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But Ben Shneiderman, a University of Maryland computer scientist who has for decades warned against blindly automating tasks with computers, thinks fully automated cars and the tech industry’s vision for a robotic future is misguided. Even dangerous. Robots should collaborate with humans, he believes, rather than replace them.

A computer scientist argues that the quest for fully automated robots is misguided, perhaps even dangerous. His decades of warnings are gaining more attention.

Three critically ill patients at Baptist Hospital in Miami were the first in the U.S. to be successfully treated with stem cells.

The patients were suffering from acute respiratory distress syndrome, or ARDS, and doctors infused them intravenously with cells derived from the lining of umbilical cords.

These are called mesenchymal stem cells and within days after the infusion, the patients who needed 100% oxygen on ventilator support, saw their requirement slashed in half. This significant reduction was also accompanied by a drop in inflammatory markers, meaning that the harmful inflammation crippling the lungs was not only arrested but reversed, according to Baptist Health South

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Here’s a new chapter in the story of the miniaturization of machines: researchers in a laboratory in Singapore have shown that a single atom can function as either an engine or a fridge. Such a device could be engineered into future computers and fuel cells to control energy flows.” Think about how your computer or laptop has a lot of things inside it that heat up. Today you cool that with a fan that blows air. In nanomachines or quantum computers, small devices that do cooling could be something useful,” says Dario Poletti from the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD).

This work gives new insight into the mechanics of such devices. The work is a collaboration involving researchers at the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) and Department of Physics at the National University of Singapore (NUS), SUTD and at the University of Augsburg in Germany. The results were published in the peer-reviewed journal npj Quantum Information on 1 May.

Engines and refrigerators are both machines described by thermodynamics, a branch of science that tells us how energy moves within a system and how we can extract useful work. A classical engine turns energy into useful work. A refrigerator does work to transfer heat, reducing the local temperature. They are, in some sense, opposites.

DNA damage is common to our cells, but when we’re young our bodies can fix it pretty easily. Unfortunately we lose that ability over time, leading to many of the symptoms of aging that we know all too well. A new study from MIT has found that reactivating a certain enzyme improves repair of DNA damage in neurons, which helps Alzheimer’s patients and others with cognitive decline.

Previous studies by the team have shown that an enzyme called HDAC1 seems to be involved in DNA repair in neurons. For the new study, the researchers examined what happens when HDAC1 doesn’t do its job.

The team engineered mice to be deficient in HDAC1, and monitored their health compared to normal mice. Things looked good during the animals’ youth – there were no differences in DNA damage or behavior between the two groups. But as they aged, the decline became clear.

Circa 2015

A decidedly renewable resource has some very profitable uses.

Circa 2014 o.o

It’s a much better option than desalination.

Engineers found a way to stabilize a drone that only uses two propellers.

In March, Lauren McDonald was on hand for GM’s EV Day, during which much of the discussion was about the new Ultium batteries GM and LG Chem will be manufacturing at a new battery factory just down the road from the former Lordstown, Ohio assembly plant. That factory is projected to have an annual capacity of 30 gigawatt-hours of battery cells. While GM made a bunch of grandiose claims about its campaign to bring electric cars to market that day, few actual details about the Ultium battery emerged during the presentation.

A team of researchers from the University of Lille, CNRS, Centrale Lille, University of Artois, in France, and Keele University in the U.K has developed a way to produce ethane from methane using a photochemical looping strategy. In their paper published in the journal Nature Energy, the group describes their process. Fumiaki Amano with the University of Kitakyushu in Japan has published a News & Views piece on the work done by the team in the same journal issue.

Over the past several years, methane has become important for the production of fuels and other chemicals. But due to its stability, converting methane to desired products requires high temperatures and results in less-than-desired selectivity. Developing a way to carry out such conversions without the need for energy intensive heat production has been a goal of chemists in the field for several years. Prior research has suggested that methane coupling is an attractive option due to the ease with which it can be dehydrogenated to ethylene. In this new effort, the researchers followed up on such suggestions, and in so doing, have developed a way to produce ethane from methane that overcomes prior problems.

Amano suggests the success factor used by the researchers centered around the development of a three-part nanocomposite material—by adding phosphotungstic acid and silver cations to a traditional TiO₂ photocatalyst. The resulting Ag–HPW/TiO₂ nanocomposites induced methane coupling which resulted in the production of ethane—and also small amounts of propane and CO₂. The final result was a two-stage looping process that was based on photochemical conversions. Amano notes that the process resulted in silver cation reduction to a metallic, which was followed up by reoxidization of a metallic silver species using oxygen that was irradiated with ultraviolet light. He also points out that the HPW coating that was used on the particles was a major factor in improving selectivity, and suggests that the looping redox cycle is similar in some ways to the reactions that happen in rechargeable batteries.