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Billionaire Bill Gates’ advanced nuclear reactor company TerraPower LLC and PacifiCorp have selected Wyoming to launch the first Natrium reactor project on the site of a retiring coal plant, the state’s governor said on Wednesday.

TerraPower, founded by Gates about 15 years ago, and power company PacifiCorp, owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, said the exact site of the Natrium reactor demonstration plant is expected to be announced by the end of the year. Small advanced reactors, which run on different fuels than traditional reactors, are regarded by some as a critical carbon-free technology that can supplement intermittent power sources like wind and solar as states strive to cut emissions that cause climate change.

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Electrical engineers at the University of California San Diego developed a technology that improves the resolution of an ordinary light microscope so that it can be used to directly observe finer structures and details in living cells.

The technology turns a conventional light microscope into what’s called a super-resolution microscope. It involves a specially engineered material that shortens the wavelength of light as it illuminates the sample—this shrunken light is what essentially enables the microscope to image in higher resolution.

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That would be a useful thing.

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My, what a hardship. Why not ban their sale in Texas until they stop killing people?

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The speed of light may not necessarily be constant. Light travelling through a plasma can appear to move at speeds both slower and faster than what we refer to as “the speed of light” – 299,792,458 metres per second – without breaking any laws of physics.

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Researchers at the University of Marburg in Germany and Aalto University in Finland have now discovered a new carbon network, which is atomically thin like graphene, but is made up of squares, hexagons, and octagons forming an ordered lattice. They confirmed the unique structure of the network using high-resolution scanning probe microscopy and interestingly found that its electronic properties are very different from those of graphene.

 

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SCIENCE! Is there anything it can’t do?

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An international, interdisciplinary team of researchers that includes engineers from The University of Austin has found a way to replicate a natural process that moves water between cells, with a goal of improving how we filter out salt and other elements and molecules to create clean water while consuming less energy.

In a new paper published today (May 20, 2021) in Nature Nanotechnology, researchers created a molecule-sized water transport channel that can carry water between cells while excluding protons and undesired molecules. These channels mimic the water transport functions of proteins in our bodies known as aquaporins. In our cells, uncontrolled transport of protons alongside water can be harmful because they can change the pH of cells, potentially disrupting or killing them.

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Following the official launch of the new iMac on Friday, iFixit has already gotten its hands on one of these redesigned 24-inch iMacs to share its traditional teardown. This gives us a better look at the internal parts of the computer, which is basically a single logic board with everything soldered there.

I love these.

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omewhere in Paris, in a white room, seated at a white table, a man wearing a headset reminiscent of those worn by VR gamers reached out with his right hand and placed his fingers on a black notebook. This simple motion, which he executed with confidence, was notable for one very important reason: The man had been blind for close to four decades.

What was different now was that as part of a clinical trial, genes had been injected into one of his eyes, causing neurons in the retina to produce a light-sensing protein normally found in the slimy bodies of green algae. When the black goggles he was wearing projected video images of his surroundings as a pulsed light beam onto those now-light-sensitive cells, the neurons fired, and the signal traveled up the optic nerve and into the visual processing center of the brain. The genetically modified neurons had become stand-ins for the photoreceptors he had lost many years before to a genetic disease called retinitis pigmentosa.

The man’s progress identifying objects inside the lab and out in the world were reported Monday in Nature Medicine. While he couldn’t see colors or fine details, the case study describes the first time optogenetic therapy successfully restored partial vision to a blind patient.

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The Army’s ERAMS program will soon announce development contracts for howitzer shells capable of firing over 100 km (62 miles) to counter Russian and Chinese artillery.

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Oh, I hope he does. His nose cannot be too often rubbed into the dirt.

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Touchscreens, kiosks, headless commerce, drones and even robots delivering pizza are the present and the future of the retail and restaurant industries as those sectors grapple with continued labor shortages, experts say, and that spells growth for startups focused on automation technologies.

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A drug dealer was tracked down after sharing a photo of Stilton cheese.

Carl Stewart, 39, was identified through his fingerprints after police analysed the image he posted in an online chat.

…

Stewart posted the photo on the encrypted messaging service EncroChat, which had been cracked by police.

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I’d really like to have one of these. If you can only have one chair, this is the one to have.

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Israel’s Aquarius Engines this week gave the world a first look at the tiny hydrogen engine it hopes can supplant gas engine-generators and hydrogen fuel cells in future electrified vehicles. Weighing just 22 lb (10 kg), the simple engine uses a single moving piston to develop power. Beyond vehicles, Aquarius is developing the engine for use as an off-grid micro-generator.

First created in 2014, Aquarius’ efficient single-piston linear engine has a single central cylinder in which the piston moves between two engine heads. In previous iterations, Aquarius used more conventional fossil fuels to create combustion, but now it’s turning attention to emissions-slashing hydrogen. The company says Austrian engineering firm AVL-Schrick recently completed third-party testing, verifying that a modified version of the engine can operate purely on hydrogen.

