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Oct 14, 2020

This crazy pen lets you write and draw in any color you want

Posted by in category: electronics

Circa 2016


Scribble Pen is a smart pen that lets you draw in any color simply objects by scanning them with its built in color sensor.

Oct 14, 2020

Room-Temperature Superconductivity Achieved for the First Time

Posted by in categories: materials, physics

Physicists have reached a long-sought goal. The catch is that their room-temperature superconductor requires crushing pressures to keep from falling apart.

Oct 14, 2020

Astronomers Solve Mystery of a Galaxy Containing 99.99% Dark Matter

Posted by in category: cosmology

The mystery of a galaxy that shouldn’t have existed could now have a solution. Dragonfly 44, a faint galaxy that was found in 2016 to consist of 99.99 percent dark matter, has been closely re-examined, revealing a lower and more normal proportion of dark matter.

This would mean that we don’t have to revise our models of galaxy formation to try to figure out how they could have produced such an extreme outlier — everything is behaving completely normally, the researchers said.

“Dragonfly 44 (DF44) has been an anomaly all these years that could not be explained with the existing galaxy formation models,” said astronomer Teymoor Saifollahi of the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute in the Netherlands.

Oct 14, 2020

SpaceX to explore ways to provide weather data to U.S. military

Posted by in categories: business, military, space

SpaceX won a $2 million contract from the SpEC consortium to study ways to provide weather data to the U.S. Space Force.


WASHINGTON — SpaceX is looking at ways it could provide weather data to the U.S. military. The company is working under a $2 million six-month study contract from the U.S. Space Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center.

Charlotte Gerhart, chief of the Space and Missile Systems Center Production Corps Low Earth Orbit Division, said in a statement to SpaceNews that SpaceX received the contract in July from SMC’s Space Enterprise Consortium.

Continue reading “SpaceX to explore ways to provide weather data to U.S. military” »

Oct 14, 2020

A Small Electric Car Made of Recycled Trash

Posted by in categories: sustainability, transportation

Collectively, we produce 2.1 billion tons of waste per year, or as a group of students from the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) would explain it, we produce the same amount as “the PSV Eindhoven football stadium filled 7380 times to the roof.”

Oct 14, 2020

New Technology Accelerates Crop Improvement with CRISPR

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, food, genetics

Researchers know how to make precise genetic changes within the genomes of crops, but the transformed cells often refuse to grow into plants. One team has devised a new solution.


Scientists who want to improve crops face a dilemma: it can be difficult to grow plants from cells after you’ve tweaked their genomes.

A new tool helps ease this process by coaxing the transformed cells, including those modified with the gene-editing system CRISPR-Cas9, to regenerate new plants. Howard Hughes Medical Institute Research Specialist Juan M. Debernardi and Investigator Jorge Dubcovsky, together with David Tricoli at the University of California, Davis Plant Transformation Facility, Javier Palatnik from Argentina, and colleagues at the John Innes Centre, collaborated on the work. The team reports the technology, developed in wheat and tested in other crops, October 12, 2020, in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

Continue reading “New Technology Accelerates Crop Improvement with CRISPR” »

Oct 14, 2020

Ground-State Cooling of a Trapped Ion Using Long-Wavelength Radiation

Posted by in categories: engineering, quantum physics

Freeze laser.


We demonstrate ground-state cooling of a trapped ion using radio-frequency (rf) radiation. This is a powerful tool for the implementation of quantum operations, where rf or microwave radiation instead of lasers is used for motional quantum state engineering. We measure a mean phonon number of $\overline{n}=0.13$ after sideband cooling, corresponding to a ground-state occupation probability of 88%. After preparing in the vibrational ground state, we demonstrate motional state engineering by driving Rabi oscillations between the $|n=0⟩$ and $|n=1⟩$ Fock states. We also use the ability to ground-state cool to accurately measure the motional heating rate and report a reduction by almost 2 orders of magnitude compared with our previously measured result, which we attribute to carefully eliminating sources of electrical noise in the system.

Oct 14, 2020

This New Hyundai Car Runs On The Poop Of California Residents, And The Fuel Is Free

Posted by in categories: energy, transportation

With hydrogen supplied by Orange County’s sewage treatment plant and paid for by the car manufacturer, a new fuel cell vehicle is actually hitting the market in Los Angeles.

Oct 14, 2020

Researchers synthesize room temperature superconducting material

Posted by in categories: engineering, physics

Compressing simple molecular solids with hydrogen at extremely high pressures, University of Rochester engineers and physicists have, for the first time, created material that is superconducting at room temperature.

Featured as the cover story in the journal Nature, the work was conducted by the lab of Ranga Dias, an assistant professor of physics and mechanical engineering.

Continue reading “Researchers synthesize room temperature superconducting material” »

Oct 14, 2020

Seaweed may be the solution to our plastic crisis. A London startup is making edible packaging out of it

Posted by in categories: food, sustainability

Edible packaging from sea weed. 😃


The plastic-like seaweed packaging made by Notpla is biodegradable within six weeks, compared to hundreds of years for synthetic plastics.