Lifeboat Foundation

Nuclear power’s revival is being led by small modular reactor technology.

Small Modular Reactors or SMRs may revive the nuclear fission reactor industry around the world. These nuclear power plants are a fraction of the size of existing facilities. They take less time to build and have safety features that make a Fukushima or Chornobyl-like event next to impossible.

As the world pivots from burning fossil fuels to generating electricity and heat, SMRs may have a role to play to get the global economy to carbon neutrality or what is referred to as the net zero 2050 target date.

Continue reading “Small Modular Nuclear Quickly Becoming a Reality in the Quest for Net Zero” »

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The University of Innsbruck, Austria, realized a quantum computer that breaks out of this paradigm and unlocks additional computational resources, hidden in almost all of today’s quantum devices. Computers are well-known for operating with binary information, or zeros and ones, which has led to computers powering so much. This new approach results in more computational power with fewer quantum particles.

Quantum computers work with more than zero and one and digital computers work with zeros and ones, also called binary information. Quantum computers are also designed with binary information processing in mind. In fact, it was so successful that computers now power everything from coffee makers to self-driving cars, and it’s hard to imagine life without them. Restricting researchers to binary systems prevent these devices from living up to their true potential.

Continue reading “Quantum Computers can Look Beyond Zeros and Ones! Research Reveals” »

Unlike the moon’s surface, which heats up to 260 degrees Fahrenheit (127 degrees Celsius) during the day and drops to minus 280 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 173 degrees Celsius) at night, these lunar pits in the Mare Tranquillitatis region have a human-friendly, stable temperature.

(Mare Tranquillitatis, commonly known as the Sea of Tranquility, is where Apollo 11, the first mission to put humans on the moon, landed due to its smooth and relatively flat terrain.)

The data comes from an analysis of images taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft and computer modeling.

A new system for keeping body tissues functional after death could help make more organs available for transplant.

Constructing a tiny robot from DNA and using it to study cell processes invisible to the naked eye… You would be forgiven for thinking it is science fiction, but it is in fact the subject of serious research by scientists from Inserm, CNRS and Université de Montpellier at the Structural Biology Center in Montpellier. This highly innovative “nano-robot” should enable closer study of the mechanical forces applied at microscopic levels, which are crucial for many biological and pathological processes. It is described in a new study published in Nature Communications.

Our cells are subject to mechanical forces exerted on a microscopic scale, triggering biological signals essential to many cell processes involved in the normal functioning of our body or in the development of diseases.

For example, the feeling of touch is partly conditional on the application of mechanical forces on specific cell receptors (the discovery of which was this year rewarded by the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine). In addition to touch, these receptors that are sensitive to mechanical forces (known as mechanoreceptors) enable the regulation of other key biological processes such as blood vessel constriction, pain perception, breathing or even the detection of sound waves in the ear, etc.

Physicists are (temporarily) augmenting reality to crack the code of quantum systems.

Predicting the properties of a molecule or material requires calculating the collective behavior of its electrons. Such predictions could one day help researchers develop new pharmaceuticals or design materials with sought-after properties such as superconductivity. The problem is that electrons can become “quantum mechanically” entangled with one another, meaning they can no longer be treated individually. The entangled web of connections becomes absurdly tricky for even the most powerful computers to unravel directly for any system with more than a handful of particles.

Now, quantum physicists at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Quantum Physics (CCQ) in New York City and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland have sidestepped the problem. They created a way to simulate entanglement by adding to their computations extra “ghost” electrons that interact with the system’s actual electrons.

Researchers find multiple important biomarkers in people with Hikikomori (pathological social withdrawal), and they demonstrate their potential for predicting the severity of the disorder.

Key blood biomarkers for the pathological social withdrawal disorder called Hikikomori have been discovered by researchers at Kyushu University. The team’s research enabled them to distinguish between healthy people and hikikomori sufferers, as well as to gauge the severity of the disease.

Hikikomori is a condition in which people isolate themselves from society and family for a time longer than six months, according to the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare of Japan. Hikikomori, also called “pathological social withdrawal,” is said to affect over a million individuals in Japan as of 2022. Although it has traditionally been thought of as a syndrome specific to the Japanese culture, evidence over the past few decades has shown that it is increasingly becoming a global phenomenon. Some fear that the COVID-19.

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With the 2020 Covid lockdowns still fresh in our minds, the recent outbreak of monkeypox in the United States has many people on edge. But what is monkeypox? How significant is this outbreak? Will it get worse? How can you prepare? These are alarming questions that people across the world are asking right now, and here we hope to answer at least a few of them.

Monkeypox is a member of the orthopoxvirus genus, the same genus that also houses the variola virus that causes smallpox. While the name suggests the virus originated in monkeys, this is misleading. It is more likely that rodents and small mammals are the origin of this zoonotic disease, with the source of a 2003 outbreak coming from prairie dogs.

Continue reading “Monkeypox Updates: Transmission, Symptoms, and Treatment” »

Thirty seconds of sunlight could boost the battery life of future smartwatches and other wearables by tens of minutes, thanks to a renewable and rechargeable battery prototype developed by the University of Surrey.

Surrey’s Advanced Technology Institute (ATI) has demonstrated how its new photo-rechargeable system, which merges zinc-ion batteries with perovskite solar cells, could allow wearables to spring back to life without the need to plug in.

Jinxin Bi, a Ph.D. candidate at ATI and the first author of the paper, says that “this technology provides a promising strategy for efficient use of clean energy and enables wearable electronics to be operated continuously without plug-in charging. Our prototype could represent a step forward to how we interact with wearables and other internet-of-things devices, such as remote real-time health monitors.”