The typical person in North America ingests about 100,000 granules of microplastic every year, much of it leaching from the plastic bottles we chug our sodas, water, and energy drinks from, a study by biologists in British Columbia found (“Drinking the Bottle Along With the Water,” 10 Jul 2019). Those bits lodge in the body...
Category: TRENDS IN HI-TECH SCIENCE
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SPACE FOR RENT
Billionaires may be commercializing space by renting out their rockets to NASA to send payloads aloft or by tossing up wealthy thrill-seekers for joyrides in zero gravity, but Orbital Reef has taken the idea to a different scale. It’s creating a space station in low Earth orbit for rent or lease to research scientists, product...
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A TRAVELING FACTORY
International consumer goods conglomerate Unilever has fitted up a shipping container as a “nanofactory” to make basic consumer items such as mayonnaise and skin creams. If it works, the company will make a fleet of the traveling factories that can be quickly rigged up to test new product ideas or shipped on trucks or boats...
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PIG’S KIDNEY WORKS IN A HUMAN. HEARTS ARE NEXT.
Medical researchers have been eyeing pig parts as replacements for failing human organs for decades. Now they’ve made one work. Surgeons from New York University attached a pig’s kidney to blood vessels of a human patient who had been declared brain-dead. Over a two-day experiment, the kidney—which remained outside the person’s body—worked as well as...
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EV BATTERY RECYCLING IS NOW A THING
Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited (CATL), China’s largest maker of EV batteries, will invest $32 billion renminbi, or about $5 billion, in a new plant to unmake them. Chinese law requires battery makers to recycle their products when consumers have used them up and CATL is planning to make the most out of that directive....
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QUANTUM COMPUTING COMES TO THE DESKTOP
Quantum computers (“Quantum Computing Makes a Quantum Leap,” 20 July, 2021) are the stuff of scientists’ dreams: machines that can solve a problem in minutes that would take a conventional computer years to work through. The difference: conventional computers process bits of information sequentially—one at a time—as a series of digital ones and zeroes. In...
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HUNDREDS OF UNKNOWN CHEMICALS FOUND IN VAPE LIQUIDS
E-cigarettes don’t contain most of the 400 contaminants and ingredients found in regular tobacco cigarettes, studies have shown. However, the vape liquids that fuel e-cigarettes contain almost 2,000 chemicals that science doesn’t even recognize, according to a new investigation by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, the first study to look so broadly at vape products’...
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TANK-GROWN BREAST MILK IN A BOTTLE
Breast-fed infants develop stronger immune systems, have fewer illnesses and infections, and fewer cases of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. That’s why 80 percent of mothers nurse their new babies. Pediatricians recommend breast-feeding for the first six months of life but as many as half of women quit after three months, according to a study by...
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CHARGER DELIVERS 60 MILES OF EV RANGE IN 3 MINUTES
A new electric vehicle charging station from global technology company ABB promises to solve two of drivers’ biggest EV concerns at once: fear of running out of juice between charging stations and having to wait half an hour or more while a booster charge trickles into the vehicle’s battery pack. ABB’s Terra 360 charger can...
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AIRBUS ACCEPTS THE CHALLENGE: IS A HYDROGEN-POWERED AIRLINER POSSIBLE?
Airbus, Europe’s largest aircraft builder, announced plans to begin building an all-hydrogen-powered passenger jetliner this decade and have it in service by 2035. The plan is part of the company’s commitment to converting to airplanes by 2050 that don’t give off carbon dioxide or other harmful emissions. Now Airbus has to face the hard realities...
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