Lifeboat Foundation

Rutgers University scientists have devised a highly accurate method for creating coatings of biologically active materials for a variety of medical products. Such a technique could pave the way for a new era of transdermal medication, including shot-free vaccinations, the researchers said.

Writing in Nature Communications, the researchers described a new approach to electrospray deposition, an industrial spray-coating process. Essentially, the team developed a way to better control the target region within a spray zone as well as the electrical properties of microscopic particles that are being deposited. The greater command of those two properties means that more of the spray is likely to hit its microscopic target.

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Scientists led by Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) investigators have made a significant advance in developing alternative materials for the high-speed memory chips that let computers access information quickly and that bypass the limitations of existing materials.

They have discovered a way that allows them to make sense of previously hard-to-read data stored in these alternative materials, known as antiferromagnets.

Researchers consider antiferromagnets to be attractive materials for making computer memory chips because they are potentially more energy efficient than traditional ones made of silicon. Memory chips made of antiferromagnets are not subject to the size and speed constraints nor corruption issues that are inherent to chips made with certain magnetic materials.

Rice University chemists have discovered that tiny gold “seed” particles, a key ingredient in one of the most common nanoparticle recipes, are one and the same as gold buckyballs, 32-atom spherical molecules that are cousins of the carbon buckyballs discovered at Rice in 1985.

Carbon buckyballs are hollow 60-atom molecules that were co-discovered and named by the late Rice chemist Richard Smalley. He dubbed them “buckminsterfullerenes” because their atomic structure reminded him of architect Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes, and the “fullerene” family has grown to include dozens of hollow molecules.

In 2019, Rice chemists Matthew Jones and Liang Qiao discovered that golden fullerenes are the gold “seed” particles chemists have long used to make gold nanoparticles. The find came just a few months after the first reported synthesis of gold buckyballs, and it revealed chemists had unknowingly been using the golden molecules for decades.

New research published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Survey has revealed the age of our universe. Read this web story to know everything.

An international team finds new single-crystalline oxide thin films with fast and dramatic changes in electrical properties via Li-ion intercalation through engineered ionic transport channels.

Researchers have pioneered the creation of T-Nb2O5 thin films that enable faster Li-ion movement. This achievement, promising more efficient batteries and advances in computing and lighting, marks a significant leap forward in iontronics.

An international research team, comprising members from the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics, Halle (Saale), Germany, the University of Cambridge, UK, and the University of Pennsylvania, USA, have reported an important breakthrough in materials science. They achieved the first realization of single-crystalline T-Nb₂O₅ thin films, exhibiting two-dimensional (2D) vertical ionic transport channels. This results in a swift and significant insulator-metal transition through Li-ion intercalation in the 2D channels.

According to a study published in the journal Nature Water, Neolithic people living in China were capable of complex engineering feats without the need for a centralised state authority.

Last year, NASA undertook its first planetary defense mission with the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART). The goal was to divert the moonlet Dimorphos from its orbit, demonstrating that an asteroid could be redirected in the case of a catastrophic course toward Earth.

The spacecraft’s impact, while altering the moonlet’s orbit, also resulted in the dispersal of 37 boulders from its surface. Some of these space rocks are as wide as 22 feet off its surface.

The DART mission was watched intently across the globe on September 26, 2022. The spacecraft successfully shifted Dimorphos’s orbit from an original 11 hours and 55 minutes to 11 hours and 23 minutes post-impact.

The protons and neutrons making up atomic nuclei are made up of a trio of even smaller fundamental particles known as quarks.

A new study has now mapped out in unprecedented detail the distribution of the different kinds of quark inside a proton, expanding on our understanding of this all-important part of an atom.

Although the quantum landscape within protons is a seething mess of quarks and their opposing antiquarks popping in and out of existence, there is a general dominance of two ‘flavors’ over the others; two up-flavor quarks and a single down-flavor quark.

These and other missions on the horizon will face the same obstacle that has plagued scientists since they first attempted to search for signs of Martian biology with the Viking landers in the 1970s: There is no definitive signature of life.

That might be about to change. In 2021, a team led by Lee Cronin of the University of Glasgow in Scotland and Sara Walker of Arizona State University proposed a very general way to identify molecules made by living systems—even those using unfamiliar chemistries. Their method, they said, simply assumes that alien life forms will produce molecules with a chemical complexity similar to that of life on Earth.

Called assembly theory, the idea underpinning the pair’s strategy has even grander aims. As laid out in a recent series of publications, it attempts to explain why apparently unlikely things, such as you and me, even exist at all. And it seeks that explanation not, in the usual manner of physics, in timeless physical laws, but in a process that imbues objects with histories and memories of what came before them. It even seeks to answer a question that has perplexed scientists and philosophers for millennia: What is life, anyway?