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Category: engineering – Page 135

Immune system-stimulating nanoparticle could lead to more powerful vaccines

A common strategy to make vaccines more powerful is to deliver them along with an adjuvant — a compound that stimulates the immune system to produce a stronger response.

Researchers from MIT, the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, and other institutions have now designed a new nanoparticle adjuvant that may be more potent than others now in use. Studies in mice showed that it significantly improved antibody production following vaccination against HIV, diphtheria, and influenza.

“We started looking at this particular formulation and found that it was incredibly potent, better than almost anything else we had tried,” says Darrell Irvine, the Underwood-Prescott Professor with appointments in MIT’s departments of Biological Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering; an associate director of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research; and a member of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard.

OPG chooses BWRX-300 SMR for Darlington new build

Canada’s first commercial Small Modular Reactor (SMR)

Ontario Power Generation (OPG) has selected the BWRX-300 small modular reactor (SMR) for the Darlington new nuclear site, and will work with GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy (GEH) to deploy the reactor. Canada’s first commercial, grid-scale, SMR could be completed as early as 2028.

OPG and GEH will collaborate on SMR engineering, design, planning, preparing licensing and permitting materials, and site preparation activities. Site preparation will begin in the spring of 2022, pending appropriate approvals, OPG said. It aims to apply to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) for a construction licence by the end of next year.

Darlington is the only site in Canada currently licensed for new nuclear: OPG was granted a site preparation licence by the CNSC in 2012, after completion of an environmental assessment which included public involvement, but reductions in forecast electricity demand led to a decision to defer plans for new build. OPG last year announced it was resuming planning activities for additional nuclear power generation via an SMR at the site, rather than a large conventional reactor, as previously envisaged. The CNSC recently granted a 10-year renewal to the site preparation licence, which had been due to expire in August 2022.

Scientists Develop Wireless-Networks that Allow Brain Circuits to Be Controlled Remotely through Internet

Wireless implantable devices and IoT could manipulate the brains of animals from anywhere around the world due to their minimalistic hardware, low setup cost, ease of use, and customizable versatility.

A new study shows that researchers can remotely control the brain circuits of numerous animals simultaneously and independently through the internet. The scientists believe this newly developed technology can speed up brain research and various neuroscience studies to uncover basic brain functions as well as the underpinnings of various neuropsychiatric and neurological disorders.

A multidisciplinary team of researchers at KAIST, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of Colorado, Boulder, created a wireless ecosystem with its own wireless implantable devices and Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure to enable high-throughput neuroscience experiments over the internet. This innovative technology could enable scientists to manipulate the brains of animals from anywhere around the world. The study was published in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering on November 25.

How SpaceX Assembled and Installed Mechazilla Step-by-Step

Mechazilla, one of the best innovative creations of SpaceX to catch its rocket will be discussed right here on this article, on how SpaceX assembled and installed this step-by-step. So, make sure to stay tuned for this very exciting information.

There is no doubt that people have talked about Elon Musk’s contributions to science and engineering, and given the fact that currently, he is the richest person in the world according to Forbes.

And his commitment to the cause of humanity pushes him to do many of the impossible. Further, the success SpaceX and he experienced in reusing a Falcon rocket prompted him to develop a plan for using the next-generation rocket, Starship.

Negative Energy, Quantum Information and Causality — Adam Levine

Friends Lunch with a Member.

Topic: Negative Energy, Quantum Information and Causality.
Speaker: Adam Levine.
Date: November 19, 2021

Einstein’s equations of gravity show that too much negative energy can lead to causality violations and causal paradoxes such as the so-called “grandfather paradox. In quantum mechanics, however, negative energies can arise from intrinsically quantum effects, such as the Casimir effect. Thus, it is not clear that gravity and quantum mechanics can be self-consistently combined. In this talk, Levine will discuss modern advances in understanding the connection between energy and causality in gravity and how quantum gravity avoids obvious paradoxes. He will also explore how this line of thought leads to new insights in quantum field theory, which governs particle physics.

As a physicist, Adam Levine’s research aims to understand the structure of entanglement in quantum field theories and quantum gravity through use of techniques from the study of conformal field theories, as well as quantum information theory and AdS/CFT. With support from the National Science Foundation, Adam is a long term Member in the School of Natural Sciences. He received his Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley (2019), was a Graduate Fellow at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (2018), a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellow (2017−2020), and received the Jeffrey Willick Memorial Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Astrophysics from Stanford University (2015).

The UN Is Engineering a Floating City. To Withstand a Category 5 Hurricane?

Because global warming and its associated risks are here to stay.

Global warming is causing many physical risks such as droughts, wildfires, and floods. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, global warming is essentially irreversible, which means these dangers will keep coming up. Luckily, some countries have started planning ahead.

The Busan Metropolitan City of the Republic of Korea, the UN-Habitat, and OCEANIX have joined forces to build the world’s first prototype sustainable floating city in order to get ahead of physical risks.

“Sustainable floating cities are a part of the arsenal of climate adaptation strategies available to us. Instead of fighting with water, let us learn to live in harmony with it. We look forward to developing nature-based solutions through the floating city concept, and Busan is the ideal choice to deploy the prototype,” said in a statement the Executive Director of UN-Habitat, Maimunah Mohd Sharif.

As the population rises, more and more people are being pushed to coastal cities. However, these regions are notoriously susceptible to floods and hurricanes.

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Theoretical Breakthrough at MIT Could Boost Data Storage

New work on linear-probing hash tables from MIT

MIT is an acronym for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is a prestigious private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts that was founded in 1861. It is organized into five Schools: architecture and planning; engineering; humanities, arts, and social sciences; management; and science. MIT’s impact includes many scientific breakthroughs and technological advances.