Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists can’t study what they can’t measure — as David Muller knows only too well. An applied physicist, Muller has been grappling for years with the limitations of the best imaging tools available as he seeks to probe materials at the atomic scale.

One particularly vexing quarry has been ultra-thin layers of the material molybdenum disulfide, which show promise for building thin, flexible electronics. Muller and his colleagues at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, have spent years peering at MoS₂ samples under an electron microscope to discern their atomic structures. The problem was seeing the sulfur atoms clearly, Muller says. Raising the energy of the electron beam would sharpen the image, but knock atoms out of the MoS₂ sheet in the process. Anyone hoping to say something definitive about defects in the structure would have to guess. “It would take a lot of courage, and maybe half the time, you’d be right,” he says.

This July, Muller’s team reported a breakthrough. Using an ultra-sensitive detector that the researchers had created and a special method for reconstructing the data, they resolved features in MoS₂ down to 0.39 angstroms, two and a half times better than a conventional electron microscope would achieve. (1 Å is one-tenth of a nanometre, and a common measure of atomic bond lengths.) At once, formerly fuzzy sulfur atoms now showed up clearly — and so did ‘holes’ where they were absent. Ordinary electron microscopy is “like flying propeller planes”, Muller says. “Now we have a jet.”

Continue reading “The microscope revolution that’s sweeping through materials science” »

For the first time, a human organ has been successfully transported between medical facilities by a drone. A team of scientists from the University of Maryland Baltimore used a research-qualified donor kidney as a test subject to shuffle back and forth on a remotely piloted hexacopter, testing the organ for changes throughout 14 flights. Its longest journey was 3 miles at a maximum speed of 40 mph, the duration and distance of which were suitable for demonstrating transportation between inner city hospitals.

Currently, organs have few options for transportation, and the process for moving them involves a network of couriers and commercial aircraft that are dependent on schedules and traffic patterns. When normal commercial schedules aren’t available, the cost of private charter transportation can be prohibitive. Even when cost isn’t a factor, the time involved in the process altogether can prevent a transplant from being completed as organs are very sensitive cargo.

To best ensure a successful transplant procedure, organs must be moved quickly between the donor and the recipient. The amount of time an organ can spend chilled after removal and when it’s warmed up and the blood supply restored, called cold ischemia time (CIT), is very limited. Some organs, such as the heart, only have as few as 4 hours available to be transported before they are no longer eligible for transplant. Up against airplane flight availability and traffic patterns, an improvement like what drone transportation could provide might have life saving implications.

Continue reading “Drone successfully flies human organ transplant between hospitals” »

Quasars powered by supermassive black holes have been unexpectedly vanishing. Scientists have started to figure out why.

A remarkable machine propelled by ionic wind could signal a future with cleaner aeroplanes.

Practice makes perfect when sending a robot on the perilous journey to the red planet.

Insulin will be beyond the reach of around half of the 79 million people expected to be living with diabetes in 12 years time, a new study predicts.

Researchers fly the first atmospheric aircraft to use space-proven ionic thrust technology.

• By Angus Chen on November 21, 2018

Turkish-born astrophysicist Burçin Mutlu-Pakdil shares her name with a rare double ring of stars more than 350 light-years away.

We wanted to bring your attention to a recent publication that discusses the topic of cellular senescence and the contributions of senescent cells to aging and disease [1].

What is perhaps the most interesting part of this paper is the section covering the potential future directions that researchers may take in managing senescent cell populations in order to mitigate age-related disease.

The author writes not only about the direct destruction of senescent cells via senolytic drugs but also about the modulation of the harmful secretions these cells produce, which are called the senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP).

Continue reading “Senescent Cell Therapies and Future Directions” »