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Graphene excels at removing contaminants from water, but it’s not yet a commercially viable use of the wonder material.

That could be changing.

In a recent study, University at Buffalo engineers report a new process of 3D printing aerogels that they say overcomes two key hurdles—scalability and creating a version of the material that’s stable enough for repeated use—for treatment.

UCLA materials scientists have developed a class of optical material that controls how heat radiation is directed from an object. Similar to the way overlapping blinds direct the angle of visible light coming through a window, the breakthrough involves utilizing a special class of materials that manipulates how thermal radiation travels through such materials.

Recently published in Science, the advance could be used to improve the efficiency of energy-conversion systems and enable more effective sensing and detection technologies.

“Our goal was to show that we could effectively beam thermal —the all objects emanate as —over broad wavelengths to the same direction,” said study leader Aaswath Raman, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. “This advance offers new capabilities for a range of technologies that depend on the ability to control the flows of heat in the form of thermal radiation. This includes imaging and sensing applications that rely on thermal sources or detecting them, as well as energy applications such as , waste heat recovery and radiative cooling, where restricting the directionality of heat flow can improve performance. ”.

It points out that to measure down to the synapse the energy needed would melt the tissue of your head.


Investigate the possibility of scanning the human brain and uploading our minds and consciousness to a digital world.

Imagine a future where nobody dies— instead, our minds are uploaded to a digital world. There they could live on in a realistic, simulated environment with avatar bodies, calling in and contributing to the biological world. Mind-uploading has powerful appeal— but what would it actually take to scan a person’s brain and upload their mind? Michael S. A. Graziano explores the challenges.

Pfizer pill to treat COVID symptoms could be ready by year’s end, CEO says.


An oral drug like the one Pfizer is developing could be taken at home and might keep people out of the hospital.

“Particular attention is on the oral because it provides several advantages,” Bourla said. “One of them is that you don’t need to go to the hospital to get the treatment, which is the case with all the injectables so far. You could get it at home, and that could be a game-changer.”

The drug might be effective against the emerging variants, he said. Pfizer is also working on an injectable anti-viral drug.

As the command module pilot on NASA’s Apollo 11 mission, Collins circled the moon while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin touched down at Tranquility Base on July 20, 1969. When his two crewmates returned from the surface, Collins was in the unique position to capture a photo of all of humanity — his fellow astronauts on board the lunar module and everyone else on Earth off in the distance.

Mission Control likened Collins’ experience to that of the first human in existence. “Not since Adam has any human known such solitude,” a mission commentator said. Collins later rejected that notion.

“That’s baloney,” Collins said on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission in 2019. “You put some Samoan on his little canoe out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean at night and he doesn’t really know where he’s going, he doesn’t know how to get there. He can see the stars, they’re his only friend out there, and he’s not talking to anybody. That guy is lonely.”

In a major milestone for quantum physics, thousands of molecules have been induced to share the same quantum state, dancing together in unison like one huge super molecule.

This is a goal long-sought by physicists, who hope to harness complex quantum systems for technological applications — but getting a bunch of unruly molecules to work together is on a difficulty par with herding cats.

“People have been trying to do this for decades, so we’re very excited,” said physicist Cheng Chin from the University of Chicago.