Lifeboat Foundation

We will need a good dose of healthy stoicism if we are to survive in the world after work. Luxury items will be significantly reduced in the world we’re imagining. Stoics like Marcus Aurelius and Seneca recommended that we adjust our desires to simple, reliable pleasures, like fresh water, decent bread, modest clothing, and good friends. Luxury pleasures are rare and unreliable so we suffer more when they fail to materialize.

But chocolate cake is delicious and diamonds are beautiful. When Plato sketched a Spartan lifestyle in the Republic, his friends accused him of designing a city for pigs not humans — and they demanded that he add spices and luxury to the imagined utopia. While I’m sensitive to this worry, I hasten to point out that many Americans are currently, and by their own initiative, downsizing their sense of the good life. The contemporary “tiny house movement” — which builds elegant housing around 1/10th the size of average homes — is already the kind of stoic adjustment that Americans will need to make when we’re all unemployed.

Cleaner energy sources are becoming cheaper too.

We all love graphene — the one-atom-thick sheets of carbon aren’t just super flexible, harder than diamond, and stronger than steel, they’ve also recently become superconductors in their own right.

But it’s not the only over-achieving nanomaterial out there. Researchers have just simulated a stretched out, one-dimensional (1D) chain of boron, predicting that the material could have even weirder properties than graphene.

Continue reading “Scientists Simulate a New Material That Could Be Even Weirder Than Graphene” »

Poor Americans, people in rural locations, and those with disabilities would benefit most.

Consumer protection

App reveals constituents

Research News / 1.2.2017

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In what could be called a classic “Eureka” moment, UC Santa Barbara materials researchers have discovered a simple yet effective method for mastering the electrical properties of polymer semiconductors. The elegant technique allows for the efficient design and manufacture of organic circuitry (the type found in flexible displays and solar cells, for instance) of varying complexity while using the same semiconductor material throughout.

“It’s a different strategy by which you can take a material and change its properties,” said Guillermo Bazan, a professor of chemistry and materials at UCSB. With the addition of fullerene or copper tetrabenzoporphyrin (CuBP) molecules in strategic places, the charge carriers in semiconducting materials—negative electrons and positive “holes”—may be controlled and inverted for better device performance as well as economical manufacture. The discovery is published in a pair of papers that appear in the journals Advanced Functional Materials and Advanced Electronic Materials.

In the realm of polymer semiconductors, device functionality depends on the movement of the appropriate charge carriers across the material. There have been many advances in the synthesis of high-mobility, high-performance materials, said lead author Michael Ford, graduate student in materials, but the fine control of the electrons and holes is what will allow these sophisticated polymers to reach their full potential.

Continue reading “Full(erene) potential: Adding specific molecules to ‘trap’ charge carriers in semiconducting polymers” »

Nice.

Summary: Researchers report adult neurogenesis not only helps increase the number of cells in a neural network, it also promotes plasticity in the existing network. Additionally, they have identified the role the Bax gene plays in synaptic pruning.

Source: university of alabama at birmingham.

Continue reading “Brain Plasticity: How Adult Born Neurons Get Wired” »

Scientists on the quest to offer more hope for glioblastoma patients may have found a way to stop the growth of the deadly brain tumor. The discovery targets the genes that sustain the tumor growth past the early stages with the drug mithramycin, which may be more effective than the current chemotherapy treatments.

Glioblastoma is the most common and deadly form of primary brain cancer. In glioblastoma, malignant glial cells form vast networks of tendrils throughout the brain, making it nearly impossible to surgically remove all the cancerous tissues. Dubbed as the “octopus tumor,” the tumor can evade even the most aggressive surgeries, chemotherapies, and radiotherapies, leaving patients with a five-year survival rate of less than 10 percent. Patients are in desperate need of better alternatives or supplementary treatments to beat this notoriously deadly cancer.

Continue reading “An Antibiotic May Stop Growth of Deadly Brain Cancer Trending” »