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Researchers have created a plant-based, sustainable, scalable material that could replace single-use plastics in many consumer products.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, created a polymer film by mimicking the properties of spider silk, one of the strongest materials in nature. The new material is as strong as many common plastics in use today and could replace plastic in many common household products.

They had to put ‘vegan’ in the headline just so that the Right People would notice.

The Register (UK).

Thus, they created a programme called Mobile Force Protection. This includes a handy Humvee-mounted box that launches friendly drones and guides them toward the enemy buzzbot with “a newly-developed X band radar that automatically senses and identifies unmanned aerial system threats.”

Then, when it gets close enough: “The primary drone negation mechanism shoots strong, stringy streamers from reusable interceptors that foul propellers causing loss of propulsion.”

Or, in common parlance, it sneezes a big glob of pink silly-string snot all over it, which gunges up the rotors and causes the stunned enemy hobbycopter to tumble to the ground.

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Sure, let’s turn the clock back a hundred years or so….

Although I’m not sure many people think of ‘working’ and ‘French’ at the same time.

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But as with other metals like uranium, land-based lithium reserves pale in comparison to what’s out there in the sea. According to researchers at Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), there’s about 5,000 times as much lithium in the oceans as there is in land deposits, and a newly developed technology could start extracting it cheaply enough to make the big time – while producing hydrogen gas, chlorine gas and desalinated water as a bonus.

The process relies on an electrochemical cell containing a ceramic membrane made from lithium lanthanum titanium oxide (LLTO), with pores just wide enough to let lithium ions through while blocking larger metal ions. “LLTO membranes have never been used to extract and concentrate lithium ions before,” says post-doctorate researcher Zhen Li, who developed the cell.

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A sheriff in Smyth County, Va., who has twice been elected as a Democrat, has quit the party due to its “relentless attacks on law enforcement,” becoming the third sheriff in the state to do so, reports WJHL-TV.

“I am changing to the Republican Party because of the relentless attack on law enforcement by Democrats in Richmond and Washington,” Chip Shuler said in a release.

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In a new study published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters in April, scientists at UC Riverside took advantage of this phenomenon by immersing a metal vapor in a magnetic field, and then watched it assemble molten metal droplets into predictably shaped nanoparticles. Their work could make it easier to build the exact particles engineers want, for uses in just about anything.

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Researchers at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology developed what they believe is an economically viable system to extract high-purity lithium from seawater.

Suck on it, China.

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The study, published in Nature Communications, was carried out in collaboration with teams at the University of Exeter, India, Switzerland, Singapore, and the US.

…

Currently, carbon-based overcoats (COCs) – layers used to protect platters from mechanical damages and corrosion – occupy a significant part of this spacing. The data density of HDDs has quadrupled since 1990, and the COC thickness has reduced from 12.5nm to around 3nm, which corresponds to one terabyte per square inch. Now, graphene has enabled researchers to multiply this by ten.

The Cambridge researchers have replaced commercial COCs with one to four layers of graphene, and tested friction, wear, corrosion, thermal stability, and lubricant compatibility. Beyond its unbeatable thinness, graphene fulfills all the ideal properties of an HDD overcoat in terms of corrosion protection, low friction, wear resistance, hardness, lubricant compatibility, and surface smoothness.

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In a first, the digital fiber contains memory, temperature sensors, and a trained neural network program for inferring physical activity.

Coming soon to a celebrity boob near you….

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A federal judge overturned California’s 32-year-old ban on so-called assault-style weapons on Friday, describing it as a “failed experiment” and prompting scathing criticism from the state’s governor and attorney general.

California has prohibited the sale of the weapons since 1989. The ban was challenged in a 2019 lawsuit against California’s attorney general by plaintiffs including James Miller, a state resident, and the San Diego County Gun Owners, a political action committee.

“This case is about what should be a muscular constitutional right and whether a state can force a gun policy choice that impinges on that right with a 30-year-old failed experiment,” judge Roger Benitez of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California wrote in the court order filed late on Friday.

“Government is not free to impose its own new policy choices on American citizens where Constitutional rights are concerned,” the order added.

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The European Union decided on Friday to ban Belarusian airlines from accessing its airspace and finalise new economic sanctions against the regime of President Alexander Lukashenko, several diplomatic sources in Brussels told AFP.

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Amid the Israel-Gaza war, Jewish communities across the U.S. were targeted in a flurry of anti-Semitic attacks. The Daily Caller spoke with Jewish leaders and found that many of them believed leading progressives in Congress and elsewhere were, at least in part, responsible for the recent uptick.

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The breakthrough graphene aluminium-ion battery cells charge up to 70 times faster than lithium-ion cells, are more efficient, can discharge energy faster and have a longer lifespan. They’re also more sustainable and easier to recycle.

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Unfortunately it won’t fix the fact that United Airlines is the Worst. Airline. Ever.

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I guess they don’t get out much.

A two-dimensional material with similar physical properties to graphene has now turned out to blow graphene out of the water in terms of toughness.

The material is called hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN), and it’s so resistant to cracking that scientists are gobsmacked. The finding flies in the face of the fundamental description of fracture mechanics that scientists have been using to predict and define toughness since the 1920s.

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And who could blame them?

Austin, Texas, saw the largest influx of tech workers during the pandemic, with a net 217 software and information technology workers moving to the city per 10,000 existing workers. Nashville clocked in second with 154.7 net techies per 10,000, followed by Charlotte, NC, with 145.8; Jacksonville, Fla., with 136; and Denver with 130.4.

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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.

Read it. And watch the video, it’s fascinating.

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.