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Blog – Page 6436

The U.S. dollar remains the world’s de facto monetary reserve, but with China going full speed ahead with its digital yuan, that could be in jeopardy. Researchers are digging into regulated online money called Central Bank Digital Currencies, or CBDCs, and what that could look like in the U.S.

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Continue reading “Could China Dethrone The U.S. Dollar With A Digital Yuan?” | >

Humanity has a plastic problem, but who said the problem couldn’t also be tasty? Scientists are trying to come up with creative solutions to address the ever-growing issue every day, with some even converting plastic bottles into vanillin using bacteria. Most recently, two scientists have echoed this sentiment and won the $1.18 million (1 million euro) 2021 Future Insight Prize in the process by creating a food ‘generator’ concept that turns plastics into protein.

The names behind the project, which was initially funded by a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) cooperative agreement award for $7.2 million over four years, are Ting Lu, a professor of bioengineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Stephen Techtmann, associate professor of biological sciences at Michigan Technological University.

Their goal was to improve a process for converting plastic trash into protein powder and lubricants using a combination of chemicals and high heat (pyrolysis). The two scientists call their project a food ‘generator.’

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Artificially designed, amyloid-silk hybrid protein developed in Zhang lab even outperforms some spider silks.

Spider silk is said to be one of the strongest, toughest materials on the Earth. Now engineers at Washington University in St. Louis have designed amyloid silk hybrid proteins and produced them in engineered bacteria. The resulting fibers are stronger and tougher than some natural spider silks.

Their research was published in the journal ACS Nano.

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Some of the greatest mysteries in cosmology revolve around antimatter, and it’s hard to study because it’s rare and hard to produce in the lab. Now a team of physicists has outlined a relatively simple new way to create antimatter, by firing two lasers at each other to reproduce the conditions near a neutron star, converting light into matter and antimatter.

In principle, antimatter sounds simple – it’s just like regular matter, except its particles have the opposite charge. That basic difference has some major implications though: if matter and antimatter should ever meet, they will annihilate each other in a burst of energy. In fact, that should have destroyed the universe billions of years ago, but obviously that didn’t happen. So how did matter come to dominate? What tipped the scales in its favor? Or, where did all the antimatter go?

Unfortunately, antimatter’s scarcity and instability make it difficult to study to help answer those questions. It’s naturally produced under extreme conditions, such as lightning strikes, or near black holes and neutron stars, and artificially in huge facilities like the Large Hadron Collider.

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For 2 decades, physicists have strived to miniaturize particle accelerators—the huge machines that serve as atom smashers and x-ray sources. That effort just took a big step, as physicists in China used a small “plasma wakefield accelerator” to power a type of laser called a free-electron laser (FEL). The 12-meter-long FEL isn’t nearly as good as its kilometers-long predecessors. Still, other researchers say the experiment marks a major advance in miniaccelerators.

Experiment demonstrates improvement in particle beams from plasma-based accelerators.

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Cigarette butts are a common type of litter for marine environments but AI-powered robot litter pickers could be the solution.

It seems many people leave behind more than just sandcastles when they go home after a trip to the beach. Beach litter is a recurring issue, and it is damaging our coastal environments and wildlife.

And there is one small item that is causing a big problem: cigarette butts. They may only be a few centimetres long, but they are full of microplastics and toxic chemicals that harm the marine environment. They don’t easily decompose, and when they come into contact with the water, harmful substances can leach out.

Unfortunately, they are also the most common type of litter, with an estimated 4.5 trillion discarded annually.

Continue reading “This little robot is cleaning up our beaches, one cigarette butt at a time” | >

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Cassie the robot, invented at Oregon State University and produced by OSU spinout company Agility Robotics, has made history by traversing 5 kilometers, completing the route in just over 53 minutes.

Cassie was developed under the direction of robotics professor Jonathan Hurst with a 16-month, $1 million grant from the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense.

Since Cassie’s introduction in 2017, OSU students funded by the National Science Foundation have been exploring machine learning options for the robot.

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