Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists and institutions dedicate more resources each year to the discovery of novel materials to fuel the world. As natural resources diminish and the demand for higher value and advanced performance products grows, researchers have increasingly looked to nanomaterials.

Nanoparticles have already found their way into applications ranging from energy storage and conversion to quantum computing and therapeutics. But given the vast compositional and structural tunability nanochemistry enables, serial experimental approaches to identify new materials impose insurmountable limits on discovery.

Now, researchers at Northwestern University and the Toyota Research Institute (TRI) have successfully applied machine learning to guide the synthesis of new nanomaterials, eliminating barriers associated with materials discovery. The highly trained algorithm combed through a defined dataset to accurately predict new structures that could fuel processes in clean energy, chemical and automotive industries.

Rigetti unveils 80-qubit processor quantum computer consisting of two 40-qubit computers, and experiments with ‘third state’ in quantum processors.

All 18 COVID-19 patients hospitalized with moderate or severe symptoms who were administered the drug Amor-18 developed by Israeli biotech company Amorphical in a phase II clinical trial recovered and were discharged in a few days, the company announced Wednesday. Of the 19 individuals who were given a placebo, six had to be transferred to intensive care, and two died.

All 18 hospitalized individuals administered the treatment developed by Israeli biotech company Amorphical in a phase II trial recovered and were discharged in a few days.

When three is not enough.

Israel has announced a fourth dose of the COVID-19 vaccine to people older than 16. The additional dose will be given to senior citizens, medical workers, people with suppressed immune system.

Continue reading “Israel announces fourth dose of COVID vaccine | Latest English News | World News | WION” »

Companies and labs are racing to build next-generation devices that track and translate brain activity to help people immobilized by disease or injury handle tasks requiring movement.

Artificial intelligence (AI) backed drug discovery company Insilico Medicine announced last week that it was dosing the first healthy volunteer in a microdose trial of ISM 001–005. Designed with the help of AI, the drug is a small-molecule inhibitor of a biological target that was discovered by Pharma. AI. The trial is being conducted in Australia.

The AI-designed drug will be used to treat chronic lung disease idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, or IPF usually leads to progressive and irreversible lung-function decline and affects 20 people out of over 100,000 globally.

Chief Scientific Officer of Insilico, Freng Ren, said in a press release that this drug discovery and trial marks a significant milestone in the AI-drug discovery space. This is because the said candidate is the first-ever AI-discovered novel molecule based on an AI-discovered target.

Targeting cancers and viruses, better knowledge of the human immune system is leading to new medicines.

Researchers at the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science (CEMS) and the RIKEN Cluster for Pioneering Research (CPR) in Japan have developed a technique to improve the flexibility of ultra-thin electronics, such as those used in bendable devices or clothing. Published in Science Advances, the study details the use of water vapor plasma to directly bond gold electrodes fixed onto separate ultra-thin polymer films, without needing adhesives or high temperatures.

As electronic devices get smaller and smaller, and the desire to have bendable, wearable, and on-skin electronics increases, conventional methods of constructing these devices have become impractical. One of the biggest problems is how to connect and integrate multiple devices or pieces of a device that each reside on separate ultra-thin polymer films. Conventional methods that use layers of adhesive to stick electrodes together reduce flexibility and require temperature and pressure that are damaging to super-thin electronics. Conventional methods of direct metal-to-metal bonding are available, but require perfectly smooth and clean surfaces that are not typical in these types of electronics.

A team of researchers led by Takao Someya at RIKEN CEMS/CPR has developed a new method to secure these connections that does not use adhesive, high temperature, or high pressure, and does not require totally smooth or clean surfaces. In fact, the process takes less than a minute at room temperature, followed by about a 12-hour wait. The new technique, called water-vapor plasma-assisted bonding, creates stable bonds between gold electrodes that are printed into ultra-thin—2 thousandths of a millimeter—polymer sheets using a thermal evaporator.

Researchers have discovered that using a thin-film coating of copper or copper compounds on surfaces could enhance copper’s ability to inactivate or destroy the SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for COVID-19.

In a study that began soon after the pandemic hit in March 2020, University of Waterloo engineering graduate students investigated how six different thin metal and oxide coatings interacted with HCov-229E, a coronavirus that is genetically like SARS-CoV-2 but safer to work with.

“While there was already some data out there on the lifetime of the virus on common-touch surfaces like stainless steel, plastics and copper, the lifetime of the virus on engineered coatings was less understood,” said Kevin Mussleman, the Waterloo mechanical and mechatronics engineering professor who led the study.