Tag: science

Secretive Experiment to Shoot Aerosols Into the Sky Over San Francisco to Increase Cloud Cover

A secretive project conducted from the deck of an aircraft carrier in the San Francisco Bay will shoot trillions of aerosol particles into the sky to increase cloud cover in the name of preventing global warming, and details have been held back to “avoid (a) public backlash.”

The experiment is being dubbed America’s “first outdoor test to limit global warming.”

“The Coastal Atmospheric Aerosol Research and Engagement, or CAARE, project is using specially built sprayers to shoot trillions of sea salt particles into the sky in an effort to increase the density — and reflective capacity — of marine clouds,” reports Scientific American.

“The experiment is taking place, when conditions permit, atop the USS Hornet Sea, Air & Space Museum in Alameda, California, and will run through the end of May, according to a weather modification form the team filed with federal regulators.”

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These Electronic Textiles Don’t Need Chips or Batteries

Sensors, controllers, and other electronic devices embedded in clothing could change the way we interact with computers and with each other. But efforts to turn t-shirts into electronic devices have been hampered by the need to power them with bulky batteries and process their data using stiff circuit boards.

Research published today in Science shows that it doesn’t have to be that way. Textiles woven from high-tech layered fibers couple with the body to scavenge electromagnetic energy from the environment—batteries not included. The textiles can also act as simple sensors that are easy to read by eye, or they can beam out a wireless signal. The research team behind the fibers includes Chengyi Hou, Hongzhi Wang, and Qinghong Zhang, who are in the college of materials science and engineering at Donghua University in Shanghai.

The group has demonstrated these smart fibers in a variety of applications. They’ve made a carpet that senses people’s footsteps, a textile-based game controller, a wearable 644-pixel display, and a textile keyboard that can be used to write messages to put on the display.

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NASA AND CERN ARE GEARING UP FOR TESTS DURING THIS MONTH’S SOLAR ECLIPSE

What happens when NASA launches a rocket during a full solar eclipse and CERN activates its particle accelerator simultaneously? We’ll find out on April 8. 

During the once-in-a-generation celestial phenomenon, several unique scientific investigations will be focused on the solar eclipse, aiming to harness a better understanding of what happens during these events. 

A total solar eclipse is where the Moon moves between the Sun and Earth by completely blocking the Sun’s surface and casting a shadow on Earth. Millions of people across Mexico, the United States and Canada will be located in the path of totality (where the Moon’s shadow completely covers the Sun) to witness this occurrence.

As part of the experiments it will be undertaking, NASA has scheduled three sounding rocket launches, and WB-57 high-altitude planes will also take off to examine the unique conditions between the Sun and the Earth that will occur. 

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“INTELLIGENT LIQUID” CREATED BY HARVARD SCIENTISTS REPRESENTS STRANGE “NEW CLASS OF FLUID”

Harvard researchers say they have developed a programmable metafluid they are calling an ‘intelligent liquid’  that contains tunable springiness, adjustable optical properties, variable viscosity, and even the seemingly magical ability to shift between a Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluid.

The team’s exact formula is still a secret as they explore potential commercial applications. However, the researchers believe their intelligent liquid could be used in anything from programmable robots to intelligent shock absorbers or even optical devices that can shift between transparent and opaque states.

“We are just scratching the surface of what is possible with this new class of fluid,” said Adel Djellouli, a Research Associate in Materials Science and Mechanical Engineering at Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the first author of the paper. “With this one platform, you could do so many different things in so many different fields.”

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Scientists Put Tardigrade Proteins Into Human Cells. Here’s What Happened.

Freeze ’em, heat ’em, blast them into empty space; with survival skills unlike any other organism on the planet, those hardy critters known as tardigrades will only come back for more.

While it’s clear their ability to withstand stress is in part due to their ability to turn their insides into gel, the mechanisms behind this act of metabolic preservation haven’t yet been made clear.

A new study led by researchers from the University of Wyoming found that expressing key tardigrade proteins in human cells slowed metabolism, providing critical insights into how these virtually indestructible invertebrates can survive under the most extreme conditions.

The team focused on a particular protein called CAHS D, already known to protect against extreme drying (desiccation). Through a variety of methods, the researchers showed how CAHS D transformed into a gel-like state when under stress, keeping molecules protected and protecting against drying.

“This study provides insight into how tardigrades, and potentially other desiccation-tolerant organisms, survive drying by making use of biomolecular condensation,” write the researchers in their published paper.

“Beyond stress tolerance, our findings provide an avenue for pursuing technologies centered around the induction of biostasis in cells and even whole organisms to slow aging and enhance storage and stability.”

Tardigrades have already shown they can survive hot and cold temperatures and high levels of radiation that would be fatal to human beings, and long periods without any water – normally so essential to life. They can even survive in space.

Previous research has revealed an impressive number of tricks that tardigrades use to stay alive, built up over hundreds of millions of years. Essentially, they’re very good at slowing the processes of life right down with the help of CAHS D, and that could be useful in human cells too.

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HOLOGRAPHIC BREAKTHROUGH: SCIENTISTS CREATE FULL-COLOR 3D HOLOGRAPHIC DISPLAYS WITH ORDINARY SMARTPHONE SCREEN

A team of scientists from the University of Tokyo has revealed a major breakthrough that allows them to create realistic 3D holographic displays using an ordinary iPhone screen.

