Lifeboat Foundation

Buckling, the sudden loss of structural stability, is usually the stuff of engineering nightmares. Mechanical buckling means catastrophic failure for every structural system from rockets to soufflés. It’s what caused the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, among numerous other disasters.

But, as anyone who has ever played with a toy popper knows, buckling also releases a lot of energy. When the structure of a popper buckles, the energy released by the instability sends the toy flying through the air. Now, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have harnessed that energy and used buckling to their advantage to build a fast-moving, inflatable soft actuator.

Continue reading “Researchers build a fast-moving jumping soft robot” »

In an innovative study, Radboudumc and LUMC jointly tested a candidate vaccine based on a genetically weakened malaria parasite. The results of this clinical trial, published in Science Translational Medicine, show that the vaccine is safe and elicits a defense response against a malaria infection.

Malaria is a major infectious disease, caused by a parasite with a complicated life cycle in humans and mosquitoes. The first stage in humans takes place in the liver, the second in the blood. Since the liver phase does not cause any symptoms of disease, but the blood phase does, the purpose of the vaccine is to stop the parasite in the liver.

Tune in live at 4 p.m. EDT, as NASA astronauts Douglas Hurley and Robert Behnken arrive at Kennedy Space Center to meet the SpaceX #CrewDragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket that will launch them to the space station and into history.

Airglow is the constant, faint glow of Earth’s upper atmosphere created by the interaction between sunlight and particles in this region. The phenomenon is similar to auroras, but where auroras are driven by high-energy particles originating from the solar wind, airglow is energized by ordinary, day-to-day solar radiation.

Studying airglow gives scientists clues about the upper atmosphere’s temperature, density, and composition, and helps us trace how particles move through the region itself. Two NASA missions take advantage of our planet’s natural glow to study the upper atmosphere: ICON focuses on how charged and neutral gases in the upper atmosphere interact, while GOLD observes what’s driving change — the Sun, Earth’s magnetic field or the lower atmosphere — in the region.

By watching and imaging airglow, the two missions enable scientists to tease out how Earth’s weather and space intersect, dictating the region’s complex behavior. https://go.nasa.gov/2RJax4x

Temporary tattoo electrodes are the most recent development in the field of cutaneous sensors. They have successfully demonstrated their performances in the monitoring of various electrophysiological signals on the skin. These epidermal electronic devices offer a conformal and imperceptible contact with the wearer while enabling good quality recordings over time. Evaluations of brain activity in clinical practice face multiple limitations, where such electrodes can provide realistic technological solutions and increase diagnostics efficiency. Here we present the performance of inkjet-printed conducting polymer tattoo electrodes in clinical electroencephalography and their compatibility with magnetoencephalography. The working mechanism of these dry sensors is investigated through the modeling of the skin/electrode impedance for better understanding of the biosignals transduction at this interface. Furthermore, a custom-made skin phantom platform demonstrates the feasibility of high-density recordings, which are essential in localizing neuropathological activities. These evaluations provide valuable input for the successful application of these ultrathin electronic tattoos sensors in multimodal brain monitoring and diagnosis.

Other researchers who were not involved in the project pointed out that plenty of work still has to be done to eventually be able to connect it to the human visual system, as Scientific American reports.

But some are hopeful.

“I think in about 10 years, we should see some very tangible practical applications of these bionic eyes,” Hongrui Jiang, an electrical engineer at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who was not involved in the research, told Scientific American.

More than 100,000 coronavirus cases have been reported to the World Health Organization in the last 24 hours, “the most in a single day since the outbreak began,” director-general Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said at a news conference Wednesday.

“We still have a long way to go in this pandemic,” he said. “In the last 24 hours, there have been 106,000 cases reported to WHO — the most in a single day since the outbreak began.”

Tedros added that almost “two-thirds of these cases were reported in just four countries,” although he did not specify where the cases had been recorded.

Superior qubits key to rapid increase in power.

Circa 2019

Cerebral palsy is a condition that results from injuries or abnormalities of the brain, usually in the womb but occurring any time during 2 years after birth. It affects brain and nervous system functions such as thinking, seeing, hearing, learning and movement.

Continue reading “Stem Cell Therapy for Cerebral Palsy” »