The event will take place in a man-made city with a year-round winter sports complex.
Can you make snow in the desert? It seems you can, as Saudi Arabia will be hosting the 2029 Asian Winter Games, according to a report.
The games will take place at an under-construction US$500 billion megacity called Neom that is set to boast a year-round winter sports complex along with other futuristic amenities and features.
The project will take 7–8 years.
An 853-mile-long (1,373 km) undersea electricity cable connecting Egypt with Europe has been touted to help Europe’s impending energy crisis amidst Russia’s war with Ukraine.
Imaginima/iStock.
The undersea cable from northern Egypt to Attica, Greece, will be able to transport 3,000 MW of electricity, which is enough to power up to 450,000 homes, according to a report published by Euronews last month.
It looks like Musk’s buy-out will lead to the creation of his own app named X.
According to a report from Bloomberg News, Elon Musk has informed Twitter that he is once more prepared to purchase the business at his original offer of $54.20 a share. This news is also supported by an official U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing from the 3rd of October 2022.
“Elon Musk is proposing to buy Twitter Inc. for the original offer price of $54.20 a share… Musk made the proposal in a letter to Twitter, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing confidential information,” states the Bloomberg report.
JD Lasica/Wikimedia Commons.
An upcycling method changes the most widely produced plastic into the second most widely produced plastic, making it more sustainable.
A new technique has been developed by scientists that transforms polyethylene (PE), the most widely produced plastic, into polypropylene (PP), the second most produced plastic.
Upcycling plastic efficiently to eliminate waste
The purpose of this process is to reduce greenhouse emissions. “The world needs more and better options for extracting the energy and molecular value from its waste plastics,” said Susannah Scott, co-lead author of the study and Distinguished Professor and Mellichamp Chair of Sustainable Catalytic Processing at UC Santa Barbara. This new study was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
Millions of people could suddenly lose electricity if a ransomware attack just slightly tweaked energy flow onto the U.S. power grid.
No single power utility company has enough resources to protect the entire grid, but maybe all 3,000 of the grid’s utilities could fill in the most crucial security gaps if there were a map showing where to prioritize their security investments.
Purdue University researchers have developed an algorithm to create that map. Using this tool, regulatory authorities or cyber insurance companies could establish a framework that guides the security investments of power utility companies to parts of the grid at greatest risk of causing a blackout if hacked.
A group of researchers led by Cornell is unlocking the full potential of aluminum nitride—an important material for the advancement of electronics and photonics—thanks to the development of a surface cleaning technique that enables high-quality production.
The research was published Sept. 9 in the journal Science Advances. Graduate student Zexuan Zhang and research associate Yongjin Cho are the lead authors. The senior authors are Debdeep Jena and Huili Grace Xing, both professors of materials science and engineering and of electrical and computer engineering.
Aluminum nitride has gained significant research interest in the field of semiconductor materials as it provides an unmatched combination of high electrical resistivity and thermal conductivity, according to Zhang. The ceramic material is used as an electrically-insulating but thermally-conducting barrier in electronic devices, and due to its ability to operate at deep UV frequencies, it has great potential for use in light-emitting diodes and lasers.
Some solid materials have a memory of how they have previously been stretched out, which impacts how they respond to these kinds of deformations in the future. A new Penn State study lends insight into memory formation in the foams and emulsions common in food products and pharmaceuticals and provides a new method to erase this memory, which could guide how materials are prepared for future use.
“A crease in a piece of paper serves as a memory of being folded or crumpled,” said Nathan Keim, associate research professor of physics at Penn State who led the study. “A lot of other materials form memories when they are deformed, heated up, or cooled down, and you might not know it unless you ask the right questions. Improving our understanding of how to write, read, and erase memories provides new opportunities for diagnostics and programming of materials. We can find out the history of a material by doing some tests or erase a material’s memory and program a new one to prepare it for consumer or industrial use.”
The researchers studied memory in a type of material called disordered solids, which have particles that are often erratically arranged. For example, ice cream is a disordered solid made up of a combination of ice crystals, fat droplets, and air pockets mixed together in a random way. This is in stark contrast to materials with “crystalline structures,” with particles arranged in highly ordered rows and columns. Disordered solids are common in food sciences, consumer products, and pharmaceuticals and include foams like ice cream and emulsions like mayonnaise.
The complexity of life on Earth was derived from simplicity: From the first protocells to the growth of any organism, individual cells aggregate into basic clumps and then form more complex structures. The earliest cells lacked complicated biochemical machinery; to evolve into multicellular organisms, simple mechanisms were necessary to produce chemical signals that prompted the cells to both move and form colonies.
Replicating this behavior in synthetic systems is necessary to advance fields such as soft robotics. Chemical engineering researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering have established this feat in their latest advancement in biomimicry.
The research, “Lifelike behavior of chemically oscillating mobile capsules,” was published in the journal Matter. The lead author is Oleg E. Shklyaev, post-doctoral associate with Anna Balazs, Distinguished Professor of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering and the John A. Swanson Chair of Engineering.
Thanks to new RNA vaccines, we humans have been able to protect ourselves incredibly quickly from new viruses like SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. These vaccines insert a piece of ephemeral genetic material into the body’s cells, which then read its code and churn out a specific protein—in this case, telltale “spikes” that stud the outside of the coronavirus—priming the immune system to fight future invaders.
The technique is effective, and has promise for all sorts of therapies, says Eerik Kaseniit, Ph.D. student in bioengineering at Stanford. At the moment, though, these sorts of RNA therapies can’t focus on specific cells. Once injected into the body, they indiscriminately make the encoded protein in every cell they enter. If you want to use them to treat only one kind of cell—like those inside a cancerous tumor—you’ll need something more precise.
Kaseniit and his advisor, assistant professor of chemical engineering Xiaojing Gao, may have found a way to make this possible. They’ve created a new tool called an RNA “sensor”—a strand of lab-made RNA that reveals its contents only when it enters particular tissues within the body. The method is so exact that it can home in on both cell types and cell states, activating only when its target cell is creating a certain RNA, says Gao. The pair published their findings Oct. 5 in the journal Nature Biotechnology.
Carnegie Mellon University researchers have pioneered the CMU Array—a new type of microelectrode array for brain computer interface platforms. It holds the potential to transform how doctors are able to treat neurological disorders.
The ultra-high-density microelectrode array (MEA), which is 3D-printed at the nanoscale, is fully customizable. This means that one day, patients suffering from epilepsy or limb function loss due to stroke could have personalized medical treatment optimized for their individual needs.
The collaboration combines the expertise of Rahul Panat, associate professor of mechanical engineering, and Eric Yttri, assistant professor of biological sciences. The team applied the newest microfabrication technique, Aerosol Jet 3D printing, to produce arrays that solved the major design barriers of other brain computer interface (BCI) arrays. The findings were published in Science Advances.