While conventional approaches to holography involve complex and expensive laser emitters that have limited their practical use, the researchers behind this novel approach say their work could lead to dramatic improvements in holographic displays for virtual reality applications, including gaming, training, and even advanced military applications.

3D HOLOGRAPHIC DISPLAYS LIMITED BY COST AND COMPLEXITY

In science fiction, holograms are used for anything from basic communications to advanced military weaponry. In the real world, 3D holographic displays have yet to break through to everyday products and devices. That’s because creating holograms that look real and have significant fidelity requires laser emitters or other advanced pieces of optical equipment. This situation has stymied commercial development, as these components are complex and expensive.

More recently, research scientists were able to create realistic 3D holographic images without lasers by using a white chip-on-board light-emitting diode. Unfortunately, that method required two spatial light modulators to control the wave fronts of the emitted light, adding a prohibitive amount of complexity and cost.

Now, those same scientists say they have created a simpler, more cost-effective way to create realistic-looking 3D holographic displays using only one spatial light modulator and new software algorithms. The result is a simpler and cheaper method for creating holograms that an everyday technology like a smartphone screen can emit.

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Korean Fusion Reactor Breaks Record, Staying 7 Times Hotter Than The Sun’s Core

Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research, or KSTAR, is one of the most advanced test fusion reactors on the planet. Nicknamed the Korean artificial sun, it has now demonstrated sustained fusion temperature for almost a minute and the ability to contain extremely hot plasma for over 100 seconds.

Fusion is what powers stars, but in stars, it happens at lower temperatures than we need to do it here on Earth. That’s because gravity is keeping everything packed together so fusion is more likely to happen. So the temperature required on Earth for a Tokamak system – which is a donut-shaped reactor – is about seven times the temperature at the core of the Sun: 100 million °C (180 million °F).

KSTAR first reached this threshold in 2018 but only for 1.5 seconds. A year later, they were able to keep the plasma that hot for 8 seconds, increasing it to 20 seconds in 2020. The last record was in 2021, when the plasma was kept that hot for half a minute. Since then, the team at the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy (KFE) has upgraded the device by building a new tungsten divertor environment and they have pushed the temperature for longer.

Now, KSTAR can sustain 100 million °C for 48 seconds – and it can keep hot plasma in the high-confinement mode (also known as H-mode) for 102 seconds. The goal is to achieve 300 seconds of burning plasma by the end of 2026. 

“Despite being the first experiment run in the environment of the new tungsten divertors, thorough hardware testing and campaign preparation enabled us to achieve results surpassing those of previous KSTAR records in a short period,” Dr Si-Woo Yoon, Director of the KSTAR Research Center, said in a statement.

“To achieve the ultimate goal of KSTAR operation, we plan to sequentially enhance the performance of heating and current drive devices and also secure the core technologies required for long-pulse high performance plasma operations.”

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Scientists Are Searching the South Pole to See if Quantum Gravity Actually Exists

Within physics, there are two enormous foundational systems—quantum mechanics and general relativity—that have been like Macs and PCs for decades. Over time, scientists on both sides have worked toward the other side, because anyone who wants to explain the entire universe has to make the two foundations work together. And, like any decent computer lab, a unifying theory has to be truly cross-platform.

In new research, researchers from the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute (NBI)—alongside 58 other member universities— revealed the secrets of 300,000 neutrinos they studied at the South Pole. Their paper (published in Nature Physics) is one step down a road that they hope will lead to quantum gravity. This hypothesized force, if it’s ever demonstrated in real life measurements, could be the physics dongle that adapts general relativity to quantum mechanics at last.

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8 Extremely Unusual Events That Will Happen During The Month Of April

When is the last time that there was so much buzz about one month?  As we enter April, there is so much anticipation in the air, and it isn’t just because of the Great American Eclipse on April 8th.  In recent days, I have heard from so many people that feel like something really big is about to happen.  I can feel it too.  It is almost as if we are all holding our breath as we wait for the next shoe to drop.  Chaos is threatening to erupt all over the globe, and meanwhile signs in the heavens are literally screaming at us to pay attention.  The following are 8 extremely unusual events that will happen during the month of April…

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Scientists Uncover Mechanism Viruses Use to Cause Cancer

Viral infections are thought to be a central cause of between 10 to 20 percent of cancers worldwide, representing a significant portion of the global cancer burden.

A recent discovery may further our understanding of how viruses cause cancer.

Researchers from the Cleveland Clinic uncovered one of the mechanisms that a type of virus called Kaposi sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV) uses to induce cancer.

The study, published last month in Nature Communications, found that the KSHV virus activated a specific pathway responsible for cell metabolism and the way cells grow and multiply. Using current U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved breast cancer drugs, they were able to reduce the replication of the virus, stop the progression of the lymphoma, and shrink existing tumors in preclinical models.

Jun Zhao, of the Cleveland Clinic Florida Research and Innovation Center, who holds a doctorate in genetic, molecular, and cellular biology is the study’s lead author.

“Our findings have significant implications: viruses cause between 10% to 20% of cancers worldwide, a number that is constantly increasing as new discoveries are made. Treating virus-induced cancers with standard cancer therapies can help shrink tumors that are already there, but it doesn’t fix the underlying problem of the virus,” Mr. Zhao explained in a news release. “Understanding how pathogens transform a healthy cell into a cancer cell uncovers exploitable vulnerabilities and allows us to make and repurpose existing drugs that can effectively treat virus-associated malignancies.”

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