Lifeboat Foundation

Electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection is a significant concern in the chemical and electronics industries. In electronics, ESD often causes integrated circuit failures due to rapid voltage and current discharges from charged objects, such as human fingers or tools.

With the help of 3D printing techniques, researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) are “packaging” electronics with printable elastomeric silicone foams to provide both mechanical and electrical protection of sensitive components. Without suitable protection, substantial equipment and component failures may occur, leading to increased costs and potential workplace injuries. The team’s research is featured in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

3D printing is a rapidly growing manufacturing method that enables the production of cellular foams with customizable pore architectures to achieve compressive mechanical properties that can be tailored to minimize permanent deformation by evenly distributing stress throughout the printed architecture.

Breaking oxygen out of a water molecule is a relatively simple process, at least chemically. Even so, it does require components, one of the most important of which is a catalyst. Catalysts enable reactions and are linearly scalable, so if you want more reactions quickly, you need a bigger catalyst. In space exploration, bigger means heavier, which translates into more expensive. So, when humanity is looking for a catalyst to split water into oxygen and hydrogen on Mars, creating one from local Martian materials would be worthwhile. That is precisely what a team from Hefei, China, did by using what they called an “AI Chemist.”

Unfortunately, the name “AIChemist” didn’t stick, though that joke might vary depending on the font you read it in. Whatever its name, the team’s work was some serious science. It specifically applied machine learning algorithms that have become all the rage lately to selecting an effective catalyst for an “oxygen evolution reaction” by utilizing materials native to Mars.

Continue reading “An AI Chemist Made A Catalyst to Make Oxygen On Mars Using Local Materials” »

Bacteria modify their ribosomes when exposed to widely used antibiotics, according to research published in Nature Communications. The subtle changes might be enough to alter the binding site of drug targets and constitute a possible new mechanism of antibiotic resistance.

Escherichia coli is a common bacterium which is often harmless but can cause serious infections. The researchers exposed E. coli to streptomycin and kasugamycin, two drugs which treat bacterial infections. Streptomycin has been a staple in treating tuberculosis and other infections since the 1940s, while kasugamycin is less known but crucial in agricultural settings to prevent bacterial diseases in crops.

Both antibiotics tamper with bacteria’s ability to make new proteins by specifically targeting their ribosomes. These molecular structures create proteins and are themselves made of proteins and ribosomal RNA. Ribosomal RNA is often modified with chemical tags that can alter the shape and function of the ribosome. Cells use these tags to fine tune protein production.

Oxford University researchers have made a significant step toward realizing a form of “biological electricity” that could be used in a variety of bioengineering and biomedical applications, including communication with living human cells. The work was published on 28 November in the journal Science.

Iontronic devices are one of the most rapidly-growing and exciting areas in biochemical engineering. Instead of using electricity, these mimic the human brain by transmitting information via ions (charged particles), including sodium, potassium, and calcium ions.

Ultimately, iontronic devices could enable biocompatible, energy-efficient, and highly precise signaling systems, including for drug-delivery.

Researchers at University of California San Diego analyzed the genomes of hundreds of malaria parasites to determine which genetic variants are most likely to confer drug resistance.

The findings, published in Science, could help scientists use machine learning to predict antimalarial drug resistance and more effectively prioritize the most promising experimental treatments for further development. The approach could also help predict treatment resistance in other infectious diseases, and even cancer.

“A lot of drug resistance research can only look at one chemical agent at a time, but what we’ve been able to do here is create a roadmap for understanding antimalaria drug resistance across more than a hundred different compounds,” said Elizabeth Winzeler, Ph.D., a professor at UC San Diego Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and the Department of Pediatrics at UC San Diego School of Medicine.

An exploration of two new papers proposing new chemicals that SETI may search for in the atmospheres of exoplanets that may indicate life.

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Continue reading “Two New SETI Biosignature Types” »

A quiet revolution is brewing in labs around the world, where scientists’ use of AI is growing exponentially. One in three postdocs now use large language models to help carry out literature reviews, coding, and editing. In October, the creators of our AlphaFold 2 system, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper became Nobel Laureates in Chemistry for using AI to predict the structure of proteins, alongside the scientist David Baker, for his work to design new proteins. Society will soon start to feel these benefits more direct ly, with drugs and materials designed with the help of AI currently making their way through development.

In this essay, we take a tour of how AI is transforming scientific disciplines from genomics to computer science to weather forecasting. Some scientists are training their own AI models, while others are fine-tuning existing AI models, or using these models’ predictions to accelerate their research. Scientists are using AI as a scientific instrument to help tackle important problems, such as designing proteins that bind more tightly to disease targets, but are also gradually transforming how science itself is practised.

Continue reading “A new golden age of discovery” »

An international team of scientists has published a study highlighting the potential role of iron sulfides in the formation of life in early Earth’s terrestrial hot springs. According to the researchers, the sulfides may have catalyzed the reduction of gaseous carbon dioxide into prebiotic organic molecules via nonenzymatic pathways.

This work, appearing in Nature Communications, offers new insights into Earth’s early carbon cycles and prebiotic chemical reactions, underscoring the significance of iron sulfides in supporting the terrestrial hot springs origin of life hypothesis.

The study was conducted by Dr. Nan Jingbo from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology, Chinese Academy of Sciences; Dr. Luo Shunqin from Japan’s National Institute for Materials Science; Dr. Quoc Phuong Tran from the University of New South Wales, Australia, and other researchers.

Pesticides can be made more effective and environmentally friendly by improving how they stick to plant surfaces, thanks to new research led by Dr. Mustafa Akbulut, professor of chemical engineering at Texas A&M University.

Akbulut and his research group have developed an innovative pesticide delivery system called nanopesticides. These tiny technologies, developed through a collaboration between Texas A&M University’s engineering and agricultural colleges, Dr. Luis Cisneros-Zevallo, professor of Horticultural Science and Dr. Younjin Min, professor of Chemical Environ Engineering at University of California, Riverside, could change how we use pesticides.

“The U.S. is a world leader in agricultural production, feeding not just our nation but much of the world. Yet we are using pesticides in a way that is simply not sustainable—with a substantial fraction not reaching its intended target,” said Akbulut. “Our research shows that by optimizing the surface chemistry of pesticide carriers, we can make these essential crop protection tools more efficient.”