“Today, we tell the world that America has achieved a tremendous scientific breakthrough,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm in a December press conference. “…This milestone moves us one significant step closer to the possibility of zero carbon abundant fusion energy powering our society. If we can advance fusion energy, we could use it to produce electricity, transportation fuels, power heavy industry, [and] so much more.”

The revolutionary leap forward took place on December 5th in the National Ignition Facility at California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where scientists have been trying to generate fusion since 2009.

“The pursuit of fusion ignition in the laboratory is one of the most significant scientific challenges ever tackled by humanity, and achieving it is a triumph of science, engineering, and most of all, people,” says LLNL Director Dr. Kim Budil. “Crossing this threshold is the vision that has driven 60 years of dedicated pursuit — a continual process of learning, building, expanding knowledge and capability, and then finding ways to overcome the new challenges that emerged. These are the problems that the U.S. national laboratories were created to solve.”

The experiment consisted of physicists pointing 192 of the world’s most powerful lasers at a pencil eraser-sized fuel pellet wrapped in a diamond. The pellet, made up of deuterium and tritium (both isotopes of hydrogen), was blasted with 2.05 megajoules of energy and heated up to 3 million degrees Celsius for a fraction of a second. The heat vaporized the hydrogen nub and released a wave of neutron particles that produced 3 megajoules of energy.

This is the first time that scientists have been able to breach the dividing line of “ignition,” the point at which the amount of energy created equals the amount of energy required to start the reaction.

“You see one diagnostic and you think maybe that’s not real and then you start to see more and more diagnostics rolling in, pointing to the same thing,” says Annie Kritcher, a physicist at Livermore who reviewed the data immediately after the experiment. “It’s a great feeling.”

By breaking the ignition barrier, scientists have proved that reproducing the same energy that creates stars is possible and could eventually lead to a sustainable form of energy that doesn’t require harmful carbon dioxide or other polluting byproducts.

Of course, it could still be years before clean energy on is available on a mass scale. “Probably decades,” said Dr. Budil during the press conference. “Not six decades, I don’t think. I think not five decades, which is what we used to say. I think it’s moving into the foreground and probably, with concerted effort and investment, a few decades of research on the underlying technologies could put us in a position to build a power plant.”

To make nuclear fusion viable as a global energy source, scientists will have to develop more efficient lasers and better containment options. Current power plant designs can’t handle the kind of heat and energy created by nuclear fusion.

The December 5th breakthrough in nuclear fusion gives us hope that truly clean energy is in our planet’s future. “This is a great day,” said Energy Secretary Granholm, one that “will go down in the history books.”

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In her new book The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants, University of British Columbia professor Karen Bakker outlines some of the most ground-breaking experiments in animal and plant communication.

“Digital technologies, so often associated with our alienation from nature, are offering us an opportunity to listen to nonhumans in powerful ways, reviving our connection to the natural world,” writes Bakker, a director at the UBC Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability.

She points out that digital listening posts are now being used to continuously record the sounds of ecosystems around the planet, from rainforests to the bottom of the ocean. Developments in miniaturization have even enabled scientists to place microphones on tiny animals like honeybees.

“Combined, these digital devices function like a planetary-scale hearing aid: enabling humans to observe and study nature’s sounds beyond the limits of our sensory capabilities,” Bakker writes. The next step for many scientists is harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to sift through these sounds and enable robots to “speak animal languages and essentially breach the barrier of interspecies communication.”

She cites a team of researchers in Germany that have taught tiny robots how to do the honeybee waggle dance. Using these dancing machines, the scientists were able to command the honeybees to stop moving, and to communicate where to fly to collect a specific nectar. The researchers plan to experiment with implanting robots into the hives so that the honeybees accept them as members of their community.

Bakker also writes about bioacoustics scientist Katie Payne and her discoveries regarding elephant communication. Payne was the first to find that elephants make infrasound signals, sounds below the human hearing range. The vibrations of these signals allow elephants to send messages across long distances through soil and stones. Scientists have since found that elephants have different signals for “honeybee” and “human,” as well as distinguishable signals for “threatening human” versus “nonthreatening human.” If the power of AI could be harnessed to send messages to elephant herds, we might be able to help protect their dwindling populations without removing them from their natural habitats.

Coral reefs also get attention in Bakker’s book. “A healthy coral reef sounds a little bit like an underwater symphony,” she explains. “There are cracks and burbles and hisses and clicks from the reef and its inhabitants and even whales dozens of miles away. If you could hear in the ultrasonic, you might hear the coral itself.” With the use of AI, scientists might eventually be able to get coral to repopulate certain areas by broadcasting “healthy coral reef” sounds to coral larvae.

While the idea of someday having “a zoological version of Google Translate” sounds overwhelmingly positive, there is the fear is that unscrupulous humans might use the technology to control animal populations for their own gain. Bakker warns that the possibility of exploiting animals “raises a lot of alarm bells” and that our “newfound powers” should never be used “to assert our domination over animals and plants.”

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The robot’s self-led evolution is part of what makes it so fascinating. It isn’t improving its speed and dexterity thanks to new lines of code in its programming or some kind of robot bootcamp. It’s learning on its own by running through facilities full of obstacles that mimic conditions in the real world.

