Lifeboat Foundation

Hydrogen gas could someday replace fossil fuels as a “clean” energy source, producing only water and energy. However, handling large quantities of gaseous hydrogen is cumbersome, and converting it to a liquid requires vessels that can withstand extremely high pressures. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Central Science have developed a method to store and release highly pure hydrogen with salts in the presence of amino acids.

The reversible storage of hydrogen in solid salts has emerged as one potential way to make the fuel easier to transport and handle, but the reactions to do this require precious metals as catalysts and may produce carbon dioxide as an unwanted byproduct. So, Henrik Junge, Matthias Beller and colleagues developed effective storage-release systems with both bicarbonate and carbonate salts, as well as manganese, which is a more widely available metal catalyst.

The researchers found that converting bicarbonate and hydrogen into formate, and vice versa, was most effective with potassium salts, a manganese-based catalyst and lysine—an amino acid that acted as an additional promoter and reacted with carbon dioxide to capture it—at reaction temperatures below 200 F. After five storage-release cycles, the reaction system produced hydrogen with a high yield (80%) and purity (99%).

Picture an entire city charged by batteries. This new battery design may unlock a new era of energy.

My name is Roman Stolyarov, and for my PhD work at the Media Lab I developed a terrain-adaptive control system for robotic leg prostheses. While modern prostheses allow people with leg amputations to get around, the way that they get around is often tiring, uncomfortable, and burdensome on their intact joints. In the worst case, irregular terrain geometries—from uneven sidewalks to rugged hiking trails—can be difficult or impossible to navigate with conventional prostheses, burdening the user’s mobility, independence, and sense of being able-bodied. My work was intended to help people with amputations feel as able-bodied and mobile as possible, by allowing them to walk seamlessly regardless of the ground terrain.

Atom containing an antiproton, the proton’s antimatter equivalent, in place of an electron has an unexpected response to laser light when immersed in superfluid helium, reports the ASACUSA collaboration at CERN

Established in 1954 and headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, CERN is a European research organization that operates the Large Hadron Collider, the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Its full name is the European Organization for Nuclear Research (French: Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire) and the CERN acronym comes from the French Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire.

GitHub Copilot, the text-to-code AI tool, has been—for the most part—revolutionary in determining how people code. Twitter has been erupting with people expressing how this new AI tool has benefitted them with organisation heads and developers alike hailing it for saving much of their time.

However, the latest discussion surrounding it suggests that things are murky.

A robot that uses AI and 3D cameras to paint fingernails is now giving Target customers 10-minute manicures for just $8.

Tesla has even more colors in the works, and these colors will be coming to the United States, unlike Quicksilver and Midnight Cherry Red.

Researchers at Europe’s science lab CERN, who regularly use particle physics to challenge our understanding of the universe, are also applying their craft to upend the limits to cancer treatment.

The physicists here are working with giant particle accelerators in search of ways to expand the reach of cancer radiation therapy, and take on hard-to-reach tumours that would otherwise have been fatal.

In one CERN lab, called CLEAR, facility coordinator Roberto Corsini stands next to a large, linear particle accelerator consisting of a 40-metre metal beam with tubes packed in aluminium foil at one end, and a vast array of measurement instruments and protruding colourful wires and cables.

Within the next decade, NASA’s DAVINCI mission plans to send a descent sphere whistling through the atmosphere of Venus, collecting not only samples of its atmosphere but also high-resolution images of the planet’s surface. But Venus is a deeply inhospitable place, with surface temperatures hotter than an oven and pressure so great it is like being 900 meters underwater. Now, NASA has shared more details about one of the DAVINCI mission’s instruments and how it will collect vital data in this most challenging of environments.

DAVINCI’s VASI instrument (Venus Atmospheric Structure Investigation) will be responsible for taking readings of the atmosphere as the descent sphere drops through the atmosphere on its 63-minute-long fall to the surface, including collecting data on temperature, pressure, wind speed and direction. This should help answer some long-open questions about the planet’s atmosphere, particularly its lower atmosphere, which remains a mystery in many ways.

“There are actually some big puzzles about the deep atmosphere of Venus,” said the science lead for the VASI instrument, Ralph Lorenz of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, in a statement. “We don’t have all the pieces of that puzzle and DAVINCI will give us those pieces by measuring the composition at the same time as the pressure and temperature as we get near the surface.”