Lifeboat Foundation

😀 😍 circa 2018.

You know Chernobyl, right? The place of the biggest nuclear accident in the world? The are is so radioactive nobody lives in the vicinity anymore, and nearby plants are suffering major amounts of radiation. However, not everybody is sad about this event; a type of fungi (mushrooms) possess an ability beyond imagination: they can take the lethal radiation and use it as a source of energy to feed and grow. Researchers have called them radiotrophic fungus.

For some 500 million years, fungi have been inhabiting this planet, feeding on whatever they could finding, filling every biological niche they could find. But who could have actually guessed that they could feed on nuclear radiation? Researchers from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (AEC) had a hunch, and they investigated it to test. They first got the idea after reading that samples brought from Chernobyl were filled with some black fungi growing on it.

Circa 2011 😀 😍

All three men’s leg and trunk muscle mass grew, and two were eventually able to control some muscle function even without stimulation.

MANSFIELD — Gas prices at the pump across Ohio have been on the rise for a while, but Russia’s invasion this week — and other more natural factors — could.

MOUNT VERNON — Gas prices at the pump across Ohio have been on the rise for a while, but Russia’s invasion this week — and other more natural factors — could make those prices rise even more.

The American Automobile Association reported Friday that Ohio’s average price at the pump for regular gas rose $0.01 from Thursday. It’s up $0.11 from last week and $0.27 from a month ago.

Continue reading “Gas prices continue to skyrocket, but Russian invasion of Ukraine only 1 factor” »

It’s coming together! Engineers for the James Webb Space Telescope have now completed two more phases of the seven-step, three-month-long mirror alignment process. This week, the team made more adjustments to the mirror segments along with updating the alignment of its secondary mirror. These refinements allowed for all 18 mirror segments to work together — for the first time — to produce one unified image.

As you can see in the image above, this view of the star HD 84,406 shows one image instead of the 18 views – one from each segment – that we saw earlier this week. NASA engineers say that after future alignment steps, the image will be even sharper.

“We still have work to do, but we are increasingly pleased with the results we’re seeing,” said Lee Feinberg, optical telescope element manager for Webb, in a blog post. “Years of planning and testing are paying dividends, and the team could not be more excited to see what the next few weeks and months bring.”

Medcalf: Because you’re moving away from the economics of scale to closer to the clinic, the batches are smaller and some of the traditional paradigms for quality assurance, such as proof of sterility, are harder to arrange. Thus, you need to have a manufacturing system that includes quality assurance within the system itself.

Automation is often presented as a way to remove the single largest source of infective risk, i.e. the human operator. For example, the self-sterilizing reusable units being developed at the University of Osaka under Professor Masahiro Kino-oka allow small-scale production with a high degree of confidence in the aseptic management of the environment.

Another challenge is defining a product that has variable characteristics. The main reason for decentralizing is to allow customization to a patient, which means you need to have a hierarchy of levels of specification. For example, with bioprinting, which also produces a customized product, you need to define bulk properties, but you also need to set constraints around how it’s anchored or implanted into the patient.

Specialized Atlanta-based UAV consulting firm Skyfire is itself launching into aerial action with the release of its SF2 drone, which is designed and manufactured specifically for public safety and critical sector operators.

Skyfire’s entry into specialized drone manufacturing with the SF2 was motivated by the understanding, insight, and feedback it gathered in its work with hundreds of US public safety and critical sector clients as they navigated the Federal Aviation’s certification of authorization process. Relying on that information flow from diverse partners, Skyfire decided to provide solutions to shortcomings and close operational gaps it was hearing about.

The joint development team of Professor Shibata (the University of Tokyo), JEOL Ltd. and Monash University succeeded in directly observing an atomic magnetic field, the origin of magnets (magnetic force), for the first time in the world. The observation was conducted using the newly developed Magnetic-field-free Atomic-Resolution STEM (MARS). This team had already succeeded in observing the electric field inside atoms for the first time in 2012. However, since the magnetic fields in atoms are extremely weak compared with electric fields, the technology to observe the magnetic fields had been unexplored since the development of electron microscopes. This is an epoch-making achievement that will rewrite the history of microscope development.

Electron microscopes have the highest spatial resolution among all currently used microscopes. However, in order to achieve ultra-high resolution so that atoms can be observed directly, we have to observe the sample by placing it in an extremely strong lens magnetic field. Therefore, atomic observation of magnetic materials that are strongly affected by the lens magnetic field such as magnets and steels had been impossible for many years. For this difficult problem, the team succeeded in developing a lens that has a completely new structure in 2019. Using this new lens, the team realized atomic observation of magnetic materials, which is not affected by the lens magnetic field. The team’s next goal was to observe the magnetic fields of atoms, which are the origin of magnets (magnetic force), and they continued technological development to achieve the goal.

This time, the joint development team took on the challenge of observing the magnetic fields of iron (Fe) atoms in a hematite crystal (α-Fe₂O₃) by loading MARS with a newly developed high-sensitivity high-speed detector, and further using computer image processing technology. To observe the magnetic fields, they used the Differential Phase Contrast (DPC) method at atomic resolution, which is an ultrahigh-resolution local electromagnetic field measurement method using a scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM), developed by Professor Shibata et al. The results directly demonstrated that iron atoms themselves are small magnets (atomic magnet). The results also clarified the origin of magnetism (antiferromagnetism) exhibited by hematite at the atomic level.

Quantum theory was originally formulated using complex numbers. Nonetheless, when replying to a letter by Hendrik Lorenz, Erwin Schrödinger (one of its founding fathers), wrote: “Using complex numbers in quantum theory is unpleasant and should be objected to. The wave function is surely fundamentally a real function.”

In recent years, scientists successfully ruled out any local hidden variable explanation of quantum theory using Bell tests. Later, such tests were generalized to a network with multiple independent hidden variables. In such a quantum network, quantum theory with only real numbers, or “real quantum theory,” and standard quantum theory make quantitatively different predictions in some scenarios, enabling experimental tests of the validity of real quantum theory.

Researchers at Southern University of Science and Technology in China, the Austrian Academy of Sciences and other institutes worldwide have recently adapted one of these tests so that they could be implemented in state-of-the-art photonic systems. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, experimentally demonstrates the existence of quantum correlations in an optical network that cannot be explained by real quantum theory.

The Santa Cruz Mountains define the geography of the Bay Area south of San Francisco, protecting the peninsula from the Pacific Ocean’s cold marine layer and forming the region’s notorious microclimates. The range also represents the perils of living in Silicon Valley: earthquakes along the San Andreas fault.

In bursts that last seconds to minutes, earthquakes have moved the region’s surface meters at a time. But researchers have never been able to reconcile the quick release of the Earth’s stress and the bending of the Earth’s crust over years with the formation of mountain ranges over millions of years. Now, by combining geological, geophysical, geochemical and satellite data, geologists have created a 3D tectonic model that resolves these timescales.

The research, which appears in Science Advances Feb. 25, reveals that more mountain building happens in the period between large earthquakes along the San Andreas Fault, rather than during the quakes themselves. The findings may be used to improve local seismic hazard maps.