Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 3597

A team from Newcastle University and Northumbria University in the UK has found that the thin, root-like threads produced by many fungi can potentially be used as a biodegradable, wearable material that’s also able to repair itself.

In their tests, the researchers focused on the Ganoderma lucidum fungus, producing a skin from branching filaments known as hyphae, which together weave into a structure called a mycelium.

With a little more work the fragile skins could serve as a substitute for leather, satisfying vegan, environmental, and fashion tastes, though the process of its creation also needs to be sped and scaled up before it can be transformed into next season’s jacket.

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On May 4, the first photovoltaic solar farm to connect directly to the UK’s National Grid transmission network went online.

Larks Green is a 200-acre solar farm located on the Severn Vale next to the hamlet of Itchington, to the north of Bristol, and with the addition of a big battery energy storage facility, it’s being heralded as a game-changer in creating a future where solar power is a consistent supplier of much of Britain’s electricity.

The 50 MW solar farm is owned and operated by Cero Generation and Enso Energy and was connected to the National Grid’s Iron Acton substation.

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A startup called Chemix is using AI to move faster. Inside a San Francisco Bay Area lab, glowing machines—which look a little like servers in a data center—physically test different battery chemistries. Then the company’s software platform, called Mix, uses the data to help design new versions for testing, speeding up the cycle of iteration.

“It’s suggesting new molecules for us to test on a daily basis,” says cofounder and CEO Kaixiang Lin, who previously worked on battery design as a doctoral student at Harvard, a postdoc at Stanford, and at another battery startup. “We call it battery R&D on autopilot, because there’s very little human intervention in this process.”

It takes the system about six months, he says, to design new batteries that can beat the performance of existing batteries on the market by an average of 300%.

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Glycans perform varied and crucial functions in numerous cellular activities. The diverse roles of glycans are matched by their highly complex structures, which derive from differences in composition, branching, regio-and stereochemistry, and modification. This incomparable structural diversity is challenging to the structural analysis of glycans.

Recently, a joint research group led by Prof. Qing Guangyan and Prof. Liang Xinmiao from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has developed a identification method based on single-molecule sensing through a glycan derivatization strategy. The study was published in Nature Communications on March 28.

Identifying and sequencing glycans using nanopore single-molecule techniques has sparked interest; however, it has achieved little progress over the past dozen years. Only a handful of cases that focused on either high molecular weight polysaccharides or some monosaccharides were reported.

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May 8 (Reuters) — Chip designer Qualcomm Inc (QCOM.O) said on Monday it would buy Israel’s Autotalks Ltd that makes chips used in technology aimed at preventing vehicle crashes, as the U.S. firm looks to deepen its automotive business.

With increasing electric vehicles and automatic features in cars, the number of chips used by automakers is surging, making the automotive market a key growth area for chipmakers.

Autotalks makes dedicated chips used in the vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications technology for manned and driverless vehicles to improve road safety.

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Four crewmembers at the International Space Station (ISS) enjoyed a short ride aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Endeavour on Saturday, moving the spacecraft to a different port to make way for a cargo ship arriving in June.

SpaceX Crew-6 members Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg of NASA, along with Sultan Alneyadi of the United Arab Emirates and Andrey Fedyaev of Russia, undocked from the Harmony module’s space-facing port at 7:23 a.m. before flying the short distance to the same module’s forward port.

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Stinging of Hymenoptera can induce IgE-mediated hypersensitivity reactions in patients with venom allergies, ranging from local to severe systemic reactions and even fatal anaphylaxis. Allergic patients’ quality of life can be primarily improved by injecting increased venom doses to alter their immune response to tolerate venom. This venom-specific immunotherapy is very effective and well tolerated, especially in the administration of vaccines. Creative Biolabs is a world leader in the field of vaccine development. With our extensive experience and advanced platform, we are therefore confident in offering the best vaccine development services for allergic disease.

Creative Biolabs provides vaccine development services for bee venom allergy according to customer’s detailed requirements.

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Floating life (neuston) is a core component of the ocean surface food web, but the Sargasso Sea in the North Atlantic is the only known region of high neustonic abundance. This study reveals high densities of floating life in the plastic-rich Great Pacific Garbage Patch, suggesting that this area could be an important marine habitat.

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