Lifeboat Foundation

It was invented by David Gathu and Moses Kinyua and is powered by brain signals.

The signals are converted into an electric current by a “NeuroNode” biopotential headset receiver. This electrical current is then driven into the robot’s circuitry, which gives the arm its mobility.

The arm has several component materials including recycled wood and moves vertically and horizontally.

Continue reading “Kenyan inventors create bio-robotic arm controlled by brain signals” »

I don’t think that star is the same after that one night stand.

When black holes swallow down massive amounts of matter from the space around them, they’re not exactly subtle about it. They belch out tremendous flares of X-rays, generated by the material heating to intense temperatures as it’s sucked towards the black hole, so bright we can detect them from Earth.

This is normal black hole behaviour. What isn’t normal is for those X-ray flares to spew forth with clockwork regularity, a puzzling behaviour reported in 2019 from a supermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy 250 million light-years away. Every nine hours, boom — X-ray flare.

Continue reading “Astronomers Have Discovered a Star That Survived Being Swallowed by a Black Hole” »

Researchers at[ MIT have developed a new method for growing plant tissues in a lab](https://news.mit.edu/2021/lab-grown-plant-tissue-0120) — sort of like how companies and researchers are approaching lab-grown meat. The process would be able to produce wood and fibre in a lab environment, and researchers have already demonstrated how it works in concept by growing simple structures using cells harvested from zinnia leaves.

Researchers at MIT have developed a new method for growing plant tissues in a lab — sort of like how companies and researchers are approaching lab-grown meat. The process would be able to produce wood and fibre in a lab environment, and researchers have already demonstrated how it works in concept by growing simple structures using cells harvested from zinnia leaves.

This work is still in its very early stages, but the potential applications of lab-grown plant material are significant, and include possibilities in both agriculture and in construction materials. While traditional agricultural is much less ecologically damaging when compared to animal farming, it can still have a significant impact and cost, and it takes a lot of resources to maintain. Not to mention that even small environmental changes can have a significant effect on crop yield.

Continue reading “MIT develops method for lab-grown plants that eventually lead to alternatives to forestry and farming” »

A new discovery in the mountains of northern Israel has caused significant excitement for geologists around the world. While working in the Zevulun Valley, close to Mount Carmel, Israeli mining company Shefa Yamim found a new mineral never before discovered on earth.

The International Mineralogical Association regularly approves new minerals for its official list, with up to 100 new substances added to the register each year.

However, this latest discovery was hailed as a significant event, as it was previously believed that this type of mineral was only found on extraterrestrial material.

When sheets of two-dimensional nanomaterials like graphene are stacked on top of each other, tiny gaps form between the sheets that have a wide variety of potential uses. In research published in the journal Nature Communications, a team of Brown University researchers has found a way to orient those gaps, called nanochannels, in a way that makes them more useful for filtering water and other liquids of nanoscale contaminants.

“In the last decade, a whole field has sprung up to study these spaces that form between 2-D nanomaterials,” said Robert Hurt, a professor in Brown’s School of Engineering and coauthor of the research. “You can grow things in there, you can store things in there, and there’s this emerging field of nanofluidics where you’re using those channels to filter out some molecules while letting others go through.”

There’s a problem, however, with using these nanochannels for filtration, and it has to do with the way those channels are oriented. Like a notebook made from stacked sheets of paper, graphene stacks are thin in the vertical direction compared to their horizontal length and width. That means that the channels between the sheets are likewise oriented horizontally. That’s not ideal for filtration, because liquid has to travel a relatively long way to get from one end of a channel to the other. It would be better if the channels were perpendicular to the orientation of the sheets. In that case, liquid would only need to traverse the relatively thin vertical height of the stack rather than the much longer length and width.

A mix of actuator and bit-level memory.

New research shows that patterns inspired by lobster shells can make 3D printed concrete stronger, to support more complex and creative architectural structures.

Digital manufacturing technologies like 3D concrete printing (3DCP) have immense potential to save time, effort and material in construction.

They also promise to push the boundaries of architectural innovation, yet technical challenges remain in making 3D printed concrete strong enough for use in more free-form structures.

New photo-ferroelectric materials allow storage of information in a non-volatile way using light stimulus. The idea is to create energy efficient memory devices with high performance and versatility to face current challenges. The study has been published in Nature Communications by Josep Fontcuberta and co-workers and opens a path towards further investigations on this phenomenon and to neuromorphic computing applications.

Can you imagine controlling the properties of a material by just shining light on it? We are used to seeing that the temperature of materials increases when exposed to the sun. But light may also have subtler effects. Indeed, light photons can create pairs of free charge carriers in otherwise insulating materials. This is the basic principle of the photovoltaic panels we use to harvest electrical energy from sun.

In a new twist, a light-induced change of materials’ properties could be used in memory devices, allowing more efficient storage of information and faster access and computing. This, in fact, is one of our society’s current challenges: being able to develop high-performance commercially available electronic devices which are, at the same time, energy efficient. Smaller electronic devices having lower energy consumption and high performance and versatility are the goal.

In a feat requiring perseverance, world-leading technology, and no small amount of caution, scientists have used intense X-rays to inspect irradiated nuclear fuel. The imaging, led by researchers at Purdue University and conducted at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, revealed a 3D view of the fuel’s interior structure, laying the groundwork for better nuclear fuel designs and models.

Until now, examinations of uranium fuel have been limited to mostly surface microscopy or to various characterization techniques using mock versions that possess little radioactivity. But scientists want to know at a deeper level how the material changes as it undergoes fission inside a nuclear reactor. The resulting insights from this study, which the Journal of Nuclear Materials published in August 2020, can lead to nuclear fuels that function more efficiently and cost less to develop.

Continue reading “Scientists gain an unprecedented view of irradiated nuclear fuel” »