A lot of robot developers train their creations to navigate rough terrain by essentially running them at full capacity at all times, anticipating the most challenging obstacles like ice on a path. But that makes the robot inefficient, and keeps it from learning through experience. MIT puts the Mini Cheetah and other robots through physical agility courses, but they’ve also found a much faster way to get the results they want: through artificial intelligence.

The Mini Cheetah robot project is led by researchers from the Institute of AI and Fundamental Interactions (IAIFI) and MIT’s Improbable AI Lab, which is part of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) directed by MIT Assistant Professor Pulkit Agrawal. MIT PhD student Gabriel Margolas and IAIFI postdoc Ge Yang explained the process in an interview with MIT.

“Programming how a robot should act in every possible situation is simply very hard,” Margolas and Yang explain. “The process is tedious, because if a robot were to fail on a particular terrain, a human engineer would need to identify the cause and failure and manually adapt the robot controller, and this process can require substantial human time. Learning by trial and error removes the need for a human to specify precisely how the robot should behave in every situation. This would work if (1) the robot can experience an extremely wide range of terrains; and (2) the robot can automatically improve its behavior with experience.”

“Thanks to modern simulation tools, our robot can accumulate 100 days worth of experience on diverse terrains in just three hours of actual time. We developed an approach by which the robot’s behavior improves from simulated experience, and our approach critically also enables the successful deployment of those learned behaviors in the real world.”

The Mini Cheetah features a mechanically robust design that lets it survive accidents and high-impact falls. It’s powered by high-torque actuators that allow for omnidirectional movement with different gaits depending on the terrain: trotting, pacing, bounding, and something called “pronking,” a behavior seen in animals like gazelles that involves springing into the air and lifting all four feet off the ground simultaneously.

This is what allows the Mini Cheetah to do a 360-degree backflip, which it was able to do before it could even walk. The cheetah has also learned how to turn at high speeds and run with a disabled leg. To understand just how agile the Mini Cheetah really is, you have to see it in action. Check out this video from MIT CSAIL showing the robot’s latest evolution.

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“We’ve made huge strides with silicon computing, but they’re still rigid and inflexible,” says Brett Kagan, an author of the study published in Neuron and Chief Scientific Officer at Cortical Labs in Melbourne, Australia. “That’s something we don’t see with biology.”

“From worms to flies to humans, neurons are the starting block for generalized intelligence,” he adds. “So, the question was, can we interact with neurons in a way to harness that inherent intelligence?…We chose Pong due to its simplicity and familiarity, but [also because] it was one of the first games used in machine learning, so we wanted to recognize that.”

Kagan and his team of researchers from 10 other institutions decided to explore that query by seeing how brain cells would react when taught to play a video game.

To achieve their goal, the researchers took material from adult stem cells and grew a layer of 800,000 living neurons on a silicon chip at the bottom of a nutrient-filled petri dish. The chip was connected to a computer, with the ability to detect and send electrical signals to the neurons. The team then booted up a game of Pong, sending electrical impulses to the living sample to indicate the position of the bouncing ball. The computer monitored electrical activity from the cells to see what they did with the new information.

At first, they didn’t do much — until the researchers gave the brain cells some motivation to learn to play. Every time the brain cells sent electrical signals to move the paddle to where the ball would be, scientists gave the cells a gift in the form of a beautifully organized burst of electrical activity. If the cells incorrectly predicted the position, they would instead receive a stream of chaotic white noise.

“If they hit the ball, we gave them something predictable,” Kagan says. “When they missed it, they got something that was totally unpredictable.”

This reward and punishment strategy was based on the Free Energy Principle that says brain cells always want to be able to predict their environment, leading them to seek out organized electrical signals over chaotic ones.

Eventually the petri dish cells learned to formulate electrical patterns that moved the paddle in front of the ball, gradually resulting in longer rallies. While the cells never got very good at playing, they still predicted the correct position significantly more often than just random simulations, an exciting achievement considering that the petri dish contained fewer brain cells than a cockroach.

“If you could see a cockroach playing a game of Pong and it was able to hit the ball twice as often as it was missing it, you would be pretty impressed with that cockroach,” Kagan says. The research team hopes that this experiment will lead to breakthroughs in understanding how the brain works, with possible biocomputing implications.

Study co-author Karl Friston, a theoretical neuroscientist and professor at University College London, says: “We now have, in principle, the ultimate biomimetic ‘sandbox’ in which to test the effects of drugs and genetic variants — a sandbox constituted by exactly the same computing (neuronal) elements found in your brain and mine.”

The post These Lab-Grown Brain Cells Just Learned How to Play Pong first appeared on Dornob.

In October, multinational pharmaceutical company Merck & Co. declared that it was exercising its option to jointly develop and commercialize a personalized cancer vaccine (PCV) from Moderna that is already undergoing human trials. Called mRNA-4157/V940, the vaccine is designed for high-risk melanoma patients. According to the American Academy of Dermatology Association, the vast majority of skin cancer deaths are from melanoma, resulting in roughly 20 American deaths every day.

