Mountains, valleys and other landforms are revealed in a new effort to map the land hiding under Antarctica’s ice.
The power shift continues.
Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.
Since the Industrial Revolution, the world has developed complex supply chains, from designers to manufacturers, from distributors to importers, wholesalers and retailers, it’s what allowed billions of products to be made, shipped, bought and enjoyed in all corners of the world. In recent times the power of the Internet, especially the mobile phone, has unleashed a movement that’s rapidly destroying these layers and moving power to new places.
The Internet is the most powerful mechanism we can imagine to match perfectly individuals that need something, and people with something to offer. The moment started slowly by reducing complexity and removing the middle layer in the late 1990s. From insurance to early PC makers like Dell to travel agents, this time seemed to be an age where “direct” became a desirable moniker. This time seemed to favor scale and efficiency over service or brand, for commodities like insurance cover or processing power, the overheads of sales, marketing and retail footprint were stripped away.
Can humans live forever?
Posted in life extension
Open-source software powers nearly all the world’s major companies. This software is freely available, and is developed collaboratively, maintained by a broad network that includes everyone from unpaid volunteers to employees at competing tech companies. Here’s how giving away software for free has proven to be a viable business model.
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Researchers at Duke University have engineered a bandage that captures and holds a pro-healing molecule at the site of a bone break to accelerate and improve the natural healing process.
In a proof-of-principle study with mice, the bandage helped to accelerate callus formation and vascularization to achieve better bone repair by three weeks.
The research points toward a general method for improving bone repair after damage that could be applied to medical products such as biodegradable bandages, implant coatings or bone grafts for critical defects.
Since the 1950s at least, researchers have speculated that the brain is a kind of computer in which neurons make up complex circuits that perform untold numbers of calculations every second. Decades later, neuroscientists know that these brain circuits exist, yet technical limitations have kept most details of their computations out of reach.
Now, neuroscientists reported December 12 in Cell, they may finally be able to reveal what circuits deep in the brain are up to, thanks in large part to a molecule that lights up brighter than ever before in response to subtle electrical changes that neurons use to perform their compuations.
Currently, one of the best ways to track neurons’ electrical activity is with molecules that light up in the presence of calcium ions, a proxy for a neuron spike, the moment when one neuron passes an electrical signal to another. But calcium flows too slowly to catch all the details of a neuron spike, and it doesn’t respond at all to the subtle electrical changes that lead up to a spike. (One alternative is to implant electrodes, but those implants ultimately damage neurons, and it isn’t practical to place electrodes in more than a handful of neurons at once in living animals.)
Materials formed on vanishingly small scales are being used in medicine, electronics, manufacturing and a host of other applications. But scientists have only scratched the surface of understanding how to control building blocks on the nanoscale, where simple machines the size of a virus operate.
Now, a team of researchers led by Dongsheng Li, a materials scientist at PNNL, and collaborators at the University of Michigan and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, have unlocked the secret to one of the most useful nanostructures: the five-fold twin. Their study describing why and how this shape forms is detailed in the journal Science and was presented at the Materials Research Society annual meeting on December 5, 2019.
A cross section of a five-fold twin structure looks for all the world like a pie sliced into five perfectly symmetrical pieces. Nanomaterials with this structure have already been shown to have useful properties and are deployed in medical research for precisely tagging cancerous tumors for imaging and tracking, and in electronics, where they are valued for their mechanical strength.
Scientists at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) have developed a new methodology that allows researchers to assess the chemical composition and structure of metallic particles with a diameter of only 0.5 to 2 nm. This breakthrough in analytical techniques will enable the development and application of minuscule materials in the fields of electronics, biomedicine, chemistry, and more.
The study and development of novel materials have enabled countless technological breakthroughs and are essential across most fields of science, from medicine and bioengineering to cutting-edge electronics. The rational design and analysis of innovative materials at nanoscopic scales allows us to push through the limits of previous devices and methodologies to reach unprecedented levels of efficiency and new capabilities. Such is the case for metal nanoparticles, which are currently in the spotlight of modern research because of their myriad potential applications. A recently developed synthesis method using dendrimer molecules as a template allows researchers to create metallic nanocrystals with diameters of 0.5 to 2 nm (billionths of a meter).
Who is responsible when a robot harms a human? Robot ethics tackle this and other interesting robot issues.