Lifeboat Foundation

Harmful PFAS chemicals can now be detected in many soils and bodies of water. Removing them using conventional filter techniques is costly and almost infeasible. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology IGB are now successfully implementing a plasma-based technology in the AtWaPlas joint research project.

Contaminated water is fed into a combined glass and stainless steel cylinder where it is then treated with ionized gas, i.e., plasma. This reduces the PFAS molecular chains, allowing the toxic substance to be removed at a low cost.

Per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) have many special properties. As they are thermally and chemically stable as well as resistant to water, grease and dirt, they can be found in a large number of everyday products: Pizza boxes and baking paper are coated with them, for example, and shampoos and creams also contain PFAS. In industry they serve as extinguishing and wetting agents, and in agriculture they are used in plant protection products.

As freshwater scarcity affects millions worldwide, scientists and engineers have looked for new ways of filtering unwanted metals and minerals out of water while retaining those elements for re-use elsewhere.

Capacitive deionization (CDI), a technology in which a membrane made from electrode materials removes metal ions from water, has proved a promising technique for such next-generation water filters. Researchers from University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory envisioned the technique could be made even more efficient if they modified the molecular surface of the electrodes.

Continue reading “New technology more efficiently removes heavy metals from water” »

Dr. Ralph W. Moss and his son Ben discuss the anti-cancer properties and challenges of consuming green tea as a part of a healthy diet.

Program Notes:

Continue reading “Green Tea & Cancer — Studies show interesting results, but there may be unwanted side effects” »

The company will pause hiring soon, and expects up to 30% of non-customer-facing roles will be replaced by automation in the next five years.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=jU1DsipURcM

A new NASA animation highlights the “super” in supermassive black holes. These monsters lurk in the centers of most big galaxies, including our own Milky Way, and contain between 100,000 and tens of billions of times more mass than our sun.

“Direct measurements, many made with the help of the Hubble Space Telescope, confirm the presence of more than 100 supermassive black holes,” said Jeremy Schnittman, a theorist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “How do they get so big? When galaxies collide, their central black holes eventually may merge together too.”

Continue reading “NASA animation sizes up the universe’s biggest black holes” »

Many people who have come close to death or have been resuscitated report a similar experience: Their lives flash before their eyes, memorable moments replay, and they may undergo an out-of-body experience, sensing they’re looking at themselves from elsewhere in the room. Now, a small study mapping the brain activity of four people while they were dying shows a burst of activity in their brains after their hearts stop.

The authors say the finding, published today in the, may explain how a person’s brain could replay conscious memories even after the heart has stopped. It “suggests we are identifying a marker of lucid consciousness,” says Sam Parnia, a pulmonologist at New York University Langone Medical Center who was not involved in the study.

Although death has historically been medically defined as the moment when the heart irreversibly stops beating, recent studies have suggested brain activity in many animals and humans can continue for seconds to hours. In 2013, for instance, University of Michigan neurologist Jimo Borjigin and team found that rats’ brains showed signs of consciousness up to 30 seconds after their hearts had stopped beating. “We have this binary concept of life and death that is ancient and outdated,” Parnia says.

An AI-based decoder that can translate brain activity into a continuous stream of text has been developed, in a breakthrough that allows a person’s thoughts to be read non-invasively for the first time.

The decoder could reconstruct speech with uncanny accuracy while people listened to a story – or even silently imagined one – using only fMRI scan data. Previous language decoding systems have required surgical implants, and the latest advance raises the prospect of new ways to restore speech in patients struggling to communicate due to a stroke or motor neurone disease.

“For a noninvasive method, this is a real leap forward compared to what’s been done before, which is typically single words or short sentences.”

What if someone could listen to your thoughts? Sure, that’s highly improbable, you might say. Sounds very much like fiction. And we could have agreed with you, until yesterday.

Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have decoded a person’s brain activity while they’re listening to a story or imagining telling a story into a stream of text, thanks to artificial intelligence and MRI scans.

Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array telescope’s data will now help scientists hunt for technosignatures.

The hunt for alien life will get a shot in the arm with one of the world’s most powerful radio telescope arrays joining the mission, situated about 50 miles west of Socorro, New Mexico.

The National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) will now help gather the information that enables researchers to analyze emissions that only artificial transmitters make, which signals the existence of an advanced civilization far beyond.