While most vaccines try to prevent the body from ever getting a disease, cancer vaccines of that nature have proven elusive in the past. The mRNA-4157/V940 takes a different approach, teaching the immune systems of those with melanoma how to fight off tumors based on their individual cancer markers.

Here’s how it works: The scientists take samples of a melanoma patient’s mutated cancer cells. They then sequence the tumor genes, identifying the antigens that will trigger an immune response. From there, they create an individualized mRNA vaccine that can tell the patient’s body to generate T cells to combat the specific mutational signature of the tumors, thereby halting the progress of the cancer.

Biotechnology firm Moderna was one of the first major companies to develop an effective vaccine against the COVID-19 disease, helping to dramatically reduce the severity of the global pandemic. That vaccine used breakthrough mRNA technology to teach the body to recognize and fight a disease without ever having encountered it (by contrast, traditional vaccines introduce a weakened or inactivated germ into the body so it can learn to combat it in the future). As this technology proved successful at preventing SARS viruses, many companies have since started developing mRNA vaccines for everything from heart failure to food allergies to dementia.

The fact that Merck has exercised its option with Moderna on this mRNA cancer vaccine means that human trials are going very well. The two companies first established the agreement in 2016 for Moderna to develop a cancer-fighting injection, but none of the research was promising enough for Merck to want to jump in on the action until now. Merck will pay Moderna $250 million to help with and share in the profits of further development, sales, and distribution of mRNA-4157/V940.

The cancer vaccine is currently being administered in Phase 2 clinical trials among 157 patients who have had their cancer surgically removed but are at high risk for recurrence. Some of the patients in the trial receive nine doses of mRNA-4157/V940 every three weeks, in addition to Merck’s powerhouse cancer immunotherapy Keytruda every three weeks. The rest of the patients only receive Keytruda. The study’s main goal is to determine how long patients stay recurrence-free based on both treatment options. Primary data is expected in the fourth quarter of 2022, but preliminary results are extremely encouraging, according to both companies.

“This long-term collaboration combining Merck’s expertise in immuno-oncology with Moderna’s pioneering mRNA technology has yielded a novel tailored vaccine approach,” says Dr. Eliav Barr, Merck’s Senior Vice President, Head of Global Clinical Development, and Chief Medical Officer, in a press release, adding “We look forward to working with our colleagues at Moderna to advance mRNA-4157/V940 in combination with KEYTRUDA as it aligns with our strategy to impact early-stage disease.”

“Together we have made significant progress in advancing mRNA-4157 as an investigational personalized cancer treatment used in combination with KEYTRUDA,” explains Stephen Hoge, M.D. and President of Moderna. “With data expected this quarter on PCV, we continue to be excited about the future and the impact mRNA can have as a new treatment paradigm in the management of cancer.”

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A collection of researchers from France’s École Polytechnique school of engineering, Germany’s Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) laboratory, and the University of Rostock attempted to simulate the conditions found on the two massive planets made from ice rocks and ice-forming molecules.

The interiors of Uranus and Neptune are composed mainly of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, a combination of elements that are actually found in similar proportions in PET (polyethylene terephthalate), the polymer that makes up everyday objects like plastic water bottles and plastic packaging. Thankfully for their research, PET sheets are cheap to come by.

Even though the icy giants are the coldest planets in our solar system, with temperatures reaching lows of -373 °F, the interiors can still top 10,000°F, with an atmospheric pressure a million times greater than that on Earth. To mimic these conditions, the researchers brought their plastic bottle material to California’s National Accelerator Laboratory to make use of the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), an extremely powerful, hard x-ray free electron laser.

After firing ten ultra-concentrated laser pulses per second at the plastic, the PET reached temperatures of 10,832 °F, comparable to the inner temperatures of Neptune and Uranus. The impact of the laser on the plastic bottle also created a shockwave that compressed the material at a pressure equal to those on the icy giants. The result was flashier than expected, producing an explosion of nanodiamonds.

“We discovered that this extreme pressure produced tiny diamonds,” explains Dominik Kraus, HZDR physicist and University of Rostock professor.

Kraus adds that “the nanodiamonds are indeed diamonds in terms of crystal structure. The same crystal structure as on many wedding rings, just a million times smaller. So yes, these are actual diamonds. On the short timescale of our experiments, they have not enough time to grow further. However, inside planets where we could have growth times of millions of years, the diamonds could be gigantic — kilometers or larger.”

The discovery has both terrestrial and celestial implications. Here on Earth, diamonds might now be produced to perfection. “So far, diamonds of this kind have mainly been produced by detonating explosives,” says Kraus. “With the help of laser flashes, they could be manufactured more cleanly in the future. The X-ray laser means we have a lab tool that can precisely control the diamonds’ growth.”

This could also be a new way to manufacture nanodiamonds used as “quibits” for quantum computing and sensors, or to create the tiny diamonds that are used for many industrial strength abrasives and polishing agents. In the space arena, the findings could help expand our knowledge of the most common type of planets floating around in the universe, including the fact that they may have continual sparkling diamond showers.

