Apparently NASA state that there’s a 12% chance of the Earth being hit by an extreme solar storm within the next ten years.
VIDEO: The last major solar storm left the entire province of Quebec in a blackout.
Researchers from Beijing and Philadelphia develop a method to 3D print embryonic stem cells in highly uniform blocks.
Researchers from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China and Drexel University in the US have developed an extrusion-based 3D printing method to produce highly uniform “blocks” of embryonic stem cells. These blocks are a grid-like 3D structure that was able to demonstrate cell viability and rapid self-renewal while maintaining high pluripotency. Lead author Wei Sun says, “It was really exciting to see that we could grow embryoid body in such a controlled manner. The grown embryoid body is uniform and homogenous, and serves as much better starting point for further tissue growth.”
Other common methods of printing stem cells are either done in 2D or with the “suspension” method, but these methods do not produce cells with the same cell uniformity and homogenous proliferation as that of the 3D method. This new method would enable researchers to perform experiments on tissue regeneration. Another author on the paper, Rui Yao, adds, “Our next step is to find out more about how we can vary the size of the embryoid body by changing the printing and structural parameters, and how the varying the embryoid body size leads to “manufacture” of different cell types.”
For the first time, physicists in the US have managed to measure the force that attracts antimatter particles to each other. And, surprisingly, it’s not that different to the attractive force that holds regular matter together.
The results take us one step closer to understanding one of the biggest mysteries of our Universe: why there’s so much more matter than antimatter, and suggest that the imbalance isn’t a result of antiparticles not being able to ‘stick’ together.
For every particle that exists – electrons, protons, quarks – there’s an equal and opposite antiparticle, which has the opposite electrical charge and spin, and these antiparticles make up what’s known as antimatter. When the Universe was formed, physicists believe that equal amounts of antimatter and matter were produced, but today it’s very hard to find any naturally occurring antimatter left.
Smartphones, laptops, and all manner of electronics have advanced by leaps in bounds over the past few decades, but an essential component of most of them — the battery, or more precisely the lithium-ion battery — hasn’t. The technological remnant of the mid-’90s has a tendency to degrade and isn’t particularly efficient, which is why scores of researchers have spent years pursuing alternatives. Until now, though, practical limitations — i.e., physical dimensions and mass manufacturing constraints — have permanently relegated many to laboratories. But a new design, a refinement of so-called lithium-air design by scientists at the University of Cambridge, looks to be one of the most feasible yet.
Lithium-air (Li-air) batteries have been around for a while — chemist K. M. Abraham is credited with developing the first rechargeable variant in 1995 — but they’ve never been considered very practical. That’s because they use carbon as an electron conductor instead of the metal-oxide found in conventional Li-ion batteries, and generate electricity from the reaction of oxygen molecules and lithium molecules, a process which leads to the production of electrically resistant lithium peroxide. As the lithium peroxide builds up, the power-producing reaction diminishes until it eventually ceases completely.
Related: Why batteries suck, and the new tech that might supercharge them.
With modern innovations such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, wi-fi, tablet computing and more, it’s easy for man to look around and say that the human brain is a complex and well-evolved organ. But according to Author, Neuroscientist and Psychologist Gary Marcus, the human mind is actually constructed somewhat haphazardly, and there is still plenty of room for improvement.
“I called my book Kluge, which is an old engineer’s word for a clumsy solution. Think of MacGyver kind of duct tape and rubber bands,” Marcus said. “The thesis of that book is that the human mind is a kluge. I was thinking in terms of how this relates to evolutionary psychology and how our minds have been shaped by evolution.”
Marcus argued that evolution is not perfect, but instead it makes “local maxima,” which are good, but not necessarily the best possible solutions. As a parallel example, he cites the human spine, which allows us to stand upright; however, since it isn’t very well engineered, it also gives us back pain.
“You can imagine a better solution with three legs or branches that would distribute the load better, but we have this lousy solution where our spines are basically like a flag pole supporting 70 percent of our body weight,” Marcus said.
Continue reading “Can Humans Actually Have A Brain Like A Computer?” »
Gooooood, good.
Big data will help crack the code on aging.
Two of the leading scientists at the edge of the medical revolution believe that our life expectancy could start creeping up toward the triple digits.
Continue reading “Big Data and Genetic Sequencing Will Help Extend the Human Lifespan” »
“McKibben calls Friday’s announcement a turning point in the fight against climate change”
(Phys.org)—” Spooky action at a distance,” Einstein’s famous, dismissive characterization of quantum entanglement, has long been established as a physical phenomenon, and researchers are keen to develop practical applications for entanglement including communication, encryption, and computing.
Quantum entanglement is a phenomenon in which the production or the interactions of a number of particles cannot be described independently of each other, and must instead be described in terms of the whole system’s quantum state.
Two recent experiments with entanglement have been reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, one proving that complex quantum states in photons can be preserved even in turbulent atmospheric conditions; the other demonstrating entanglement swapping between qubits over the 143 kilometers between the Canary Islands and Tenerife.
