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The President of Estonia Kersti Kaljulaid at the Tartu University laboratory. Photo: Mattias Tammet / Office of the President of the Republic of Estonia.

As the world is running out of lithium, planet-friendlier batteries are waiting to hit the market. We are using up lithium, the essential metal in rechargeable batteries. Some experts estimate that there won’t be any lithium left by 2035, and some say that it may already disappear within four years. Who should lose sleep over this? Anyone with a smartphone, a laptop or an electric car. Without lithium, they would have to be plugged in at all times.

Continue reading “Tartu researchers are turning soil into batteries” »

The international body representing stem-cell scientists has torn up a decades-old limit on the length of time that scientists should grow human embryos in the lab, giving more leeway to researchers who are studying human development and disease.

Previously, the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) recommended that scientists culture human embryos for no more than two weeks after fertilization. But on 26 May, the society said it was relaxing this famous limit, known as the ‘14-day rule’. Rather than replace or extend the limit, the ISSCR now suggests that studies proposing to grow human embryos beyond the two-week mark be considered on a case-by-case basis, and be subjected to several phases of review to determine at what point the experiments must be stopped.

The ISSCR made this change and others to its guidelines for biomedical research in response to rapid advances in the field, including the ability to create embryo-like structures from human stem cells. In addition to relaxing the ‘14-day rule’, for instance, the group advises against editing genes in human embryos until the safety of genome editing is better established.

Summary: The reactivation of learned material during slow oscillation/sleep spindle complexes, and the precision of SO-spindle coupling predicts how strong a memory will be reactivated in the brain.

Source: University of Birmingham.

While we sleep, the brain produces particular activation patterns. When two of these patterns – slow oscillations and sleep spindles – gear into each other, previous experiences are reactivated. The stronger the reactivation, the clearer will be our recall of past events, a new study reveals.

Getting people to see Tesla as a robotics company in Artificial Intelligence is Elon Musk’s new goal.

The wonderful mess of molecules that make up living things is so complex, biologists have overlooked an entire class of them – until now. This missed bit of biochemistry is neither rare nor hard to find; it’s just no one had thought to look for it before.

“This is a stunning discovery of an entirely new class of biomolecules,” said Stanford biochemist Carolyn Bertozzi.

“It’s really a bombshell because the discovery suggests that there are biomolecular pathways in the cell that are completely unknown to us.”

Researchers created an algorithm to identify similar cell types from species – including fish, mice, flatworms and sponges – that have diverged for hundreds of millions of years, which could help fill in gaps in our understanding of evolution.

Cells are the building blocks of life, present in every living organism. But how similar do you think your cells are to a mouse? A fish? A worm?

Comparing cell types in different species across the tree of life can help biologists understand how cell types arose and how they have adapted to the functional needs of different life forms. This has been of increasing interest to evolutionary biologists in recent years because new technology now allows sequencing and identifying all cells throughout whole organisms. “There’s essentially a wave in the scientific community to classify all types of cells in a wide variety of different organisms,” explained Bo Wang, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford University.

What is really going on with Virgin Galactic, Get the inside scoop from the initial developer of the engine technology who worked for Burt Rutan on SpaceShipOne and also worked SpaceShipTwo-Tim Pickens, See why he, and I are concerned about Virgin Galactic.
Tim Pickens is an entrepreneur, inventor, innovator, engineer and educator. He specializes in commercial space, technical product development and solutions, and business consulting and strategy for space and technical companies. He is known for applying a lean philosophy to develop creative solutions and innovative partnerships to provide responsive, low-cost products and services for government and private industry. Pickens’ 25+ years of experience in the aerospace industry, specializing in the design, fabrication and testing of propulsion hardware systems, has earned him a reputation as one of the industry’s leaders in these areas. Early in his career, Pickens served as propulsion lead for Scaled Composites on SpaceShipOne, winner of the $10 million Ansari X Prize. He also worked for small hardware-rich aerospace companies in Huntsville, and later supported the Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo venture.

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3D printed food is no longer the domain of sci-fi fantasy. It’s here and it’s real: but is it really a big deal, or is it just a passing fad?

In science fiction television shows and movies such as those in the Star Trek universe, the food synthesizers or replicators were electronic devices that took base elements and transformed them into any type of food that was desired. This seemingly miraculous device could only exist in the world of science fiction — at least for now. However, thanks to the advances in 3D printing, it is now possible to create food that mimics the taste, shape, and color of familiar dishes.

Over the past few years, 3D printers have become more commonplace in commercial industries and are used to create all types of items that range from small models and jewelry up to large construction items used to create buildings. But what about 3D printed foods? Is it the future of gastronomy, or just a quirky fad?

Continue reading “What’s the Deal with 3D Printed Food?” »

In the last few years, several technology companies including Google, Microsoft, and IBM, have massively invested in quantum computing systems based on microwave superconducting circuit platforms in an effort to scale them up from small research-oriented systems to commercialized computing platforms. But fulfilling the potential of quantum computers requires a significant increase in the number of qubits, the building blocks of quantum computers, which can store and manipulate quantum information.

But quantum signals can be contaminated by thermal noise generated by the movement of electrons. To prevent this, superconducting quantum systems must operate at ultra-low temperatures—less than 20 milli-Kelvin—which can be achieved with cryogenic helium-dilution refrigerators.

The output microwave signals from such systems are amplified by low-noise high-electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) at low temperatures. Signals are then routed outside the refrigerator by microwave coaxial cables, which are the easiest solutions to control and read superconducting devices but are poor heat isolators, and take up a lot of space; this becomes a problem when we need to scale up qubits in the thousands.