Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 370

Electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection is a significant concern in the chemical and electronics industries. In electronics, ESD often causes integrated circuit failures due to rapid voltage and current discharges from charged objects, such as human fingers or tools.

With the help of 3D printing techniques, researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) are “packaging” electronics with printable elastomeric silicone foams to provide both mechanical and electrical protection of sensitive components. Without suitable protection, substantial equipment and component failures may occur, leading to increased costs and potential workplace injuries. The team’s research is featured in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

3D printing is a rapidly growing manufacturing method that enables the production of cellular foams with customizable pore architectures to achieve compressive mechanical properties that can be tailored to minimize permanent deformation by evenly distributing stress throughout the printed architecture.

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Breaking oxygen out of a water molecule is a relatively simple process, at least chemically. Even so, it does require components, one of the most important of which is a catalyst. Catalysts enable reactions and are linearly scalable, so if you want more reactions quickly, you need a bigger catalyst. In space exploration, bigger means heavier, which translates into more expensive. So, when humanity is looking for a catalyst to split water into oxygen and hydrogen on Mars, creating one from local Martian materials would be worthwhile. That is precisely what a team from Hefei, China, did by using what they called an “AI Chemist.”

Unfortunately, the name “AIChemist” didn’t stick, though that joke might vary depending on the font you read it in. Whatever its name, the team’s work was some serious science. It specifically applied machine learning algorithms that have become all the rage lately to selecting an effective catalyst for an “oxygen evolution reaction” by utilizing materials native to Mars.

To say it only chose the catalyst isn’t giving the system the full credit it’s due, though. It accomplished a series of steps, including developing a catalyst formula, pretreating the ore to create the catalyst, synthesizing it, and testing it once it was complete. The authors estimate that the automated process saved over 2,000 years of human labor by completing all of these tasks and point to the exceptional results of the testing to prove it.

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Viviana Gradinaru, an assistant professor of biology at Caltech, discovered her passion for neuroscience as an undergraduate at Caltech, her alma mater. Viviana did her Ph.D. work with Karl Deisseroth at Stanford University where she played an instrumental role in the early development and applications of optogenetics, a research area concerned with the perturbation of neuronal activity via light-controlled ion channels and pumps. More information on her own lab at Caltech can be found at glab.caltech.edu. Viviana is also interested in entrepreneurship for better human health and has co-founded a company, Circuit Therapeutics, based on optogenetics.

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)\ \ .

On January 18, 2013, Caltech hosted TEDxCaltech: The Brain, a forward-looking celebration of humankind’s quest to understand the brain, by exploring the past, present and future of neuroscience. Visit TEDxCaltech.com for more details.

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Bacteria modify their ribosomes when exposed to widely used antibiotics, according to research published in Nature Communications. The subtle changes might be enough to alter the binding site of drug targets and constitute a possible new mechanism of antibiotic resistance.

Escherichia coli is a common bacterium which is often harmless but can cause serious infections. The researchers exposed E. coli to streptomycin and kasugamycin, two drugs which treat bacterial infections. Streptomycin has been a staple in treating tuberculosis and other infections since the 1940s, while kasugamycin is less known but crucial in agricultural settings to prevent bacterial diseases in crops.

Both antibiotics tamper with bacteria’s ability to make new proteins by specifically targeting their ribosomes. These molecular structures create proteins and are themselves made of proteins and ribosomal RNA. Ribosomal RNA is often modified with chemical tags that can alter the shape and function of the . Cells use these tags to fine tune protein production.

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The Defense Department has released a new strategy document that gives global military installations the ability to use private 5G networks if such solutions best meet their mission needs.

The Pentagon’s private 5G deployment strategy, which was signed on Oct. 16 and publicly released on Tuesday, outlined the operational requirements that must be met for DOD bases to embrace private networks instead of commercial high-speed solutions.

In a foreword to the guidance, DOD Acting Chief Information Officer Leslie Beavers called the new document an addendum to the department’s 5G strategy and implementation plan that were released in 2020. That previously issued guidance outlined the need for DOD to leverage the use of “private, hybrid and public 5G networks” to enhance its operational and data-sharing capabilities across the globe.

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Officials of the Army Contracting Command at Redstone Arsenal, Ala., announced a $670.5 million contract to DTS last week to build the common hypersonic glide body and thermal protection system. DTS is a wholly owned subsidiary of Leidos Dynetics.

The Army hired DTS to produce the first commercially manufactured set of common hypersonic glide body systems. DTS is working with Lockheed Martin Corp. to support integration and prototyping of the new common hypersonic glide body, which is expected to be available across military services to provide commonality to air-, land-, and sea-launched hypersonic weapons.

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Ocean currents spin off huge gyres, whose kinetic energy is transferred to ever-smaller turbulent structures until viscosity has erased velocity gradients and water molecules jiggle with thermal randomness. A similar cascade plays out in space when the solar wind slams into the magnetopause, the outer boundary of Earth’s magnetic field. The encounter launches large-scale magnetic, or Alfvén, waves whose energy ends up heating the plasma inside the magnetosphere. Here, however, the plasma is too thin for viscosity to mediate the cascade. Since 1971 researchers have progressively developed their understanding of how Alfvén waves in space plasmas generate heat. These studies later culminated in a specific hypothesis: Alfvén waves accelerate ion beams, which create small-scale acoustic waves, which generate heat. Now Xin An of UCLA and his collaborators have found direct evidence of that proposed mechanism [1]. What’s more, the mechanism is likely at work in the solar wind and other space plasmas.

Laboratory-scale experiments struggle to capture the dynamics of rotating plasmas, and real-world observations are even more scarce. The observations that An and his collaborators analyzed were made in 2015 by the four-spacecraft Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission. Launched that year, the MMS was designed to study magnetic reconnection, a process in which the topology of magnetic-field lines is violently transformed. The field rearrangements wrought by reconnection can be large, on the scale of the huge loops that sprout from the Sun’s photosphere. But the events that initiate reconnection take place in a much smaller region where neighboring field lines meet, the X-line. The four spacecraft of MMS can fly in a configuration in which all of them witness the large-scale topological transformation while one of them could happen to fly through the X-line—a place where no spacecraft had deliberately been sent before.

On September 8, 2015, the orbits of the MMS spacecraft took them through the magnetopause on the dusk side of Earth. They were far enough apart that together they could detect the passage of a large-scale Alfvén wave, while each of them could individually detect the motion of ions in the surrounding plasma. An and his collaborators later realized that these observations could be used to test the theory that ion beams and the acoustic waves that they generate mediate the conversion of Alfvén-wave energy to heat.

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