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Category: food – Page 118

As the U.S. corporate world continues its withdrawal from Russia due to the invasion of Ukraine, a growing stigma against anything Russian is reverberating in Silicon Valley as tech start-ups and venture capital firms reassess their exposure and limit risks.

DoorDash and GrubHub recently cancelled deals with now-shut U.S. food delivery start-ups launched by Russian founders. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology pulled out of a multi-year partnership with Moscow’s Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, while Index Ventures halted further deals in the country.

For Silicon Valley, the issues with Russian business run to the heart of immigrant founder-led culture and a global world of institutional investors that in recent years sought more access to top VC ideas.

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The teeth of a mollusk can not only capture and chew food to nurture its body, but the marine choppers also hold insights into creating advanced, lower-cost and environmentally friendly materials.

David Kisailus, UC Irvine professor, and graduate student Taifeng Wang, both in and engineering, took a close look at the ultrahard teeth of the Northern Pacific Cryptochiton stelleri or gumboot chiton. Their findings are published in the Small Structures April 2022 issue.

“The findings in our work are critical, as it not only provides an understanding of the precision of in mineralization to form high-performance architected materials, but also provides insights into bioinspired synthetic pathways to a new generation of advanced materials in a broad range of applications from wear-resistant materials to ,” said Kisailus.

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BOW ISLAND, AB — Patrick Fabian is quickly picking up a new skill. The seed farmer plans to start using drones…

BOW ISLAND, AB – Patrick Fabian is quickly picking up a new skill.

The seed farmer plans to start using drones to monitor his 1,250 irrigated acres.

“On our farm, it will be mostly for crop surveillance to check the middle of the fields and the things we can’t normally see properly without walking every single square foot of the farm,” Fabian said.

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The human brain, fed on just the calorie input of a modest diet, easily outperforms state-of-the-art supercomputers powered by full-scale station energy inputs. The difference stems from the multiple states of brain processes versus the two binary states of digital processors, as well as the ability to store information without power consumption—non-volatile memory. These inefficiencies in today’s conventional computers have prompted great interest in developing synthetic synapses for use in computers that can mimic the way the brain works. Now, researchers at King’s College London, UK, report in ACS Nano Letters an array of nanorod devices that mimic the brain more closely than ever before. The devices may find applications in artificial neural networks.

Efforts to emulate biological synapses have revolved around types of memristors with different resistance states that act like memory. However, unlike the the devices reported so far have all needed a reverse polarity to reset them to the initial state. “In the brain a change in the changes the output,” explains Anatoly Zayats, a professor at King’s College London who led the team behind the recent results. The King’s College London researchers have now been able to demonstrate this brain-like behavior in their synaptic synapses as well.

Zayats and team build an array of gold nanorods topped with a polymer junction (poly-L-histidine, PLH) to a metal contact. Either light or an electrical voltage can excite plasmons—collective oscillations of electrons. The plasmons release hot electrons into the PLH, gradually changing the chemistry of the polymer, and hence changing it to have different levels of conductivity or light emissivity. How the polymer changes depends on whether oxygen or hydrogen surrounds it. A chemically inert nitrogen chemical environment will preserve the state without any energy input required so that it acts as non-volatile memory.

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While hydroelectric dams are capable of generating a lot of electricity, they drastically disrupt the environment. Scientists have now proposed a simpler but still effective alternative, in which electric trucks replace such dams.

In a typical hydroelectric facility, a dam is built across a river, causing a reservoir to form directly upstream of that dam. When a gate in the dam is opened, water from the reservoir flows through and drops down to a lower elevation. As it does so, it spins up turbines which generate electricity.

Unfortunately, formation of the reservoir involves the flooding of land which may previously have contained forests, crops, or even people’s homes.

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Fabien Cousteau has a vision for how humans can live and work in the ocean. He imagines that long-term stays under the waves could be enabled through the construction of underwater habitats, which would look and feel like houses, as opposed to just sealed, submarine-like bubbles.

These habitats would have a galley, kitchen, workspace, and sleeping quarters, he describes. And of course, there would be windows, or viewports, to the outside world, and a front door in the form of a moon pool that will actually be on the bottom of the house. This would allow easy access into and out of the facility.

The project, called Proteus, would be a marine analog to the International Space Station, and would primarily accommodate aquanauts, the equivalent of an astronaut in the ocean. It’s an idea that has been bubbling for some time now. But it could start taking shape relatively soon. Proteus Ocean Group, a private company which would operate and run Proteus, has recently signed an engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) contract with a firm that has expertise in creating hyperbaric and pressure vessels in the ocean environment. Much of what Proteus is doing in terms of the technology they’re exploring is similar to space technology.

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