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Aug 15, 2021

Reforestation holds promise for Europe’s increasingly drier summers

Posted by in categories: climatology, sustainability

“A new study suggests that if Europe planted trees across all the land suitable for reforestation, it might not only sequester carbon but also partially ameliorate the increasingly dry European summers predicted by climate change models.”


Plant more trees! This message has been one of the cornerstones of the European response to worsening climate change. A new study published in Nature Geoscience suggests that if Europe planted trees across all the land suitable for reforestation, it might not only sequester carbon, but also partially ameliorate the increasingly dry European summers predicted by climate change models. In all, mass reforestation could increase summer rainfall by an average of 7.6%.

“When planned carefully, reforestation could result in additional benefits in regions where it is implemented,” said Ronny Meier, a researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (ETH Zürich), and lead author on the study.

Continue reading “Reforestation holds promise for Europe’s increasingly drier summers” »

Aug 15, 2021

Artificial Intelligence Classifies Brain Tumors With Single MRI Scan

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, robotics/AI

A team of researchers at Washington University School of Medicine have developed a deep learning model that is capable of classifying a brain tumor as one of six common types using a single 3D MRI scan, according to a study published in Radiology: Artificial Intelligence.

“This is the first study to address the most common intracranial tumors and to directly determine the tumor class or the absence of tumor from a 3D MRI volume,” said Satrajit Chakrabarty, M.S., a doctoral student under the direction of Aristeidis Sotiras, Ph.D., and Daniel Marcus, Ph.D., in Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology’s Computational Imaging Lab at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri.

The six most common intracranial tumor types are high-grade glioma, low-grade glioma, brain metastases, meningioma, pituitary adenoma and acoustic neuroma. Each was documented through histopathology, which requires surgically removing tissue from the site of a suspected cancer and examining it under a microscope.

Aug 15, 2021

Plasma Kinetics May Revolutionize Hydrogen Storage For EVs

Posted by in categories: energy, transportation

Using hydrogen for transportation is criticized by many. It would not be as energy-efficient as batteries, and a recent study even pointed out that producing it can be more pollutant than just burning the natural gas from where it is extracted. One of the main hurdles involving it is storage: putting the gas in a tank demands a lot of energy. E for Electric discovered a “solid-state hydrogen fueling” thanks to Sandy Munro and told us more about Plasma Kinetics, the company that developed it.

Aug 14, 2021

Brain-Computer Interfaces Aim to Bring New Therapeutical Advances to Treating Neural Conditions, Paralysis, Speech Problems

Posted by in categories: computing, neuroscience

The research aims to bring the brains to a computer interface to solve its problems.

Aug 14, 2021

Fullerene Stability

Posted by in category: chemistry

This work proves that stability of C60 is a geometrical property of the thermodynamics of the system: a significant methodological advance since a detailed treatment of the energetics may be avoidable. This approach may be fruitful, not only for fullerenes but also for general problems of molecular stability and in other applications of conformational chemistry. For the non-chiral C60, C384, and the weakly-chiral C28, C76 and C380 (of these, C380 and C384 are classed as “unspirallable”), Schlegel projections are used to show that these fullerenes can all be represented by pairs of spirals counter-propagating in anti-parallel (C2) symmetry. For C60, the high symmetry is used to construct an analytical approximation for the spherical double-spirals, shown mathematically to be Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) using the formalism of Quantitative Geometrical Thermodynamics (QGT). Therefore C60 is necessarily stable. This MaxEnt stability criterion is general, depending only on the geometry and not the kinematics of the system. The sense and degree of chirality for C76 and C380 is also quantified using a Shannon entropy-based fragmentation metric.


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Aug 14, 2021

Scientists Just Created a New “Glass” That’s Tougher Than Diamond

Posted by in category: materials

A team of researchers in northern China developed the world’s hardest glassy material, the transparent, yellow-tinted AM-III, which is capable of leaving a deep scratch on the surface of a diamond, a report from South China Morning Post explains.

The material, which is made entirely of carbon, reached a 113 gigapascals (GPa) on the Vickers hardness test. As a point of reference, natural diamonds usually score somewhere between 50 and 70 on the GPa scale.

The findings of the research, led by Professor Tian Yongjun of Yanshan University in Qinhuangdao, Hebei province, were published in the journal National Science Review. In 2,013 Tian and his team created the world’s hardest material that’s visible to the naked eye, a boron nitride crystal that is twice as hard as diamond at 200 GPa.

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Aug 14, 2021

Boeing’s spaceship launch for NASA is seriously delayed as ‘disappointing’ technical issues send it back to the factory

Posted by in category: space travel

Starliner is supposed to fly astronauts for NASA someday, but it keeps having “significant” technical issues. Now it’s going back to the factory.

Aug 14, 2021

Baidu to deploy low-cost robotaxi fleet in bid to monetise self-driving

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, space, sustainability

Commercial prospects for robotaxi services remain uncertain in the near term due to the immaturity of the technology, the absence of legislation to clearly define responsibility in case of a self-driving accident, and persistently high costs associated with the complex self-driving systems.


Baidu’s autonomous driving unit has partnered with the luxury electric vehicle brand of BAIC Group to bring fifth generation Apollo Moon robotaxis to Chinese roads, cutting the cost of the vehicles by two thirds.

Aug 14, 2021

SpaceX moon mission to take eight people ‘further than any human has ever gone’ from Earth

Posted by in category: space

We’ve reached out to the DearMoon team to clarify the details.

Another SpaceX mission aims to send civilians to space very soon. Known as Inspiration4, it plans to send humans to orbit aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon, lifting off on top of a Falcon 9. It too is being bankrolled by a billionaire, Jared Isaacman, and it could fly before the end of the year.

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Aug 14, 2021

Brain-computer interfaces are making big progress this year

Posted by in categories: computing, neuroscience

Eight months in, 2,021 has already become a record year in brain-computer interface (BCI) funding, tripling the $97 million raised in 2019.