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Posts tagged research
The Rats Will Power The Matrix
Sep 19th
French researchers have created just that, and it’s smaller and more powerful than current batteries meant to function inside a living being. And the battery has the survival readiness as rat’s themselves, as it’s the first batter to work inside a living rat. The battery worked for 11 days in its first trial. During the trial, the device produced 2 microwaves of power over several hours with a peak energy density of 24.4 microwaves per milliliter (or .73 microwaves per inch). A standard pacemaker battery requires a sustained power of 10 microwaves. A larger version of the biocell could easily power a pacemaker and would be significantly smaller that batteries currently in use.
Don’t worry, the rat was not harmed during the experiment and survived without complications. Upon removing the device, the researchers found that the rat’s body had ‘accepted’ it by coating the device with tissue containing newly grown blood vessels. This proves the body would facilitate oxygen and glucose movement to the implant.
“In the future we are expecting to develop, for instance, implantable biosensors able to monitor the level of glucose to control the insulin pump,” an implant used to treat diabetes, said study co-author Serge Cosnier of the Université Joseph Fourier in Grenoble, France.
Don’t worry, the rat was not harmed during the experiment and survived without complications. Upon removing the device, the researchers found that the rat’s body had ‘accepted’ it by coating the device with tissue containing newly grown blood vessels. This proves the body would facilitate oxygen and glucose movement to the implant.
“In the future we are expecting to develop, for instance, implantable biosensors able to monitor the level of glucose to control the insulin pump,” an implant used to treat diabetes, said study co-author Serge Cosnier of the Université Joseph Fourier in Grenoble, France.
Not all plants are created equal
Sep 15th
B. C. Wolverton, Ph.D, has worked as a research scientist for NASA for over 20 years. His study, in the late ’80s and early ’90s, of the interaction of plants and air found that houseplants, when placed in sealed chambers in the presence of specific chemicals, removed those chemicals from the chambers. Though the positive impact of houseplants on indoor has become common knowledge, it turns out that some plants are better at removing toxins like carbon monoxide, benzene and pesticides from the air than others. A study conducted by NASA found 50 plants that remove many or all of the most common indoor air toxins. Wolverton rated these 50 plants for removing chemical vapors, ease of growth, resistance to insect problems, and transpiration (the amount of water they expire into the air). He assigned plants a rating from one to 10, based on these different factors, and came up with the 10 best plants for removing indoor air toxins. The 10 plants are: Areca Palm, Lady Palm, Bamboo Palm, Rubber Plant, Dracaena “Janet Craig”, Philodendron, Dwarf Date Palm, Ficus Alii, Boston Red Fern, and Peace Lily.
Video: The Empathic Civilization
Sep 3rd
Is self-interest an inherent characteristic in humans, or is it something we can move past? Political adviser Jeremy Rifkin argues for the latter, saying that over the course of human history, humankind has extended its circle of empathy as their day-to-day world got larger and larger. Or as Rifkin, the president of the Foundation on Economic Trends and the author of 17 bestselling books, posits, “Can we reach biosphere consciousness and global empathy in time to avert planetary collapse? He also says, “The Empathic Civilization is emerging. A younger generation is fast extending its empathic embrace beyond religious affiliations and national identification to include the whole of humanity and the vast project of life that envelops the Earth.” In a sense, it would be to our best self-interest to be interested in others. Video after the break
Understanding The Science of Surfing
Aug 22nd
Mechanical engineering students at the University of California, San Diego have outfitted a surfboard with a computer and sensors. These devices record the speed of the water flowing beneath the board and send this information to a laptop on shore. The purpose of such information is to determine whether surfboards have an optimal flexibility, a stiffness that makes catching waves as enjoyable as possible. Essentially, these students are studying how the boards change shape as people ride them, and how this shape affects the rider’s surfing experience.
To Recharge Battery, Just Blow Air
Aug 12th
Scientists at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland have developed the world’s first battery fueled by air. This battery has 10 times the storage capacity of conventional batteries and could pave the way for changes and innovations in things like mobile phones, laptops and electric cars. It’s much lighter than current batteries as the main chemical in traditional batteries, lithium cobalt oxide, is replaced with carbon and oxygen. This also helps to recharge the battery as it’s used, perhaps signifying the death of the phrase, “my battery’s dead”. Professor Peter Bruce of the Chemistry Department at the University of St Andrews, said in the Telegraph: “The benefits are it’s much smaller and lighter so better for transporting small applications… Storage is also important in the development of green power. You need to store electricity because wind and solar power is intermittent.”
Princeton-led team finds new building block in cells
Aug 7th
Zemer Gitai, an assistant professor of molecular biology at Princeton University, members of his laboratory, and scientists from the California Institute of Technology have published results in Nature Cell Biology of new research into how a metabolic enzyme in bacteria forms cytoplasmic filaments that affect bacterial cell shape. The study was published online July 18. Gitai
MIT researchers demonstrate how much candidate appearances affect election outcomes
Aug 1st
Per study, people around the world have similar ideas about what a good politician looks like. Read on.
LAMBORGHINI ANNOUNCES NEW CENTER FOR CARBON FIBER RESEARCH IN SANT’AGATA BOLOGNESE
Aug 1st
Sant’Agata Bolognese — Automobili Lamborghini S.p.A. announces a new Advanced Composites Research Center (ACRC) at its headquarters in Sant’Agata Bolognese. The center carries out research on innovative design and production methods for carbon-fiber elements. Both the ACRC and an all-new, highly efficient production process for extremely complex carbon-fiber structures were developed at the same time. The process
MIT Students Develop A Low-Cost Portable Ventilator
Jul 20th
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — A team of students from MIT has devised a new low-cost ventilator to keep patients breathing in places that lack standard mechanical ventilators, or during times of emergency such as pandemics or natural disasters, when normal hospital resources may be overextended. They have designed a system that uses the same widely available
MIT researchers create fibers that can detect and produce sound
Jul 13th
For centuries, “man-made fibers” meant the raw stuff of clothes and ropes; in the information age, it’s come to mean the filaments of glass that carry data in communications networks. But to Yoel Fink, an associate professor of materials science and principal investigator at MIT’s Research Lab of Electronics, the threads used in textiles and even optical fibers are much too passive. For the past decade, his lab has been working to develop fibers with ever more sophisticated properties, to enable fabrics that can interact with their environment.
