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Feb 2 (Reuters) — State-owned China National Nuclear Corp (CNNC) has signed a contract in Argentina to build the $8 billion Atucha III nuclear power plant using China’s Hualong One technology, reviving a deal that had been stalled for years.

CNNC said on its WeChat account late on Tuesday that ithad signed an engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract, which comes ahead of Argentine President Alberto Fernandez’s trip to China later this week.

Progress on the nuclear deal between the two nations had stalled since it was first negotiated by the administration of former President Cristina Fernandez, a left-wing populist who left office in 2015. She is now Argentina’s vice president.

DaVinci penned the aerial screw design in the 1400s, way before air travel was a thing. Now, it’s being put to action with this student-built drone.


Drones aren’t anything new —multi-rotor aircraft are becoming a bigger part of people’s lives every day. From the latest batch of up-and-coming urban air mobility companies to hobby applications, electric aircraft with four or more motors are commonplace, and generally, they use conventional multi-bladed propellers to keep themselves aloft. That’s not what’s going on with this particular drone developed by engineering students at the University of Maryland, though.

Assembled for a student design competition hosted by the Vertical Flight Society, it’s a mixture of old and new. With rotors reminiscent of Leonardo DaVinci’s aerial screw illustrations from the late 1490s, it flies like any other drone would, all while looking extremely bizarre and having interesting flight characteristics.

Ben RayfieldWeather control tech exists, to some extent. EMP weapons exist. If there was a 477 mile long lightning, it was probably either due to the sun or is a weapon or a terraforming experiment.

Quinn SenaAuthor.

GIPHY

Genevieve Klien shared a link.


According to a series of etherscan transactions, an attacker has exploited Wormhole, a bridge between the Ethereum and Solana blockchains, for close to $323 million in ETH.

Wormhole is a bridging protocol that enables assets to move across various blockchain protocols. When a user sends assets from one chain to another, the bridge locks the assets and mints a wrapped version of the funds on the destination chain.

Researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) have used microscopic strands of DNA to guide the assembly of gel blocks that are visible to the naked eye.

The blocks, which measure up to 2mm in length and contain DNA on their surface, self-assembled in around 10–15 minutes when mixed in a solution, the scientists reported today in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

“These hydrogel blocks are, we believe, the largest objects so far that have been programmed by DNA to form organized structures,” said Dr. Vyankat Sontakke, first author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher in the OIST Nucleic Acid Chemistry and Engineering Unit.

Stelco, which is a steelmaker producing flat-rolled, cold-rolled, and hot-rolled steel products, has announced that it is entering the electric vehicle battery recycling market through agreements with Primobius GmbH.

The company executed binding licensing and option agreements with Primobius to commercialize Primobius’ EV battery recycling and processing technologies in North America. Under the agreement, Stelco will be able to advance commercial lithium-ion battery feedstock sourcing agreements. It will also allow the company to begin the engineering and approval processes. The agreement enables Primobius the right to acquire between 25% and 50% equity in Stelco’s wholly-owned subsidiary.

The proposed Lake Erie Works refinery will enable Stelco to join the ranks of lithium-ion battery recycling leaders in North America. The integrated shredding and hydrometallurgical refinery will produce up to 18,400 net tons per year of nickel, manganese, and cobalt sulfates, and lithium hydroxide and carbonate. It’s expected to generate up to 40,000 net tons per year of scrap steel that Stelco will recycle into its steelmaking operations.

Japanese researcher Sagawa Masato has won this year’s Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering for developing the world’s “strongest” permanent magnet.

The winner of the sixth edition of the British prize was announced online on Tuesday. It had been held every other year since 2013, but became an annual event, starting this year, to keep up with the pace of scientific and technological advances.

Sagawa invented the neodymium-iron-boron magnet, which is said to be the world’s most powerful permanent magnet. The breakthrough led to the development of small and high-performance motors. This has enabled higher-performance products in various fields, such as wind power, electric vehicles and home electrical appliances.

Accelerating Research To Prevent & Cure Disease — Dr. Kevin Perrott, Ph.D., Founder & CEO, OpenCures; Co-Founder & Treasurer, SENS Research Foundation


Dr. Kevin Perrott, Ph.D. is Founder and CEO, OpenCures (https://opencures.org/), Adjunct Professor, University of Alberta, Co-Founder and Advisor, Oisin Biotechnologies, President, of Global Healthspan Policy Institute, and Co-Founder and Treasurer, SENS Research Foundation.

Kevin is a successful entrepreneur and owner of the largest motorcycle and snowmobile dealership in Canada, Riverside Honda and Skidoo Sales in Edmonton, Alberta. He became a cancer survivor, an experience which clearly highlighted the deficiencies of the current health technology development paradigm where the customer has almost no input in the development of their own health solutions. Armed with the realization that nothing is more valuable than health and the time to enjoy it with those you love, Kevin resolved to put his energies towards addressing these deficiencies.

In 2003, Kevin joined Aubrey de Grey and David Gobel to form the Methuselah Foundation which offered competitive prizes for advances in longevity science. A few years later he became a co-founder with Aubrey de Grey and others of SENS Research Foundation to develop interventions able to repair or make harmless the damage that accumulates and underlies multiple age-related disorders. Mostly recently, Kevin formed OpenCures as a for-benefit corporation helping individuals perform self-directed research, generate data, and focus the value of data on the health solutions they are interested in.

Kevin has authored and co-authored several peer-reviewed articles all focused on accelerating the science underlying the development of therapies for degenerative diseases. He is a co-founder of multiple non-profit and for-profit entities whose missions are aligned with that purpose.

Although Christmas may be several weeks behind us, various colorful LED contraptions can nowadays be found in our houses at any time of year. [Tim] got his hands on an LED curtain that came with a remote control that allows the user to set not only the color of the LEDs as a whole but also to run simple animations. But these were not your standard WS2812B strips with data lines: all the LEDs were simply connected in parallel with just two wires, so how was this even possible?

[Tim] hooked up his oscilloscope to the LED strings to find out how they worked, detailing the results in a comprehensive blog post. As it turns out, the controller briefly shorts the LED strip’s supply voltage to generate data bits, similar to the way old pulse-dialing phones worked. A tiny chip integrated into each LED picks up these pulses, but retains its internal state thanks to a capacitor that keeps the chip powered when the supply line goes low.

After reverse-engineering the protocol, [Tim] went on to implement a similar design using an ATMega328P as a controller and an ATtiny10 as the LED driver. With just a few lines of code and a 100 nF buffer capacitor across the ATtiny’s power pins, [Tim] was able to turn an LED on and off by sending pulses through the supply lines. Some work still needs to be done to fully implement a protocol as used in the LED strings, but as a proof-of-concept it shows that this kind of power-line communication is possible with standard components.