Lifeboat Foundation

Scientific ingenuity means cameras keep on getting smaller and smaller, and the latest to appear is not only incredibly tiny – the same size as a grain of salt – it’s also able to produce images of much better quality than a lot of other ultra-compact cameras.

Using a technology known as a metasurface, which is covered with 1.6 million cylindrical posts, the camera is able to capture full-color photos that are as good as images snapped by conventional lenses some half a million times bigger than this particular camera.

And the super-small contraption has the potential to be helpful in a whole range of scenarios, from helping miniature soft robots explore the world, to giving experts a better idea of what’s going on deep inside the human body.

China has announced a plan to create new forests covering 35,000 sq km (14,000 sq mi), an area larger than the country of Belgium, every year for the next five years.

Combining knowledge of chemistry, physics, biology, and engineering, scientists from McGill University develop a biomaterial tough enough to repair the heart, muscles, and vocal cords, representing a major advance in regenerative medicine.

“People recovering from heart damage often face a long and tricky journey. Healing is challenging because of the constant movement tissues must withstand as the heart beats. The same is true for vocal cords. Until now there was no injectable material strong enough for the job,” says Guangyu Bao, a PhD candidate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at McGill University.

The involvement between electron transfer (ET) and catalytic reaction at electrocatalyst surface makes electrochemical process challenging to understand and control. How to experimentally determine ET process occurring at nanoscale is important to understand the overall electrochemical reaction process at active sites.

Recently, a research group led by Prof. LI Can and Prof. FAN Fengtao from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) captured the electron transfer imaging in electrocatalysis process.

This study was recently published in the journal Nano Letters.

This crystal of iron pyrite, just four hundredths of a millimeter in size, could function as the light absorbing layer of a tiny solar cell – potentially a promising future source of power on the Moon.

Working with Estonia’s Tallinn University of Technology (TalTech), ESA has studied the production of sandpaper-like rolls of such microcrystals as the basis of monograin-layer solar cells.

“We’re looking at these microcrystals in the context of future lunar settlement,” explains ESA advanced manufacturing engineer Advenit Makaya. “Future Moon bases will need to ‘live off the land’ in order to be sustainable, and the iron and sulfur needed to produce pyrite could be retrieved from the lunar surface.”

Prof Stuart Russell, founder of the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence, at the University of California, Berkeley, is giving this year’s Reith Lectures.

He said: Because I think it’s really important and really urgent.

And the reason it’s urgent is because the weapons that we have been talking about for the last six years or seven years are now starting to be manufactured and sold.

Continue reading “Reith Lectures: AI and why people should be scared” »

Science isn’t all lab coats and test tubes. Beautiful visuals can engage people—especially students—and inspire them to learn about science more broadly.

Scientists have often invited the public to see what they see, using everything from engraved woodblocks to electron microscopes to explore the complexity of the scientific enterprise and the beauty of life. Sharing these visions through illustrations, photography, and videos has allowed laypeople to explore a range of discoveries, from new bird species to the inner workings of the human cell.

Continue reading “These gorgeous images could transform science education” »

A total solar eclipse occurred early this morning across one of our planet’s most remote and beautiful regions. It was, as always, utterly surreal.

For some, the 1 minute 30 seconds (or so) event at around 07:00 UTC was marred by low and high cloud in the Scotia Sea. There were 14 cruise ships in the 290 miles-wide path of totality, but so far there have been no reports of clear views.

Continue reading “In Photos And Video: Antarctica’s Exclusive Eclipse Of The Sun Attracts Intrepid Travelers —And Humpback Whales” »

A common strategy to make vaccines more powerful is to deliver them along with an adjuvant — a compound that stimulates the immune system to produce a stronger response.

Researchers from MIT, the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, and other institutions have now designed a new nanoparticle adjuvant that may be more potent than others now in use. Studies in mice showed that it significantly improved antibody production following vaccination against HIV, diphtheria, and influenza.

“We started looking at this particular formulation and found that it was incredibly potent, better than almost anything else we had tried,” says Darrell Irvine, the Underwood-Prescott Professor with appointments in MIT’s departments of Biological Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering; an associate director of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research; and a member of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard.