Lifeboat Foundation

In this urban rooftop setting, we saw more diversity in the fungal communities of the inoculated soil,” said Dr. Paul Metzler. “The long-term and consistent effects of the inoculum were quite surprising, as it’s not necessarily something you would expect when working with such small microorganisms.

How can urban rooftops, also known as green roofs, be improved to better help the environment? This is what a recent study published in New Phytologist hopes to address as a team of researchers led by Dartmouth College investigated how the right amount of soil microbes on urban rooftops could be used to strengthen urban rooftops. Traditionally, such rooftops use less-than-ideal methods that result in their positive environmental impact reducing over time, including the use of non-native plants in infertile soil. This study holds the potential to help scientists, city planners, and the public better understand the positive environmental impacts of urban rooftops.

For the study, the researchers built their own green roof in Chicago using locally obtained mycorrhizal fungi into the soil to produce an inoculation effect. Studies have shown that mycorrhizal fungi enhance plant life by trading much-needed nutrients to the plants for plant sugar. Over the next two years, the team actively managed the mycorrhizal fungi communities to ascertain their impact on the urban rooftop soil communities, whereas urban rooftops are traditionally passively managed. In the end, the researchers not only found that mycorrhizal fungi provide more robust and diverse soil communities, but they also found that active management was the ideal method for ensuring the mycorrhizal fungi maintain their development, and even accelerates it.

Continue reading “Harnessing Native Microbes for Green Roof Soil Health” »

When you push a button to open a garage door, it doesn’t open every garage door in the neighborhood. That’s because the opener and the door are communicating using a specific microwave frequency, a frequency no other nearby door is using.

Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Chicago, the University of Iowa and Tohoku University in Japan have begun to develop devices that could use the same principles — sending signals through magnets instead of through the air — to connect individual qubits across a chip, as reported in a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“This is a proof of concept, at room temperature, of a scalable, robust quantum technology that uses conventional materials,” said David Awschalom, the Liew Family professor in molecular engineering and physics at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering; the director of the Chicago Quantum Exchange; the director of Q-NEXT, a DOE National Quantum Information Science Research Center hosted at Argonne; and the principal investigator of the project. “The beauty of this experiment is in its simplicity and its use of well-established technology to engineer and ultimately entangle quantum devices.

Why did it just… stop?

SpaceX signed a deal with Starlab, the private space station joint venture of Voyager and Airbus, to launch on Starship.

For the past year and a half, the James Webb Space Telescope has delivered astonishing images of distant galaxies formed not long after the Big Bang, giving scientists their first glimpses of the infant universe. Now, a group of astrophysicists has upped the ante: Find the tiniest, brightest galaxies near the beginning of time itself, or scientists will have to totally rethink their theories about dark matter.

The team, led by UCLA astrophysicists, ran simulations that track the formation of small galaxies after the Big Bang and included, for the first time, previously neglected interactions between gas and dark matter. They found that the galaxies created are very tiny, much brighter, and form more quickly than they do in typical simulations that don’‘t take these interactions into account, instead revealing much fainter galaxies.

Small galaxies, also called dwarf galaxies, are present throughout the universe, and are often thought to represent the earliest type of galaxy. Small galaxies are thus especially interesting to scientists studying the origins of the universe. But the small galaxies they find don’t always match what they think they should find. Those closest to the Milky Way spin quicker or are not as dense as in simulations, indicating that the models might have omitted something, such as these gas-dark matter interactions.

The glow occurs when sunlight interacts with atoms and molecules in our atmosphere.

Mustang Mach-E and F-150 Lightning pickup owners can now reserve complimentary adapters—but the real win is access to one of the largest and most developed charging networks in the world.

Oxford PV, a spin-off from the University of Oxford, says it’s achieved the world record for the most efficient solar panel.

In collaboration with Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems, the company says its solar panel achieved 25% conversion efficiency – the percentage of solar energy shining on a panel converted into electricity. That’s a big deal compared to the more typical 16–24% in commercial solar panels.

Oxford PV’s secret sauce is perovskite-on-silicon tandem solar cells, which could theoretically hit over 43% efficiency, leaving traditional silicon solar cells with a theoretical limit of less than 30% in the dust. Its record-setting panel cranked out 421 watts over an area of 1.68 square meters. The researchers used standard mass production gear and optimized it for the tandem technology.

All thanks to perovskite solar panel technology.