If you feel no awe when watching this video, then you are already dead.
On Jan. 14, 2005, ESA’s Huygens probe made its descent to the surface of Saturn’s hazy moon, Titan. Carried to Saturn by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, Huygens made the most distant landing ever on another world, and the only landing on a body in the outer solar system. This video uses actual images taken by the probe during its two-and-a-half hour fall under its parachutes.
This publication suggests that wax could be carried on vehicles and used to create hydrogen gas in situ, the waste carbon being used to make more wax via syngas production and the Fischer-Tropsch process, where carbon monoxide and hydrogen is converted into hydrocarbons as a potential source of petro-chemicals that does not involve releasing fossil carbon into the atmosphere. While this publication is still a long way from a working industrial-scale process, it offers a very hopeful potential avenue for less-polluting technology.
Philip recently attended an event for other Oxford University chemistry alumni, and one of the speakers drew attention to a recent publication from, among others, Oxford chemists, regarding the production of hydrogen from paraffin waxes by microwave degradation using a ruthenium catalyst.
Hydrogen has often been suggested as an environmentally-friendly replacement energy source for fossil fuels in transport vehicles and other applications requiring high energy density. (Note that hydrogen is not a “fuel”, as it must be made using energy from other sources, which can be environmentally-friendly or not.) However, there are significant problems with this, notably involving the safe storage of a highly-inflammable and explosive gas which is much lighter than air.
If you were to pick one emerging technology with the potential to have a massive positive impact on humanity in the coming years, there’s a good chance you’d go with 3D bioprinting.
The ability to use “bio-ink” to print out biomaterials ranging from heart tissues to bone and cartilage is incredibly exciting — although at present it’s not exactly the most user-friendly of tech.
One company hoping to change that is Cellink, which this week has announced the launch of its new Bio X printer, which it hopes will bring 3D bioprinting to a whole new audience.
Senescent cell therapy for treating age-related diseases could also help people after chemotherapy.
Senescent cell removal therapies could help reduce the damaging impact chemotherapy has on patients as well as being used to address one of the aging processes to treat diseases.
#aging #cancer
Continue reading “Senescent cell removal could help chemotherapy patients” »
Most of today’s robot hands can perform easy tasks. They’re uber-practical grippers, simple and useful. But is it really so much to ask for robotic masterworks as dextrous as Luke Skywalker’s bionic hand in Star Wars? In short, yes, yes it is. It might have been a long time ago in a galaxy far far away—but most Star Wars tech is beyond us.
Still, it’s hard not to get in a Star Wars state of mind watching this beautiful robot hand engineered by Yale postdoc Joseph (Zhe) Xu and the University of Washington’s Emanuel Todorov.
Continue reading “This Remarkable Robot Hand Is Worthy of Luke Skywalker” »