“Planets like Uranus and Neptune, and slightly smaller, have been found to be the most abundant planets outside our Solar System,” Kraus says. “Understanding those planets will therefore also help to get further inside where life could exist outside our Solar System.”

The post Researchers Accidentally Create Nanodiamonds from Plastic Bottles first appeared on Dornob.

“It happens to be the case that the spider — after it’s deceased — is the perfect architecture for small-scale, naturally derived grippers,” says Daniel Preston, an engineer with Rice’s George R. Brown School of Engineering. The macabre idea came to Preston and Rice graduate student Faye Yap when they encountered one of the eight-legged creatures in their lab post-mortem.

“We were moving stuff around in the lab and we noticed a curled-up spider at the edge of the hallway,” says Yap. “We were really curious as to why spiders curl up after they die.”

They quickly realized that, unlike antagonistic human muscles like biceps and triceps, spiders only have flexor muscles, which allow their legs to curl in. They must be extended outward by hydraulic pressure.

“When they die, they lose the ability to actively pressurize their bodies. That’s why they curl up,” Yap adds. “At the time, we were thinking, ‘Oh, this is super interesting.’ We wanted to find a way to leverage this mechanism.”

He eventually harnessed that power by supergluing a needle into the hydraulic chamber, or prosoma, of a wolf spider carcass. They then connected the other end of the needle to a handheld syringe. When they injected a shot of air into the “necrobot’s” legs, they unfurled instantaneously, and then re-curled when the pressure was relieved. The legs can also be individually controlled thanks to the internal valves in the spider prosoma.

Yap notes “When we did it, it worked … right off the bat. I don’t even know how to describe it — that moment when you see it move.”

The scientists were able to control the zombie spiders to turn on and off a light switch and even pick up other dead spiders. And the necrobots repeated the tasks hundreds of times without decay.

“It starts to experience some wear and tear as we got close to 1,000 cycles,” says Preston. “We think that’s related to issues with dehydration of the joints. We think we can overcome that by applying polymeric coatings.”

Preston and Yap are excited about the implications these spider robots could have on the world. Preston says “There are a lot of pick-and-place tasks we could look into, repetitive tasks like sorting or moving objects around at these small scales, and maybe even things like assembly of microelectronics.”

“Another application could be deploying it to capture smaller insects in nature because it’s inherently camouflaged,” adds Yap. And as a final bonus, these necrobots are “biodegradable.” Preston explains “We’re not introducing a big waste stream, which can be a problem with more traditional components.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JOS6hMHIUM
Arachnophiles — and anyone else fascinated by the idea of zombie spiders — can watch a video of their work here.

The post “Technomancer” Scientists Make Robot Zombies Out of Dead Spiders first appeared on Dornob.

“The idea is that robots need to take care of themselves,” says Boyuan Chen, a roboticist at Duke University in North Carolina and an author of a study on the self-aware robot published in Science. “In order to do that, we want a robot to understand their body.”

“We humans clearly have a notion of self,” he adds. “Close your eyes and try to imagine how your own body would move if you were to take some action, such as stretch your arms forward or take a step backward. Somewhere inside our brain we have a notion of self, a self-model that informs us what volume of our immediate surroundings we occupy, and how that volume changes as we move.”

In addition to Chen, the team for this project included Robert Kwiatkowski and Carl Vondrick, both with the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University, and Hod Lipson from Columbia’s Mechanical Engineering Department. Together with their assistants, they created a simple robotic arm and gave it access to multiple camera feeds so it could essentially see itself from several angles.

“We were really curious to see how the robot imagined itself,” says Lipson. “But you can’t just peek into a neural network, it’s a black box.”

Using that neural network, the robot (which was mounted to a table) was able to create a conglomerate picture of its own shape and size, using a marker to draw a self-portrait on paper for the researchers. The robot was also given a command to pick up a red sphere on the surface of the table. Through a process of wiggling and rotating its arm back and forth, it began to teach itself the cause and effect of each movement. After just three hours, it was able to easily touch the ball consistently.

While past robots have been self-aware in that they were given models of themselves, this experiment is novel, as the robot came up with an understanding of itself much in the way an animal or human would — by looking in the mirror, flailing limbs about, and trying out new motions. A robot that can self-model could be much more effective and long-lasting.

“Self-modeling is a primitive form of self-awareness,” Chen explains. “If a robot, animal, or human has an accurate self-model, it can function better in the world, it can make better decisions, and it has an evolutionary advantage.”

This self-awareness could help robots on assembly lines diagnose their own problems and learn to fix them. It could also be extremely useful in situations where humans cannot be on hand to solve mechanical errors, like deep sea dives or in space.

The robotic arm currently has four degrees of freedom, or types of motion. The researchers are now trying to work it up to 12 degrees. By comparison, a human body has hundreds.

“The more complex you are, the more you need this self-model to make predictions. You can’t just guess your way through the future,” notes Lipson. “We’ll have to figure out how to do this with increasingly complex systems.”

The group’s work is also groundbreaking in that most researchers first use virtual simulations to model how a robot would respond, but such computations can be expensive and time demanding. Allowing a robot to teach itself about its own nature could potentially save vast amounts of money and resources.

