Lifeboat Foundation

How long the battery of your phone or computer lasts depends on how many lithium ions can be stored in the battery’s negative electrode material. If the battery runs out of these ions, it can’t generate an electrical current to run a device and ultimately fails.

Materials with a higher lithium ion storage capacity are either too heavy or the wrong shape to replace graphite, the electrode material currently used in today’s batteries.

Purdue University scientists and engineers have introduced a potential way that these materials could be restructured into a new electrode design that would allow them to increase a battery’s lifespan, make it more stable and shorten its charging time.

In regenerative medicine, scientists aim to significantly advance techniques that can control stem cell lineage commitment. For example, mechanical stimulation of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) at the nanoscale can activate mechanotransduction pathways to stimulate osteogenesis (bone development) in 2-D and 3D culture. Such work can revolutionize bone graft procedures by creating graft material from autologous or allogenic sources of MSCs without chemically inducing the phenomenon. Due to increasing biomedical interest in such mechanical stimulation of cells for clinical use, both researchers and clinicians require a scalable bioreactor system to provide consistently reproducible results. In a new study now published on Scientific Reports, Paul Campsie and a team of multidisciplinary researchers at the departments of biomedical engineering, computing, physics, and molecular, cell and systems biology engineered a new bioreactor system to meet the existing requirements.

The new instrument contained a vibration plate for bioreactions, calibrated and optimized for nanometer vibrations at 1 kHz, a power supply unit to generate a 30 nm vibration amplitude and custom six-well cultureware for cell growth. The cultureware contained magnetic inserts to attach to the bioreactor’s magnetic vibration plate. They assessed osteogenic protein expression to confirm the differentiation of MSCs after initial biological experiments within the system. Campsie et al. conducted atomic force microscopy (AFM) of the 3D gel constructs to verify that strain hardening of the gel did not occur during vibrational stimulation. The results confirmed cell differentiation to be the result of nano-vibrational stimulations provided by the bioreactor alone.

The increasing incidence of skeletal injuries due to age-related conditions such as osteoporosis and osteoarthritis is a metric of the depleting quality of human life. The development of treatments for increased bone density or fracture healing are prime targets for the regenerative potential of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs). Researchers have demonstrated controlled osteogenesis (development of bones) of MSCs via mechanical stimulation using several methods, including passive and active strategies. Passive methods typically alter the substrate topography to influence the cell adhesion profile, while active methods include exposure to varied forces from external sources.

The previously “impossible to solve” problems for some of the biggest financial, technological and academic institutions will soon be solved in Poughkeepsie.

That’s according to IBM, which announced the opening of its first Quantum Computing Center on Wednesday, based on its Poughkeepsie campus.

Quantum computing is “nothing short of a revolution for how we are going to process information,” Director of IBM Research Dario Gil said. While computers have traditionally processed binary code — a collection of ones and zeroes — quantum computers, he said, process information in qubits, or quantum bits.

IBM continues to push its quantum computing efforts forward and today announced that it will soon make a 53-qubit quantum computer available to clients of its IBM Q Network. The new system, which is scheduled to go online in the middle of next month, will be the largest universal quantum computer available for external use yet.

The new machine will be part of IBM’s new Quantum Computation Center in New York State, which the company also announced today. The new center, which is essentially a data center for IBM’s quantum machines, will also feature five 20-qubit machines, but that number will grow to 14 within the next month. IBM promises a 95 percent service availability for its quantum machines.

IBM notes that the new 53-qubit system introduces a number of new techniques that enable the company to launch larger, more reliable systems for cloud deployments. It features more compact custom electronics for improves scaling and lower error rates, as well as a new processor design.

A team from Dartmouth College and MIT has designed and conducted the first lab test to successfully detect and characterize a class of complex, “non-Gaussian” noise processes that are routinely encountered in superconducting quantum computing systems.

The characterization of non-Gaussian noise in superconducting quantum bits is a critical step toward making these systems more precise.

The joint study, published in Nature Communications, could help accelerate the realization of quantum computing systems. The experiment was based on earlier theoretical research conducted at Dartmouth and published in Physical Review Letters in 2016.

Generally girls lose interest in STEM careers as they get older. But, according to a new study, small changes at school and at home can have a profound impact on how girls perceive STEM careers, how confident they feel in class and how likely they are to pursue STEM academically and into their careers.

The study, “Closing the STEM Gap,” published today by Microsoft, surveyed more than 6,000 girls and young women on their interests and perceptions of science, technology, engineering and math. It found that girls tended to lose interest in STEM as they headed toward adulthood. And, by the time they’d finished high school, their interest had dropped substantially. For example, the report found that interest in computer science among females dropped 27 percentage points between middle school and college. According to the report: “In middle school … 31 percent of girls believe that jobs requiring coding and programming are ‘not for them.’ In high school, that percentage jumps up to 40. By the time they’re in college, 58 percent of girls count themselves out of these jobs.”

But, the study found, countermeasures both large and small can have a profound effect, including:

Lab chemists and computer scientists are joining forces to find a nerve-agent antidote that will go where today €™s antidotes can €™t go €“ the brain. Read more about in the latest issue of our Science & Technology Review magazine †’ https://str.llnl.gov/2019-06/valdez

A new Royal Society report called “iHuman: blurring lines between mind and machine” is for the first time systematically exploring whether it is “right” or not to use neural interfaces – machines implanted in or worn over the body to pick up or stimulate nervous activity in the brain or other parts of the nervous system. It also sets out recommendations to ensure the ethical risks are understood, and to set up a transparent, public-driven but flexible regulatory framework which will allow the UK to lead innovative technology in this field.

“DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.” Bill Gates wrote this in 1995, long before synthetic biology – a scientific discipline focused on reading, writing, and editing DNA – was being harnessed to program living cells. Today, the cost to order a custom DNA sequence has fallen faster than Moore’s law; perhaps that’s why the Microsoft founder is turning a significant part of his attention, and wallet, towards this exciting field.

Bill Gates is not the only tech founder billionaire that sees a parallel between bits and biology, either. Many other tech founders – the same people that made their money programming 1s and 0s – are now investing in biotech founders poised to make their own fortunes by programming A’s, T’s, G’s and C’s.

The industry has raised more than $12.3B in the last 10 years and last year, 98 synthetic biology companies collectively raised $3.8 billion, compared to just under $400 million total invested less than a decade ago. Synthetic biology companies are disrupting nearly every industry, from agriculture to medicine to cell-based meats. Engineered microorganisms are even being used to produce more sustainable fabrics and manufacture biofuels from recycled carbon emissions.