Lifeboat Foundation

Saad Bhamla was in his backyard when he noticed something he had never seen before: an insect urinating. Although nearly impossible to see, the insect formed an almost perfectly round droplet on its tail and then launched it away so quickly that it seemed to disappear. The tiny insect relieved itself repeatedly for hours.

It’s generally taken for granted that what goes in must come out, so when it comes to fluid dynamics in animals, the research is largely focused on feeding rather than excretion. But Bhamla, an assistant professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, had a hunch that what he saw wasn’t trivial.

“Little is known about the fluid dynamics of excretion, despite its impact on the morphology, energetics, and behavior of animals,” Bhamla said. “We wanted to see if this tiny insect had come up with any clever engineering or physics innovations in order to pee this way.”

Water is a vital resource, and clean water is a necessity. Texas A&M University researchers have developed a new technique to monitor one of the key processes of purifying water in real time.

Raw water contains microscopic pathogens that are too small to remove during water and wastewater treatment easily. Chemicals are added to form large clumps called flocs, which are easily filtered out. Flocculation is the process used in water treatment to remove suspended particles from the water.

“Coagulant chemicals need to be added to purify drinking water and remove turbidity (cloudiness) and microbes that are too small to be visible to the naked eye,” said Dr. Kuang-An Chang, professor in the Zachry Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Texas A&M.

Chaotic behavior is typically known from large systems: for example, from weather, from asteroids in space that are simultaneously attracted by several large celestial bodies, or from swinging pendulums that are coupled together. On the atomic scale, however, one does normally not encounter chaos—other effects predominate.

Now, for the first time, scientists at TU Wien have been able to detect clear indications of chaos on the nanometer scale—in chemical reactions on tiny rhodium crystals. The results have been published in the journal Nature Communications.

The chemical reaction studied is actually quite simple: with the help of a precious metal catalyst, oxygen reacts with hydrogen to form water, which is also the basic principle of a fuel cell. The reaction rate depends on external conditions (pressure, temperature). Under certain conditions, however, this reaction shows oscillating behavior, even though the external conditions are constant.

Hot gases composed of metal ions and electrons, called plasmas, are widely used in many manufacturing processes, chemical synthesis, and metal extraction from ores and welding. A collaborative research group from Tohoku University and the Toyohashi University of Technology has invented a new and efficient method to create metallic plasmas from solid metals under a strong magnetic field in a microwave resonator. They report their innovation in the journal AIP Advances.

In the most conventional methods for making plasmas, a strong electric field is applied to gases or liquids. This can require enormous amounts of energy. More recently, microwave radiation has also been harnessed to generate plasmas as it converts atoms into a form that can more effectively drive desired chemical processes, among other advantages. The plasmas generated by microwaves are now being used in commercial processes, including semiconductor manufacture, diamond deposition and to release metals from their ores.

Until now, however, this has involved multi-mode microwave generators, which generate a chaotic distribution of microwaves. One key advance achieved by the team is to apply a single-mode microwave generator to produce their metal plasmas. This creates more controlled and highly focused microwaves.

From regulators to researchers and most industries in between, all eyes are on PFAS, per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of highly fluorinated human-made compounds that have been used for decades in everything from nonstick cookware and personal care products to fire-fighting foams and school uniforms. Their commonality and extreme resistance to environmental degradation has made them ubiquitous in ground water, soil, and worst of all humans. Linked to a slew of health risks including liver toxicity, bladder cancer, and decreased immune response to vaccinations, exposure to PFAS is concerning. So, how can we eliminate these “forever chemicals?”

Historically, PFAS substances have only been characterized in water and soil, but the emission of these compounds during chemical manufacturing, use, and disposal results in their emission into the air. Ryan Sullivan, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University, has been developing new methods to measure PFAS in both the atmosphere and in aerosol particles to answer outstanding questions regarding PFAS atmospheric components that lead to human exposure. His group is also developing new approaches to destroy forever molecules that are not removed by conventional water treatment plants.

The research is published in the journal Environmental Science: Processes & Impacts.

The Laboratoire Sous-marin Provence Méditerranée (LSPM) lies 40 km off the coast of Toulon, at a depth of 2,450 m, inaccessible even to sunlight. Through this national research platform run by the CNRS in collaboration with Aix-Marseille University (AMU) and IFREMER, scientists will investigate undersea unknowns while scanning the skies for neutrinos. These elementary particles of extraterrestrial origin know few obstacles and can even traverse our planet without bumping into a single atom.

The main instrument at the LSPM is KM3NeT, a giant neutrino detector developed by a team of 250 researchers from 17 countries. In the pitch-black abyss, KM3NeT will study the trails of bluish light that neutrinos leave in the water. Capable of detecting dozens of these particles a day, it will help elucidate their quantum properties, which still defy our understanding.

The other LSPM instruments will permit the scientific community to study the life and chemistry of these depths. They will offer researchers insights into ocean acidification, deep-sea deoxygenation, marine radioactivity, and seismicity, and allow them to track cetacean populations as well as observe bioluminescent animals. This oceanographic instrumentation is integrated into the subsea observatory network of the EMSO European research infrastructure.

The future of space travel with my new YouTube video on nuclear propulsion! Learn how this technology can improve the propellant efficiency of chemical rockets, making it a viable option for crewed missions to Mars, and perhaps get us to the stars.

Plus, compare nuclear propulsion to conventional chemical rockets such as the Saturn V and to the Epstein Drive from the Expanse.

Continue reading “Nuclear Propulsion — How close are we to the Expanse?” »

OpenAI’s ChatGPT has taken the world like wildfire and continues to make headlines. However, the Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) has been around for a very long time. The technology was first pioneered in academia with Ian Goodfellow and Yoshua Bengio publishing their first seminal work on Generative Adversarial Networks in 2014 and then Google picked up the torch and published seminal papers and patents in both GANs and generative pre-trained transformers (GPT). In fact, my first paper on generative chemistry, was published in 2016, first granted patent in 2018, and the first AI-generated drug went through the first phase of clinical trials.

Forbes is one of the most reputable content providers on the planet and probably the most reputable when it comes to anything dealing with money. If Forbes does not classify you as a billionaire, you are not a billionaire. It has decades of high-quality expert-generated longitudinal text, and multimedia content in multiple languages. In addition to elite human reporters and editors, it also has a small army of content creators specializing in specific areas contributing to Forbes.com. For example, it is my 5th year as a contributor and I contribute regularly to keep the pencil sharp. This massive human intelligence may be partly repurposed to help develop internal generative resources within the Forbes empire, help curate the datasets and help train or benchmark third-party generative resources. I would gladly volunteer a small amount of time to such a task.

Nature and several other journals in the Nature Publishing Group portfolio are considered to be the Olympus in academic publishing. To publish in one of the elite Nature journals academics spend months and sometimes years going through the rounds of editorial and then peer-review. The quality of the data is questioned, all experimental data is disclosed, and the thousands or millions of dollars that went into the experiments are presented in the form of a paper and supplementary materials.

Continue reading “The Unexpected Winners Of The ChatGPT Generative AI Revolution” »

A culture system allows the long-term expansion of human haematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) in vivo without the use of recombinant cytokines or albumin, with potential applications for clinical therapies involving HSCs.