Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) have used microscopic strands of DNA to guide the assembly of gel blocks that are visible to the naked eye.

The hydrogel blocks, which measure up to 2mm in length and contain DNA on their surface, self-assembled in around 10–15 minutes when mixed in a solution, the scientists reported today in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

“These hydrogel blocks are, we believe, the largest objects so far that have been programmed by DNA to form organized structures,” said Dr. Vyankat Sontakke, first author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher in the OIST Nucleic Acid Chemistry and Engineering Unit.

Stelco, which is a steelmaker producing flat-rolled, cold-rolled, and hot-rolled steel products, has announced that it is entering the electric vehicle battery recycling market through agreements with Primobius GmbH.

The company executed binding licensing and option agreements with Primobius to commercialize Primobius’ EV battery recycling and processing technologies in North America. Under the agreement, Stelco will be able to advance commercial lithium-ion battery feedstock sourcing agreements. It will also allow the company to begin the engineering and approval processes. The agreement enables Primobius the right to acquire between 25% and 50% equity in Stelco’s wholly-owned subsidiary.

The proposed Lake Erie Works refinery will enable Stelco to join the ranks of lithium-ion battery recycling leaders in North America. The integrated shredding and hydrometallurgical refinery will produce up to 18,400 net tons per year of nickel, manganese, and cobalt sulfates, and lithium hydroxide and carbonate. It’s expected to generate up to 40,000 net tons per year of scrap steel that Stelco will recycle into its steelmaking operations.

With a touch of modern engineering, da Vinci’s 15th century invention is more plausible than not.

Japanese researcher Sagawa Masato has won this year’s Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering for developing the world’s “strongest” permanent magnet.

The winner of the sixth edition of the British prize was announced online on Tuesday. It had been held every other year since 2013, but became an annual event, starting this year, to keep up with the pace of scientific and technological advances.

Sagawa invented the neodymium-iron-boron magnet, which is said to be the world’s most powerful permanent magnet. The breakthrough led to the development of small and high-performance motors. This has enabled higher-performance products in various fields, such as wind power, electric vehicles and home electrical appliances.

Accelerating Research To Prevent & Cure Disease — Dr. Kevin Perrott, Ph.D., Founder & CEO, OpenCures; Co-Founder & Treasurer, SENS Research Foundation

Dr. Kevin Perrott, Ph.D. is Founder and CEO, OpenCures (https://opencures.org/), Adjunct Professor, University of Alberta, Co-Founder and Advisor, Oisin Biotechnologies, President, of Global Healthspan Policy Institute, and Co-Founder and Treasurer, SENS Research Foundation.

Continue reading “Dr Kevin Perrott, PhD — Founder & CEO — OpenCures — Accelerating Research To Prevent & Cure Disease” »

Although Christmas may be several weeks behind us, various colorful LED contraptions can nowadays be found in our houses at any time of year. [Tim] got his hands on an LED curtain that came with a remote control that allows the user to set not only the color of the LEDs as a whole but also to run simple animations. But these were not your standard WS2812B strips with data lines: all the LEDs were simply connected in parallel with just two wires, so how was this even possible?

[Tim] hooked up his oscilloscope to the LED strings to find out how they worked, detailing the results in a comprehensive blog post. As it turns out, the controller briefly shorts the LED strip’s supply voltage to generate data bits, similar to the way old pulse-dialing phones worked. A tiny chip integrated into each LED picks up these pulses, but retains its internal state thanks to a capacitor that keeps the chip powered when the supply line goes low.

After reverse-engineering the protocol, [Tim] went on to implement a similar design using an ATMega328P as a controller and an ATtiny10 as the LED driver. With just a few lines of code and a 100 nF buffer capacitor across the ATtiny’s power pins, [Tim] was able to turn an LED on and off by sending pulses through the supply lines. Some work still needs to be done to fully implement a protocol as used in the LED strings, but as a proof-of-concept it shows that this kind of power-line communication is possible with standard components.

We might be amidst a chip shortage, but if you enjoy reverse-engineering, there’s never a shortage of intriguing old chips to dig into – and the 2513N 5×7 character ROM is one such chip. Amidst a long thread probing a few of these (Twitter, ThreadReader link), [TubeTime] has realized that two address lines were shorted inside of the package. A Twitter dopamine-fueled quest for truth has led them to try their hand at making the chip work anyway. Trying to clear the short with an external PSU led to a bond wire popping instead, as evidenced by the ESD diode connection disappearing.

A dozen minutes of sandpaper work resulted in the bare die exposed, making quick work of the bond wires as a side effect. Apparently, having the bond pads a bit too close has resulted in a factory defect where two of the pads merged together. No wonder the PSU wouldn’t take that on! Some X-acto work later, the short was cleared. But without the bond wires, how would [TubeTime] connect to it? This is where the work pictured comes in. Soldering to the remains of the bond wires has proven to be fruitful, reviving the chip enough to continue investigating, even if, it appears, it was never functional to begin with. The thread continued on with comparing ROMs from a few different chips [TubeTime] had on hand and inferences on what could’ve happened that led to this IC going out in the wild.

Such soldering experiments are always fun to try and pull off! We rarely see soldering on such a small scale, as thankfully, it’s not always needed, but it’s a joy to witness when someone does IC or PCB microsurgery to fix factory defects that render our devices inoperable before they were even shipped. Each time that a fellow hacker dares to grind the IC epoxy layers down and save a game console or an unidentified complex board, the world gets a little brighter. And if you aren’t forced to do it for repair reasons, you can always try it in an attempt to build the smallest NES in existence!

Imagine if we could use strong electromagnetic fields to manipulate the local properties of spacetime—this could have important ramifications in terms of science and engineering.

Electromagnetism has always been a subtle phenomenon. In the 19th century, scholars thought that electromagnetic waves must propagate in some sort of elusive medium, which was called aether. Later, the aether hypothesis was abandoned, and to this day, the classical theory of electromagnetism does not provide us with a clear answer to the question in which medium electric and magnetic fields propagate in vacuum. On the other hand, the theory of gravitation is rather well understood. General relativity explains that energy and mass tell the spacetime how to curve and spacetime tells masses how to move. Many eminent mathematical physicists have tried to understand electromagnetism directly as a consequence of general relativity. The brilliant mathematician Hermann Weyl had especially interesting theories in this regard. The Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla thought that electromagnetism contains essentially everything in our universe.