Lifeboat Foundation

Could buy patients more time to survive critical injuries and diseases, even when disaster strikes far from a hospital.

Donepezil, an FDA-approved drug to treat Alzheimer’s, has the potential to be repurposed for use in emergency situations to prevent irreversible organ injury, according to researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.

Using donepezil (DPN), researchers report that they were able to put tadpoles of Xenopus laevis frogs into a hibernation-like torpor.

A sweat-powered wearable has the potential to make continuous, personalized health monitoring as effortless as wearing a Band-Aid. Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed an electronic finger wrap that monitors vital chemical levels—such as glucose, vitamins, and even drugs—present in the same fingertip sweat from which it derives its energy.

The advance was published Sept. 3 in Nature Electronics by the research group of Joseph Wang, a professor in the Aiiso Yufeng Li Family Department of Chemical and Nano Engineering at UC San Diego.

The device, which wraps snugly around the finger, draws power from an unlikely source—the fingertip’s sweat. Fingertips, despite their small size, are among the body’s most prolific sweat producers, each packed with over a thousand sweat glands. These glands can produce 100 to 1,000 times more sweat than most other areas of the body, even during rest.

The big picture: The US is committed to establishing semiconductor manufacturing within its borders, and perhaps no effort is more crucial to this goal than TSMC’s three-fab facility in Arizona. The government is pouring billions into the development, alongside TSMC’s $65 billion investment.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. has reached a significant milestone in its expansion into the US. Recent trial production at the company’s new Arizona facility has yielded results comparable to those of its established plants in Taiwan, according to Bloomberg, which cited a person familiar with the company who requested anonymity. This development is a positive sign for the chipmaker’s ambitious US project, which has faced delays and doubts about whether it could match the production efficiency of its Taiwanese operations.

The Arizona plant began engineering wafer production in April using advanced 4-nanometer process technology. With production yields now on par with its facilities in Tainan, Taiwan, TSMC should be able to maintain its targeted gross margin rates of 53 percent or higher.

During the worst days of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us became accustomed to news reports on the reproduction number R, which is the average number of cases arising from a single infected case. If we were told that R was much greater than 1, that meant the number of infections was growing rapidly, and interventions (such as social distancing and lockdowns) were necessary. But if R was near to 1, then the disease was deemed to be under control and some relaxation of restrictions could be warranted. New mathematical modeling by Kris Parag from Imperial College London shows limitations to using R or a related growth rate parameter for assessing the “controllability” of an epidemic [1]. As an alternative strategy, Parag suggests a framework based on treating an epidemic as a positive feedback loop. The model produces two new controllability parameters that describe how far a disease outbreak is from a stable condition, which is one with feedback that doesn’t lead to growth.

Parag’s starting point is the classical mathematical description of how an epidemic evolves in time in terms of the reproduction number R. This approach is called the renewal model and has been widely used for infectious diseases such as COVID-19, SARS, influenza, Ebola, and measles. In this model, new infections are determined by past infections through a mathematical function called the generation-time distribution, which describes how long it takes for someone to infect someone else. Parag departs from this traditional approach by using a kind of Fourier transform, called a Laplace transform, to convert the generation-time distribution into periodic functions that define the number of the infections. The Laplace transform is commonly adopted in control theory, a field of engineering that deals with the control of machines and other dynamical systems by treating them as feedback loops.

The first outcome of applying the Laplace transform to epidemic systems is that it defines a so-called transfer function that maps input cases (such as infected travelers) onto output infections by means of a closed feedback loop. Control measures (such as quarantines and mask requirements) aim to disrupt this loop by acting as a kind of “friction” force. The framework yields two new parameters that naturally describe the controllability of the system: the gain margin and the delay margin. The gain margin quantifies how much infections must be scaled by interventions to stabilize the epidemic (where stability is defined by R = 1). The delay margin is related to how long one can wait to implement an intervention. If, for example, the gain margin is 2 and the delay margin is 7 days, then the epidemic is stable provided that the number of infections doesn’t double and that control measures are applied within a week.

BOCA CHICA, Texas (ValleyCentral) — A tourist staple at the Boca Chica SpaceX launch site is being relocated.

Many space enthusiasts who have been following SpaceX’s progression in the Rio Grande Valley know that the Starhopper started it all for the space flight company in South Texas.

In 2019, the Starhopper prototype performed its first successful 150 meter flight at the SpaceX Starbase (Boca Chica) site. Since then, the company has continued to test its flight engineering with different SN rockets.

848 likes, — cad.camer on July 28, 2024: ‘❤️3D Gear #gear #technology #mechanical #engineering #mech #tech’

A small team of engineers and geophysicists from Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Central Florida has found, via modeling, that creating millions of metal nanorods from material on the Martian surface and then blasting them into the atmosphere would be a more efficient way to heat the planet than generating greenhouse gases. Their paper is published in the journal Science Advances.

Science fiction writers have for many years envisioned a future when Mars is made habitable through terraforming techniques, allowing humans to survive without the need for special buildings and spacesuits. Recently, scientists have begun looking at the possibility, though most project ideas are far less ambitious.

Instead of completely transforming the planet, many are looking at simply warming it up a bit to make it more habitable. Most such ideas have centered on releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to capture more heat from the sun. Unfortunately, there are few ingredients on the Martian surface that could be used to create and release such gases.

Prof Lee said, “Existing breakthrough studies in quantum advantage are limited to highly-specific tailored problems. Finding new applications for which quantum computers provide unique advantages is the central motivation of our work.”

“Our approach allows us to explore the intricate signatures of topological materials on quantum computers with a level of precision that was previously unattainable, even for hypothetical materials existing in four dimensions,” added Prof Lee.

Despite the limitations of current noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, the team is able to measure topological state dynamics and protected mid-gap spectra of higher-order topological lattices with unprecedented accuracy, thanks to advanced in-house developed error mitigation techniques. This advance demonstrates the potential of current quantum technology to explore new frontiers in material engineering.

How can ultrasonic waves be used to treat chronic pain? This is what a recent study published in the journal Pain hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated how a noninvasive treatment known as Diadem, which is a novel biomedical device designed to use ultrasonic waves for combating chronic pain. This study holds the potential to help researchers develop more effective methods at treating chronic pain aside from invasive, surgical treatments.

For the study, the researchers enlisted 20 patients who suffer from chronic pain to participate in trials for the Diadem device or sham stimulations, the latter of which involved auditory masking that has been used in previous research. Each patient received two 40-minute sessions comprised of either the Diadem or sham treatments, followed by being monitored for one week. In the end, the researchers found that 60 percent of patients were received the Diadem treatments reported improved pain management on day 1 and day 7. In contrast, 15 percent and 20 percent of patients who received the sham treatment reported the same for day 1 and day 7, respectively.

“If you or your relatives suffer from chronic pain that does not respond to treatments, please reach out to us; we need to recruit many participants so that these treatments can be approved for the general public,” said Dr. Jan Kubanek, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Utah and a co-author on the study. “With your help, we think chronic pain can be effectively silenced. And with new pain treatment options, we can tackle the opioid crisis, too.”