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Germany’s largest semiconductor manufacturer, Infineon Technologies, is using printed circuit boards (PCB) that can easily be recycled by immersing them in hot water.

Infineon is experimenting with a biodegradeable PCB developed by UK start-up Jiva Materials. It’s called Soluboard and is manufactured from natural fibers, a number of other biodegradeable ingredients, and a halogen-free polymer. The finished board is as flame retardant as other PCB substrates on the market today.

When Soluboard is immersed in warm water the polymer dissolves and the layers of the composite material delaminate, which allows the fibers to be composted and the “remaining solution” can be safely disposed of just like waste water. The additional benefit of these PCBs is the way in which they breakdown (see the image below), allowing 90% of the components attached to a board to be reclaimed and then either reused or recycled.

These biodegradeable PCBs make it easy to recover components and can be thrown on a compost heap at the end of their life.

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In a recent study published in the journal Nature Medicine, researchers pursued one-time cures for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM). They used a previously constructed murine model of HCM, designated as R403Q-129SvEv, to evaluate two different genetic therapies, as follows:

I) an adenine base editor (ABE8e)

Ii) a potent Cas9 nuclease delivered by an adeno-associated virus (AAV) vector.

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The space race has been revived, but this time, the goal post has been shifted much further – to Mars. As recent technological advancements promise to open new horizons of exploration, NASA plans to cut the travel time to Mars with a nuclear-powered spacecraft.

A trip to Mars currently takes approximately seven months, covering a staggering 300-million-mile journey. NASA, in collaboration with the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), now proposes an ambitious plan that hinges on the promise of nuclear thermal propulsion technology to reduce this duration significantly.

NASA aims to launch a nuclear-powered spacecraft, known as DRACO (Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations), into Earth’s orbit either by late 2025 or early 2026. The spacecraft, under construction by Lockheed Martin, a leading aerospace and defense company, will serve as a testbed for this groundbreaking technology.

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The day before, SpaceX was still able to send the Jupiter-3 satellite into space using a Falcon Heavy rocket. A few days earlier, the launch was cancelled for unknown reasons when the countdown stopped at the 65-second mark.

Here’s What We Know

Falcon Heavy failed to set a world record for payload mass. The minibus-sized Jupiter 3 weighs more than 9,000kg, and Hughes Network Systems calls it the world’s largest commercial communications satellite. But the record belongs to Europe’s Ariane 5 rocket, which sent two satellites into orbit weighing a combined 10.2 tonnes. This happened two years ago.

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A Google-backed startup has successfully tested an enhanced geothermal system that could harness Earth’s inner heat to generate clean electricity anywhere, anytime — and they built it, ironically, with technology perfected by the oil industry.

The challenge: Geothermal power plants take advantage of the heat radiating from deep inside the Earth to create electricity. Usually, this is done by drilling wells down to natural underground reservoirs of hot water and using that steam to spin electric turbines.

This is a clean, reliable source of energy, but it is hard to scale. The need to build geothermal plants near existing hydrothermal reservoirs, which are relatively rare, limits its use to a handful of places — today, geothermal supplies just 0.4% of the US’s utility-scale electricity.

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