Lifeboat Foundation

Winemakers must pay close attention to their soil, the rain, the heat, and the sunlight. But rodents like gophers and mice can wreak havoc on a vineyard. Rather than turning to rodenticides to deter pests, graduate students at Humboldt State University in California are testing a more natural approach by using owls.

The experiment is part of a long-term research study under the direction of professor Matt Johnson of the university’s Department of Wildlife. The current cohort, including students Laura Echávez, Samantha Chavez, and Jaime Carlino, has placed around 300 owl nest boxes sporadically through vineyards in Napa Valley. They are documenting the impact of relying on owls to deter and remove pests rather than rodenticides.

The researchers have surveyed 75 wineries in Napa Valley, and four-fifths now use the owl nest boxes and notice a difference in rodent control. The barn owls have a four-month nesting season, during which they spend about one-third of their time hunting in the fields. A family of barn owls may eat as many as 1,000 rodents during the nesting season or around 3,400 in a single year.

British startup Urban-Air Port (UAP) has announced plans to open 200 flying taxi and cargo drone hubs in 65 cities globally over the next five years. The announcement comes following a significant investment from Supernal, a division of Hyundai Motor Group, to deliver on the company’s shared vision of integrating advanced air mobility (AAM) into existing transit networks and creating a seamless passenger journey.

UAP’s vertiport sites will provide essential infrastructure to help enable mass adoption of eVTOL aircraft – such as cargo drones and air taxis – as public acceptance grows and will transform the way goods and people are transported around urban areas. The world’s first fully operational hub for eVTOLs, Air-One, will open for public visitation in Coventry City Centre in April.

The demonstration will show how AAM can help unlock the potential of sustainable mobility and how the industry will work to help reduce congestion, cut air pollution and decarbonize transport.

China’s artificial sun reached 158 million degrees Fahrenheit for 17 minutes and 36 seconds. (Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

China set a ground-breaking record with its “artificial sun,” which superheated plasma to temperatures five times hotter than the sun. The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) nuclear fusion reactor reached 158 million degrees Fahrenheit for 1,056 seconds (17 minutes, 36 seconds). This latest breakthrough brings the country one step closer toward its goal for unlimited clean fusion energy.

China’s EAST surpassed France’s Tore Supra tokamak record, set in 2003 when it superheated plasma in its coiling loop to identical temperatures for 390 seconds. Also, in May 2021, EAST set another record by running at 216 million F for 101 seconds. The fusion reactor achieved a peak temperature of 288 million Fahrenheit for 20 seconds during this experiment. In comparison, the sun’s core reaches approximately 27 million Fahrenheit.

Giving low-income families more money changes a child’s brain activity, and the effect can be seen by a child’s first birthday.

“Neuroscientists have described links between a child’s socioeconomic background and the structure of the brain,” says Kimberly Noble at Columbia University in New York. “But all that work has been correlational to date.”

Instead, Noble and her team are looking at how exactly child poverty causes reduced grey matter volume in the hippocampus and frontal cortex, which is associated with the subsequent development of thinking and learning. These changes have been seen throughout childhood and adolescence.

The discovery, one of the only confirmed intermediate-mass black holes, lives in an equally rare object known as a low-mass, stripped nucleus.

Astronomers discovered a black hole unlike any other. At one hundred thousand solar masses, it is smaller than the black holes we have found at the centers of galaxies, but bigger than the black holes that are born when stars explode. This makes it one of the only confirmed intermediate-mass black holes, an object that has long been sought by astronomers.

“We have very good detections of the biggest, stellar-mass black holes up to 100 times the size of our sun, and supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies that are millions of times the size of our sun, but there aren’t any measurements of black between these. That’s a large gap,” said senior author Anil Seth, associate professor of astronomy at the University of Utah and co-author of the study. “This discovery fills the gap.”

The first molecular electronics chip has been developed, realizing a 50-year-old goal of integrating single molecules into circuits to achieve the ultimate scaling limits of Moore’s Law. Developed by Roswell Biotechnologies and a multi-disciplinary team of leading academic scientists, the chip uses single molecules as universal sensor elements in a circuit to create a programmable biosensor with real-time, single-molecule sensitivity and unlimited scalability in sensor pixel density. This innovation, appearing this week in a peer-reviewed article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), will power advances in diverse fields that are fundamentally based on observing molecular interactions, including drug discovery, diagnostics, DNA sequencing, and proteomics.

“Biology works by single molecules talking to each other, but our existing measurement methods cannot detect this,” said co-author Jim Tour, Ph.D., a Rice University chemistry professor and a pioneer in the field of molecular electronics. “The sensors demonstrated in this paper for the first time let us listen in on these molecular communications, enabling a new and powerful view of biological information.”

The molecular electronics platform consists of a programmable semiconductor chip with a scalable sensor array architecture. Each array element consists of an electrical current meter that monitors the current flowing through a precision-engineered molecular wire, assembled to span nanoelectrodes that couple it directly into the circuit. The sensor is programmed by attaching the desired probe molecule to the molecular wire, via a central, engineered conjugation site. The observed current provides a direct, real-time electronic readout of molecular interactions of the probe. These picoamp-scale current-versus-time measurements are read out from the sensor array in digital form, at a rate of 1,000 frames per second, to capture molecular interactions data with high resolution, precision and throughput.

Aboard the International Space Station, NASA Expedition 66 Flight Engineers Mark Vande Hei and Kayla Barron of NASA answered pre-recorded questions about life and work as astronauts on the orbital laboratory during an in-flight event Jan. 24 with students attending the Center for Early Childhood Education in Hollywood, California. Vande Hei and Barron are in the midst of long duration missions living and working aboard the microgravity laboratory to advance scientific knowledge and demonstrate new technologies for future human and robotic exploration missions as part of NASA’s Moon and Mars exploration approach, including lunar missions through NASA’s Artemis program.

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US medical drone delivery specialist Spright extends partnership with Germany’s Wingcopter to use its eVTOL UAV exclusively in its fleets.

German drone company Wingcopter and US medical UAV services provider Spright have deepened their relationship with a new deal for electric vertical takeoff and (eVTOL) aerial delivery craft valued at $16 million dollars.

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Innovating Life-Saving Therapeutic Devices — Dr. Amy Throckmorton, PhD — BioCirc Research Laboratory, Drexel University School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems.

Dr. Amy Throckmorton, Ph.D. (https://drexel.edu/biomed/faculty/core/ThrockmortonAmy/) is Associate Professor and Director of the BioCirc Research Laboratory, in the School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems, at Drexel University.

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