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Summary: Entrainment can safely manipulate brain waves to induce improvements in memory, a new study reveals.

Source: Florida Institute of Technology.

The brain is made of millions of cells called neurons, that send electrical messages to talk to each other in patterns of vertical electric activity called oscillations. By inducing them first, then finding the amplitude of the specific brain waves is improved during memory, ultimately memory performance itself is boosted. Once introduced, what if a person can boost the speed of these oscillations to improve memory? A university study in a journal for adolescents may show we can.

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An ink made using engineered bacterial cells can be 3D-printed into structures that release anti-cancer drugs or capture toxins from the environment.

The microbial ink is the first printable gel to be made entirely from proteins produced by E.coli cells, without the addition of other polymers.

“This is the first of its kind… a living ink that can respond to the environment. We have repurposed the matrix that these bacteria normally utilise as a shielding material to form a bio-ink,” says Avinash Manjula-Basavanna at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston.

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Urban Aeronautics, the Israel-based aerospace company behind the world’s first compact, wingless electric vertical takeoff, and landing (eVTOL) vehicle, is getting closer to turning its groundbreaking concept into reality. The company said it has raised the first $10 million of a $100 million funding round this week towards CityHawk from private investors in the US, Brazil, and Israel.

According to the company, the car-sized, six-seater CityHawk has more in common with birds than with nearly every other eVTOL prototype in existence. With a distinct, wingless exterior and patented fully-enclosed Fancraft rotor system, the CityHawk is mainly designed for commercial air charters and emergency medical services (EMS). It will be fueled by hydrogen, the most sustainable technology in development today. This means it must be able to conduct multiple trips within a city per day with zero emissions and minimal noise.

An innovative Fancraft technology is based on dual enclosed, ducted rotors with a variable pitch for thrust control, which enable uncompromised stability even in strong winds and turbulence during takeoff, hovering, and landing. The enclosed structure also results in minimal noise, both inside the cabin and outside.

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The extra juice comes from a secret ingredient…corn starch.

Could a simple materials change make electric car batteries able to four times more energy? Scientists in South Korea think so. In a new paper in the American Chemical Society’s Nano Letters, a research team details using silicon and repurposed corn starch to make better anodes for lithium ion batteries.

This team is based primarily in the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), where they’ve experimented with microemulsifying silicon, carbon, and corn starch into a new microstructured composite material for use as a battery anode. This is done by mixing silicon nanoparticles and corn starch with propylene gas and heating it all to combine.

Using biowaste corn starch is already pretty popular, with products like biodegradeable “corn plastic” cutlery, packaging, and the infamous nontoxic packing peanut. The same qualities that make corn starch attractive in these applications apply to the silicon anode project. Existing lithium-ion batteries use carbon anodes, and scientists know silicon would work better in many ways but have struggled to stabilize the silicon enough for this use to be practical. “To enhance the stability of silicon, Dr. Jung and his team focused on using materials that are common in our everyday lives, such as water, oil, and starch,” KIST wrote in a statement about the paper.

Continue reading “Corny Lithium-Ion Batteries Could Hold Quadruple the Charge” | >

A team of scientists has discovered a technique to keep tadpoles alive despite removing their capacity to breathe — by injecting algae into the little froglets’ brains, turning their heads a bright, almost neon, green.

What the frog? Plants, such as algae, produce oxygen through photosynthesis. Animals, on the other hand, cannot — we typically use lungs or gills to filter it from the environment.

But what if there was a way animals could get the oxygen they need the same way that plants do?

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“It is like using your thumb to control the water spray from a hose,” said Ming Liu, associate professor in UC Riverside’s Marlan. “You know how to get the desired spraying pattern by changing the thumb position, and likewise, in the experiment, we read the light pattern to retrieve the details of the object blocking the five nm-sized light nozzles.”

The light is then focused into a spectrometer, where it forms a tiny ring shape. The researchers can formulate the absorption and scattering images with colors by scanning the probe over an area and recording two spectra for each pixel.

The team expects the new nano-imaging technology can be an important tool to help the semiconductor industry make uniform nanomaterials with consistent properties for use in electronic devices. The new full-color nano-imaging technique could also be used to improve understanding of catalysis, quantum optics, and nanoelectronics.

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