Lifeboat Foundation

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread across the world, testing remains a key strategy for tracking and containing the virus. Bioengineering graduate student, Maha Alafeef, has co-developed a rapid, ultrasensitive test using a paper-based electrochemical sensor that can detect the presence of the virus in less than five minutes. The team led by professor Dipanjan Pan reported their findings in ACS Nano.

“Currently, we are experiencing a once-in-a-century life-changing event,” said Alafeef. “We are responding to this global need from a holistic approach by developing multidisciplinary tools for early detection and diagnosis and treatment for SARS-CoV-2.”

There are two broad categories of COVID-19 tests on the market. The first category uses reverse transcriptase real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) and nucleic acid hybridization strategies to identify viral RNA. Current FDA-approved diagnostic tests use this technique. Some drawbacks include the amount of time it takes to complete the test, the need for specialized personnel and the availability of equipment and reagents.

LOS ANGELES, CA / ACCESSWIRE / December 7, 2020 / US Nuclear (OTCQB: UCLE) is the prime contractor to build MIFTI’s fusion generators, which could be used in the relatively near future to power the propulsion systems for space travel and provide plentiful, low-cost, clean energy for the earth and other planetary bases once our astronauts get to their destination, be it the moon, Mars, Saturn or beyond. Chemical powered rockets opened the door to space travel, but are still far too slow and heavy even to travel to distant planets within our solar system, let alone travel to other stars. Accordingly, NASA is now looking to nuclear powered rockets that can propel a space vessel at speeds close to the speed of light and thermonuclear power plants on the moon and Mars, as these are the next steps towards space exploration and colonization.

The US Energy Secretary, Dan Brouillette, recently said, “If we want to engage in outer space, or deep space as we call it, we have to rely upon nuclear fuels to get us there… that will allow us to get to Mars and back on ‘one tank of gas’.” This is made possible by the large energy density ratio which makes the fuel weight for chemical fuels ten million times higher than the fuel that powers the fusion drive. NASA is now relying on private companies to build spaceships: big companies like Boeing, but more and more on high-tech startups such as Elon Musk’s Space-X, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, and Richard Branson’s Virgin Atlantic.

While nuclear fission has been considered as a basis for the next generation of rocket engines, the fuel used for fission is enriched uranium, which is scarce, costly, unstable, and hazardous. On the other hand, thermonuclear fusion uses a clean, low-cost isotope of hydrogen from ordinary seawater, and one gallon of this seawater extraction yields about the same amount of energy as 300 gallons of gasoline.

A new machine learning approach offers important insights into catalysis, a fundamental process that makes it possible to reduce the emission of toxic exhaust gases or produce essential materials like fabric.

In a report published in Nature Communications, Hongliang Xin, associate professor of chemical engineering at Virginia Tech, and his team of researchers developed a Bayesian learning model of chemisorption, or Bayeschem for short, aiming to use artificial intelligence to unlock the nature of chemical bonding at catalyst surfaces.

“It all comes down to how catalysts bind with molecules,” said Xin. “The interaction has to be strong enough to break some chemical bonds at reasonably low temperatures, but not too strong that catalysts would be poisoned by reaction intermediates. This rule is known as the Sabatier principle in catalysis.”

**Peroxisomes are compartments where cells turn fatty molecules into energy and useful materials, like the myelin sheaths that protect nerve cells. In humans, peroxisome dysfunction has been linked to severe metabolic disorders, and peroxisomes may have wider significance for neurodegeneration, obesity, cancer and age-related disorders.**

Peroxisomes are also highly conserved, from plants to yeast to humans, and Bartel said there are hints that these structures may be general features of peroxisomes.

“Peroxisomes are a basic organelle that has been with eukaryotes for a very long time, and there have been observations across eukaryotes, often in particular mutants, where the peroxisomes are either bigger or less packed with proteins, and thus easier to visualize,” she said. But people didn’t necessarily pay attention to those observations because the enlarged peroxisomes resulted from known mutations.

Continue reading “Hidden structure found in essential metabolic machinery” »

Exploring the frontiers of neuromodulation, neurostimulation, and neural interfaces.

Neuromodulation is defined as “the alteration of nerve activity through targeted delivery of a stimulus, such as electrical stimulation or chemical agents, to specific neurological sites in the body”. It is carried out to normalize – or modulate – nervous tissue function.

Continue reading “Dr. Amilcar dos Santos MD — Exploring Far Frontiers of Neural, Spinal, and Brain-Computer Interfaces” »

Maybe you’ve felt a certain chemistry with 2019 but don’t know why? Maybe it’s because this year marks the 150th anniversary of the Periodic Table of the Elements. It’s considered the founding document of modern chemistry, one you may have studied in school.

UW-Madison professor of chemistry Bassam Shakhashiri knows both the history of the table, and its modern relevance. He says the table came about through a collaboration of a few scientists but that Dmitri Mendeleev properly gets much of the credit.

“Dimitri Mendeleev, the Russian chemist, he proposed — sometimes people say he discovered — the pattern of similar behavior [of certain elements] and arranged them,” Shakhashiri explains.

Don’t worry, they aren’t immune to a good slipper…for now.

The rise of the superbug cockroach is upon us. A new study has found that German cockroaches (Blattella germanica) are rapidly evolving to become resistant to many widely used bug sprays and insecticides, as well as chemicals they’ve never been directly exposed to, making them near-impossible to eliminate and one step closer to taking over the world.

Remarkably, the study published in Scientific Reports revealed these scuttling pests could even develop resistance within a single generation. Others also developed cross-resistance, meaning they gained a tolerance to a usually toxic substance just through contact with a similar type of insecticide.

Continue reading “Cockroaches Are Rapidly Evolving To Become ‘Almost Impossible’ To Kill” »

Warrior for our planet!

Commissioner Virginijus Sinkevicius:

Continue reading “Privacy Overview” »

There are several ways to generate power from that mixing. And a couple of blue energy power plants have been built. But their high cost has prevented widespread adoption. All blue energy approaches rely on the fact that salts are composed of ions, or chemicals that harbor a positive or negative charge. In solids, the positive and negative charges attract one another, binding the ions together. (Table salt, for example, is a compound made from positively charged sodium ions bound to negatively charged chloride ions.) In water, these ions detach and can move independently.

By pumping the positive ions—like sodium or potassium—to the other side of a semipermeable membrane, researchers can create two pools of water: one with a positive charge, and one with a negative charge. If they then dunk electrodes in the pools and connect them with a wire, electrons will flow from the negatively charged to the positively charged side, generating electricity.

In 2013, French researchers made just such a membrane. They used a ceramic film of silicon nitride—commonly used in industry for electronics, cutting tools, and other uses—pierced by a single pore lined with a boron nitride nanotube (BNNT), a material being investigated for use in high-strength composites, among other things. Because BNNTs are highly negatively charged, the French team suspected they would prevent negatively charged ions in water from passing through the membrane (because similar electric charges repel one another). Their hunch was right. They found that when a membrane with a single BNNT was placed between fresh- and saltwater, the positive ions zipped from the salty side to the fresh side, but the negatively charged ions were mostly blocked.