Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 4972

Microplastics, tiny particles of plastic that are now found worldwide in the air, water, and soil, are increasingly recognized as a serious pollution threat, and have been found in the bloodstream of animals and people around the world.

Some of these microplastics are intentionally added to a variety of products, including agricultural chemicals, paints, cosmetics, and detergents—amounting to an estimated 50,000 tons a year in the European Union alone, according to the European Chemicals Agency. The EU has already declared that these added, nonbiodegradable microplastics must be eliminated by 2025, so the search is on for suitable replacements, which do not currently exist.

Now, a team of scientists at MIT and elsewhere has developed a system based on silk that could provide an inexpensive and easily manufactured substitute. The new process is described in a paper in the journal Small, written by MIT postdoc Muchun Liu, MIT professor of civil and environmental engineering Benedetto Marelli, and five others at the chemical company BASF in Germany and the U.S.

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Using data collected over two decades ago, scientists from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, have compiled the first complete map of hydrogen abundances on the Moon’s surface. The map identifies two types of lunar materials containing enhanced hydrogen and corroborates previous ideas about lunar hydrogen and water, including findings that water likely played a role in the Moon’s original magma-ocean formation and solidification.

APL’s David Lawrence, Patrick Peplowski and Jack Wilson, along with Rick Elphic from NASA Ames Research Center, used orbital data from the Lunar Prospector mission to build their map. The probe, which was deployed by NASA in 1998, orbited the Moon for a year and a half and sent back the first direct evidence of enhanced at the lunar poles, before impacting the .

When a star explodes, it releases , or high-energy protons and neutrons that move through space at nearly the speed of light. When those cosmic rays come into contact with the surface of a planet, or a moon, they break apart atoms located on those bodies, sending protons and neutrons flying. Scientists are able to identify an element and determine where and how much of it exists by studying the motion of those protons and neutrons.

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TEL AVIV, Israel — A one-time vaccine for HIV is a step closer to reality, according to a new study. A team in Israel used gene-editing technology to engineer type B white blood cells, which can trigger the immune system to fight the virus.

Dr. Adi Barzel of Tel Aviv University says this is one of the few times scientists have been able to engineer B cells outside of the human body. Their study finds that B white blood cells spark the immune system to produce more HIV-neutralizing antibodies. Currently, there is no cure for AIDS, which the HIV virus causes.

“Based on this study, we can expect that over the coming years we will be able to produce a medication for AIDS, additional infectious diseases and certain types of cancer caused by a virus, such as cervical cancer, head and neck cancer and more,” Dr. Barzel says in a university release.

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Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer (left to right)

In 1911, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, in his quest to study materials at ever lower temperatures, happened to find that the electrical resistance of some metallic materials suddenly vanished at temperatures near absolute zero. He called the phenomenon superconductivity, and scientists soon found additional materials that exhibited this property.

But no one could completely explain how it worked. For the next few decades, many prominent physicists worked to develop a theory of the mechanism underlying superconductivity, but no one had much success, and some despaired of figuring it out. One such physicist, Felix Bloch, was quoted as proposing “Bloch’s theorem: Superconductivity is impossible.”

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Scientists, designers and engineers across the space industry are working tirelessly to form innovative solutions for traveling to, living on and further understanding Mars.

Mars has long occupied our imagination as a site of wonder and possibility in film — from the high-tech invasion portrayed in The War of the Worlds to Andy Weir’s perhaps more accurate depiction The Martian.

Today, reality is closer than ever to the dreams of science fiction. As early as the 2030s, humans will be able to visit Earth’s planetary neighbor in the most ambitious aerospace mission yet.

The key to becoming an interplanetary species? Cutting-edge materials. Thankfully, scientists, designers, and engineers across the space industry are working tirelessly to form innovative solutions for traveling to, living on, and further understanding Mars.

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