Lifeboat Foundation

SAN ANTONIO — April 8, 2019 — A team of Southwest Research Institute and General Electric (GE) engineers have designed, built and tested the highest temperature supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO2) turbine in the world. The turbine was developed with $6.8 million of funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Solar Energy Technologies Office (SETO), in addition to $3 million from commercial partners GE Research, Thar Energy, Electric Power Research Institute, Aramco Services Company and Navy Nuclear Laboratory. Additionally, the DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency — Energy (ARPA-E) Full-Spectrum Optimized Conversion and Utilization of Sunlight (FOCUS) program provided financial support and extended the test program to validate advanced thermal seals.

Copyright © 2019 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

A doctor who treated survivors of a mysterious nuclear accident in Russia was told that the radioactive isotope cesium-137 must have made its way into their body due to “Fukushima crabs,” according to CNN.

The August 8 incident at the Nyonoksa testing range on a platform in the White Sea has not yet been fully explained, but at least seven individuals have been reported dead after what nuclear agency Rosatom described as an accident involving an “isotope power source for a liquid-fuelled rocket engine.” It later emerged that the incident was serious enough that Russian officials in Arkhangelsk wavered over the issue of whether to issue evacuation orders for nearby towns. While several of the personnel deaths were due to an onsite explosion, the Washington Post reported this week (citing the Novaya Gazeta newspaper) that two individuals had died of radiation exposure before they could be taken to Moscow for treatment.

Researchers from Weill Cornell Medicine and the Rockefeller University say they have uncovered the basic mechanism of Piezo proteins, which function as sensors in the body for mechanical stimuli such as touch, bladder fullness, and blood pressure. The discovery opens up many new paths of investigation into the roles of Piezo proteins in human diseases and potential new therapeutic strategies, according to the scientists.

In the study (“Force-induced conformational changes in PIEZO1”), published in Nature, the team used advanced microscopy techniques to image the Piezo1 protein at rest and during the application of mechanical forces. They confirmed this complex protein’s structure and showed essentially how it can convert mechanical stimuli into an electrical signal.

“Piezo1 is a mechanosensitive channel that converts applied force into electrical signals. Partial molecular structures show that Piezo1 is a bowl-shaped trimer with extended arms. Here we use cryo-electron microscopy to show that Piezo1 adopts different degrees of curvature in lipid vesicles of different sizes. We also use high-speed atomic force microscopy to analyze the deformability of Piezo1 under force in membranes on a mica surface and show that Piezo1 can be flattened reversibly into the membrane plane,” the investigators wrote.

Bob Wright, a Trump friend and ex-NBC chair, is one of the proposal’s backers.

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have developed an organ-on-an-electronic-chip platform, which uses bioelectrical sensors to measure the electrophysiology of the heart cells in three dimensions. These 3D, self-rolling biosensor arrays coil up over heart cell spheroid tissues to form an “organ-on-e-chip,” thus enabling the researchers to study how cells communicate with each other in multicellular systems such as the heart.

The organ-on-e-chip approach will help develop and assess the efficacy of drugs for disease treatment—perhaps even enabling researchers to screen for drugs and toxins directly on a human-like tissue, rather than testing on animal tissue. The platform will also be used to shed light on the connection between the heart’s electrical signals and disease, such as arrhythmias. The research, published in Science Advances, allows the researchers to investigate processes in cultured cells that currently are not accessible, such as tissue development and cell maturation.

Continue reading “Researchers advance organ-on-chip technology to advance drug development” »

Some treatments for neurodegenerative diseases involve inserting wires into the brain and zapping certain brain cells with electricity. But what if you could do the same thing using sound waves?

Nootropics are colloquially known as “smart drugs” – substances that increase cognitive function in healthy people. In this video, bestselling author Dave Asprey discusses two naturally occurring nootropics: caffeine and nicotine.

Microdosing one milligram of the latter — about 5 to 10 percent of a cigarette’s worth — may even protect against Alzheimer’s.

A Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying a humanoid robot failed to dock with the International Space Station (ISS) on Saturday morning, Russian state news agencies reported.

The Soyuz MS-14 crew ship launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on August 21 with the Skybot F-850, a life-sized artificially intelligent humanoid robot, on the commander’s seat.

Given the issues, emerged during the docking of the #SoyuzMS14 spacecraft with the ISS, the state commission chaired by Roscosmos Director General Dmitry Rogozin will held a meeting to consider the situation and discuss the measures to overcome the fault in the docking system. pic.twitter.com/turpSi08Rf

It’s not like the one in your car, but a team of physicists at Trinity College Dublin have built what they claim is the world’s smallest engine. The engine is the size of a single calcium ion — about ten billion times smaller than an automobile engine.

Rather than powering your next road trip, the atomic engine could one day be used to lay the foundation for extraordinary, futuristic nanotechnologies.

Here’s how it works: the calcium ion holds an electrical charge, which makes it spin. This angular momentum is then used to convert heat from a laser beam into vibrations.