A new electrode that could free up 20% more light from organic light-emitting diodes has been developed at the University of Michigan. It could help extend the battery life of smartphones and laptops, or make next-gen televisions and displays much more energy efficient.
The approach prevents light from being trapped in the light-emitting part of an OLED, enabling OLEDs to maintain brightness while using less power. In addition, the electrode is easy to fit into existing processes for making OLED displays and light fixtures.
“With our approach, you can do it all in the same vacuum chamber,” said L. Jay Guo, U-M professor of electrical and computer engineering and corresponding author of the study.
The new system streamlines the process of fermenting plant sugar to fuel by helping yeast survive industrial toxins.
More corn is grown in the United States than any other crop, but we only use a small part of the plant for food and fuel production; once people have harvested the kernels, the inedible leaves, stalks and cobs are left over. If this plant matter, called corn stover, could be efficiently fermented into ethanol the way corn kernels are, stover could be a large-scale, renewable source of fuel.
“Stover is produced in huge amounts, on the scale of petroleum,” said Whitehead Institute Member and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) biology professor Gerald Fink. “But there are enormous technical challenges to using them cheaply to create biofuels and other important chemicals.”
NASA’s Perseverance rover captured a historic group selfie with the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter on April 6, 2021. But how was the selfie taken? Vandi Verma, Perseverance’s chief engineer for robotic operations at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California breaks down the process in this video.
Video taken by Perseverance’s navigation cameras shows the rover’s robotic arm twisting and maneuvering to take the 62 images that compose the image. The rover’s entry, descent, and landing microphone captured the sound of the arm’s motors whirring during the process.
Selfies allow engineers to check wear and tear on the rover over time.
CRISPR gene editing already promises to fight diseases that were once thought unassailable, but techniques so far have required injecting the tools directly into affected cells. That’s not very practical for some conditions. However, there’s just been a breakthrough. NPRreports that researchers have published results showing that you can inject CRISPR-Cas9 into the bloodstream to make edits, opening the door to the use of gene editing for treating many common diseases.
The experimental treatment tackled a rare genetic disease, transthyretin amyloidosis. Scientists injected volunteers with CRISPR-loaded nanoparticles that were absorbed by the patients’ livers, editing a gene in the organ to disable production of a harmful protein. Levels of that protein plunged within weeks of the injection, saving patients from an illness that can rapidly destroy nerves and other tissues in their bodies.
The test involved just six people, and the research team still has to conduct long-term studies to check for possible negative effects. If this method proves viable on a large scale, though, it could be used to treat illnesses where existing CRISPR techniques aren’t practical, ranging from Alzheimer’s to heart disease.
The middle and working classes have seen a steady decline in their fortunes. Sending jobs to foreign countries, the hollowing out of the manufacturing sector, pivoting toward a service economy and the weakening of unions have been blamed for the challenges faced by a majority of Americans.
There’s an interesting, compelling and alternative explanation. According to a new academic research study, automation technology has been the primary driver in U.S. income inequality over the past 40 years. The report, published by theNational Bureau of Economic Research, claims that 50% to 70% of changes in U.S. wages, since 1980, can be attributed to wage declines among blue-collar workers who were replaced or degraded by automation.
Artificial intelligence, robotics and new sophisticated technologies have caused a wide chasm in wealth and income inequality. It looks like this issue will accelerate. For now, college-educated, white-collar professionals have largely been spared the fate of degreeless workers. People with a postgraduate degree saw their salaries rise, while “low-education workers declined significantly.” According to the study, “The real earnings of men without a high-school degree are now 15% lower than they were in 1980.”
When an 87-year-old Californian man was wheeled into an operating room just outside Phoenix last year, the pandemic was at its height and medical protocols were being upended across the country.
A case like his would normally have required 14 or more bags of fluids to be pumped into him, but now that posed a problem.
Had he been infected with the coronavirus, tiny aerosol droplets could have escaped and infected staff, so the operating team had adopted new procedures that reduced the effectiveness of the treatment but used fewer liquids.
In both cases, the language is an attempt to call forth the spirit of the Outer Space Treaty. However, as many critics have stated, the Artemis Accords suffer from the fact that they are tied to a specific space agency and program. This was certainly the basis of Rogozin and Russia’s resistance when the Accords were first announced, hence why Russia and China have come together to do the same.
In short, they have decided to establish a set of bilateral agreements that would allow others to participate in their program of lunar exploration. While it’s not clear what the long-term implications of this will be, it could possibly lead to tensions and territorial disputes down the road. After all, one of the hallmarks of the current era of space exploration is its plurality, where multiple space agencies (and commercial space) are involved instead of two competing superpowers.
But when three of the five major space powers create two competing frameworks and ask others to join them, one can be forgiven for concluding that there’s a new Space Race in town!
Neil deGrasse Tyson explains the early state of our Universe. At the beginning of the universe, ordinary space and time developed out of a primeval state, where all matter and energy of the entire visible universe was contained in a hot, dense point called a gravitational singularity. A billionth the size of a nuclear particle.
While we can not imagine the entirety of the visible universe being a billion times smaller than a nuclear particle, that shouldn’t deter us from wondering about the early state of our universe. However, dealing with such extreme scales is immensely counter-intuitive and our evolved brains and senses have no capacity to grasp the depths of reality in the beginning of cosmic time. Therefore, scientists develop mathematical frameworks to describe the early universe.
Neil deGrasse Tyson also mentions that our senses are not necessarily the best tools to use in science when uncovering the mysteries of the Universe.
It is interesting to note that in the early Universe, high densities and heterogeneous conditions could have led sufficiently dense regions to undergo gravitational collapse, forming black holes. These types of Primordial black holes are hypothesized to have formed soon after the Big Bang. Going from one mystery to the next, some evidence suggests a possible Link Between Primordial Black Holes and Dark Matter.
In modern physics, antimatter is made up of elementary particles, each of which has the same mass as their corresponding matter counterparts — protons, neutrons and electrons — but the opposite charges and magnetic properties.
A collision between any particle and its anti-particle partner leads to their mutual annihilation, giving rise to various proportions of intense photons, gamma rays and neutrinos. The majority of the total energy of annihilation emerges in the form of ionizing radiation. If surrounding matter is present, the energy content of this radiation will be absorbed and converted into other forms of energy, such as heat or light. The amount of energy released is usually proportional to the total mass of the collided matter and antimatter, in accordance with Einstein’s mass–energy equivalence equation.
Kerbal Space Program has now been out for a full 10 years, progressing alongside the space industry and the various people that operate within it. This documentary-style video takes a look at the people that have been influenced, inspired, and introduced to the wonder of space exploration by this bizarre game about little green beings, created by a small group of developers in Mexico City.
We want to thank you, the community, for helping us turn KSP into the launchpad for the next generation of space explorers!
