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Japan’s Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga has declared a state of emergency for the nation’s capital and surrounding areas as Covid-19 cases surge to the highest levels since the start of the pandemic.

The emergency declaration will be in place from Friday until February 7 and applies to Tokyo and the three neighboring prefectures of Chiba, Saitama and Kanagawa. The emergency includes a number of restrictions on daily life.

Suga has ordered companies to encourage their staff to work from home and reduce office populations by 70%.

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Capturing energy from the Sun with solar panels is only half the story – that energy needs to be stored somewhere for later use. In the case of flow batteries, storage is relegated to vats of liquid. Now, an international team led by University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists has created a new version of these solar flow batteries that’s efficient and long-lasting.

To make the new device, the team combined several existing technologies. It’s a silicon/perovskite tandem solar cell, paired with a redox flow battery, which the team says will allow people to harvest and store renewable energy in one device. Not only is it efficient, but it should be inexpensive and simple enough to scale up for home use.

The energy-harvesting part of the equation combines the long-time industry-leading material – silicon – with a promising young upstart called perovskite. These tandem solar cells have proved better than either material alone, since the two materials capture different wavelengths of light.

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A new “transforming” rover in development at NASA will be able to explore rough terrain unlike any rover before it.

DuAxle (short for dual-Axel) gets its name because it’s made of a combination of a pair of two-wheeled Axel rovers. The Axel rover is a simple, two-wheeled rover with a long tether that connects to a larger vehicle and stabilizes the rover as it descends into and explores craters that other rovers would not be able to handle. The Axel is equipped with a robotic arm that can collect samples, as well as stereoscopic cameras to gather imagery.

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Aging is, at least for now, inevitable, and our eyes are not immune to those changes. Vision loss is, in fact, one of the top 10 causes of disability in the US., however, shows that this might be reversible in the future.

A large team of geneticists, ophthalmologists, and other scientists used a group of molecules called Yamanaka factors to turn cells in the eyes of mature mice back to a youthful state. This reversed the damage done by aging, and the cells were then able to regenerate, connect back to the brain, and vision was restored in both models of normal aging and glaucoma.

Yamanaka factors are nothing new in neuroscience. They are named after the after Shinya Yamanaka led research using those factors to convert mature adult cells back to stem cells, kickstarting the field of induced pluripotent stem cells — cells reprogrammed with the ability to generate other types of cells.

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Circa 2020 radiationless laser.

One of the world’s leading specialists in laser fusion, the Australian physicist Prof. Heinrich Hora, has proposed a new type of nuclear reactor which promises to provide highly-efficient, radioactivity-free generation of electric power, with virtually unlimited reserves of fuel. The design uses ultra-high-power, ultra-short-pulsed lasers to trigger fusion reactions between nuclei of hydrogen and boron. Hora believes that a prototype of his reactor could be running within the decade.

In the previous installments of this series, Jonathan Tennenbaum introduced readers to the new reactor concept and its fascinating scientific and technological background.

It is fitting to conclude this series with an interview Tennenbaum conducted in March this year with Heinrich Hora.

Continue reading “Meet the father of the hydrogen-boron laser fusion reactor” | >