Lifeboat Foundation

Eye-catching new hotel in Scotland bears resemblance to the widely known emoji; ‘really hard to see anything else’

General relativity, part of the wide-ranging physical theory of relativity formed by the German-born physicist Albert Einstein. It was conceived by Einstein in 1915. It explains gravity based on the way space can ‘curve’, or, to put it more accurately, it associates the force of gravity with the changing geometry of space-time. (Einstein’s gravity)

The mathematical equations of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, tested time and time again, are currently the most accurate way to predict gravitational interactions, replacing those developed by Isaac Newton several centuries prior.

Continue reading “If light has no mass, why is it affected by gravity? General Relativity Theory” »

Retired naval officer Joseph Dituri has spent more than three months living inside a 100sqft pod in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean.

His time spent below the waves was part of a study group to research the effects of a pressurised environment on the human body.

Euclid is ESA’s mission to shed light on dark matter and dark energy, but teams at the Agency’s mission control centre in Darmstadt, Germany, are also in the dark. A series of problems have befallen the mission in pre-launch simulations.

Currently about halfway through the Euclid simulations campaign, the key focus in the Main Control Room is the Launch and Early Orbit Phase (LEOP) and spacecraft commissioning.

These are the two most critical moments in a mission’s life; as it wakes up after the rigours of launch, makes its first manoeuvres towards its target destination and as its instruments are commissioned.

Sucralose, a widely used artificial sweetener, produces a DNA

DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is a molecule composed of two long strands of nucleotides that coil around each other to form a double helix. It is the hereditary material in humans and almost all other organisms that carries genetic instructions for development, functioning, growth, and reproduction. Nearly every cell in a person’s body has the same DNA. Most DNA is located in the cell nucleus (where it is called nuclear DNA), but a small amount of DNA can also be found in the mitochondria (where it is called mitochondrial DNA or mtDNA).

Researchers at the University of Oklahoma led a study recently published in Science Advances that proves the principle of using spatial correlations in quantum entangled beams of light to encode information and enable its secure transmission.

Light can be used to encode information for high-data rate transmission, long-distance communication and more. But for secure communication, encoding large amounts of information in light has additional challenges to ensure the privacy and integrity of the data being transferred.

Alberto Marino, the Ted S. Webb Presidential Professor in the Homer L. Dodge College of Arts, led the research with OU doctoral student and the study’s first author Gaurav Nirala and co-authors Siva T. Pradyumna and Ashok Kumar. Marino also holds positions with OU’s Center for Quantum Research and Technology and with the Quantum Science Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

A group of biochemical engineers, Siavash Ahrar, Manasi Raje, Irene Lee and Elliot Hui at the University of California, Irvine, has developed a finite state machine (FSM) implemented as a pneumatic circuit using microfluidic valves to build a lab-on-a-chip. Their work is published in the journal Science Advances.

Over the past several years, biochemical and mechanical engineers have been working toward the goal of automating many of the chemical process that are currently done by hand—trained lab technicians using pipettes to determine the concentration of a chemical dissolved in a liquid, for example. Automating such tasks would not only make them less expensive, it could speed things up, potentially offering medical lab results in minutes rather than hours. To that end, engineers have been working toward building what they call a lab-on-a-chip. In this new effort, the research team has applied pneumatics to the problem.

Many chemical processes involve the movement of liquids. The researchers sought to use water pressure instead of electricity when building circuits for use on a potential lab-on-a-chip. They created a tiny sandwich comprising panes of glass as the bread and a sheet of silicone as the interior. But before making their sandwich, they etched the glass panes to allow a liquid to pass through and poked holes in the silicone sheet to connect the channels in the glass panes.

Nikola Tesla’s “valvular conduit” design, also known today as the “Tesla valve”, was patented in 1920. The design, essentially a series of interconnected keychain-shaped loops, was created to enable fluid to pass in only one direction with no moving parts.

Exhaled breath VOCs showed variations in concentration associated with the different clips, even though the relative change was less distinguishable compared to the genital response (Fig. 3). For female participants, breath levels of CO₂ and isoprene during the sex clip were significantly lower compared to the anxiety and sport clips (p 0.05, Table S2). For male participants, CO₂, C₂H₄O₂ and C₆H₆O were found to have a significantly lower, higher and higher breath level, respectively, for the sex clip comparing to the other two clips (p 0.05, Table S2). The relative change of CO₂ during the sex clip was in general only 3–4% lower than that during the anxiety and sport clips but was significant for both genders (p 0.05). The minute-by-minute box plot (Fig. 2c) also shows that breath CO₂ appears to lower slightly in concentration for both genders during the sex clip. Isoprene was significantly decreased during the sex clip compared to the sport clip for both genders (males:13%, females:15%, p ≤ 0.001). For women during the sex clip, the isoprene also had a significantly lower level compared to the anxiety clip (12%, p 0.01). For the 1-min data distribution shown in Fig. 2d, participants showed not only elevated isoprene concentration during the sport and anxiety clips but also larger variations among each other reflected by the length of the box representing 25–75% data distribution. Interestingly, isoprene level peaked at the beginning of the sex clip (the second minute) for both genders.

From Fig. 3, it can be seen that several other measured VOCs, C₁₀ H₁₄ O, C₇H₈O, C₈H₁₁ NO₂ and acetaldehyde for female participants, and C₈H₇N for male participants showed large relative changes during the sex clip compared to the anxiety clip and the sport clip. However, no significant difference was identified between the sex clip and the other two clips (Table S2) for these VOCs, indicating the mean values were largely affected by outliers. In such cases, the VOCs identified as having a distinguishable change during the sex clip might be specific to an individual rather than being representative of the whole group of participants. Among the female participants, one subject (No. 39) had substantial elevation of C₁₀ H₁₄ O, C₇H₈O, C₈H₁₁ NO₂ in her breath starting in the end of the sport clip until the end of the sex clip, which caused a significant deviation in terms of the mean values. While for acetaldehyde, subject No. 20 had a much higher relative increase compared to the first neutral clip in her breath than other participants, affecting the mean values. For male participants, two persons with a strong physiological response (No. 6 and 10) had substantial elevated breath levels of C₈H₇N, C₆H₆O and C₇H₈O during the sex clip.

Among all participants, several VOCs showed change according to the genital response of certain individual participants (1 female and 2 male participants). Although the data from those participants were considered as outliers in the previous section, as there were no experimental errors identified and the breath-genital related change occurred in different clip playing order, it is unlikely that those outliers coincidentally followed the genital response pattern. Furthermore, genital response and genital temperature data was rated highly in terms of quality for those individuals. Therefore, we may use these individuals to characterize the breath marker responses for each gender in real time.