Lifeboat Foundation

Water and wood may one day be all that’s needed to provide electrical power for a household. At a time when energy is a critical issue for many millions of people worldwide, scientists in Sweden have managed to generate electricity with the help of these two renewable resources.

The method reported by researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology focuses on what naturally happens after wood is placed in water, and the water evaporates. Transpiration, a process in which water moves through a plant, is constantly occurring in nature. And it produces small amounts of electricity, known as bioelectricity.

Yuanyuan Li, assistant professor at the Division of Biocomposites at KTH, says that with some nanoengineering of wood—and pH tuning—small but promising amounts of electricity can now be harvested.

Researchers use the device to study heart attacks and hope to test new heart medications.

Researchers have developed a device that can mimic aspects of a heart attack with hopes of using the device to test and develop novel heart medications. The research team, from the University of Southern California Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering in the U.S., created the tool, which they call a “heart attack on a chip.”

The study was published in the journal Science Advances.

Continue reading “A ‘heart attack on a chip’ device could lead to treatments for cardiovascular disease” »

One key objective of electronics engineering research is to develop computing devices that are both highly performing and energy-efficient, meaning that they can compute information quickly while consuming little power. One possible way to do this could be to combine units that perform logic operations and memory components into a single device.

So far, most computing devices have been made up of a processing unit and a physically separate memory component. The creation of a device that can efficiently perform both these functions, referred to as a logic-in-memory architecture, could help to significantly simplify devices and cut down their power consumption.

While a few of the logic-in-memory architectures proposed so far achieved promising results, most existing solutions come with practical limitations. For instance, some devices have been found to be unstable, unreliable or only applicable to specific use cases.

Scientists from EPFL and the University of Lausanne have used a chip that was originally designed for environmental science to study the properties of biocement formation. This material has the potential to replace traditional cement binders in certain civil engineering applications.

The chip is the size of a credit card and its surface is engraved with a flow channel measuring one meter from end to end that is as thick as a human hair. Researchers can inject a solution into one end of the channel and, with the help of time-lapse microscopy, observe the solution’s behavior over several hours. Medical scientists have used similar chips for health care applications, such as to examine how arteries get clogged or how a drug spreads into the bloodstream, while environmental engineers have applied them to the study of biofilms and contaminants in drinking water.

Now, a team of civil engineers at EPFL’s Laboratory of Soil Mechanics (LMS), together with scientists from the Faculty of Geosciences and Environment at the University of Lausanne (UNIL), have repurposed the chip to understand complex transport-reaction phenomena involved in the formation of new kinds of biocement.

Genetically engineering humans is a controversial topic. Some people believe that it is unethical, while others believe that it could be beneficial to humanity. There are pros and cons to both sides of the argument, and it is important to consider all of them before making a decision whether we should be genetically engineering humans or not.

Dr. Jennifer A. Fogarty, Ph.D. (https://www.bcm.edu/people-search/jennifer-fogarty-100936) is the Chief Scientific Officer for the Translational Research Institute for Space Health (TRISH — https://www.bcm.edu/academic-centers/space-medicine/translat…-institute) at Baylor College of Medicine, and the Director of the Applied Health and Performance at Sophic Synergistics LLC.

As Chief Scientist of TRISH, Dr. Fogarty leads an innovative and high-risk research and technology development portfolio to address the most challenging human health and performance risks of space exploration.

Continue reading “Dr. Jennifer Fogarty, Ph.D. — Baylor — Innovations To Safeguard Health & Performance In Deep Space” »

Researchers at the UPC’s Department of Electronic Engineering have developed a new type of magnetometer that can be integrated into microelectronic chips and that is fully compatible with the current integrated circuits. Of great interest for the miniaturization of electronic systems and sensors, the study has been recently published in Microsystems & Nanoengineering.

Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) are electromechanical systems miniaturized to the maximum, so much so that they can be integrated into a chip. They are found in most of our day-to-day devices, such as computers, car braking systems and mobile phones. Integrating them into electronic systems has clear advantages in terms of size, cost, speed and energy efficiency. But developing them is expensive, and their performance is often compromised by incompatibilities with other electronic systems within a device.

MEMS can be used, among many others, to develop magnetometers—a device that measures magnetic field to provide direction during navigation, much like a compass—for integration into smartphones and wearables or for use in the automotive industry. Therefore, one of the most promising lines of work are Lorentz force MEMS magnetometers.

Telecommunications have reshaped many aspects of our lives over the past few decades by providing incredibly convenient ways to share and access information. One of the most important enablers for this transformation has been the adoption and improvement of broadband technologies, which cram enormous amounts of data over wide frequency bands to achieve unprecedented transfer speeds. Today, most large cities have fiber optics-based networks that distribute high-speed internet directly to every home.

Unfortunately, it is not always feasible to deploy fiber optic links to remote locations and rural areas, due to the associated costs and civil engineering work required. Such places could benefit from a different approach to optical broadband communications: free-space optics. The main idea in free-space optical (FSO) communications is to set up aligned transmitter–receiver pairs where needed and use air as the medium to carry the signals.

While there are still many challenges to address in FSO systems (such as low energy efficiency, impact of weather, and high background noise), scientists worldwide are continuously trying out new ways of solving these issues and achieving higher data rates.

They call them cold hearts, and they are at the center of their new hydrogen-based ZEROe aircraft.