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Calling the space photos “really gorgeous,” Jane Rigby, NASA’s Operations Project Scientist for the telescope, said: “that’s something that has been true for every image we’ve gotten with Webb. We can’t take blank sky [images]. Everywhere we look, there’s galaxies everywhere.”

The Webb telescope got its start back in 1996 under the name Next Generation Space Telescope. As an international program, NASA combined forces with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency during the following two decades of research and development. It was finally launched on Christmas Day 2021 with the goal of being the premier observatory of this decade. It’s also the largest infrared telescope currently in space.

For the first six months, the telescope’s equipment calibrated as the device glided into its halo orbit, a spot between the sun and the moon where the gravitational forces from both keep it on a specific path. Once the calibration was complete, Webb was able to send its first set of data. These are some of its biggest discoveries:

Deep Field

The first deep field captured by Webb is galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, itself a collection of thousands of galaxies. “This deep field, taken by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), is a composite made from images at different wavelengths, totaling 12.5 hours — achieving depths at infrared wavelengths beyond the Hubble Space Telescope’s deepest fields, which took weeks,” NASA explains. Those 12.5 hours allowed Webb to pinpoint light from one galaxy that had traveled 13.1 billion years before reaching the giant telescope’s mirrors.

Baby Stars

Webb also captured a chunk of a “stellar nursery” roughly 7,600 lightyears from Earth. Called NGC 3324, it is situated at the northwest corner of the Carina Nebula. The image shows an amazing mountain of space dust as stars begin to form. “The blistering ultraviolet radiation from the young stars is sculpting the nebula’s wall by slowly eroding it away,” NASA said in a statement. “Dramatic pillars tower above the glowing wall of gas, resisting this radiation. The ‘steam’ that appears to rise from the celestial ‘mountains’ is actually hot, ionized gas and hot dust streaming away from the nebula due to the relentless radiation.”

Star Deathbed

Webb was also able to immortalize the death of a star in the Southern Ring Nebula, with exquisite detail thanks to the mid-infrared technology.

Five Galaxies in One Image

Webb also shined its lens on a cluster of galaxies called Stephan’s Quintet, a great celestial laboratory for studying the effects galaxies have on each other. The returned picture of this area is the largest of the telescope’s images to date, with over 120 million pixels and a conglomeration of almost 1,000 separate image files. The photo is actually about one-fifth the size of the Moon’s diameter.

Puffy Giants

The telescope also took in data on WASP-96 b, a giant gas planet outside our solar system. While NASA didn’t release any pictures of this one, they did put out a spectrum analysis of the planet’s atmosphere. Scientists also found the “chemical fingerprint” of water in the swirling gas, itself an epic discovery.

The James Webb Space Telescope developers designed it to pull in images for at least five years, but they are hopeful it will last at least ten. The longevity will most likely be limited by how much fuel it takes to maintain the halo orbit around the sun. No matter how long it lasts, it’s clear the cutting-edge device is already providing us with incredible new insights into our universe.

The post NASA’s James Webb Telescope Glimpses Galaxies More Than 13 Billion Years Old first appeared on Dornob.

Using a helium balloon, a Styrofoam cooler, an extendable rod, and an Insta360 ONE X2 action camera, the students assembled a device that could reach into the limits of the Earth’s atmosphere. During that week of work, educational specialists from Hi-Impact, whose mission is to bring technology and media into the school curriculum, taught the children about how the helium in the balloon expands as the altitude increases (with most reaching a height between 60,000 and 100,000 feet above Earth). They learned how the atmospheric pressure decreases the higher it rises, finally forcing the balloon to burst. They also studied how to predict the flight path of the balloon based on wind forecasts and the size of the payload.

Based in Northern England, Hi-Impact has been visiting schools around the UK for over a decade now, teaching students to construct their own weather balloons and getting them excited about science. Their materials list has adapted over the years to provide better space flights and images of Earth. In particular, the addition of the Insta360 camera has been key to capturing awe-inspiring photos from the planet’s outer atmosphere.

“The 360-degree camera gives Hi-Impact the ability to see everything that goes on during the flight — from the excited faces at takeoff, through the rain as it passes into the clouds, and eventually the blackness of the sky and the burst of the balloon before drifting back down aided by a parachute,” explains Simon Sloan, the company’s Innovation Manager.

After the students launched this year’s balloon, it rose over 80,000 feet high over the course of two hours before popping and falling back to Earth roughly 125 miles from the launch site. The multiple trackers placed on the payload (and monitored by the students) allowed Hi-Impact to easily find the device and collect plenty of data. Thanks to its camera footage, students were even able to watch the balloon explode at the pinnacle of its climb.

While the balloon was certainly short of the 327,000 feet it takes to technically reach space, the St. Bridget’s floating camera was still able to produce professional quality photos of the full curvature of the Earth, complete with a layer of puffy clouds draped over the deep blue oceans. Plus, the Insta360 was able to withstand the extreme temperatures, which fell as low as -49 degrees Fahrenheit on this flight.

