Lifeboat Foundation

EPFL researchers have discovered that nanoscale devices harnessing the hydroelectric effect can harvest electricity from the evaporation of fluids with higher ion concentrations than purified water, revealing a vast untapped energy potential.

Evaporation is a natural process so ubiquitous that most of us take it for granted. In fact, roughly half of the solar energy that reaches the earth drives evaporative processes. Since 2017, researchers have been working to harness the energy potential of evaporation via the hydrovol~aic (HV) effect, which allows electricity to be harvested when fluid is passed over the charged surface of a nanoscale device. Evaporation establishes a continuous flow within nanochannels inside these devices, which act as passive pumping mechanisms. This effect is also seen in the microcapillaries of plants, where water transport occurs thanks to a combination of capillary pressure and natural evaporation.

Although hydrovoltaic devices currently exist, there is very little functional understanding of the conditions and physical phenomena that govern HV energy production at the nanoscale. It’s an information gap that Giulia Tagliabue, head of the Laboratory of Nanoscience for Energy Technology (LNET) in the School of Engineering, and PhD student Tarique Anwar wanted to fill. They leveraged a combination of experiments and multiphysics modelling to characterize fluid flows, ion flows, and electrostatic effects due to solid-liquid interactions, with the goal of optimizing HV devices.

Adding a fourth light to traffic signals—in addition to red, green, and yellow—would shorten wait times at street corners for pedestrians, as well as improve traffic flow for both autonomous vehicles and human drivers. And the more autonomous vehicles there are in the traffic network, the shorter the wait times for everyone.

There are so many investments that we could be making, but there are also Moonshots.

It was an amazing learning opportunity.

Tesla has started to push a new Full Self-Driving Beta v12 software update. It’s still not going wide, there’s no new release note, but CEO Elon Musk says it’s a “big release”

When talking about Tesla’s Full Self-Driving program, it’s hard not to talk about delays.

Tesla fans would argue that the company is trying to solve a major problem in self-driving and we should cut it some slack when it comes. The counter argument is that Tesla started selling Full Self-Driving since 2016 and by doing it, it created pressure on itself to deliver on its promise.

Do we have enough fuel to get to our destination? This is probably one of the first questions that comes to mind whenever your family gets ready to embark on a road trip. If the trip is long, you will need to visit gas stations along your route to refuel during your travel.

NASA is grappling with similar issues as it gets ready to embark on a sustainable mission back to the moon and plans future missions to Mars. But while your car’s fuel is gasoline, which can be safely and indefinitely stored as a liquid in the car’s gas tank, spacecraft fuels are volatile cryogenic liquid propellants that must be maintained at extremely low temperatures and guarded from environmental heat leaks into the spacecraft’s propellant tank.

And while there is already an established network of commercial gas stations in place to make refueling your car a cinch, there are no cryogenic refueling stations or depots at the moon or on the way to Mars.

Science and Technology:

I will want to see a video of myself doing sex with some cinema actresses 😍❤️

OpenAI’s premier text-to-video generator is coming in 2024, and the company is not ruling out AI-generated adult content.

ABOVE: Blackiston and his colleagues dovetailed biology and robotics to generate biobots derived from frog stem cells. These biobots can move due to cilia, small hairlike structures that cover their surfaces. Douglas Blackiston and Sam Kriegman, licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Douglas Blackiston, a developmental biologist at Tufts University, has always been fascinated by transformation. Using uncommon model organisms, from caterpillars and butterflies to tadpoles and frogs, he investigates how biology is adaptive. In one of his favorite projects, Blackiston transplanted eyes into the tails of blind tadpoles, restoring their vision in a striking display of tissue plasticity. This led him to an unusual spin-off project, where his work in biology dovetailed with robotics. In this work, Blackiston and his colleagues repurposed frog stem cells into programmable synthetic organisms to explore the design space of cells and their interactions.

Researchers from Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California (UC) San Diego have discovered thousands of previously unknown bile acids, a type of molecule used by our gut microbiome to communicate with the rest of the body. The findings can build a better understanding of our gut microbiome and may lead to the development of therapeutics for diseases that are related to the gut microbiome such as type 2 diabetes, intestinal bowel diseases, and more.

The findings are published in Cell in an article titled, “The underappreciated diversity of bile acid modifications.”

“The repertoire of modifications to bile acids and related steroidal lipids by host and microbial metabolism remains incompletely characterized,” the researchers wrote. “To address this knowledge gap, we created a reusable resource of tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) spectra by filtering 1.2 billion publicly available MS/MS spectra for bile-acid-selective ion patterns.”