The British government is seeking a site for what would be the world’s first commercial fusion reactor. The device would heat hydrogen gas to the temperature of the sun’s surface to melt hydrogen atoms together, unleashing vast energies and providing clean power in more quantities than the device uses. So-called “hot fusion” has been in...
Category: TRENDS IN HI-TECH SCIENCE
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AN ELECTRONIC BLOOD VESSEL
Scientists have been growing miniature versions of organs, such as livers and lungs, in labs for some time. But creating blood vessels to nourish and sustain those lab-grown tissues has been harder. Engineered vessels often have resulted in tissue rejection or they simply failed to work for sustained periods of time. Now scientists at China’s...
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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TRANSFORMS CHEMICAL ENGINEERING
Chemical engineering has been a laborious process: marking up the whiteboard to lay out a hypothesis, then putting on the lab coat, grabbing the test tubes, and hitting the workbench for long sessions of “wet chemistry” to test the idea. Now artificial intelligence can do most of that wet work instead. IBM’s new RoboRXN chemistry...
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STUDY: OXYGEN TREATMENT REVERSES AGING
Researchers at Tel Aviv University and the Shamir Medical Center say they have reversed key signs of aging in older adults by subjecting them to hyperbaric oxygen treatments (HOTs). In HOTs, a person is sealed in a tank and the air pressure inside the tank is raised to two or three times normal levels. As...
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NEW “TWISTRONICS” GRAPHENE IS SUPERCONDUCTOR
Since it was first created in 2004, graphene – a sheet of carbon just one atom thick – has fascinated scientists as a kind of universal material: it’s bendable yet many times stronger than steel, it’s transparent, and conducts electricity. Graphene already is being used in medical filters and specialty coatings, among a spectrum of...
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CAN VITAMIN D DEFEAT THE COVID VIRUS?
A small study by doctors at Reina Sofia University Hospital in Cordoba, Spain, indicates that taking vitamin D supplements might keep a person from catching the COVID virus or minimize its effects on those who already have it. The physicians divided 76 newly hospitalized COVID patients into two groups. One group of 26 was given...
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LOOKING ALZHEIMER’S IN THE EYE
One of the many frustrations surrounding Alzheimer’s disease has been physicians’ inability to diagnose it. Often, the only way to be sure of its presence has been to autopsy a person’s brain after the patient has died. Years ago, researchers at the University of Minnesota began looking at the retina, the thin layer of tissue...
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SETBACK FOR NOVEL NUCLEAR PLANT DESIGN
Eight of 36 utilities that had agreed to partner to help finance a novel nuclear power plant to be owned by Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS) have withdrawn from the group. The eight quit the plan soon after UAMPS announced the plant would take three years longer to build than expected and cost 50...
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SYNTHETIC PROTEIN FOOLS COVID VIRUS, PREVENTS INFECTION
An international team of researchers has created a synthetic protein that binds to the spikes on a COVID virus. The new protein effectively “fills up” the space on the virus that it would use to bind to a human cell. The filled-in connection leaves the virus no way to grab onto a human cell and...
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NEW ROBOT SWIMS, CRAWLS, RUNS OVER WATER
The new AmphiSTAR robot from Ben Gurion University swims, crawls over rough ground using a sprawling mechanism inspired by cockroaches, and runs over water like a basilisk lizard, the designers say. The robot, which fits in the palm of a hand, holds four propellers on outboard fins. The propellers can be tilted out behind to...