Lifeboat Foundation

A tech company in Hong Kong says it has developed the world’s first artificially intelligent laser skin treatment, which scans and detects the heat, sensitivity and shape of a customer’s face. Rods Technology spent over five years developing the technology to help reduce the number of injuries caused by manual treatments conducted by “blind” dermatologists. Over 100 laser facial injuries were reported in Hong Kong between January and July 1, 2022. With a human operator only needing to turn on the machine, the robot dermatologist is able to customise a treatment to help reduce acne scarring, wrinkles and even remove tattoos. The first commercial facial was sold in July 2022.

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Circa 2013

The extremely heavy element was just confirmed by scientists in Sweden. We talk to a chemist about the discovery—and what it means.

How a poker prodigy “accidentally” created a booming lettuce company.

Nestled in deep woods in Jefferson, Kim and Rusty Fenn live off the grid in a home they built themselves out of wood from their property. They have two solar-power systems on their roof, one to generate electricity and one to heat their water.

They have all the appliances any home would want, and the solar power provides all their needs. They heat with a heat pump and a wood stove.

Kim, the creative one of the couple, had a pile of chicken grain bags, and decided to make a bag out of one. She then made a bunch for Christmas presents for friends and family. They were such a hit, that the couple decided to make them commercially.

DNA from ancient fossils suggests interbreeding regularly occurred between the two species by about 45,000 years ago, two studies find.

— Energy Info

Media Contact: Jennifer Kalez

SALEM – A public partnership with the Oregon Department of Energy, Oregon Department of Land Conservation & Development, Oregon State University’s Institute for Natural Resources, and the U.S. Department of Defense has published new educational materials that will help local governments, Tribes, communities, policymakers, agencies, energy developers, and other stakeholders access important information and considerations for potential renewable energy in Oregon.

Continue reading “New Interactive Tool and Report Connects Oregon Renewable Energy Potential with Important Development Considerations” »

A European team of astronomers led by Professor Kalliopi Dasyra of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, under participation of Dr. Thomas Bisbas, University of Cologne modeled several emission lines in Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) and Very Large Telescope (VLT) observations to measure the gas pressure in both jet-impacted clouds and ambient clouds. With these unprecedented measurements, published recently in Nature Astronomy, they discovered that the jets significantly change the internal and external pressure of molecular clouds in their path.

Depending on which of the two pressures changes the most, both compression of clouds and triggering of star formation and dissipation of clouds and delaying of star formation are possible in the same galaxy. “Our results show that supermassive black holes, even though they are located at the centers of galaxies, could affect star formation in a galaxy-wide manner,” said Professor Dasyra. “Studying the impact of pressure changes in the stability of clouds was key to the success of this project. Once few stars actually form in a wind, it is usually very hard to detect their signal on top of the signal of all other stars in the galaxy hosting the wind.”

It is believed that supermassive black holes lie at the centers of most galaxies in our universe. When particles that were infalling onto these black holes are trapped by magnetic fields, they can be ejected outwards and travel far inside galaxies in the form of enormous and powerful jets of plasma. These jets are often perpendicular to galactic disks. In IC 5,063 however, a galaxy 156 million light years away, the jets are actually propagating within the disk, interacting with cold and dense molecular gas clouds. From this interaction, compression of jet-impacted clouds is theorized to be possible, leading to gravitational instabilities and eventually star formation due to the gas condensation.

Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science, the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology and the National Institute for Material Science in Tsukuba (Japan) have recently probed a Chern mosaic topology and Berry-curvature magnetism in magic-angle graphene. Their paper, published in Nature Physics, offers new insight about topological disorder that can occur in condensed matter physical systems.

“Magic angle twisted bilayer graphene (MATBG) has drawn a huge amount of interest over the past few years due to its experimentally accessible flat bands, creating a playground of highly correlated physics,” Matan Bocarsly, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org, “One such correlated phase observed in transport measurements is the quantum anomalous Hall effect, where topological edge currents are present even in the absence of an applied magnetic field.”

The quantum anomalous Hall effect is a charge transport-related phenomenon, in which a material’s Hall resistance is quantized to the so-called von Klitzing constant. It resembles the so-called integer quantum Hall effect, which Bocarsly and his colleagued had studied extensively in their previous works, particularly in graphene and MATBG.

Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have developed the world’s first electric nanomotors made of DNA. The self-assembling structures can be activated by an electric charge to spin a ratcheting rotor arm.

The tiny motor was made using a technique called DNA origami. Like its namesake papercraft, the method involves intricately folding strands of DNA into three-dimensional shapes, with past examples including virus traps, immune-evading drug delivery systems, and even microscopic Van Gogh replicas. These structures are made by carefully selecting DNA sequences that will fold and attach to each other in certain ways, so researchers can add specific strands to a solution and let the DNA objects assemble themselves.

For the new study, the team used this process to make a molecular motor out of DNA for the first time. The motor consists of a rotor arm measuring up to 500 nanometers (nm) long, which is mounted on a base about 40 nm high that’s fixed to a glass plate. Wrapped around the tip of the base, just below the rotor, is a platform with several ratcheting obstacles built into its surface, which controls the direction that the rotor can spin.