Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 2905

The system is like a solid version of pumped hydro, which uses surplus generating capacity to pump water uphill into a reservoir. When the water’s released it flows down through turbines, making them spin and generate energy.

Energy Vault’s solid gravity system uses huge, heavy blocks made of concrete and composite material and lifts them up in the air with a mechanical crane. The cranes are powered by excess energy from the grid, which might be created on very sunny or windy days when there’s not a lot of demand. The blocks are suspended at elevation until supply starts to fall short of demand, and when they’re lowered down their weight pulls cables that spin turbines and generate electricity.

Because concrete is denser than water, it takes more energy to elevate it, but that means it’s storing more energy too. The cranes are controlled by a proprietary software that automates most aspects of the system, from selecting blocks to raise or lower to balancing out any swinging motion that happens in the process.

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When two sheets of graphene are placed on top of each other and slightly twisted, their atoms form a moiré pattern, or superlattice. At the so-called “magic” twist angle of 1.08°, something unusual happens: the weak van der Waals (vdW) coupling between atoms in adjacent layers modifies the atoms’ electronic states and transforms the material from a semimetal to a superconductor. The study of such twist-related electronic effects is known as “twistronics”, and it also includes phenomena such as correlated insulator states that appear at different degrees of misalignment.

Because the moiré pattern that underlies twistronics appears only at the interface between two thin sheets, it was assumed that twistronic effects could only occur in structures containing just a few layers. Although it is possible to produce a moiré pattern at a two-dimensional interface within a three-dimensional structure, it was thought that this pattern would not substantially modify the properties of the bulk material. After all, the 2D moiré region would only comprise a small fraction of the total 3D crystal volume.

New work by two research groups – one at the University of Washington in the US and Osaka University in Japan, the other at the University of Manchester in the UK – shows that this picture is not always correct. In fact, rotating a single layer of a 2D material by a small twist angle within a three-dimensional graphite film can cause the properties of the moiré interface to become inextricably mixed with those of the graphite. The result is a new class of hybrid 2D-3D moiré materials that substantially alters our understanding of how twistronics works.

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Back in 1,867, in an effort to test his thoughts on the emerging science of thermodynamics, physicist James Clerk Maxwell imagined an intelligent ‘demon’ sorting molecules between two containers based on their energy.

In 2023, a less diabolical version of Maxwell’s fictitious demon may have been found.

According to a new study from researchers at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, proteins embedded in cell membranes called ATP-Binding Cassette (ABC) transporters have features that echo Maxwell’s demon, allowing them to sort substrates.

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I’ve compiled this list to agglomerate just a few of the resources that I find useful for learning about how the world works, developing new skills, expanding my repertoire of ways of looking at global challenges, and planning how to contribute towards creating the future. Feel free to let me know if you know of good resources not listed here! I’m always excited to expand my learning. #futurism

I’m compiling this list to agglomerate just a few of the resources that I find useful for learning about how the world works, developing new skills, expanding my repertoire of ways of looking at global challenges, and planning how to contribute towards creating the future. Since many of the links here might change over time, please comment if you find any that do not work so that I can look for suitable replacement links. Also, feel free to let me know if you know of good resources not listed here! I’m always excited to expand my learning.

Scientific Funding

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Researchers led by Hiroshi Ohno at the RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences (IMS) in Japan have discovered a type of gut bacteria that might help improve insulin resistance, and thus protect against the development of obesity and type-2 diabetes. The study, published August 30 in the scientific journal Nature, involved genetic and metabolic analysis of human fecal microbiomes and then corroborating experiments in obese mice.

Insulin is a hormone released by the pancreas in response to blood sugar. Normally, it helps get the sugar into the muscles and liver so that they can use the energy. When someone develops insulin resistance, it means that insulin is prevented from doing its job, and as a result, more sugar stays in their blood and their pancreas continues to make more insulin. Insulin resistance can lead to obesity, pre-diabetes, and full-blown type-2 diabetes.

Our guts contain trillions of bacteria, many of which break down the carbohydrates that we eat when they would otherwise remain undigested. While many have proposed that this phenomenon is related to obesity and pre-diabetes, the facts remain unclear because there are so many different bacteria and there is a lack of metabolic data. Ohno and his team at RIKEN IMS have addressed this lack with their comprehensive study, and in the process, discovered a type of bacteria that might help reduce insulin resistance.

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In a recent study, Ji Won Seo and team found the outcomes of single-incision laparoscopic surgery (SILS) better than conventional laparoscopic surgery (CLS) for treating gastric gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GISTs). The findings of the study were published in BMC Surgery.

Between November 2020 and April 2022, a group of 15 consecutive patients with gastric GIST underwent single-incision gastric wedge resection, forming the SILS group. This group’s early perioperative outcomes were then meticulously analyzed and compared with a corresponding group of 15 patients who had undergone conventional laparoscopic surgery (CLS). The selection criteria for the surgical approach were consistent with those used for traditional laparoscopic procedures for gastric GIST.

The study’s findings revealed several significant insights. The estimated blood loss and intraoperative blood transfusion were comparable between the SILS and CLS groups, signifying similar surgical efficacy and safety. Notably, the SILS group experienced no intraoperative complications or instances requiring a shift to multiple-port or open surgery.

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