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India is getting to work on what will be the largest renewable energy project in the world. Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation this week — physically — for the 30 gigawatt (GW) wind and solar power project being built in his home state of Gujarat, India.

It was not that long ago that 30 megawatts was a large renewable energy power plant, and 300 megawatts is still considered a large project. 30 gigawatts is 30, 000 megawatts. I know — it doesn’t really seem to make sense. It can’t be that large … right?

Well, there’s no way it’s a single standalone project — but this is apparently a real projects of sorts (series of renewable energy power projects in the same general area) that will reportedly total 30 GW. For some comparison, in total, all across the United States, from Florida to Hawaii, we have 49.45 GW of solar power capacity installed from large solar power plants (not including rooftop solar). India plans to have “one project” in one state total 30 GW — down a bit from the 41.5 GW we reported at the beginning of the month (unless that is simply a longer-term plan). India itself had only 42.8 GW of solar power capacity installed at the end of 2019. Only 5 countries had more than 30 GW of solar power capacity installed.

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Situated in waters off the northeast coast of England, the Dogger Bank Wind Farm will have a total capacity of 3.6 gigawatts when completed.

Equinor and SSE have both described it as the “world’s biggest offshore wind farm,” and it will have the ability to power millions of homes in the U.K. annually.

Earlier this month, both Equinor and SSE sold 10% stakes in the first two phases of the project to Italian firm Eni. Upon completion of this deal, Equinor and SSE’s shares of Dogger Bank A & B will still amount to 40% each.

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O,.o.

A peculiar new paper, published in a little-known scientific journal, has the tabloids stirred up about the possibility of life on Mars.

According to this paper, an international team of scientists are now claiming to have found evidence of ‘mushrooms’ growing on the surface of the Red Planet.

The ‘evidence’ is primarily based on images, taken by NASA’s Curiosity and Opportunity rovers, which capture a birds-eye-view of what look like, well, mushrooms.

Continue reading “Here’s The Truth About That Photo of ‘Mushrooms’ Growing on Mars” | >

As we sit here in 2020, in the middle of a major viral pandemic, we can’t forget the fact that a century after the first antibiotics were created, drug resistant bacterial infections have become a major threat around the globe, exactly at the same time that the antibiotic pipelines of pharma companies have either dried up, or they have gotten out of the business.

In the U.S. alone, Centers For Disease Control (CDC) estimates that antibiotic resistance causes more than 2 million infections, several million hospital stay days, and over 35, 000 deaths per year. Worldwide, such infections cause 750, 000 deaths every year. And a recent United Nations (UN) report concluded that by 2050, “super bugs” could kill 10 million people globally every year, if no action is taken to combat the problem.

A solution to this emerging threat lies in the area of bacteriophage therapy (or “phage” for short), which is a type of virus that infects, replicates within, and are very good at killing bacteria.

Interestingly, phages have been used for over 90 years as an alternative to antibiotics in the former Soviet Union and Central Europe as well as in France. They are seen as a possible therapy against multi-drug-resistant strains of many bacteria and have been shown to interfere not just with bacteria life cycles, but also with biofilm production and quorum sensing involved bacterial colonization processes.

Continue reading “Dr. Robert Schooley MD — Harnessing Phage Therapies In The Fight Against Drug Resistant “Super-Bugs”” | >

The single-celled organism behind the infections is usually found in warm bodies of freshwater, including lakes and rivers. Once a person is infected — an exceedingly rare occurrence usually resulting from swimming or diving in infected waters — the amoeba travels from the nose into the brain.

Once there, the organism can kick off a nasty brain condition called primary amebic meningoencephalitis (PAM). And yep, according to the CDC, PAM is “usually fatal.”

The good news: there have only been 34 infections reported in the US in the last ten years, according to CDC data.

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The team in charge of recovering China’s successfully returned lunar samples in Inner Mongolia wasn’t just futuristic because it was picking up Moon rocks — its members also wore passive exoskeletons to help trudge through the snow, the South China Morning Post reports.

“I would have been exhausted after walking 20 or 30 meters, but with the help of the exoskeleton, 100 meters or more was not a problem,” one of the team members told SCMP. He was tasked with carrying 110 pounds of gear through the deep snow with temperatures well below 0 degrees Fahrenheit.

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Emerging and reemerging infections present an ever-increasing challenge to global health. Here, we report a nanoparticle-enabled smartphone (NES) system for rapid and sensitive virus detection. The virus is captured on a microchip and labeled with specifically designed platinum nanoprobes to induce gas bubble formation in the presence of hydrogen peroxide. The formed bubbles are controlled to make distinct visual patterns, allowing simple and sensitive virus detection using a convolutional neural network (CNN)-enabled smartphone system and without using any optical hardware smartphone attachment. We evaluated the developed CNN-NES for testing viruses such as hepatitis B virus (HBV), HCV, and Zika virus (ZIKV). The CNN-NES was tested with 134 ZIKV-and HBV-spiked and ZIKV-and HCV-infected patient plasma/serum samples. The sensitivity of the system in qualitatively detecting viral-infected samples with a clinically relevant virus concentration threshold of 250 copies/ml was 98.97% with a confidence interval of 94.39 to 99.97%.

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Smartphone systems can also benefit from the recent unprecedented advancements in nanotechnology to develop diagnostic approaches. Catalysis can be considered as one of the popular applications of nanoparticles because of their large surface-to-volume ratio and high surface energy (11–16). So far, numerous diagnostic platforms for cancer and infectious diseases have been developed by substituting enzymes, such as catalase, oxidase, and peroxidase with nanoparticle structures (17–20). Here, we adopted the intrinsic catalytic properties of platinum nanoparticles (PtNPs) for gas bubble formation to detect viruses on-chip using a convolutional neural network (CNN)–enabled smartphone system.

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