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I find this vaguely disturbing.

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Israeli researchers have developed a set of “molecular tweezers” that can pick apart the biofilm which protects some bacteria.

Certainly sounds uncomfortable.

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Physicists have been playing hard and fast with the speed limit of light pulses for a while, speeding them up and even slowing them to a virtual stand-still using various materials like cold atomic gases, refractive crystals, and optical fibers.

This time, researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and the University of Rochester in New York have managed it inside hot swarms of charged particles, fine-tuning the speed of light waves within plasma to anywhere from around one-tenth of light’s usual vacuum speed to more than 30 percent faster.

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Mark McCloskey, the St. Louis attorney who gained national attention after he and his wife pointed weapons at Black Lives Matter protesters outside his home last summer, announced his campaign for the U.S. Senate Tuesday.

“God came knocking on my door disguised as an angry mob. It really did wake me up,” he told Fox News “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” while making his announcement to run in the race to fill the seat of retiring Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., who is not running for reelection when his term expires in 2022.

“It seemed to me that people have to stand up. Each and every one of us needs to stand up and say we are not sheep, we are a free people,” McCloskey further commented.

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‘Hey, is that your new Tesla?’ ‘Uh, no, that’s a concrete block….’

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The researchers have described their new “optical rectennas” in a paper published today (May 18, 2021) in the journal Nature Communications. These devices, which are too small to see with the naked eye, are roughly 100 times more efficient than similar tools used for energy harvesting. And they achieve that feat through a mysterious process called “resonant tunneling” — in which electrons pass through solid matter without spending any energy.

“They go in like ghosts,” said lead author Amina Belkadi, who recently earned her PhD from the Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering (ECEE).

Rectennas (short for “rectifying antennas”), she explained, work a bit like car radio antennas. But instead of picking up radio waves and turning them into tunes, optical rectennas absorb light and heat and convert it into power.

I’ll believe it when I can buy one at Walmart.

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In California and other parts of the West, the fresh water that is provided through snowpack provides clean drinking water, renewable forms of energy and a healthy ecosystem, and one man is responsible for the way the water in that snowpack is measured, even more than 100 years after he introduced the method.

Each year, the state’s Department of Water Resources conducts a water survey and compares it to years prior. Last month’s water survey found below-average precipitation across the entire state.

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SINCE THE Romans began doing it with great panache more than 2,000 years ago, road-building has been a sweaty, grubby business, involving heaving great quantities of rocks and stones into place and, in more recent times, covering the surface with asphalt or concrete. Now a group of Swiss researchers think they have come up with a more elegant solution. Strange as it may seem, this involves knitting.

Martin Arraigada and Saeed Abbasion of the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology use a robotic arm to lay out string in a series of elaborate patterns. As the knitting takes shape, layers of stones are added and tamped down. The string entangles the stones, keeping them in place. The result is a structure that is surprisingly stable and strong. In one experiment a section of pavement put together in this way withstood a load of half a tonne. The encapsulated stones hardly moved at all.

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I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

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I’ve got ones I can sell but it will cost you.

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Today Mahle, a German auto parts company, unveiled a motor that’s free of both rare earths and of physical contact. Power is beamed into the rotor wirelessly, through induction, by a coil carrying alternating current. This induces a current in the receiving electrode, inside the rotor, which energizes the copper windings there to produce an electromagnetic field.

I’m sure it still has bearings, and those will eventually wear out.

1. Never buy a dictionary with ‘Webster’ in the name.
2. Always buy a dictionary with ‘Oxford’ in the name.

That is all.

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

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We have the technology.

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Everybody is coming to Texas. I’m expecting Claude Rains next.

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As it turns out, there really is an app for that.

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There’s no shortage of dinosaur myths. Paleontologist Dave Hone recently compiled a list of eight persistent falsehoods over at the Guardian–from the misapprehension that all dinosaurs were huge to the untenable idea that Tyrannosaurus could only scavenge its meals–but there was one particular misunderstanding that caught my attention. For decades, popular articles and books claimed that the armor-plated Stegosaurus and the biggest of the sauropod dinosaurs had second brains in their rumps. These dinosaurs, it was said, could reason “a posteriori” thanks to the extra mass of tissue. It was a cute idea, but a totally wrong hypothesis that actually underscores a different dinosaur mystery.

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The team built the 60 square meter (roughly 645 square feet) prototype house with local soil in a zero-waste construction process. It didn’t require any materials to be transported to the site, avoiding the environmental impact of transportation. The 350-layer 3D-printed house was built with 60 cubic meters of natural material.

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The New Yorker published an essay Thursday in which Eric Edelman — a “friend” of Cheney’s and a former national security adviser to former Vice President Dick Cheney, Liz Cheney’s father — said Liz Cheney “was the one who generated” a hit piece on Trump in the Post, written by “ten living former Defense Secretaries, including her father.”

