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Category: innovation – Page 160

Astronomers have made the first measurement of spin-orbit alignment for a distant ‘super-Jupiter’ planet, demonstrating a technique that could enable breakthroughs in the quest to understand how exoplanetary systems form and evolved.

An international team of scientists, led by Professor Stefan Kraus from the University of Exeter, has carried out the measurements for the exoplanet Beta Pictoris b—located 63 light years from Earth.

The planet, found in the Pictor constellation, has a mass of around 11 times that of Jupiter and orbits a young star on a similar as Saturn in our solar system.

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Yan McMullen had never heard of the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences when he started casting about for a graduate chemistry program. But on the recommendation of one of his professors, he sent an email to the College’s Professor of Chemistry Stephen Bradforth proposing an experiment to tease out what makes a metal really a metal.

The proposal would not only turn into his Ph.D. thesis but a major scientific breakthrough.

McMullen’s proposal was not an easy sell. The experiment would be expensive and possibly dangerous.

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NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine signaled today that astronauts would soon be cleared to take suborbital spaceflights aboard the commercial rocket ships being tested by Virgin Galactic and by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture.

“NASA is developing the process to fly astronauts on commercial suborbital spacecraft,” Bridenstine said in a tweet. “Whether it’s suborbital, orbital or deep space, NASA will utilize our nation’s innovative commercial capabilities.”

Bridenstine said the details will be laid out in a request for information to be released next week. Efforts to get further information from NASA Headquarters weren’t immediately successful.

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Back in the Sixties, one of the hottest toys in history swept America. It was called Etch-A-Sketch, and its popularity was based on a now-laughably simple feature. It was a handheld small-laptop-sized device that allowed users to create crude images by turning two control knobs that drew horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines composed of aluminum particles sealed in a plastic case. It allowed experienced artists to compose simple and sometimes recognizable portraits. And it allowed inexperienced wannabe artists who could barely draw stick-figure characters to feel like masters of the genre by generating what, frankly, still looked pretty much like mush. But Etch-A-Sketch was fun, and it went on to sell 100 million units to this day.

Six decades later, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and City University of Hong Kong have come up with an invention that actually does what so many wishful enthusiasts imagined Etch-A-Sketch did all those years ago.

DeepFaceDrawing allows users to create stunningly lifelike portraits by inputting loose, non-professional, roughly drawn sketches. It requires no artistic skills and no programming experience.

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Dexamethasone, a cheap and widely used steroid, has become the first drug shown to be able to save lives among Covid-19 patients in what scientists hailed as a “major breakthrough”.

Results of trials announced on Tuesday showed dexamethasone, which is used to reduce inflammation in other diseases, reduced death rates by around a third among the most severely ill Covid-19 patients admitted to hospital.

The results suggest the drug should immediately become standard care in patients with severe cases of the pandemic disease, said the researchers who led the trials.

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UK experts say the low-dose steroid treatment is a major breakthrough in the fight against the deadly virus.

It cut the risk of death by a third for patients on ventilators. For those on oxygen, it cut deaths by a fifth.

The drug is part of the world’s biggest trial testing existing treatments to see if they also work for coronavirus.

Researchers estimate that if the drug had been used to treat patients in the UK from the start of the coronavirus pandemic up to 5,000 lives could have been saved. Because it is cheap, it could also be of huge benefit in poorer countries struggling with high numbers of Covid-19 patients.

Experts say there should be no delay in getting the cheap drug to patients after “fantastic” trial results.

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Chinese company, Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd. (CATL), this week announced a new battery technology that could revolutionise the electric vehicle market.

Established in 2011 and headquartered in Ningde, eastern China, CATL employs more than 24,000 people and has grown to become the world’s largest maker of lithium batteries. Amid surging demand for electric vehicles, its revenue soared by 54% last year. China, as a whole, installed 62.2 GWh of battery storage capacity last year, according to the China Automotive Battery Industry Innovation Alliance, of which CATL supplied 31.5 GWh for a market share of nearly 51%.

In addition to domestic sales, CATL supplies a wide range of carmakers internationally – including Tesla, BMW, Toyota, Honda, and Volkswagen. While sales have slumped more recently, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, CATL and its clients are expecting demand to return in 2021.

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