On Thursday, Virgin Galactic’s Galactic 5 mission carried planetary scientist Alan Stern and researcher Kellie Gerardi to suborbital space for the first time.
Designing a heat engine capable of producing maximum power while maintaining maximum efficiency has long been a significant challenge in physics and engineering. Practical heat engines are constrained by a theoretical limit to their efficiency, known as the Carnot limit, which sets a cap on how much heat can be converted to useful work.
In a breakthrough, researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR) have devised a novel “micro heat engine” that has overcome this limitation at the lab scale. The study was recently published in the journal Nature Communications
<em> Nature Communications </em> is a peer-reviewed, open-access, multidisciplinary, scientific journal published by Nature Portfolio. It covers the natural sciences, including physics, biology, chemistry, medicine, and earth sciences. It began publishing in 2010 and has editorial offices in London, Berlin, New York City, and Shanghai.
Researchers led by a team at UT Southwestern Medical Center have developed a device that can isolate blood flow to the brain, keeping the organ alive and functioning independent from the rest of the body for several hours.
The device, tested using a pig brain model and described in Scientific Reports, could lead to new ways to study the human brain without influence from other bodily functions. It also could inform the design of machines for cardiopulmonary bypass that better replicate natural blood flow to the brain. The findings build on previous research by study leader Juan Pascual, M.D., Ph.D., and his colleagues.
This novel method enables research that focuses on the brain independent… More.
If you’ve ever drizzled honey on a piece of toast, you’ve noticed how the amber liquid folds and coils in on itself as it hits the toast. The same thing can happen with 3D and 4D printing if the print nozzle is too far from the printing substrate. Harvard scientists have taken a page from the innovative methods of abstract expressionist artist Jackson Pollock —aka the “splatter master”—to exploit the underlying physics rather than try to control it to significantly speed up the process, according to a new paper published in the journal Soft Matter. With the help of machine learning, the authors were able to decorate a cookie with chocolate syrup to demonstrate the viability of their new approach.
As reported previously, Pollock early on employed a “flying filament” or “flying catenary” technique before he perfected his dripping methods. The paint forms various viscous filaments that are thrown against a vertical canvas. The dripping technique involved laying a canvas flat on the floor and then pouring paint on top of it. Sometimes, he poured it directly from a can; sometimes he used a stick, knife, or brush; and sometimes he used a syringe. The artist usually “rhythmically” moved around the canvas as he worked. His style has long fascinated physicists, as evidenced by the controversy surrounding the question of whether or not Pollock’s paintings show evidence of fractal patterns.
Back in 2011, Harvard mathematician Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan collaborated with art historian Claude Cernuschi on an article for Physics Today examining Pollock’s use of a “coiling instability” in his paintings. The study mathematically describes how a viscous fluid folds onto itself like a coiling rope—just like pouring cold maple syrup on pancakes.
Researchers in South Korea developed a technique for encapsulating NK cells in a hydrogel that could be 3D printed into a porous shape and later implanted at the site of a removed tumor..
A new 3D-printing-based approach could unleash a cutting-edge immunotherapy against solid tumors, which account for 90% of all cancers.
Natural killers: Some immune system cells only know to attack a threat if they’ve encountered it at least once before (or been instructed to attack it by other cells that have). Natural killer (NK) cells, however, can recognize diseased cells the first time they cross paths with them — and then alert other members of the immune system, too.
This makes them a valuable first-line defense against illness, but, unfortunately, cancer cells multiply too fast and NK cells die too quickly for them to outright stop many cancers from spreading.
And finally figured out that I was using Starlink and they block port 25. So my bots now use port 2,525 since other ISPs also block port 25 and I don’t want to have to deal with this again.
The interesting thing is that I had a problem with my fiber provider so I switched to Starlink and then forgot to switch back. So Starlink isn’t terrible…
High-speed internet. Available almost anywhere on Earth.
The immune system is a complex network of cells with critical functions in health and disease. However, a comprehensive census of the cells comprising the immune system is lacking. Here, we estimated the abundance of the primary immune cell types throughout all tissues in the human body. We conducted a literature survey and integrated data from multiplexed imaging and methylome-based deconvolution. We also considered cellular mass to determine the distribution of immune cells in terms of both number and total mass. Our results indicate that the immune system of a reference 73 kg man consists of 1.8 × 1012 cells (95% CI 1.5–2.3 × 1012), weighing 1.2 kg (95% CI 0.8–1.9). Lymphocytes constitute 40% of the total number of immune cells and 15% of the mass and are mainly located in the lymph nodes and spleen. Neutrophils account for similar proportions of both the number and total mass of immune cells, with most neutrophils residing in the bone marrow. Macrophages, present in most tissues, account for 10% of immune cells but contribute nearly 50% of the total cellular mass due to their large size. The quantification of immune cells within the human body presented here can serve to understand the immune function better and facilitate quantitative modeling of this vital system.
Astronomers studying data from NASA’s retired Kepler space telescope discovered a new system of seven “scorching” planets orbiting a distant star that is bigger and hotter than the sun, the space agency said Thursday.
NASA described the newly found planets as “sweltering” and “bathed” in radiant heat emitted by the host star that was described as “sun-like.” That star is 10% larger and 5% “hotter than the sun,” NASA said, and there is more heat per area from that star than any planet in our solar system experiences.
All of the planets are larger than Earth, with the two inner planets just slightly larger and the other five planets even bigger, about twice the size of Earth. The inner planets are “probably rocky and may have thin atmospheres,” NASA said, while the five outer planets are expected to have thick atmospheres.
In order to survive, organisms must control the pressure inside them, from the single-cell level to tissues and organs. Measuring these pressures in living cells and tissues in physiological conditions is a challenge.
In research that has its origin at UC Santa Barbara, scientists now at the Cluster of Excellence Physics of Life (PoL) at the Technical University in Dresden (TU Dresden), Germany, report in the journal Nature Communications a new technique to ‘visualize’ these pressures as organisms develop. These measurements can help understand how cells and tissues survive under pressure, and reveal how problems in regulating pressures lead to disease.
When molecules dissolved in water are separated into different compartments, water has the tendency to flow from one compartment to another to equilibrate their concentrations, a process known as osmosis. If some molecules cannot cross the membrane that separates them, a pressure imbalance—osmotic pressure—builds up between compartments.
In a recent study published in Nature Communications, researchers report that osteoarthritis (OA) is caused by the loss of Gremlin 1 (Grem1)-lineage chondrogenic progenitor (CP) cells.
Study: Loss of Grem1-lineage chondrogenic progenitor cells causes osteoarthritis. Image Credit: airdone / Shutterstock.com.