Lifeboat Foundation

What if you could solve two of Earth’s biggest problems in one stroke? UC Riverside engineers have developed a way to recycle plastic waste, such as soda or water bottles, into a nanomaterial useful for energy storage.

Mihri and Cengiz Ozkan and their students have been working for years on creating improved energy storage materials from sustainable sources, such as glass bottles, beach sand, Silly Putty, and portabella mushrooms. Their latest success could reduce plastic pollution and hasten the transition to 100% clean energy.

“Thirty percent of the global car fleet is expected to be electric by 2040, and high cost of raw battery materials is a challenge,” said Mihri Ozkan, a professor of electrical engineering in UCR’s Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering. “Using waste from landfill and upcycling plastic bottles could lower the total cost of batteries while making the battery production sustainable on top of eliminating plastic pollution worldwide.”

Some neuroscientists are daring to wield the technologies to probe one powerful group of internal brain states: emotions. Others are applying them to states such as motivation, or existential drives such as thirst. Researchers are even finding signatures of states in their data for which they have no vocabulary.

Neuroscientists are scrutinizing huge piles of data to learn how brains create emotions and other internal states such as aggression and desire.

Scientists have discovered what they believe to be a new species of theropod dinosaur — making it a close relative of the Tyrannosaurus rex. A group of researchers said they recently uncovered rare bones in the U.K. that appear to be related to the iconic species.

Paleontologists at the University of Southampton said they recently analyzed four bones on the Isle of Wight, off the southern coast of mainland England. The bones are from the neck, back and tail of the new dinosaur, named Vectaerovenator inopinatus.

Continue reading “New dinosaur closely related to the Tyrannosaurus rex discovered in England” »

EPFL spin-off SEED Biosciences has developed a pipetting robot that can dispense individual cells one by one. Their innovation allows for enhanced reliability and traceability, and can save life-science researchers time and money.

The engineers at SEED Biosciences, an EPFL spin-off, have come up with a unique pipetting robot that can isolate single cells with the push of a button—without damaging the cells. Their device also records the cells’ electrical signature so that they can be traced. While this innovation may seem trivial, it can save researchers several weeks of precious time and speed up development work in pharmaceuticals, cancer treatments and personalized medicine. The company began marketing its device this year.

The James Webb Space Telescope will not be in orbit around the Earth, like the Hubble is, rather it will actually orbit the Sun, 1.5 million kms away from the Earth at the second Lagrange point or L2.

Music: epic cinematic dramatic adventure trailer by romansenykmusic.

A video from SpaceX shows the company’s Crew Dragon capsule plunging toward the Gulf of Mexico, then unfurling a series of parachutes to slow the spaceship carrying two NASA astronauts from 350 mph to a relatively gentle 15 mph for splashdown Sunday.

Could we build a tower that reaches outer space?

Yale physicists have developed an error-correcting cat—a new device that combines the Schrödinger’s cat concept of superposition (a physical system existing in two states at once) with the ability to fix some of the trickiest errors in a quantum computation.

It is Yale’s latest breakthrough in the effort to master and manipulate the physics necessary for a useful quantum computer: Correcting the stream of errors that crop up among fragile bits of quantum information, called qubits, while performing a task.

A new study reporting on the discovery appears in the journal Nature. The senior author is Michel Devoret, Yale’s F.W. Beinecke Professor of Applied Physics and Physics. The study’s co-first authors are Alexander Grimm, a former postdoctoral associate in Devoret’s lab who is now a tenure-track scientist at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, and Nicholas Frattini, a graduate student in Devoret’s lab.

Novel two-dimensional materials are currently a hot research topic around the world. Of special interest are van der Waals heterostructures, which are made up of individual layers of different materials held together by van der Waals forces. The interactions between the different layers can give the resulting material entirely new properties.

Double layer unlocks crucial properties

There are already van der Waals heterostructures that absorb up to 100 percent of light. Single-layers of molybdenum disulfide offer absorption capacities in this range. When light is absorbed, an electron vacates its original position in the valence band, leaving behind a positively charged hole. The electron moves to a higher energy level, known as the conduction band, where it can move freely.