Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Researchers at Michigan State University have refined an innovation that has the potential to improve safety, reduce severe injury and increase survival rates in situations ranging from car accidents, sports, law enforcement operations and more.

In 2020 and 2022, Weiyi Lu, an associate professor in MSU’s College of Engineering, developed a liquid nanofoam material made up of tiny holes surrounded by water that has been shown to protect the brain against traumatic injuries when used as a liner in football helmets. Now, MSU engineers and scientists have improved this technology to shield vital as well.

Falls, motor vehicle crashes and other kinds of collisions can cause blunt force and damage to bodily organs that can lead to life-threatening emergencies. These injuries are often the result of intense mechanical force or pressure that doesn’t penetrate the body like a cut, but causes serious damage to the body’s organs, including internal lacerations, ruptures, bleeding and organ failure.

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Early diagnosis is crucial in disease prevention and treatment. Many diseases can be identified not just through physical signs and symptoms but also through changes at the cellular and molecular levels.

When it comes to a majority of chronic conditions, early detection, particularly at the cellular level, gives patients a better chance for successful treatment. Detection of early changes at the cellular level can also dramatically improve cancer outcomes.

It’s against this backdrop that a University of Rhode Island professor and a former Ph.D. graduate student looked at understanding the smallest changes between two similar cells.

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New simulations suggest that habitable worlds could have begun forming only 200 million years after the big bang.

By Conor Feehly edited by Lee Billings

Scientists today are quite sure about how long our universe has existed: it’s been 13.8 billion years, give or take 59 million years, since the cosmos burst into being via the big bang. But they’re much less certain about a related question: When could life have first arisen, somewhere out there? Our solar system formed a mere 4.6 billion years ago, after two thirds of cosmic time had already elapsed, and life seems to have happened here almost as soon as Earth cooled down from its fiery birth to harbor oceans of liquid water.

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Researchers at the University of Twente, in collaboration with the City University of Hong Kong, have designed a cutting-edge programmable photonic chip in a thin-film lithium niobate platform, an important material in photonics. Published in Nature Communications, this work paves the way for next-generation high-performance radar and communication applications.

An important material is changing the way work, making them smaller, faster, and more efficient: thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN). It offers exceptional properties for how light and electrical signals can interact. This enables the seamless integration of key components—such as electro-optic modulators and signal processors—onto a single chip. As a result, can achieve unprecedented compactness, efficiency, and performance.

Researchers at the University of Twente have designed a TFLN-based integrated photonic chip, working in close collaboration with City University of Hong Kong, where the fabrication takes place. At the same time, these chips are also being fabricated locally in the MESA+ Nanolab.

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Charging forward at top speed, a garden snail slimes up 1 millimeter of pavement per second. By this logic, Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology researchers’ new 3D printing process speeds past existing methods—at a snail’s pace.

Researchers in Beckman’s Autonomous Materials Systems Group created “growth printing,” which mimics tree trunks’ outward expansion to print polymer parts quickly and efficiently without the molds and expensive equipment typically associated with 3D printing. Their work appears in the journal Advanced Materials.

“Humans are incredibly talented at making things. Completely new manufacturing processes are hard to find. Growth printing is entirely new, which is thrilling,” said Sameh Tawfick, a professor of mechanical science and engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and project lead.

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