This isn’t the first year of weather balloons for St. Bridget’s, either. They began their relationship with Hi-Impact several years ago, and the students have looked forward to the annual event where Years 5 and 6 take control of the launch and run mission control. “This is always an exciting few days for the school,” St. Bridget’s administration says.

The post Elementary Students’ Weather Balloon Camera Captures Stunning Images Near Space first appeared on Dornob.

Most people have heard of 3D printing — a manufacturing process that involves pushing a building material like plastic or resin through a machine that forms it into a precise and predetermined shape. This type of printing is revolutionizing all kinds of industries from construction to automobiles. Scientists have also been able to 3D print tissues and biological parts from living cells called bio-inks.

The University of Chicago engineers have taken that process one step further by developing a bio-ink that can be printed in four dimensions. That means there’s also a time component to the product. Namely, this special bio-ink can instruct the material to transform its shape over time. It can even do this multiple times in a preprogrammed schedule or on-demand in response to external signals.

“This bio-ink system provides the opportunity to print bio-constructs capable of achieving more sophisticated architectural changes over time than was previously possible,” says research leader Eben Alsberg, a professor in the departments of biomedical, mechanical, and industrial engineering, pharmacology and regenerative medicine, and orthopedics in a university publication.

“These cell-rich structures with pre-programmable and controllable shape morphing promise to better mimic the body’s natural developmental processes and could help scientists conduct more accurate studies of tissue morphogenesis and achieve greater advances in tissue engineering,” he adds.

The bio-ink Alsberg and his team created is made up of tightly-packed, flake-shaped microgels and living cells.

“The bio-inks have what are called shear-thinning and rapid self-healing properties that enable smooth extrusion-based printing with high resolution and high fidelity without a supporting bath. The printed bioconstructs, after further stabilization by light-based crosslinking, remain intact while, for example, bending, twisting, or undergoing any number of multiple deformations. With this system, cartilage-like tissues with complex shapes that evolve over time could be bioengineered,” Alsberg explains.

The team published their work in the science periodical Advanced Materials in a study titled “Jammed Micro-Flake Hydrogel for Four-Dimensional Living Cell Bioprinting,” sharing the results of their experiments with the prototype hydrogels.

“This is the first system that meets the demanding requirements of bioprinting 4D constructs: load living cells in bio-inks, enable printing of large complex structures, trigger shape transformation under physiological conditions, support long-term cell viability, and facilitate desired cell functions such as tissue regeneration,” says Aixiang Ding, Team Member and Postdoctoral Research Associate at UIC.

This groundbreaking, shape-shifting bio-ink could make it possible to 4D-print livers, kidneys, and perhaps even hearts that can better copy the shape, function, and healing properties of natural organs.

“We are endeavoring to translate this system into clinical applications of tissue engineering, as there is a critical shortage of available donor tissues and organs,” Ding adds.

If this new bio-ink can live up to its potential, it could drastically reduce and eventually eliminate the need for human organ donors, potentially saving thousands of lives of those on transplant waiting lists each year.

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MIT professor Michael Strano and his team of researchers were able to defy decades of scientific studies by coaxing polymers, the building blocks of all plastics, out of their traditional chain shape into two-dimensional sheet orientations. By layering these molecular discs, the team was able to forge an ultra-strong, lightweight material they named 2DPA-1.

“Instead of making a spaghetti-like molecule, we can make a sheet-like molecular plane, where we get molecules to hook themselves together in two dimensions,” Strano explains in an MIT press release. “This mechanism happens spontaneously in solution, and after we synthesize the material, we can easily spin-coat thin films that are extraordinarily strong.”

Exactly how strong is this molecular arrangement? The researchers found that its elastic modulus (the amount of force required to deform a material) was four to six times greater than that of bulletproof glass, its yield strength (the amount of force needed to break the material) was twice as strong as steel, and its density was only one-sixth that of steel.

Another novel feature of 2DPA-1 is its gas impermeability. Other plastics are composed of coiled chains of polymers with gaps that allow gases to flow through. Strano likened them to a bowl of spaghetti noodles. He said with a large bowl of noodles, it’ll be hard to see the bottom of the bowl, but sauce added on top can still seep through all the way to the bottom because of the little pockets of space in between noodles.

The 2DPA-1 material is instead configured of monomers that lock together in unbreakable hydrogen bonds like like interlocking LEGO bricks, making it impossible for gases to leak through. The applications of this discovery could be wide reaching. One possibility could include creating ultra-thin coatings for anything covered in paint. For example, a layer of 2DPA-1 could significantly extend the life of a car’s paint job as it would prevent water and gases from getting through, keeping rust and rot at bay. It could also be employed as a coating for cell phones to make them virtually indestructible.

The uber-strong plastic could also radically change the construction market. Being twice as strong as steel, 2DPA-1 could replace traditional framing materials, allowing structures like bridges and skyscrapers to last much longer. That would reduce the carbon footprint of each new building, and save valuable resources from being used up as quickly.

“We don’t usually think of plastics as being something that you could use to support a building, but with this material, you can enable new things,” Strano adds. “It has very unusual properties and we’re very excited about that.”

Having filed two patents for 2DPA-1, the MIT team is now conducting more experiments on their remarkable 2D polymer sheets to discover what other types of innovative materials can be fashioned from its groundbreaking molecular form.

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Researchers at the University of Stuttgart studied the drying properties of wood and used computational designs to engineer sheets of moist wood that could automatically form desired shapes as they dried.

“There’s a hidden code in the layout of the boards,” said researcher Dylan Wood in an interview with FastCompany. “And when you put them into your house, which is typically dry, they dry out and this physical shape emerges from this code.”

Dylan and his team wanted to preserve the natural strength of wood while eliminating much of the waste created with traditional furniture-making techniques. They took their cues from the biomimetic process that occurs when pinecones open after falling to the ground. While the conifer cones are still attached to the tree, their scales, made of moisture-preserving fibers, remain tightly shut for water containment and protection from predators. When the pinecones die and fall off, however, the scales dry out and passively open into a new shape, releasing the inner seeds for future tree growth.

The Stuttgart team used the same principles to create self-assembling furniture. The process starts with a fresh-cut tree that gets sliced into planks. After that, each sheet is scanned for water content and grain using a custom software. The system analyzes the data and can predict how each piece will bend when it dries out.

“You usually have to be very careful about this [grain] system and how you use it, but it can be very technically mapped out,” notes Wood, adding that “part of the cleverness in what we do here is we kind of put it back together in a slightly different way.”

Based on the prediction software, the researchers cut the wood into puzzle pieces that are assembled in a specific pattern. Everything is then pressed flat and wrapped in packaging that traps in the moisture. After the furniture is shipped and unpacked, the wood will slowly (over the course of 8 to10 hours) dry and warp to form itself into a chair or chaise.

Because the wood’s molecular properties are preserved, instead of being crushed into sawdust and glued back together like in most furniture, its natural strength is also retained.

Wood used this knowledge and the HygroShape design to co-found Hylo Tech, a spin-off company for retailing the self-forming seats. Along with co-founder Laura Kiesewetter, the Hylo Tech website advertises the H1 upright lounge chair and the H2 chaise lounge rocker.

The design of the H1 has been compared to the famous midcentury Eames Lounger by Herman Miller, which bears a similarly elegant molded shell.

“We love the Eames chair. We see this almost as a reinvestigation of that spirit,” says Wood. “But what’s shocking is that we can get the shape just from the pieces and the materials. We don’t need the mold.”

The finished H1 and H2 are strong and durable, but because of the individual variations in the grain and the drying process, the exact shape of each chair can still shift and change slightly over time.

“We always thought we wanted it to look exactly like the picture,” says Wood. “But trialing with friends and colleagues, [we learned] there actually is a kind of value to the things being slightly different, and expressing the variation they have in the wood.”

Because the technique is still experimental, interested buyers can contact the company for more details. The website says it products should hopefully start shipping in summer 2022.

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The team, led by Yushan Yan, a professor at the university, and Henry Belin du Pont, Chair of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, has spent the last 15 years searching for a way to eliminate the CO2 problem in the fuel cells. In a paper released in the journal Nature, they explained how their problem might actually be a solution to drastically reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That means it has serious climate change-fighting potential.

“Once we dug into the mechanism, we realized the fuel cells were capturing just about every bit of carbon dioxide that came into them, and they were really good at separating it to the other side,” says Brian Setzler, Assistant Professor for Research in Chemical and Bimolecular Engineering.

The team leveraged this “self-purging” ability to create a carbon dioxide separator that could be placed upstream from their fuel cell stacks. “It turns out our approach is very effective,” Yan says. “We can capture 99 percent of the carbon dioxide out of the air in one pass if we have the right design and the right configuration.”

This was achieved by a somewhat risky process of embedding the power source for the electrochemical technology inside the separation membrane, which involved internally short-circuiting the device. “And by using this internal electrically shorted membrane, we were able to get rid of the bulky components, such as bipolar plates, current collectors, or any electrical wires typically found in a fuel cell stack,” says Lin Shi, a doctoral candidate in the Yan group and the paper’s lead author.

This short-cut makes it easier for the carbon dioxide particles to travel from one side of the device to the other, and allows the team to pack the whole thing into a smaller package capable of filtering greater quantities of air at a time. Their first prototype, about the size of a soda can, was designed to scrub CO2 from a vehicle’s exhaust. It’s capable of filtering about 10 liters of air per minute and removing about 98 percent of CO2.

A second, smaller version measuring 2 by 2 inches can continuously remove about 99 percent of carbon dioxide in air flowing at a rate of two liters per minute. The device can also be scaled up as necessary for larger applications, like on aircraft, spacecraft, and submarines. Though the researchers don’t say as much, that seems to open up the potential for after-market emissions-reducing devices on existing vehicles powered by fossil fuels. After all, these vehicles aren’t just going to disappear once electric cars become more standard.

While this is all great news, some scientists are urging us not to get too excited. Carbon capture alone isn’t enough to avert the climate crisis, and it would be easy to use this breakthrough as an excuse to slow the transition away from fossil fuels to cleaner technologies. At the end of the day, we need a multi-pronged approach if we’re going to avoid total catastrophe in the not-so-distant future.

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The Webb telescope is a $10 billion(!) space telescope that was launched on Christmas Day. Dubbed the most complicated and powerful space telescope of all time, Webb is a multi-agency project that involves NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency – a true group effort. Because the telescope is so complex, it’s designed was calculated to have over 300 potential points of failure, including glitches, malfunctions, and other unforeseen hurdles.

Now, the telescope’s right wing is in position, completing the primary mirror without any serious complications. Gregory Robinson, the Webb Program Director at NASA, discussed the enormity of the project in a recent press release, explaining: “This is the first time a NASA-led mission has ever attempted to complete a complex sequence to unfold an observatory in space…the successful completion of all the Webb’s Space Telescope’s deployments is historic.”

There are a number of reasons why the powerful and complex telescope’s completion is being deemed historic by NASA. The completed primary mirror, for example, is the largest mirror ever sent into space, measuring in at an impressive 21 feet wide. And according to NASA, Webb has about 6.25 times more collecting area than the Hubble telescope — enabling it to cover more than 15 times the area. It also has a better spatial resolution than many of its counterparts, including the infrared Spitzer space telescope.

Another reason Webb’s deployment is so significant is its complexity. Traditional in-orbit assembly was deemed impossible by NASA, mainly because the International Space Station doesn’t have the capabilities to assemble such a precision instrument. Instead, the telescope was folded up tight, placed in an Ariane 5 rocket, and deployed above low Earth orbit, also preventing any potential damage that might have occurred during ISS in-orbit assembly due to overwhelming amounts of space debris.

Though the deployment of the primary mirror is a big step in the Webb Telescope’s development, it’s just one of many needed to really get the powerful project underway. The next step is to align the powerful primary mirror’s 18 hexagonal segments, allowing them all to function as a cohesive unit. Once aligned, the individual segments will act as a single concave mirror that redirects incoming light to the secondary mirror.

The third and final course correction for Webb took place on January 23rd, when the telescope was steered to its workstation about a million miles away (literally). There, NASA will get it up and running by aligning, calibrating, and powering up the various scientific instruments. Then comes the fun part: the real mission. Expected to last at least 10 years, the $10 billion dollar beauty will, according to analysis, have enough propellant to keep it operating in orbit for at least that long. And that’s good news, as it will be way beyond the reach of any crewed vehicle.

Described as “…an unprecedented mission that is on the precipice of seeing the light from the first galaxies and discovering the mysteries of our universe,” by NASA administrator Bill Nelson, the James Webb Space Telescope will use its infrared capabilities to study faraway ancient galaxies and out-there exoplanets, taking us deeper into space than we’ve ever been before.

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This year, the prehistoric theme has been drawn outdoors among the plants for “Evolution on a Path to Enlightenment,” a gorgeous illuminated exhibition filled with ghostly hand-painted silk sculptures made by Sichuan-based company China Lights. Some of these creatures tower several meters into the air, gently billowing in the wind so they almost seem to be alive.

A Spectacular Voyage Through Time

The installation follows the evolution of biodiversity through the ages, created through the research and reconstruction work of the museum’s paleontologists. Over a hundred luminous structures represent the many species that have inhabited the Earth over the last 600 million years, including not just dinosaurs, but also lesser-known creatures that went extinct long ago.

The journey starts from Place Valhubert with the Origins of Life (3,700 to 490 millions years ago) during the Precambrian and Cambrian times, and moves into the Primary Era (490 to 250 million years ago) and Paleozoic times when organisms first started to adapt to the terrestrial environment. Then comes the Secondary Era (250 to 66 million years ago) in Mesozoic times when dinosaurs appeared. Finally, the Tertiary Era (66 million years ago to the present time) presents the Cenozoic era, in which many of these animals became extinct and mammals came to dominate the planet.

The inflatables are pretty noteworthy in their own right for the artistry that went into them. Lit from within, each one dazzles against the dark backdrop of the nighttime gardens. Naturally, an enormous T-rex with wide-open jaws is the star of the show, but even the delicate invertebrates are strikingly beautiful. It would be fun to take in this artistic display at dusk after spending the afternoon looking at all the skeletons and fossils inside the museum.

“Evolution on a Path to Enlightenment” opened November 21st, 2021 and will close on January 30th, 2022. It’s hosting visitors every day, and you can buy tickets online for €12 to €15.

A Must-See Paris Attraction

If you’re not familiar with the Jardin des Plantes, you’re going to want to add it to your dream tour of Paris. Founded in 1626 as a royal garden of medicinal plants, it opened to the public in 1650 and became associated with scientific study of botany and zoology in the late 1700s. It covers over 68 acres and houses 6 greenhouses for display and 22 for research, along with 23,500 species of plants like bromeliads, orchids, ferns, aroids, alpine plants, confers, cacti, grasses, and more.

There’s also a zoo on site with Art Deco buildings like the Vivarium, Monkey House, and Big Cat House. One of the oldest zoos in the world, second only to Tiergarten Schönbrunn in Vienna, Austria, The Ménagerie opened in 1794 and still hosts many animals. The most popular is Nénette the orangutan.

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