Lifeboat Foundation

A team including evolutionary biologists from the University of Toronto (U of T) have identified the ways in which herbicide-resistant strains of an invasive weed named common waterhemp have emerged in fields of soy and corn in southwestern Ontario.

They found that the resistance—which was first detected in Ontario in 2010—has spread thanks to two mechanisms: first, pollen and seeds of resistant plants are physically dispersed by wind, water and other means; second, resistance has appeared through the spontaneous emergence of resistance mutations that then spread.

The researchers found evidence of both mechanisms by comparing the genomes of herbicide-resistant waterhemp plants from Midwestern U.S. farms with the genomes of plants from Southern Ontario.

The news: A gel developed by Stanford researchers could be sprayed on forests and vegetation to make them fire-resistant, helping to stop wildfires from spreading. It’s made from cellulose polymers (extracted from plants) and particles of silica, which are chemically identical to sand, mixed with a flame-retardant fluid.

How to use it: Fire-fighting sprays are currently used on wildfires only in emergencies: this new approach would deploy them protectively before any fires can break out. In a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers say the gel is nontoxic and biodegradable.

Rain-resistant: The team tested the gel on plants in the laboratory and then on patches of grass by a road in California, supervised by local firefighters. They found it can withstand wind and up to half an inch of rain, so iy only needs to be applied once per fire season (if it rains more than that, the risk of wildfires plummets anyway).

Tonight—just like every night—the pursuit of E.T. perseveres in Hat Creek, California.

There, in the midst of the Cascade Mountains, the faint buzz of the Allen Telescope Array hums on a secluded and scrubby field where jackrabbits wander and rattlesnakes roam.

Since 2007, the array’s 42 radio dishes have scanned the skies for signals from alien civilizations. Detecting one is the longest of long shots. So far, nothing suggesting an extraterrestrial intelligence has been found. Here at Hat Creek, a close encounter with a bear seems more likely.

This new breed of city takes various different forms, from government initiatives, to public-private partnerships, to entirely private enterprises. Many are being used to jump-start economies in the developing world, with masterplans carefully calibrated to attract foreign investors and treasuries looking to sink their funds into something concrete. They provide a powerful means for wealthy countries to expand their strategic influence abroad, with the construction of new cities acting as a form of “debt-trap diplomacy”, tying host nations into impossibly burdensome deals. They are billed as a panacea for the world’s urban ills, solving overcrowding, congestion and pollution; yet, more often than not, they turn out to be catalysts for land dispossession, environmental degradation and social inequality.

The feature Kim enjoys most is a small touchscreen display on his kitchen wall that allows him to keep track of his and his wife’s consumption of electricity, water and gas and, most important, compare it against the average statistics for the building. Flicking between the screens of bar charts and graphs, a broad grin spreads across his face: for yet another day running, they are more energy-efficient than all their neighbours.

From their living room window at the top of one of the city’s new residential towers, a panorama of downtown Songdo unfolds. Across an eight-lane highway lies Central Park, a broad swath of trees surrounding an ornamental lake, flanked by rows of glass towers with vaguely jaunty silhouettes. Armies of identikit concrete apartment blocks march into the hazy distance beyond, terminating at a Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course. It looks a lot like many other modern Asian cities, a place of generic towers rising above a car-dominated grid. Public life is mostly confined to the air-conditioned environments of malls and private leisure clubs.

Continue reading “‘The next era of human progress’: what lies behind the global new cities epidemic?” »

Catalan designer eugeni quitllet is an acclaimed industrial designer who describes himself as a ‘disoñador,’ a spanish contraction of designer and dreamer. his invented future is gravity-free, with incredible aesthetics summarized in a combination of digital precision and flowing curves. eugeni creates bestselling objects between drawings and sculptures, mastering fullness and voids to reveal elegant silhouettes hidden in the material.

galaXsea envisions the first space solar sail boat 3D-printed in space.

SAN FRANCISCO—( BUSINESS WIRE )—Twist Bioscience Corporation (NASDAQ: TWST), a company enabling customers to succeed through its offering of high-quality synthetic DNA using its silicon platform, today announced that it has entered into an agreement with Imagene SA, where Imagene will provide Twist with an encapsulation service to store DNA through its DNAshell® technology to store digital data encoded in DNA for thousands of years.

“We are happy to be partnering with Twist and providing them with our disruptive DNAshell® technology to safely store DNA with digital data encoded.” Tweet this

“This agreement with Imagene provides the next step in the continuum on DNA digital data storage and fits within our strategy to cover all aspects of the process efficiently to enable the development of DNA as a digital storage medium,” commented Emily Leproust, Ph.D., CEO of Twist Bioscience. “We believe the DNAshell ® technology allows us to encapsulate the DNA-stored digital data securely, protecting it for eternity from any elements including radiation, and eliminating the need for continued copying of digital data due to degradation experienced in other forms of storage today.”

The quantum superposition principle has been tested on a scale as never before in a new study by scientists at the University of Vienna in collaboration with the University of Basel. Hot, complex molecules composed of nearly two thousand atoms were brought into a quantum superposition and made to interfere. By confirming this phenomenon – “the heart of quantum mechanics”, in Richard Feynman’s words – on a new mass scale, improved constraints on alternative theories to quantum mechanics have been placed. The work was published in Nature Physics on September 23, 2019.

Quantum to classical?

The superposition principle is a hallmark of quantum theory which emerges from one of the most fundamental equations of quantum mechanics, the Schrödinger equation. It describes particles in the framework of wave functions, which, much like water waves on the surface of a pond, can exhibit interference effects. But in contrast to water waves, which are a collective behavior of many interacting water molecules, quantum waves can also be associated with isolated single particles.

It’s taken 30 years of biotech, but synthetic biology can now engineer antibodies faster than your body can, enabling cures for anything from snakebites to a universal flu vaccine. Meet the company that aims to revolutionize the entire pharmaceutical industry.

After three years of quietly toiling away on a robotic food system, Seattle startup Picnic has emerged from stealth mode with a system that assembles custom pizzas with little human intervention.

Picnic — previously known as Otto Robotics and Vivid Robotics — is the latest entrant in a cohort of startups and industry giants trying to find ways to automate restaurant kitchens in the face of slim margins and labor shortages. And its journey here wasn’t easy.

“Food is hard. It’s highly variable,” said Picnic CEO Clayton Wood. “We learned a lot about food science in the process of developing the system.”