Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have developed a light-activated coating for filtration membranes—the kind used in water treatment facilities, at semiconductor manufacturing sites and within the food and beverage industry—to make them self-cleaning, eliminating the need to shut systems down in order to repair them.

Cheap and effective, water filtration membranes have been around for years but have always been vulnerable to clogging from organic and inorganic materials that stop up its pores over time, a phenomenon known as fouling.

“Anything you stick in water is going to become fouled sooner or later,” said Argonne senior scientist Seth Darling.

A team of researchers from the U.S., China, and Saudi Arabia has developed a new kind of plastic that is able to maintain its original qualities when recycled. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes how the new plastic is made and how well it did when tested for recyclability.

For many years, plastics have been seen as a highly desirable modern advancement—they are light, strong, bendable when needed, and can be used in a very wide variety of applications. The down side to plastics, of course, is that they do not recycle very well and they take a very long time to decay. This has led to millions of tons of plastic waste winding up in landfills and in the water table. Because of that, scientists have been hard a work looking for a new kind of plastic that has all the advantages of the old plastic but also can be easily recycled. In this new effort, the researchers claim to have developed just such a plastic.

The researchers made the new plastic by preparing a bridged bicyclic thiolactone monomer from a bio-based olefin carboxylic acid. The result was a plastic (they called PBTL) that had all the qualities of traditional plastics. They next tested their plastic by conducting bulk depolymerization at 100°C using a catalyst. Testing of the result showed the PBTL had been broken down into its original monomer. They followed that up by breaking down samples of PBTL (using a catalyst) at room temperature. And once again, close examination showed the sample had been broken down to the original monomer.

How we adapt to aging late in life may be genetically influenced, according to a study led by a psychologist at the University of California, Riverside.

The research, published in Aging Cell, has implications for how epigenetic factors relate to aging. Epigenesis is a process in which chemicals attached to DNA control its activity. Epigenetic changes, which can be passed on to offspring, may be critical to accelerated aging as well as declines in cognitive and physical functioning that often accompany aging. Epigenetic modifications resulting in altered gene expression may occur due to a number of biological processes, including one the researchers focused on: DNA methylation.

In DNA methylation, methyl groups are added to the DNA molecule. DNA has four different types of nucleotides: A, T, G, and C. DNA methylation occurs at the C bases of eukaryotic DNA. Changes in DNA methylation correlate strongly with aging.

Short stories about theity written in collaboration with GPT-3.

There are galaxies shaped like jellyfish, galaxies that consume other galaxies, and galaxies that seem to lack the dark matter that pervades the rest of the universe. Here are the strangest galaxies in the universe.

Tesla vehicles are equipped with extrernal speakers.

The main function is to output a pedestrian warning sound, which has become required for electric vehicles in many markets due to the fact that they are quiet at low speeds.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been playing around with ideas on how to release other features that take advantage of the fact that the vehicles are now equipped with external speakers.

“Our standard model of cosmology is based on an isotropic universe, one that is the same, statistically, in all directions,” says astrophysicist John Webb at the University of New South Wales about the universal constant which appears inconstant at the outer fringes of the cosmos, it occurs in only one direction…” That standard model itself is built upon Einstein’s theory of gravity, which itself explicitly assumes constancy of the laws of Nature. If such fundamental principles turn out to be only good approximations, the doors are open to some very exciting, new ideas in physics.”

Those looking forward to a day when science’s Grand Unifying Theory of Everything could be worn on a t-shirt may have to wait a little longer as astrophysicists continue to find hints that one of the cosmological constants is not so constant after all.

Continue reading “‘The Inconstant Universe’ --Weird Findings Point to a New Physics” »

An internally built system called Advanced Listening analyzes phone calls, emails, text messages and more, identifying possible compliance violations, systemic issues and opportunities to improve processes, products and customer service.

WASHINGTON — The Blue Origin-led team that is one of three working on lunar lander concepts for NASA’s Artemis program has delivered a full-sized mockup of that lander to the agency for testing by engineers and astronauts.

Blue Origin announced Aug. 20 that its “National Team” has installed an engineering model of the lander in the Space Vehicle Mockup Facility at the Johnson Space Center. The full-sized, but low-fidelity, mockup includes both the descent element, developed by Blue Origin, and ascent element, built by Lockheed Martin, and stands more than 12 meters high.

Continue reading “Blue Origin team delivers lunar lander mockup to NASA” »