the human senses beyond their current physical limitations, to provide soldiers with superhuman abilities.

The basics of brain-machine interfaces with AI are being developed for the military, and if the results are as successful as scientists hope they will be, soldiers could one day be enhanced with cybernetics, effectively becoming trans-human soldiers.

The US Military is also examining newly scientific tools, like genetic engineering, brain chemistry, and shrinking robotics, for even more dramatic enhancements. But most of this advanced technology remains classified.

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As chemical fertilizer shortages persist, peecycling — the process of recycling human urine — could increase the yield of nutrient-rich crops

The need to find alternative sources for fertilizer have become urgent as chemical fertilizer shortages from the Ukrainian war threaten countries globally.

A Chinese military analyst suggested countermeasures for the Starlink satellite system developed by Musk’s SpaceX – including ways to hack or destroy the service.

Biochemistry Researchers Repair and Regenerate Heart Muscle Cells

Researchers at the University of Houston are reporting a first-of-its-kind technology that not only repairs heart muscle cells in mice but also regenerates them following a heart attack, or myocardial infarction as its medically known.

Published in The Journal of Cardiovascular Aging 0, the groundbreaking finding has the potential to become a powerful clinical strategy for treating heart disease in humans, according to Robert Schwartz, Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor of biology and biochemistry at the UH College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics.

The new technology developed by the team of researchers uses synthetic messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) to deliver mutated transcription factors — proteins that control the conversion of DNA into RNA — to mouse hearts.

Process to customize molecules does double duty

Inspired by your liver and activated by light, a chemical process developed in labs at Rice University and in China shows promise for drug design and the development of unique materials.

Researchers led by Rice chemist Julian West and Xi-Sheng Wang at the University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, are reporting their successful catalytic process to simultaneously add two distinct functional groups to single alkenes, drawn from petrochemicals that contain at least one carbon-carbon double bond combined with .

Better yet, they say, is that these alkenes are “unactivated”—that is, they lack reactive atoms near the double bond—and until now, have proven challenging to enhance.

Using microbrewery waste to synthesize carbon quantum dots

For a few years now, spent grain, the cereal residue from breweries, has been reused in animal feed. This material could also be used in nanotechnology. Professor Federico Rosei’s team at the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS) has shown that microbrewery waste can be used as a carbon source to synthesize quantum dots. The work, done in collaboration with Claudiane Ouellet-Plamondon of the École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS), was published in the Royal Society of Chemistry’s journal RSC Advances.

Often considered “artificial atoms,” are used in the transmission of light. With a range of interesting physicochemical properties, this type of nanotechnology has been successfully used as a sensor in biomedicine or as LEDs in next generation displays. But there is a drawback. Current quantum dots are produced with heavy and toxic metals like cadmium. Carbon is an interesting alternative, both for its biocompatibility and its accessibility.

Organ storage a step closer with cryopreservation discovery

Australian scientists have taken the first step towards improved storage of human cells, which may lead to the safe storage of organs such as hearts and lungs.

The team’s discovery of new cryoprotective agents opens the door to many more being developed that could one day help to eliminate the need for organ transplant waiting lists. Their results are published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry B.

Cryopreservation is a process of cooling biological specimens down to very low temperatures so they can be stored for a long time. Storing cells through cryopreservation has had big benefits for the world—including boosting supplies at blood banks and assisting reproduction—but it is currently impossible to store organs and simple tissues.

Scientists observe longitudinal plasmonic field in nanocavity at subnano-scale

A group of scientists working on surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) has made a nanoruler to provide insight into the longitudinal plasmonic fields in nanocavities, according to research published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

SERS is a highly sensitive and powerful spectral analysis technique applicable in various fields. In to weak Raman scattering, SERS achieves a dramatically enhanced Raman signal of up to 1010–15, allowing the analysis of single molecules.

“How we develop the technology depends, to a large extent, on what we know about fields. In the experiments, we observed an uneven distribution in the plasmonic field at the nano-scale. But it lacks theoretic and experimental support. So we decided to figure it out,” said Yang Liangbao, who leads the team at the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Clean doping strategy produces more responsive phototransistors

The library of two-dimensional (2D) layered materials keeps growing, from basic 2D materials to metal chalcogenides. Unlike their bulk counterparts, 2D layered materials possess novel features that offer great potential in next-generation electronics and optoelectronics devices.

Doping engineering is an important and effective way to control the peculiar properties of 2D materials for the application in logical circuits, sensors, and optoelectronic devices. However, additional chemicals have to be used during the process, which may contaminate the materials. The techniques are only possible at specific steps during material synthesis or device fabrication.

In a new paper published in eLight, a team of scientists led by Professor Han Zhang of Shenzhen University and Professor Paras N Prasad of the University of Buffalo studied the implementation of neutron-transmutation doping to manipulate . Their paper, titled has demonstrated the change for the first time.

Building artificial nerve cells

For the first time, researchers have demonstrated an artificial organic neuron, a nerve cell, that can be integrated with a living plant and an artificial organic synapse. Both the neuron and the synapse are made from printed organic electrochemical transistors.

On connecting to the carnivorous Venus flytrap, the electrical pulses from the artificial nerve cell can cause the plant’s leaves to close, although no fly has entered the trap. Organic semiconductors can conduct both electrons and ions, thus helping mimic the ion-based mechanism of pulse (action potential) generation in plants. In this case, the small electric pulse of less than 0.6 V can induce action potentials in the plant, which in turn causes the leaves to close.

“We chose the Venus flytrap so we could clearly show how we can steer the biological system with the artificial organic system and get them to communicate in the same language,” says Simone Fabiano, associate professor and principal investigator in organic nanoelectronics at the Laboratory of Organic Electronics, Linköping University, Campus Norrköping.

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