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Managing the heat generated in electronics is a huge problem, especially with the constant push to reduce the size and pack as many transistors as possible in the same chip. The whole problem is how to manage such high heat fluxes efficiently. Usually, electronic technologies, designed by electrical engineers, and cooling systems, designed by mechanical engineers, are done independently and separately. But now, EPFL researchers have quietly revolutionized the process by combining these two design steps into one: They’ve developed an integrated microfluidic cooling technology together with the electronics that can efficiently manage the large heat fluxes generated by transistors. Their research, which has been published in Nature, will lead to even more compact electronic devices and enable the integration of power converters, with several high-voltage devices, into a single chip.

The best of both worlds

In this ERC-funded project, Professor Elison Matioli, his doctoral student Remco Van Erp, and their team from the School of Engineering’s Power and Wide-band-gap Electronics Research Laboratory (POWERLAB), began working to bring about a real change in designing by conceiving the electronics and together, right from the beginning. The group sought to extract the very near the regions that heat up the most in the . “We wanted to combine skills in electrical and mechanical engineering in order to create a new kind of device,” says Van Erp.

It’s good news for anyone planning on spending months floating around in the International Space Station (ISS) or for those who might one day find themselves on a long-haul flight to Mars, as researchers imaging the brains of Russian cosmonauts have found that while the brain does undergo changes in a microgravity environment, it doesn’t deteriorate.


New research suggests prolonged exposure to microgravity does cause parts of the brain to reorganise itself, but does not trigger loss of brain tissue.

Researchers at the University of Sheffield have developed a new compound that is able to kill both gram-positive and gram-negative antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Gram-positive and gram-negative have different cell wall structures, but the new antibiotic compound is able to pass through the cell wall of both forms of bacteria and then bind to the DNA.

The findings, published in Chemical Science, pave the way for developing new treatments for all kinds of antibiotic resistant bacteria, including the gram-positive MRSA and gram-negative E.Coli.

Singapore-based blockchain data firm CyberVein has become one of 12 firms participating in the construction of China’s Hainan Wenchang International Aerospace City. Construction commenced last month, with the site previously hosting a satellite launch center. Described as “China’s first aerospace cultural and tourism city,” it will be a hub for the development of aerospace products and support services intended for use in Chinese spacecraft and satellite launch missions. The 12-million-square-meter facility will host the country’s first aerospace super-computing center, and will focus on developing 40 technological areas including big data, satellite remote sensing and high precision positioning technology. CyberVein will work alongside major Chinese firms, including Fortune 500 companies Huawei and Kingsoft Cloud, and will leverage its blockchain, artificial intelligence and big data technologies to support the development of the city’s Smart Brain Planning and Design Institute.”


Blockchain firm CyberVein is partnering with the Chinese government to build a blockchain-powered governance system for its aerospace ‘smart city.’

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Plastics, plastics everywhere! From the water that we drink to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, plastics and all sorts of trash are quite literally everywhere; so the fact that the seabed houses even more of those probably won’t come off as a surprise for you.

Thankfully, the Fraunhofer Center for Maritime Logistics and Services (CML) and an international network of partners are willing to tackle this problem with the use of autonomous robots in a project called SeaClear.


Freeing the Earth from underwater waste is not an easy feat, but this project might actually tidy up our mess.

NASA changed its mind and decided not to buy a seat on Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft to deliver its astronaut to the International Space Station (ISS) in the spring of 2021, according to Roscosmos’ 2019 annual report.

In May, NASA chief Jim Bridenstine announced that the option of acquiring a seat on the Soyuz MS-18 manned spacecraft, which would be launched in April 2021, is being considered. In August, a source in the space industry said that for the first time in the history of the ISS, a crew consisting of only Russian cosmonauts would fly on Soyuz MS-18, but there was no official confirmation of this so far.

“At the beginning of 2020, the US side announced its readiness to purchase services for the delivery of only one astronaut in the fall of 2020: the conditions are currently being discussed, the modification project is being adjusted,” the report says. In December 2019, Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin announced the decision to provide NASA with one seat on the Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft to be launched in October 2020 and Soyuz MC-18 to be launched in April 2021.

A radio telescope in outback Western Australia has completed the deepest and broadest search at low frequencies for alien technologies, scanning a patch of sky known to include at least 10 million stars.

Astronomers used the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope to explore hundreds of times more broadly than any previous search for extraterrestrial life.

Teleportation is something we have only seen in sci-fi movies or books, but its real-life application is very complex. However, there is a new patent submitted for a full body teleportation system that claims to transport a human being through hyperspace from one location to another.

John St. Clair is the name of the inventor that has submitted that teleportation device patent and here are more details on the claims that teleportation will be possible soon.

For years giant squids were the closest thing we had to a real-life, underwater Sasquatch. Stories of their gargantuan size littered the tales of ancient seafarers and historian throughout millennia, but sometimes their massive corpses washed up on shores, so we knew they existed as more than the seeming myths they had been for centuries. Then in 2004 mankind finally captured our first images of one alive in Japanese waters. Even then it took eight more years for someone to film one swimming along Japan’s shores. Despite growing to enormous sizes – females can reach 43 feet in length, males 33 feet – they have proven to be among the most elusive creatures on Earth, monsters hiding deep below the surface.

And now researchers have finally captured footage of one swimming in U.S. waters.

This video of the infamous cephalopod, which we first heard about at Popular Science, comes from an NOAA team. On June 19 in the Gulf of Mexico, during only their fifth deployment of their Medusa exploratory deep sea probe, the team recorded a young giant squid, approximately 10–12 feet in length, swimming at the camera in a flurry of tentacles and nightmares/dreams (depending on how you feel about the ocean and its horrifying beasts).