Lifeboat Foundation

Made from the stem cells of a frog, are tiny living machines. And researchers have just debuted version 2.0.

At just 1/1000th of a millimeter, nanoparticles are impossible to see with the naked eye. But, despite being small, they’re extremely important in many ways. If scientists want to take a close look at DNA, proteins, or viruses, then being able to isolate and monitor nanoparticles is essential.

Trapping these particles involves tightly focusing a laser beam to a point that produces a strong electromagnetic field. This beam can hold particles just like a pair of tweezers but, unfortunately, there are natural restrictions to this technique. Most notable are the size restrictions—if the particle is too small, the technique won’t work. To date, optical tweezers have been unable to hold particles like individual proteins, which are only a few nanometers in diameter.

Now, due to recent advances in nanotechnology, researchers in the Light-Matter Interactions for Quantum Technologies Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) have developed a technique for precise nanoparticle trapping. In this study, they overcame the natural restrictions by developing optical tweezers based on metamaterials —a synthetic material with specific properties that do not occur naturally. This was the first time that this kind of metamaterial had been used for single nanoparticle trapping.

In our latest Short-Term Energy Outlook, we forecast that U.S. energy-related carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions will increase in both 2022 and 2023 but remain below 2019 levels. In 2020, U.S. energy-related CO₂ emissions decreased by 11% as energy use declined during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the U.S. economy began to return to pre-COVID activity, CO₂ emissions increased by an estimated 6% in 2021. We expect increasing economic activity, along with other factors, will result in those emissions increasing by another 2% in 2022 and remaining virtually flat in 2023.

We forecast that, by 2023, U.S. energy-related CO₂ emissions will total 4,971 million metric tons (MMmt) — still 3% below the 5,144 MMmt of CO₂ emissions generated in 2019 and 17% below the peak level of 6,016 MMmt in 2007.

U.S. petroleum-related CO₂ emissions increased 8% in 2021, and we forecast that they will increase by another 5% in 2022 and an additional 1% in 2023 as travel activity continues to increase. We forecast that in 2022, the number of vehicle miles traveled in the United States, which affects motor gasoline and diesel consumption, will return to 2019 levels and that air travel will increase by 4% over 2019.

Bernard Kress, principal optical architect on Microsoft’s HoloLens team, has left the company to take on the role of Director of XR Engineering at the recently formed Google Labs. A report by The Verge maintains Google is also now gearing up to produce an AR headset that could directly compete with similar offerings from the likes of Apple and Meta.

Before joining Microsoft in 2015, Kress worked as principal optical architect behind Google Glass, the company’s smartglasses that found marked success in the enterprise sector after a rocky reception by consumers in 2013.

At Microsoft, Kress continued his work—principally focused on micro-optics, wafer scale optics, holography and nanophotonics—as partner optical architect on the HoloLens team, overseeing the release of both HoloLens and HoloLens 2.

Ultra-yacht launches all-electric Duffy Bayshore 18 boat with solar charging at the St. Petersburg boat show.

Today Ultra-Yacht announced its first-ever All-Electric Duffy Boat featuring a solar charging option at the St. Petersburg Power and Sailboat Show in Florida. The Duffy Bayshore 18 is a zero-emission, low-maintenance boat that offers up to 12 hours of fun on the water.

Continue reading “Ultra-yacht launches all-electric Duffy boat with solar charging at St. Petersburg show” »

Vehicle manufacturers are ramping up electric vehicle production, so big companies like Amazon, AT&T, and IKEA are telling vehicle manufacturers what kinds of EVs they want. Here’s the “blueprint” that members of the Corporate Electric Vehicle Alliance are today presenting to makers like Volvo, GM, and Daimler explaining which EVs they want to purchase in the United States over the next five years.

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In January 2020, as Electrek then reported, Boston-based sustainability nonprofit group Ceres launched the Corporate Electric Vehicle Alliance, a group to help companies accelerate the transition to electric vehicles.

The world’s most commonly used system of measurement, the International System of Units (SI), was redefined in 2019. Since then, units have needed to be defined in terms of the constants of nature—that is, nature’s rules that are fixed and of no uncertainty, such as the speed of light—and not in terms of arbitrary references.

This has meant that new research for relating the many units of the system to the constants through experimental realizations has been called for.

“The redefinition has caused a need for new realizations,” says Professor Jukka Pekola.

Some of these objects are among the oldest and most distant known. Here we’re seeing light from ancient stars whose local contemporaries have long since been extinguished.

The oldest galaxies formed during the epoch of reionisation, when the tenuous gas in the universe first became bathed in starlight which was capable of separating electrons from hydrogen. This was the last major change in properties of the universe as a whole.

The fact that light carries so much information, allowing us to piece together the history of the universe, is remarkable. The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope will give us some vastly improved infrared images, and will inevitably raise new questions to challenge future generations of scientists.

Space Exploration Technologies Corp. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk is offering to send Starlink internet terminals to Tonga after an underwater volcanic eruption and subsequent tsunami cut off communication links.