Lifeboat Foundation

Gas stoves in California homes are leaking cancer-causing benzene, researchers found in a new study published on Thursday, though they say more research is needed to understand how many homes have leaks.

In the study, published in Environmental Science and Technology on Thursday, researchers also estimated that over 4 tons of benzene per year are being leaked into the atmosphere from outdoor pipes that deliver the gas to buildings around California — the equivalent to the benzene emissions from nearly 60,000 vehicles. And those emissions are unaccounted for by the state.

The researchers collected samples of gas from 159 homes in different regions of California and measured to see what types of gases were being emitted into homes when stoves were off. They found that all of the samples they tested had hazardous air pollutants, like benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene (BTEX), all of which can have adverse health effects in humans with chronic exposure or acute exposure in larger amounts.

In the arid, open areas of western Australia lives a giant jewel beetle with a strange habit. The male beetles are known to ignore females, choosing instead to mate with beer bottles.

Factories have added 467,000 jobs in the last 12 months, as production jumped to its highest level since 2008. But manufacturing remains a much smaller slice of the U.S. economy than it used to be.

A single computer chip has transmitted a record 1.84 petabits of data per second via a fibre-optic cable – enough bandwidth to download 230 million photographs in that time, and more traffic than travels through the entire internet’s backbone network per second.

Asbjørn Arvad Jørgensen at the Technical University of Denmark in Copenhagen and his colleagues have used a photonic chip – a technology that allows optical components to be built onto computer chips – to divide a stream of data into thousands of separate channels and transmit them all at once over 7.9 kilometres.

First, the team split the data stream into 37 sections, each of which was sent down a separate core of the fibre-optic cable. Next, each of these channels was split into 223 data chunks that existed in individual slices of the electromagnetic spectrum. This “frequency comb” of equidistant spikes of light across the spectrum allowed data to be transmitted in different colours at the same time without interfering with each other, massively increasing the capacity of each core.

Summary: In a highly competitive environment, Trinidadian killifish grow larger brains. This neuro-evolution allows for greater fitness and survival rates.

Source: UT Arlington.

In response to a high-competition environment, Trinidadian killifish evolve larger brains, increasing their fitness and survival rates, according to a new study in Ecology Letters by biologists at The University of Texas at Arlington.

NASA continues to outdo itself with the majestic images of space that it keeps releasing – but even by the agency’s high standards, a 12-year timelapse of the entirety of the night sky is an impressive achievement.

The imagery has been captured over those years by the NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer) space telescope, which was originally launched in 2009 under the previous name ‘WISE’ to study the Universe outside of our Solar System.

Continue reading “NASA Just Unveiled an Epic 12-Year Timelapse of The Entire Sky” »

Local police said there was a “complete outage” on the Shetland Islands, with a communications company pointing to undersea cable damage.

Astronomers have captured the aftermath of a dramatic gamma-ray burst, which was likely triggered by the death of an enormous star, and the brightest cosmic explosion ever detected.

While automated manufacturing is ubiquitous today, it was once a nascent field birthed by inventors such as Oliver Evans, who is credited with creating the first fully automated industrial process, in flour mill he built and gradually automated in the late 1700s. The processes for creating automated structures or machines are still very top-down, requiring humans, factories, or robots to do the assembling and making.

However, the way nature does assembly is ubiquitously bottom-up; animals and plants are self-assembled at a cellular level, relying on proteins to self-fold into target geometries that encode all the different functions that keep us ticking. For a more bio-inspired, bottom-up approach to assembly, then, human-architected materials need to do better on their own. Making them scalable, selective, and reprogrammable in a way that could mimic nature’s versatility means some teething problems, though.

Continue reading “Reprogrammable materials selectively self-assemble” »