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Oct 29, 2024

$7 billion “city within a city” planned for Phoenix

Posted by in categories: computing, economics, employment, engineering

“Our vision is for chip designers and engineering students, not just suppliers and manufacturers, to co-locate here, to create a value added ecosystem beyond just what it takes to build chips, and that’s how we’re going to create more value in the Phoenix economy,” Mack said.

A further three plants are also planned for the Phoenix site, which could bring TSMC’s total investment in the area to over $120 billion. Tech giant Apple has announced it will buy semiconductors from the fabrication plants.

The plants are anticipated to create 10,000 permanent jobs, and another 80,000 are expected to be created in the surrounding development.

Oct 29, 2024

Nuclear Rockets could Travel to Mars in Half the Time, but designing the Reactors that would Power them isn’t

Posted by in categories: chemistry, nuclear energy, particle physics, space travel

NASA plans to send crewed missions to Mars over the next decade—but the 140 million-mile (225 million-kilometer) journey to the red planet could take several months to years round trip.

This relatively long transit time is a result of the use of traditional chemical rocket fuel. An alternative technology to the chemically propelled rockets the agency develops now is called nuclear thermal propulsion, which uses nuclear fission and could one day power a rocket that makes the trip in just half the time.

Nuclear fission involves harvesting the incredible amount of energy released when an atom is split by a neutron. This reaction is known as a fission reaction. Fission technology is well established in power generation and nuclear-powered submarines, and its application to drive or power a rocket could one day give NASA a faster, more powerful alternative to chemically driven rockets.

Oct 29, 2024

Researchers use AI to find Non-Opioid Pain Relief Options

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, robotics/AI

An estimated one in five Americans live with chronic pain and current treatment options leave much to be desired. Feixiong Cheng, Ph.D., Director of Cleveland Clinic’s Genome Center, and IBM are using artificial intelligence (AI) for drug discovery in advanced pain management. The team’s deep-learning framework identified multiple gut microbiome-derived metabolites and FDA-approved drugs that can be repurposed to select non-addictive, non-opioid options to treat chronic pain.

The findings, published in Cell Press, represent one of many ways the organizations’ Discovery Accelerator partnership is helping to advance research in healthcare and life sciences.

Treating chronic pain with opioids is still a challenge due to the risk of severe side effects and dependency, says co-first author Yunguang Qiu, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Cheng’s lab whose research program focuses on developing therapeutics for nervous system disorders. Recent evidence has shown that drugging a specific subset of pain receptors in a protein class called G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) can provide non-addictive, non-opioid pain relief. The question is how to target those receptors, Dr. Qiu explains.

Oct 29, 2024

Can the ‘hard steps’ in the evolutionary history of human intelligence be recast with geological thresholds?

Posted by in category: futurism

What took so long for humans to appear on Earth? The Earth is 4.6 billion years old, and life began about 4 billion years ago, yet humans—the only intelligent, technological species we know of in the universe—have existed only for the last 200,000 years. Why didn’t we come sooner? What factor(s) delayed our appearance? And what can life’s timeline here say about the possibility of other technologically advanced lifeforms in the universe?

Oct 29, 2024

Researchers discover underlying mechanisms that make CRISPR an effective gene editing tool

Posted by in categories: bioengineering, biotech/medical

CRISPR/Cas9 is a gene editing tool that has revolutionized biomedical research and led to the first FDA-approved CRISPR-based gene therapy. However, until now, the precise mechanism of exactly how this tool works and avoids creating detrimental off-target effects was not well understood.

Oct 29, 2024

Study links black holes to dark energy

Posted by in category: cosmology

Almost 14 billion years ago, at the very beginning of the Big Bang, a mysterious energy drove an exponential expansion of the infant universe and produced all known matter, according to the prevailing inflationary universe theory.

Oct 29, 2024

A landscape of consciousness: Neurophysiologist presents diverse theories and taxonomy of proposed solutions

Posted by in category: neuroscience

“Out of meat, how do you get thought? That’s the grandest question.” So said philosopher Patricia Churchland to Robert Lawrence Kuhn, the producer and host of the acclaimed PBS program, Closer to Truth.

Oct 29, 2024

Assembling a new generation of radiopharmaceuticals with supramolecular theranostics

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry

Supramolecular metal-based structures have immense potential for biomedical applications as multimodal theranostic platforms. This Review gives an overview of the design principles and synthetic strategies; it also highlights the achievements in the field of radiochemistry.

Oct 29, 2024

‘Cosmic inflation’: did the early cosmos balloon in size? A mirror universe going backwards in time may be a simpler explanation

Posted by in category: cosmology

Move over, multiverse – a mirror universe may be a more realistic explanation.

Oct 29, 2024

The Human Mind Isn’t Meant to Be Awake After Midnight, Scientists Warn

Posted by in category: neuroscience

In the middle of the night, the world can sometimes feel like a dark place. Under the cover of darkness, negative thoughts have a way of drifting through your mind, and as you lie awake, staring at the ceiling, you might start craving guilty pleasures, like a cigarette or a carb-heavy meal.

Plenty of evidence suggests the human mind functions differently if it is awake at nighttime. Past midnight, negative emotions tend to draw our attention more than positive ones, dangerous ideas grow in appeal and inhibitions fall away.

Some researchers think the human circadian rhythm is heavily involved in these critical changes in function, as they outline in a 2022 paper summarizing the evidence of how brain systems function differently after dark.

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