Impact Lab – Page 504 – A Laboratory of the Future Human Experience

Energy, Science & Technology News, Solar Energy, Solar Power

New research explains how solar panels could soon be generating power at night

February 16, 2020

As beneficial as current solar panel technology has been in our quest to switch to renewable energy, such panels can’t generate electricity at night. Now, new research suggests it could be possible to design panels that can operate around the clock.

Under optimum conditions, at night these specially designed photovoltaic cells could generate a quarter of the energy they produce during the day, according to the new study.

To achieve this, we’d need to incorporate thermoradiative cells – devices that generate energy thanks to radiative cooling, where infrared or heat radiation leaves the cell and produces a small amount of energy in the process.

Continue reading… “New research explains how solar panels could soon be generating power at night”

Environment, new technology, Science & Technology News, Space, Space Flight

The sun is still a burning mystery. That may be about to change.

February 16, 2020

The historic launch of the new European Solar Orbiter helps foster a golden age for understanding our nearest star.

On Sunday evening, a rocket lit up Florida’s nighttime sky as it ferried a spacecraft toward a first-of-its-kind adventure to the sun.

Even though our home star smolders every day in our skies, humans have only ever seen the sun from one perspective: face-on, from within the plane of the planets. The European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter, or SolO, is about to change that, as it is designed to perform a detailed reconnaissance of the sun that will allow it to see the star’s previously invisible polar regions.

From this unique vantage point, SolO’s suite of 10 instruments will help uncover how the star sends streams of energetic particles called the solar wind throughout our planetary system. It will also help answer what controls the sun’s 11-year magnetic cycle, which varies in intensity and creates unanticipated fluctuations in solar activity.

“We fundamentally really don’t understand that,” says ESA’s Daniel Müller, SolO project scientist. “Hopefully, we’re filling in that gap with Solar Orbiter.”

Continue reading… “The sun is still a burning mystery. That may be about to change.”

Healthcare, Medical Breakthrough, Medicine, Science & Technology News

Scientists create ‘chemical gardens’ that can be used as bone substitute materials

February 16, 2020

A new way of making bone-replacement materials that allows for cells to grow around and inside them has been developed by researchers at the University of Birmingham.

The team adopted a novel approach called chemobrionics, in which chemical components are controllably driven to react together in specific ways, enabling the self-assembly of intricate bio-inspired structures.

Scientists first observed these life-like ‘chemical gardens’ several hundred years ago, but recent renewed interest in the field of chemobrionics has seen researchers using these techniques to design new materials at the micro- and nanoscale.

Continue reading… “Scientists create ‘chemical gardens’ that can be used as bone substitute materials”

Business, Future, quantum computing, Science & Technology News

A game plan for quantum computing

February 15, 2020

Pharmaceutical companies have an abiding interest in enzymes. These proteins catalyze all kinds of biochemical interactions, often by targeting a single type of molecule with great precision. Harnessing the power of enzymes may help alleviate the major diseases of our time.

Unfortunately, we don’t know the exact molecular structure of most enzymes. In principle, chemists could use computers to model these molecules in order to identify how the molecules work, but enzymes are such complex structures that most are impossible for classical computers to model.

A sufficiently powerful quantum computer, however, could accurately predict in a matter of hours the properties, structure, and reactivity of such substances—an advance that could revolutionize drug development and usher in a new era in healthcare. Quantum computers have the potential to resolve problems of this complexity and magnitude across many different industries and applications, including finance, transportation, chemicals, and cybersecurity.

Continue reading… “A game plan for quantum computing”

Automation, Healthcare, Robots, Science & Technology News

New robot does superior job sampling blood

February 15, 2020

A prototype of an automated blood drawing and testing device. Credit: Unnati Chauhan

In the future, robots could take blood samples, benefiting patients and healthcare workers alike.

A Rutgers-led team has created a blood-sampling robot that performed as well or better than people, according to the first human clinical trial of an automated blood drawing and testing device.

The device provides quick results and would allow healthcare professionals to spend more time treating patients in hospitals and other settings.

The results, published in the journal Technology, were comparable to or exceeded clinical standards, with an overall success rate of 87% for the 31 participants whose blood was drawn. For the 25 people whose veins were easy to access, the success rate was 97%.

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AI, Big Data, Healthcare, Medicine, Science & Technology News

An algorithm that can spot cause and effect could supercharge medical AI

February 15, 2020

The technique, inspired by quantum cryptography, would allow large medical databases to be tapped for causal links

Understanding how the world works means understanding cause and effect. Why are things like this? What will happen if I do that? Correlations tell you that certain phenomena go together. Only causal links tell you why a system is as it is or how it might evolve. Correlation is not causation, as the slogan goes.

This is a big problem for medicine, where a vast number of variables can be interlinked. Diagnosing diseases depends on knowing which conditions cause what symptoms; treating diseases depends on knowing the effects of different drugs or lifestyle changes. Untangling such knotty questions is typically done via rigorous observational studies or randomized controlled trials.

These create a wealth of medical data, but it is spread across different data sets, which leaves many questions unanswered. If one data set shows a correlation between obesity and heart disease and another shows a correlation between low vitamin D and obesity, what’s the link between low vitamin D and heart disease? Finding out typically requires another clinical trial.

Continue reading… “An algorithm that can spot cause and effect could supercharge medical AI”

government, Historical Perspectives, Science & Technology News, women

The year women became eligible to vote in each country

February 14, 2020

SUFFRAGE HAPPENED in 1920 in the United States, three years behind Russia and Canada but 91 years ahead of Saudi Arabia, as noted by this map depicting the year women became eligible to vote in each country. Countries began joining the fray en masse by the mid-twentieth century, but the leader of the pack comes from far down under — women in New Zealand obtained voting rights in 1893. This map was uploaded to Reddit and shows the year women became eligible to vote in each country.

A quick glance at the map tells only part of the story, however. Pay close attention to the asterisks, as the year noted for some countries signifies only limited suffrage, often only for white women or in conjunction with specific requirements such as homeownership or marriage. Belgium’s 1919 suffrage granted widows and the mothers of servicemen killed in World War I, or widows and mothers of servicemen “shot and killed by the enemy” the vote but didn’t extend the same rights to all women until 1948. Australia granted women excluding Aboriginals the right to vote in 1902. For a more complete list of exclusions, view the notes at the far bottom of the infographic.

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, Business, Internet of Things, Science & Technology News

How AI is helping reinvent the world of manufacturing

February 14, 2020

Throughout each industrial era, the companies best able to embrace change have become the most likely to succeed. This dates back to the development of steam and combustion engines through to electricity, microprocessors and now artificial intelligence.

In The Future Computed: AI and Manufacturing, Microsoft Senior Director Greg Shaw explores how AI, automation and the internet of things (IoT) present new challenges and opportunities.

Here are some of the manufacturers already demonstrating how the latest tech advances are changing the way they work.

Continue reading… “How AI is helping reinvent the world of manufacturing”

Energy, Environment, new technology, Science & Technology News

Company to harvest green hydrogen by igniting oil fires underground

February 14, 2020

Injection wells at the Superb oil field in Canada. To make hydrogen, workers heat the reservoir with steam and feed it air, setting off underground oil fires.

This month, on the frozen plains of Saskatchewan in Canada, workers began to inject steam and air into the Superb field, a layer of sand 700 meters down that holds 200 million barrels of thick, viscous oil. Their goal was not to pump out the oil, but to set it on fire—spurring underground chemical reactions that churn out hydrogen gas, along with carbon dioxide (CO2). Eventually the company conducting the $3 million field test plans to plug its wells with membranes that would allow only the clean-burning hydrogen to reach the surface. The CO2, and all of its power to warm the climate, would remain sequestered deep in the earth.

“We want to launch the idea that you can get energy from petroleum resources and it can be zero carbon emissions,” says Ian Gates, a chemical engineer at the University of Calgary and co-founder of the startup, called Proton Technologies.

Continue reading… “Company to harvest green hydrogen by igniting oil fires underground”

3D Printer, Biotech, Engineering, new technology, Science & Technology News

3D Printing humans: A quick review of 3D Bioprinters

February 14, 2020

It was only a matter of time before the iconic scene from 1997’s The Fifth Element became a reality. In the film Milla Jovovich’s character, Leeloo, is entirely rebuilt using her dead hand as a template. The resurrection is performed by a surgical robot that collects slices of heterogeneous tissue, generated from a yellow bio-ink, and places them rapidly in sequence, followed by the addition of softer tissues via long red fibres.

Continue reading… “3D Printing humans: A quick review of 3D Bioprinters”

Energy, Green Friendly, new technology, Science & Technology News

New droplet-based electricity generator: A drop of water generates 140V power, lighting up 100 LED bulbs

February 13, 2020

New droplet-based electricity generator: A drop of water generates 140V power, lighting up 100 LED bulbs

A research team led by scientists from the City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has recently developed a droplet-based electricity generator (DEG) with a field-effect transistor (FET)-like structure that allows for high energy conversion efficiency and instantaneous power density thousands of times that of its counterparts without FET technology. This would help to advance scientific research of water energy generation and tackle the energy crisis.

The research was led together by Professor Wang Zuankai from CityU’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, Professor Zeng Xiao Cheng from University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Professor Wang Zhong Lin, founding director and chief scientist from Beijing Institute of Nanoenergy and Nanosystems of Chinese Academy of Sciences. Their findings were published in Nature in a study titled “A droplet-based electricity generator with high instantaneous power density.”

Continue reading… “New droplet-based electricity generator: A drop of water generates 140V power, lighting up 100 LED bulbs”

Advertising, Corporate Manipulation, Internet, Science & Technology News

Ad blocking takes off on mobile phones, a challenge for publishers

February 12, 2020

About 15% to 30% of website traffic is from people with ad-blocking software, online ad firm Blockthrough reports.

The number of people using ad-blocking technology on mobile browsers has surged to 527 million, an increase of 64% over the last three years, according to a report published Thursday. Combined with ad blocking on personal computers, that means a total of 763 million devices were running ad blockers in the fourth quarter of 2019, the report said.

That means about 15% to 30% of website traffic is using an ad blocker, said Marty Kratky-Katz, chief executive of Blockthrough, a Toronto-based company that helps publishers try to cope with ad blocking.

Continue reading… “Ad blocking takes off on mobile phones, a challenge for publishers”