“Edelman revealed that Cheney herself secretly orchestrated an unprecedented op-ed in the Washington Post by all ten living former Defense Secretaries, including her father, warning against Trump’s efforts to politicize the military,” The New Yorker wrote.

“The congresswoman not only recruited her father but personally asked others, including Trump’s first Defense Secretary, Jim Mattis, to participate,” the magazine continued.

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Lucky us.

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The Republican party in Texas is drawing Hispanic voters disillusioned by the Democratic party’s extreme values, two female Hispanic Republican leaders with Democratic backgrounds told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

South Texas saw both a liberal decline and a conservative surge during the 2020 election, the New York Times reported, a surge that has emboldened Republicans hoping to win in Latino communities throughout the United States. Hispanic female Republicans are stepping up to the plate, the publication reported.

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The Ohio Republican Party censured Rep. Anthony Gonzalez, R-Ohio, and 9 other GOP representatives Friday for voting in February to impeach former President Donald Trump, in a nearly unanimous vote of the powerful central committee.

The vote made the Cleveland congressman the 8th of the 10 defectors to be rebuked or censured by a state or local party. Efforts against two others failed to take hold.

The resolution to censure that was approved by the committee called Trump’s second impeachment process meritless, unprecedented, unconstitutional and purposeless. Along a narrower vote, the committee also approved a second resolution, which hadn’t been on the agenda, calling on Gonzalez to resign.

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Canadian YouTuber NileRed shows how he made a thin piece of balsa wood transparent. The video has picked up more than 2 million views since it was uploaded last week.

The video is long – 43 minutes – and fairly technical (NileRed has a degree in biochemistry). But he tries hard to present it in a simple fashion. All required chemicals were purchased through Amazon.

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Producing clean water at a lower cost could be on the horizon after researchers from The University of Texas at Austin and Penn State solved a complex problem that had baffled scientists for decades, until now.

Desalination membranes remove salt and other chemicals from water, a process critical to the health of society, cleaning billions of gallons of water for agriculture, energy production and drinking. The idea seems simple — push salty water through and clean water comes out the other side — but it contains complex intricacies that scientists are still trying to understand.

The research team, in partnership with DuPont Water Solutions, solved an important aspect of this mystery, opening the door to reduce costs of clean water production. The researchers determined desalination membranes are inconsistent in density and mass distribution, which can hold back their performance. Uniform density at the nanoscale is the key to increasing how much clean water these membranes can create.

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At present, automatization and 3D printing are comparably upturning conventions in the building industry with the promise of replacing mass fabrication with near-infinite customization. HANNAH’s investigation of the new material began with Additive Architectural Elements — a series of design experiments that poke at the ornamental and structural possibilities of this emerging construction process. The highly tactile Elements begins to answer what 3D printed concrete should look and feel like, probing its structural capacity and seeking an honest language that showcases the process itself.

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Because the sHYp electrolyser operates without a membrane, can be 3D printed, does not require that input water be purified, is designed for modular generation at the point of use and produces no harmful by-products that must be disposed of, the technology is expected to be relatively inexpensive and more environmentally friendly compared with conventional electrolysis.

 

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You know, as you do.

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Her problem is that she is a Swamp Creature pretending to be a Republican.

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The city of Lubbock, Texas approved an ordinance banning abortion procedures within city limits and declaring itself a “sanctuary city for the unborn” Saturday.

While not the first, Lubbock is now the largest city in the U.S. to approve such a measure, but it will likely face legal challenges from abortion advocates who argue the measure is unconstitutional. The move comes just months after Planned Parenthood opened its first clinic in the city, according to the Texas Tribune.

Lubbock residents backed the measure with 62% of the vote on Saturday, joining dozens of other Texas cities that have already passed similar ordinances. Lubbock is the first of these cities to make a declaration while already having an abortion clinic within its limits.

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Odd form of DNA helps viruses resist their host’s defenses.

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3D weaving is in its infancy but it has already been used to create medical implants from polyester and to form aircraft bodies from carbon fibres.

But the technology could be scaled up to create buildings, the designer argued.

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‘Alien’ genomes can be found on Earth. Some viruses that infect bacteria use an alternative genetic alphabet that’s distinct from the code used by nearly all other organisms — and, now, two teams have spelled out how the system works.

More than four decades in the making, the studies show how dozens of these bacteriophages (or just ‘phages’), as they are known, write their genomes using a chemical base called 2-aminoadenine, Z for short, instead of adenine — the A in the As, Ts, Cs and Gs of genetics textbooks.

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Researchers at Australia’s Monash University Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering have created a robot that uses a mix of cameras and deep learning algorithms to scan the trees of an orchard and detect the pieces of fruit, which requires it to process information on their shape, orientation and the location of the stem-branch joint to minimize damage to the produce and the surrounding foliage.

Sure! Raise that minimum wage! See if we care!

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Me want.