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The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras has announced a collaborative study with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the research hub of central US space agency National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), to study the impact of microorganisms aboard the International Space Station. Observations from the research project will help create medical solutions to aid astronauts in long term human missions in space.

Explaining the observations, Karthik Raman, assistant professor at the department of biotechnology, IIT Madras, said that the collection of microbes, which includes a variety of bacteria and fungi, have occurred over time due to the astronauts that have been aboard the ISS over the past decades.

“Even though the ISS is a highly sterile environment, these microbes can play a big role in the way human presence in a space environment works — which our research work sought to highlight,” Raman said.

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Advancing Space For Humanity — Dr. Ezinne Uzo-Okoro, Ph.D. — Assistant Director for Space Policy, Office of Science and Technology Policy, The White House.

Dr. Ezinne Uzo-Okoro, Ph.D. is Assistant Director for Space Policy, Office of Science and Technology Policy, at the White House (https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/) where she focuses on determining civil and commercial space priorities for the President’s science advisor, and her portfolio includes a wide range of disciplines including Orbital Debris, On-orbit Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing (OSAM), Earth Observations, Space Weather, and Planetary Protection.

Previously, Dr. Uzo-Okoro built and managed over 60 spacecraft missions and programs in 17 years at NASA, in roles as an engineer, technical expert, manager and executive, in earth observations, planetary science, heliophysics, astrophysics, human exploration, and space communications, which represented $9.2B in total program value. Her last role was as a NASA Heliophysics program executive.

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From pv magazine Australia

Volt Solar Tile, a Leeson Group subsidiary, says its Australian-designed building-integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) roof tile has the highest wattage of any solar tile on the global market, with a maximum power output of 115 W and a solar efficiency of up to 19.3%.

Peter Leeson, managing director of Leeson Group and the director of Volt Solar Tile, said the Volt Planum and Lodge mono PERC solar tiles are the first in the world that can generate the same amount of energy as a standard PV panel.

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Resistive switching random-access memories (RRAMs) integrate information storage and processing into the same device, enabling faster and more energy-efficient computing. However, RRAMs are challenging to fabricate and suffer from inconsistent on-off switching. Now Zheng Jie Tan, Vrindaa Somjit, and collaborators at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have discovered that adding dopants to the RRAMs dramatically improves their performance and the yield of their fabrication [1]. The researchers say their results provide an additional “knob” to optimize RRAMs, helping position them as one of the leading technologies for so-called in-memory computation.

An RRAM comprises an insulating material sandwiched between two metallic layers. The bits are defined by the amount of current that passes through the device via conduction paths in the insulator under a voltage. If the voltage is strong enough, it can induce the formation or destruction of conduction paths, thus controlling information processing.

While fabricating their device, the researchers added electronegative dopants, such as gold atoms, to the insulating material. The electron redistribution induced by the dopants facilitated the formation of conduction paths, which became more stable and showed increased on-off switching consistency compared with their undoped counterparts. Moreover, doped RRAMs were consistently fabricated with conducting paths already established before the device was used. Undoped RRAMs are often fabricated without such paths, and the postfabrication process required to create them—“electroforming,” involving the application of a very strong voltage—can result in irreparable device damage.

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Researchers can now predict exactly how soap molecules spread across a body of water, an everyday but surprisingly complex process.

When a tiny drop of soapy water falls onto a pool of liquid, its contents spread out over the pool’s surface. The dynamics of this spreading depend on the local concentration of soap—which varies in time and is difficult to predict—at each point across the entire pool’s surface. Now Thomas Bickel of the University of Bordeaux in Talence, France, and Francois Detcheverry of the University of Lyon, France, have derived an exact time-dependent solution for these distributions [1]. The solution reveals surprisingly rich behaviors in this everyday phenomenon.

The duo considered a surfactant-laden drop spreading over the surface of a deep pool of fluid. Researchers have previously shown that the equations governing the transport of the surfactant particles can be mapped to a partial differential equation known as the Burgers’ equation, which was initially developed to describe flows in turbulent fluids.

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Elon Musk made a bold prediction during Tesla’s Q3 2022 earnings call stating that Tesla would grow to become an enormous company by the end of this decade.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk dazzled and entertained listeners during the call, which was full of jokes and ambitious goals. That’s when he made the bold statement that Tesla could surpass both Apple and Saudi Aramco’s market cap in the future.

Back in 2017, Elon Musk said Tesla would exceed Apple’s market cap of $700 billion in just a few years. Tesla did just that back in 2020 during its glorious bull run and hit the $1 trillion mark during the height of the 2021 stock market bull run.

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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.

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