Cryonicists hope that modern technology will one day bring them back from the dead. But how realistic is a second life after a deep freeze?
Devastating residential blazes and wildfires take a terrible toll in terms of deaths and injuries, as well as property loss. Today, researchers will report on a new type of coating that could limit the flammability of wood used in construction, potentially providing more time to escape fires and also curbing their spread. The environmentally friendly flame retardant could also be used for other flammable materials, such as textiles, polyurethane foam and 3D-printed parts.
The researchers will present their results today at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS).
Biomedical Interventions For Substantial Global Health Concerns — Dr. Emilio Emini, Ph.D., CEO, Bill & Melinda Gates Medical Research Institute
Dr. Emilio A. Emini, Ph.D. is the CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Medical Research Institute (https://www.gatesmri.org/), a non-profit organization dedicated to the development and effective use of novel biomedical interventions addressing substantial global health concerns, for which investment incentives are limited, and he leads the Institute’s research and development of novel products and interventions for diseases disproportionately impacting the world’s most vulnerable populations.
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Years of toil in the laboratory have revealed how a marine bacterium makes a potent anti-cancer molecule.
The anti-cancer molecule salinosporamide A, also called Marizomb, is in Phase III clinical trials to treat glioblastoma, a brain cancer. Scientists now for the first time understand the enzyme-driven process that activates the molecule.
Researchers at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography found that an enzyme called SalC assembles what the team calls the salinosporamide anti-cancer “warhead.” Scripps graduate student Katherine Bauman is the lead author of a paper that explains the assembly process in the March 21 issue of Nature Chemical Biology.
It may not feel like it, but our eyes are constantly making rapid, tiny movements called saccades, taking in new information as we focus our gaze on various things in the world. As we do so, our brains receive the input – and depending on what the object of our gaze is, it turns out the brain activity triggered can be quite unique.
“While we typically do not perceive our own eye movements, the abrupt change in visual input with each saccade has substantial consequences at the neuronal level,” researchers explain in a new study led by first author and cognitive neuroscientist Tobias Staudigl from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany.
In an experiment, Staudigl and fellow researchers worked with 13 epilepsy patients, who had electrodes implanted in their brains to monitor their condition. This kind of intervention can be helpful for brain scientists, so they often turn to such patients with electrodes already implanted, in case they’d be willing to volunteer their time.
In January 1992, two cosmic objects forever changed our galaxy.
For the first time, we had concrete evidence of extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, orbiting an alien star: two rocky worlds, whirling around a star 2,300 light-years away.
Continue reading “It’s Official: NASA Confirms We’ve Found 5,000 Worlds Outside The Solar System” »
SHANGHAI, March 22 (Reuters) — Not a single country managed to meet the World Health Organization’s (WHO) air quality standard in 2021, a survey of pollution data in 6,475 cities showed on Tuesday, and smog even rebounded in some regions after a COVID-related dip.
The WHO recommends that average annual readings of small and hazardous airborne particles known as PM2.5 should be no more than 5 micrograms per cubic metre after changing its guidelines last year, saying that even low concentrations caused significant health risks.
But only 3.4% of the surveyed cities met the standard in 2021, according to data complied by IQAir, a Swiss pollution technology company that monitors air quality. As many as 93 cities saw PM2.5 levels at 10 times the recommended level.
Russia is forcing Google to delist URLs associated with virtual private networks, or VPNs, but almost half a million Russians are downloading the technology that allows them to obscure their internet usage and access government-blocked websites.
Clearly, Russians are looking for uncensored information about their government’s war against Ukraine.
“Surfshark conducted an analysis showing that the Russian telecoms regulator (Roskomnadzor) has forced Google to delist more than 36,000 URLs that link to VPN services over the past month,” a Surfshark representative told me via email. (The company offers a VPN product.) “The most significant spike of requests was recorded amid the second week of the war, when the Kremlin banned various media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, while others left due to a ‘fake news’ law.”
Proponents of new products that allow anyone to apply artificial intelligence believe the “no-code” movement will change the world. Here’s how some “citizen developers” are using the products.
Whether it’s photovoltaics or fusion, sooner or later, human civilization must turn to renewable energies. This is deemed inevitable, considering the ever-growing energy demands of humanity and the finite nature of fossil fuels. Much research has been pursued in order to develop alternative sources of energy, most of which use electricity as the main energy carrier. The extensive R&D in renewables has been accompanied by gradual societal changes as the world adopted new products and devices running on renewables. The most striking change has been the rapid adoption of electric vehicles. While they were rarely seen on the roads even 10 years ago, now, millions of electric cars are being sold annually. The electric car market is one of the most rapidly growing sectors.
Unlike traditional cars, which derive energy from the combustion of hydrocarbon fuels, electric vehicles rely on batteries as the storage medium for their energy. For a long time, batteries had far lower energy density than those offered by hydrocarbons, which resulted in very low ranges of early electric vehicles. However, gradual improvement in battery technologies eventually allowed the drive ranges of electric cars to be within acceptable levels in comparison to gasoline-burning cars. It is no understatement that the improvement in battery storage technology was one of the main technical bottlenecks that had to be solved in order to kickstart the current electric vehicle revolution.
However, despite the vast improvements in battery technology, today’s consumers of electric vehicles face another difficulty: slow battery charging speed. Currently, cars take about 10 hours to fully recharge at home. Even the fastest superchargers at the charging stations require up to 20 to 40 minutes to fully recharge the vehicles. This creates additional costs and inconvenience to the customers.
