A new report finds that a shift to 90-percent clean power could save as many as 85,000 lives by 2050 by sparing Americans from toxic pollution.
The country is still heavily reliant on coal, but this could change in the years ahead.
Stem cells are powerful tools that could one day unlock new frontiers in regenerative medicine. Now, a new study has shown that a certain type of stem cell can be delivered into injured tissues with dissolvable microneedles, to heal wounds.
Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are responsible for replenishing bone, cartilage, muscle and fat cells in the body. But more recently, scientists have found that they have broader healing potential. If introduced to injured tissue, MSCs have been found to boost the formation of new blood vessels, reduce inflammation, and keep cells alive.
But there are a few problems. For one, injecting MSCs into the tissue with regular needles can cause further damage and scarring. Plus, it takes huge amounts of the cells to make sure that enough of them stick around to do their job.
Mobile phones and computers are currently responsible for up to 8% of the electricity use in the world. This figure has been doubling each past decade but nothing prevents it from skyrocketing in the future. Unless we find a way for boosting energy efficiency in information and communications technology, that is. An international team of researchers, including Ikerbasque Research Associate Alexey Nikitin (DIPC), has just published in Nature 1 a breakthrough in quantum physics that could deliver exactly that: electronics and communications technology with ultralow energy consumption.
Future information and communication technologies will rely on the manipulation of not only electrons but also of light at the nanometer-scale. Squeezing light to such a small size has been a major goal in nanophotonics for many years. Particularly strong light squeezing can be achieved with polaritons, quasiparticles resulting from the strong coupling of photons with a dipole-carrying excitation, at infrared frequencies in two-dimensional materials, such as graphene and hexagonal boron nitride. Polaritons can be found in materials consisting of two-dimensional layers bound by weak van der Waals forces, the so-called van der Waals materials. These polaritons can be tuned by electric fields or by adjusting the material thickness, leading to applications including nanolasers, tunable infrared and terahertz detectors, and molecular sensors.
But there is a major problem: even though polaritons can have long lifetimes, they have always been found to propagate along all directions (isotropic) of the material surface, thereby losing energy quite fast, which limits their application potential.
Quantum computing is still the province of specialized programmers—but that is likely to change very quickly.
Elon Musk has said that “it is time to bring” Tesla Semi electric trucks to volume production in a memo to all Tesla employees.
In a new email to employees last night, Musk that he wants to go “all out”:
“It’s time to go all out and bring the Tesla Semi to volume production. It’s been in limited production so far, which has allowed us to improve many aspects of the design.”
Researchers in the USA have developed a graphene-based electrochemical sensor capable of detecting histamines (allergens) and toxins in food much faster than standard laboratory tests.
The team used aerosol-jet printing to create the sensor. The ability to change the pattern geometry on demand through software control allowed rapid prototyping and efficient optimization of the sensor layout.
Commenting on the findings, which are published today in the IOP Publishing journal 2-D Materials, senior author Professor Mark Hersam, from Northwestern University, said: “We developed an aerosol-jet printable graphene ink to enable efficient exploration of different device designs, which was critical to optimizing the sensor response.”
The Senate on Tuesday confirmed Gen. Charles Q. Brown to be the next Air Force chief of staff.
WASHINGTON — SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft is performing well enough on orbit to give NASA confidence that the mission can last until August, an agency official said June 9.
Ken Bowersox, the acting associate administrator for human exploration and operations at NASA, told an online meeting of two National Academies committees that NASA had been monitoring the health of the Crew Dragon spacecraft since its launch May 30 on the Demo-2 mission, carrying NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station.
NASA, he noted, had not set a length for the mission, saying they wanted to see how the Dragon performed in space. “The Dragon is doing very well, so we think it’s reasonable for the crew to stay up there a month or two,” he told members of the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board and Space Studies Board.
The coronavirus pandemic has been a real learning curve, not least for educators. But with many schools now reopening, questions are being asked about what the future of education might look like. CNBC Make It’s Karen Gilchrist spoke to entrepreneurs in India, Hong Kong and the U.S. to learn more about the multibillion-dollar business opportunity.
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