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Blog – Page 909

Imagine a crew of astronauts headed to Mars. About 140 million miles away from Earth, they discover their spacecraft has a cracked O-ring. But instead of relying on a dwindling cache of spare parts, what if they could simply fabricate any part they needed on demand?

A team of Berkeley researchers, led by Ph.D. student Taylor Waddell, may have taken a giant leap toward making this option a reality. On June 8, they sent their 3D printing technology to space for the first time as part of the Virgin Galactic 7 mission.

Their next-generation microgravity printer—dubbed SpaceCAL—spent 140 seconds in suborbital space while aboard the VSS Unity space plane. In that short time span, it autonomously printed and post-processed a total of four test parts, including space shuttles and benchy figurines from a liquid plastic called PEGDA.

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At the mere flick of a magnetic field, mice engineered with nanoparticle-activated ‘switches’ inside their brains were driven to feed, socialize, and act like clucky new mothers in an experiment designed to test an innovative research tool.

While ’mind control’ animal experiments are far from new, they have generally relied on cumbersome electrodes tethering the subject to an external system, which not only requires invasive surgery but also sets limits on how freely the test subject can move about.

In what is claimed to be a breakthrough in neurology, researchers from the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) in Korea have developed a method for targeting pathways in the brain using a combination of genetics, nanoparticles, and magnetic fields.

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In a study published in Device (“Self-powered electrostatic tweezer for adaptive object manipulation”), a research team led by Dr. DU Xuemin from the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology (SIAT) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has reported a new self-powered electrostatic tweezer that offers superior accumulation and tunability of triboelectric charges, enabling unprecedented flexibility and adaptability for manipulating objects in various working scenarios.

The ability to manipulate objects using physical tweezers is essential in fields such as physics, chemistry, and biology. However, conventional tweezers often require complex electrode arrays and external power sources, have limited charge-generation capabilities, or produce undesirable temperature rises.

The newly proposed self-powered electrostatic tweezer (SET) features a polyvinylidene fluoride trifluoroethylene (P(VDF-TrFE))-based self-powered electrode (SE) that generates large and tunable surface charge density through the triboelectric effect, along with a dielectric substrate that functions as both a tribo-counter material and a supportive platform, and a slippery surface to reduce resistance and biofouling during object manipulation.

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Recent advancements in tachyon theory have addressed past inconsistencies by incorporating both past and future states into the boundary conditions, leading to a new quantum entanglement theory and suggesting a critical role for tachyons in matter formation.

Tachyons are hypothetical particles that travel at speeds greater than the speed of light. These superluminal particles, are the “enfant terrible” of modern physics. Until recently, they were generally regarded as entities that did not fit into the special theory of relativity. However, a paper just published by physicists from the University of Warsaw and the University of Oxford has shown that many of these prejudices were unfounded. Tachyons are not only not ruled out by the theory, but allow us to understand its causal structure better.

Superluminal Motion and Tachyons.

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Australian businesses are paying untold amounts of ransom to hackers, but the government is hoping to claw back some visibility with a landmark cybersecurity law.

While major ransomware attacks on companies such as MediSecure, Optus and Latitude have grabbed headlines for breaching the privacy of millions, the practice of quietly paying off cybercriminals has flourished in the dark.

The situation has deteriorated to the point that the government’s original ambition for an outright ban on ransom payments has been nixed, for now, and the focus has shifted to mapping the scale of the problem.

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