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Blog – Page 11558

Low-cost, low-dimensional nanoarchitectures provide optimal structures for charge collection in large-scale solar energy harvesting and conversion applications.

Photoelectrochemical water splitting, where irradiation of a photoelectrode in water produces hydrogen and oxygen, can be used for solar energy harvesting and conversion.1 The process potentially offers a clean, sustainable, and large-scale energy resource. Photoanodes used in the photoelectrochemical process are generally made from Earth-abundant oxide semiconductors, such as titanium dioxide, tungsten trioxide, and iron (III) oxide.2 Among these metal oxide semiconductors, tungsten trioxide is regarded as one of the best candidates because of its visible light-driven photocatalytic activity, its good charge transport properties, and its relative stability in aqueous electrolytes. However, the light absorption and charge collection efficiency of tungsten trioxide—especially within a bulk structure—still needs to be improved to realize practical photoelectrochemical applications.

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Wishing them luck.

Tennessee -based Branch Technology has announced it will begin construction of a 3D-printed house in 2017. Designed by Honolulu-based WATG, the project was initiated for the Freeform Home Design Challenge, which asked participants to design for Branch’s Cellular Fabrication (C-Fab) 3D printing technology. The small house designs were required to be between 600 and 800 square feet.

Branch’s C-Fab technology involves 3D printing carbon-fiber-reinforced ABS plastic with a large robotic arm. The resulting formwork can then be covered in more traditional building materials, such as concrete or foam. Instead of the typical completely 3D printed additive technique, C-Fab uses an algorithm to formulate an interior framework for the structure.

WATG’s design, entitled Curve Appeal, will be built at Branch Technology’s lab in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The house is comprised of a curving shell around an open plan. The form of the building also provides a car port. The interior of the house is divided up with class walls and a solid core.

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Very cool.

Pinpointing the type of bacteria that are at the root of an infection in clinical samples removed from living tissues, such as blood, urine or joint fluids, to quickly identify the best anti-microbial therapy still poses a formidable challenge. The standard method of culturing can take days to reveal pathogens, and they often fail to bring them to light altogether.

A team lead by Donald Ingber, M.D., Ph.D., at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University now reports a method in PLoS, which enables the rapid isolation and concentration of infectious bacteria from complex clinical samples to help speed up bacterial identification, and it should be able to accelerate the determination of antibiotic susceptibilities as well.

“We leveraged FcMBL? the genetically engineered pathogen-binding protein we developed for our sepsis therapeutic device program? to develop a fast and simple technology to help overcome this diagnostic roadblock,” said Ingber, who is the Wyss Institute’s Founding Director, the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and the Vascular Biology Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, and Professor of Bioengineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “Using clinical samples of joint fluids, we were able to show that this method can be used to quickly and efficiently isolate bacterial pathogens for various kinds of subsequent analysis, including PCR, which is commonly used for molecular diagnostics in clinical laboratories.”

Continue reading “Engineered pathogen-binding protein enables rapid isolation of infectious bacteria from joint fluids” | >

Silicon Valley is trying a new approach in get new tech into the US government (states, counties, and cities/ towns) hands.

I think most of us can agree that the internet poses some unique and wide-scale risks to our privacy.

Our every move online can be — and often is — tracked. In the past, it might have been hard for companies or the government to know your interests, political leanings, religious affiliation or health problems. But they can glean all that and more by simply watching what you do on the internet.

With a few exceptions, the government has failed to meaningfully curtail the data collection or help consumers gain some real control or choice over it. And industry self-regulation has been a joke.

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