Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 5176

Teams from Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) and University College London (UCL) have visualized the water distribution in a fuel cell in three dimensions and in real time for the first time by evaluating neutron data from the Berlin Experimental Reactor shut down in 2019. The analysis opens new possibilities for more efficient and thus more cost-effective fuel cells.

“In a fuel cell, hydrogen and oxygen are combined to form water. This produces ,” explains Ralf Ziesche from the imaging group at HZB. “Probably the most important component inside the fuel cell is the membrane.” It is only about 20 micrometers thick (half as wide as a ) and connected with various functional layers to form a separation area about 600 micrometers wide inside the fuel cell.

“The membrane composite snatches the electrons from the . Only the hydrogen nuclei—the protons—can pass through the membrane.” The electrons, on the other hand, flow off via an and are used as an electric current. Air is let in on the other side of the separating wall. The oxygen it contains reacts with the protons that come through the membrane and the electrons that flow back from the other side of the electric circuit. Pure water is produced.

Read more | >

A model attributes the propagating bands that appear in a compressed porous medium to structural changes alone.

Porous media such as snow, sand, cereals—even bones—develop strikingly similar banded patterns when they’re squeezed. Those bands form when localized deformation zones propagate throughout the material. Understanding what triggers the universal and “material-agnostic” emergence of the bands is a common goal in disciplines including avalanche research, petroleum extraction, structural engineering, geophysics, and agriculture. Now, describing the phenomenon using a model based entirely on a collapsing-pore mechanism, Lars Blatny and his colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, and the University of Sydney, Australia, identify a common origin for these patterns. The result could lead to comprehensive continuum-mechanics models of porous media.

Blatny and his colleagues simulated a vertical 2D slice of an elastoplastic structure that was squeezed from above and below. The structure was perforated with regularly spaced square holes that composed 25% to 75% of its total area. By varying the solid area fraction and the structure’s elasticity and yield strength, the researchers examined how different porous structures deform when compressed at a constant speed. They identified six classes of compaction patterns and found that they could describe these classes entirely by two numbers that characterize the material’s properties and the speed at which the structure was compressed.

Read more | >

Observer, backup youthful copy, playing the right piano notes, quantum states oh my.

Dr David Sinclair explain about through his lab experiments, why he thinks there is an observer/backup copy for our youthfulness and what are the possible identities he can think of in this clip.

David Sinclair is a professor in the Department of Genetics and co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging at Harvard Medical School, where he and his colleagues study sirtuins—protein-modifying enzymes that respond to changing NAD+ levels and to caloric restriction—as well as chromatin, energy metabolism, mitochondria, learning and memory, neurodegeneration, cancer, and cellular reprogramming.

Continue reading “WHO Is The OBSERVER That Holds The Key For OUR YOUTHFULNESS? | Dr David Sinclair Interview Clips” | >

Alzheimer’s disease has long thwarted our best efforts to pinpoint its underlying causes. Now, a new study in mice suggests that ‘poisonous flowers’ bulging with cellular debris could be the root source of one hallmark of the wretched disease and a beautifully sinister sign of a failing waste disposal system inside damaged brain cells.

The study, led by neuroscientist Ju-Hyun Lee of New York University (NYU) Langone, challenges the long-standing idea that the build-up of a protein called amyloid-beta between neurons is a crucial first step in Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia.

Instead, it suggests that damage to neurons may take root inside cells well before amyloid plaques fully form and clump together in the brain, a finding which could provide new therapeutic possibilities.

Read more | >