Lifeboat Foundation

As much as some people fear getting dental fillings or root canals, what many of them are really afraid of is the needle that delivers the anesthetic into the mouth tissue. Even though the skin in the “jabbing area” is usually pretreated with a topical anesthetic, it can still hurt. Before long, however, a shot of electricity could make that topical treatment deep-acting enough that the needle isn’t even needed.

In a recent study, scientists from the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil combined two commonly-used anesthetic drugs – prilocaine hydrochloride and lidocaine hydrochloride – with a polymer to form a hydrogel. The polymer was included to make it sticky, so that it could be applied to the lining of a pig’s mouth.

Using a process known as iontophoresis, a mild and painless electrical current was then passed through the hydrogel. As a result, there was a 12-fold increase in how well the prilocaine hydrochloride permeated through the tissue. The anesthetic effect was claimed to be not only fast-acting, but also long-lasting.

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EPFL scientists have developed a solar-panel material that can cut down on photovoltaic costs while achieving competitive power-conversion efficiency of 20.2%.

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European Space Agency building a space colony by 2030.

The European Space Agency unveiled plans on Friday to build a “lunar village” by 2030 as a stepping stone to Mars.

ESA chief Jan Woerner said the lunar “village” would be a series of structures made by robots and 3D printers that use moon dust as building material.

Continue reading “Jan Woerner: ESA chief wants to establish a Moon Village” »

The material to create space elevators will be developed by 2030, enabling a new golden age of space travel, according to a study published in the journal New Space.

“The material needed to have a 100,000 km rope will become real before 2030 and enable the creation of this low-cost access to space,” wrote Cathy W Swan, of SouthWest Analytic Network, Peter A Swan and John M Knapman, of the International Space Elevator Consortium, and David I Raitt, retired from the European Space Agency.

A space elevator would make launching people, satellites and craft into geostationary orbit dramatically cheaper than at present, with the researchers estimating it would drop from the current prices of $25,000 per kg for commercial launches and $40,000 per kg for governmental launches to $100 per kg for materials.

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Moon “village”, a successor to International Space Station, would be series of structures made by robots and 3D printers that use moon dust as building material.

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If true, this might mean there’s a “low hanging fruit” solution to ocean gyre garbage — a targeted effort to improve garbage collection in a small number of cities in developing nations, might dramatically reduce it. Hint, hint, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation! Side benefit would be greatly improving the lives of people in those cities, with some obvious health benefits along the way.

Economic growth in these countries is outpacing infrastructure, and their trash is collecting in the sea.

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The scientists below will all be bringing their perspectives to our meeting of leaders from every sector in Davos next week.

Neil Alford, materials scientist working on the creation of a room-temperature maser – the laser’s older sister, capable of amplifying microwaves rather than light for use in chemical detection or diagnostics.

Abir Al-Tabbaa, engineer investigating the potential of self-healing concrete for low-carbon infrastructure.

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Atoms are the building blocks of all matter on Earth, and the patterns in which they are arranged dictate how strong, conductive or flexible a material will be. Now, scientists at UCLA have used a powerful microscope to image the three-dimensional positions of individual atoms to a precision of 19 trillionths of a meter, which is several times smaller than a hydrogen atom.

Their observations make it possible, for the first time, to infer the macroscopic properties of materials based on their structural arrangements of atoms, which will guide how scientists and engineers build aircraft components, for example. The research, led by Jianwei (John) Miao, a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy and a member of UCLA’s California NanoSystems Institute, is published Sept. 21 in the online edition of the journal Nature Materials.

For more than 100 years, researchers have inferred how atoms are arranged in three-dimensional space using a technique called X-ray crystallography, which involves measuring how light waves scatter off of a crystal. However, X-ray crystallography only yields information about the average positions of many billions of atoms in the crystal, and not about individual atoms’ precise coordinates.

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A novel rechargeable battery developed at MIT could one day play a critical role in the massive expansion of solar generation needed to mitigate climate change by midcentury. Designed to store energy on the electric grid, the high-capacity battery consists of molten metals that naturally separate to form two electrodes in layers on either side of the molten salt electrolyte between them. Tests with cells made of low-cost, Earth-abundant materials confirm that the liquid battery operates efficiently without losing significant capacity or mechanically degrading—common problems in today’s batteries with solid electrodes. The MIT researchers have already demonstrated a simple, low-cost process for manufacturing prototypes of their battery, and future plans call for field tests on small-scale power grids that include intermittent generating sources such as solar and wind.

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