Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 8108

The coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, China, swept the world fast and furiously — and we’re barely starting to experience the first wave of the pandemic. However, to biologists and virologists, the sudden appearance of the coronavirus wasn’t surprising. It is simply a natural consequence of humans disturbing ecosystems in equilibrium and wildlife trade, something that we’ve done at an increasing rate with each passing decade.

Pandemics such as COVID-19 might become increasingly frequent as humans continue unabated on their course to expand their range at the expense of wildlife.

High rates of deforestation in Asia over the last four decades have prompted many scientists to sound the alarm, warning the world of the risk of dangerous microorganisms migrating to humans.

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‘Through advances in medical devices and synthetic biology, DARPA’s new Advanced Acclimation and Protection Tool for Environmental Readiness (ADAPTER) program aims to develop a travel adapter for the human body, an implantable or ingestible bioelectronic carrier that can provide warfighters control over their own physiology. The integrated system will be designed to entrain the sleep cycle – either to a new time zone or back to a normal sleep pattern after night missions – and eliminate bacteria that cause traveler’s diarrhea after ingestion of contaminated food and water,’ reads a DARPA statement on the new device.”

The adapter is meant to regulate sleep patterns and protect against diarrhea.

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Earlier this year, the layer of ozone over the Arctic thinned out enough to be considered a serious sized hole. It wasn’t exactly impressive compared with its southern cousin, but it was certainly a lot bigger than we’d ever seen it before.

Now, according to surveillance by the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), we can breathe a sigh of relief. It’s healed up again.

That’s great news for ecosystems below, which rely on concentrations of ozone gas high up in the stratosphere to act as a planetary-scale sunscreen against damaging showers of UV radiation.

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North­eastern Uni­ver­sity and Wen­zhou Med­ical Uni­ver­sity in China have part­nered to com­bine their exper­tise in nan­otech­nology and med­i­cine, respec­tively, to col­lab­o­rate on research focusing on reducing eye infections caused by contact lenses and intraocular devices.

Through this part­ner­ship, the researchers will explore the emerging field of picotech­nology, which involves the manip­u­la­tion of matter on an even smaller scale than is used in nanotechnology.

Nanotechnology researchers at Northeastern are joining forces with Wenzhou Medical University in China to collaborate in the new field of picotechnology—and combat eye infections.

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Not long ago nanotechnology was a fringe topic; now it’s a flourishing engineering field, and fairly mainstream. For example, while writing this article, I happened to receive an email advertisement for the “Second World Conference on Nanomedicine and Drug Delivery,” in Kerala, India. It wasn’t so long ago that nanomedicine seemed merely a flicker in the eyes of Robert Freitas and a few other visionaries!

But nano is not as small as the world goes. A nanometer is 10−9 meters – the scale of atoms and molecules. A water molecule is a bit less than one nanometer long, and a germ is around a thousand nanometers across. On the other hand, a proton has a diameter of a couple femtometers – where a femtometer, at 10−15 meters, makes a nanometer seem positively gargantuan. Now that the viability of nanotech is widely accepted (in spite of some ongoing heated debates about the details), it’s time to ask: what about femtotech? Picotech or other technologies at the scales between nano and femto seem relatively uninteresting, because we don’t know any basic constituents of matter that exist at those scales. But femtotech, based on engineering structures from subatomic particles, makes perfect conceptual sense, though it’s certainly difficult given current technology.

The nanotech field was arguably launched by Richard Feynman’s 1959 talk “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” As Feynman wrote there.

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