Posts

Since the 1920s The Geysers geothermal power plant 72 miles (115 kilometers) north of San Francisco has been pumping out electricity harvested from hot rocks deep within Earth’s crust. But there are only so many natural volcanic formations to be tapped. In locations that are not blessed by easy access to this natural resource, drilling into the hot rock bed and pumping fluid through it has the potential to unleash 2,000 times the total annual consumption of energy in the U....

There may be killer asteroids headed for Earth, and NASA has decided to do something about it. The space agency announced a new “Grand Challenge” today (June 18) to find all dangerous space rocks and figure out how to stop them from destroying Earth. The new mission builds on projects already underway at NASA, including a plan to capture an asteroid, pull it in toward the moon and send astronauts to visit it....

In early 2017 two large passenger planes and a smaller corporate jet practiced landing, one right after the other, without the usual constant help of an air traffic controller. Instead they relied on NASA-developed technology that lets planes automatically “talk” to one another and to control towers, simultaneously. If these flight tests—which took place at an airport near Seattle—prove convincing, the technology could eventually make its way to the Federal Aviation Administration for approval....

Chinese regulators have granted conditional approval to an Alzheimer’s drug that is derived from seaweed, potentially shaking up the field after years of clinical failures involving experimental therapies from major drug companies. The announcement over the weekend has been met with caution as well as an eagerness from clinicians and others to see full data from the drug maker, Shanghai Green Valley Pharmaceuticals. The company said its drug, Oligomannate, improved cognitive function in patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s compared to placebo in a Phase 3 trial, with benefits seen in patients as early as week four and persisting throughout the 36 weeks of the trial....

Scientists have developed three new robots that walk a lot like humans do. The androids, unveiled yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., are extremely efficient, using about the same amount of energy as a person out for a stroll does. The inspiration for the robots’ novel designs came from simple toys that have been around for centuries: the force of gravity allows them walk down a shallow slope without the need for motors....

Although artificial hearts are stymied by complications, left ventricular assist devices (LVADs) are extending lives. Doctors began implanting them two decades ago to keep heart failure patients alive while they waited for weeks or months for an available transplant organ. Today improved designs are being installed as final fixes. Indeed, the distinction between an LVAD used as a bridge to transplant and as a permanent aid “is disappearing,” says Kiyotaka Fukamachi, head of the Cleveland Clinic’s Cardiovascular Dynamics Laboratory....

Thomas Steitz, Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry and Professor of Chemistry at Yale University and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, receives one-third of this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry for elucidating the structure and function of the ribosome, the protein-making factory of the cell. Joining him are Venkatraman Ramakrishnan of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, and Ada Yonath at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, who also worked on the problem....

A groundbreaking treatment that arms immune cells called T cells to battle cancer is barrelling towards regulators, fuelled by unprecedented clinical success and investor exuberance. But progress of the therapy, called CAR-T, has been marred by its toxicity; several deaths have been reported in clinical trials. Even as the first company readies its application to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—expected by the end of the year—researchers are hard at work to make the supercharged T cells safer....

Chemical engineers in North Dakota have successfully turned oil from plants—canola (rapeseed), coconuts and soybeans—into jet fuel indistinguishable from the conventional kind, according to U.S. government tests. Working with the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), scientists at the Energy & Environmental Research Center (EERC) at the University of North Dakota turned these plant oils into fuel that had a similar density, energy content and even freezing point....

By Heidi Ledford of Nature magazineAn analysis of nearly three-dozen highly cited papers has found that researchers often overstate the link between biomarkers and disease by citing papers that report the strongest association, even when subsequent analyses downplay the connection. Biomarkers are biological characteristics, such as the activity of a gene or protein, which can be used to monitor a person’s health. They are key to the success of personalized medicine: biomarkers may predict whether a person is likely to develop a disease and how they will respond to a given treatment....

The rugged, diverse landscape of Papua New Guinea, just north of Australia, is a global hotspot of biodiversity, including fantastic creatures such as birds of paradise, echidnas and cuscuses. It is also home to more than 800 human languages. Because infrastructure is limited, more than 80 percent of PNG’s people still lead subsistence lifestyles, but population pressure and the opportunity to plant cash crops like cocoa or timber are threatening the balance that tribal people had maintained for centuries....

New England is nervously awaiting heavy snow and strong winds as “Winter Storm Grayson” barrels up the U.S. Atlantic coast. Already, the storm has hit regions not accustomed to severe winter weather—Florida, Georgia, Virginia and the Carolinas—with a mixture of snow and rain, according to news reports. This is no typical winter storm—meteorologists have been predicting Grayson will soon turn into a particularly intense system called a “bomb cyclone.” Scientific American spoke with Jeff Masters, director of meteorology and co-founder of Weather Underground, about the science behind the powerful winter storm hitting the eastern U....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. East Antarctica’s Conger ice shelf—a floating platform the size of Rome—broke off the continent on March 15, 2022. