Lifeboat Foundation

Usually, the two characterizations of a material are mutually exclusive: something is either stiff, or it can absorb vibrations well—but rarely both. However, if we could make materials that are both stiff and good at absorbing vibrations, there would be a whole host of potential applications, from design at the nanoscale to aerospace engineering.

A team of researchers from the University of Amsterdam has now found a way to create materials that are stiff, but still good at absorbing vibrations—and equally importantly, that can be kept very light-weight.

Continue reading “Buckle up: A new class of materials is here” »

Is Senior Vice President of the Energy Systems business unit of Westinghouse Electric Company, which is the nuclear power unit of.
Westinghouse, where her core focus is in leading the team developing and.
deploying their AP300 Small Modular Nuclear Reactor (https://www.westinghousenuclear.com/Portals/0/about-2020/lea…UL22.pdf).

Dr. Baranwal recently served Chief Technology Officer of the organization, where she led the company’s global research and development investments, spearheading their technology strategy to advance the company’s nuclear innovation, and drove next-generation solutions for existing and new markets.

Continue reading “Dr. Rita Baranwal, Ph.D. — Senior Vice President, Energy Systems, Westinghouse Electric Company” »

Is the Quantum for Bio Program Director, at Wellcome Leap (https://wellcomeleap.org/our-team/elicakyoseva/), a $40M +$10M program focused on identifying, developing, and demonstrating biology and healthcare applications that will benefit from the quantum computers expected to emerge in the next 3–5 years.

Wellcome Leap was established with $300 million in initial funding from the Wellcome Trust, the UK charitable foundation, to accelerate discovery and innovation for the benefit of human health, focusing on build bold, unconventional programs and fund them at scale—specifically programs that target global human health challenges, with the goal of achieving breakthrough scientific and technological solutions.

Continue reading “Dr. Elica Kyoseva, Ph.D. — Quantum for Bio Program Director — Wellcome Leap” »

In 2021, lanthanide-doped nanoparticles made waves—or rather, an avalanche—when Changwan Lee, then a Ph.D. student in Jim Schuck’s lab at Columbia Engineering, set off an extreme light-producing chain reaction from ultrasmall crystals developed at the Molecular Foundry at Berkeley Lab. Those same crystals are back again with a blink that can now be deliberately and indefinitely controlled.

“We’ve found the first fully photostable, fully photoswitchable nanoparticle—a holy grail of nanoprobe design,” said Schuck, associate professor of mechanical engineering.

This unique material was synthesized in the laboratories of Emory Chan and Bruce Cohen at the Molecular Foundry, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as well as in a national lab in South Korea. The research team also included Yung Doug Suh’s lab at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST).

A perovskite-based device that combines aspects of electronics and photonics may open doors to new kinds of computer chips or quantum qubits.

MIT

MIT is an acronym for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is a prestigious private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts that was founded in 1861. It is organized into five Schools: architecture and planning; engineering; humanities, arts, and social sciences; management; and science. MIT’s impact includes many scientific breakthroughs and technological advances. Their stated goal is to make a better world through education, research, and innovation.

Scientists from CiQUS, ICN2, University of Cantabria, DIPC and DTU join forces to develop a versatile method for building brick-by-brick carbon nanocircuits with tunable properties.

The quest to develop hydrogen as a clean energy source that could curb our dependence on fossil fuels may lead to an unexpected place—coal. A team of Penn State scientists found that coal may represent a potential way to store hydrogen gas, much like batteries store energy for future use, addressing a major hurdle in developing a clean energy supply chain.

“We found that coal can be this geological hydrogen battery,” said Shimin Liu, associate professor of energy and mineral engineering at Penn State. “You could inject and store the hydrogen energy and have it there when you need to use it.”

Hydrogen is a clean burning fuel and shows promise for use in the most energy intensive sectors of our economy—transportation, electricity generation and manufacturing. But much work remains to build a hydrogen infrastructure and make it an affordable and reliable energy source, the scientists said.

The psychedelic substances 5-MeO-DMT causes a long-lasting increase in the number of tiny protrusions called dendritic spines in the brain, according to new research published in Neuropsychopharmacology. The study, which was conducted on mice, sheds light on the behavioral and neural mechanisms of 5-MeO-DMT.

Serotonergic psychedelics (such as psilocybin and LSD) have shown promise as potential therapeutics for mental illnesses like depression and anxiety. Short-acting compounds are particularly interesting because they require less dosing time, which could improve patient access to treatment. In humans, 5-MeO-DMT produces a short-lasting experience due to its rapid breakdown in the body.

“My lab started research on psychiatric drugs like ketamine and psychedelics about 10 years ago. We were motivated by how basic science and clinical research can together powerfully move a drug forward to become medicine. Specifically I believe there is a lot of potential for psychedelics as therapeutics, and that drives our interest in this topic,” said study author Alex Kwan (@kwanalexc), an associate professor in the Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering at Cornell University.

A team of engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has recently shown that nearly any material can be turned into a device that continuously harvests electricity from humidity in the air. The secret lies in being able to pepper the material with nanopores less than 100 nanometers in diameter. The research appeared in the journal Advanced Materials.

“This is very exciting,” says Xiaomeng Liu, a graduate student in electrical and computer engineering in UMass Amherst’s College of Engineering and the paper’s lead author. “We are opening up a wide door for harvesting clean electricity from thin air.”

“The air contains an enormous amount of electricity,” says Jun Yao, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in the College of Engineering at UMass Amherst, and the paper’s senior author. “Think of a cloud, which is nothing more than a mass of water droplets. Each of those droplets contains a charge, and when conditions are right, the cloud can produce a lightning bolt—but we don’t know how to reliably capture electricity from lightning. What we’ve done is to create a human-built, small-scale cloud that produces electricity for us predictably and continuously so that we can harvest it.”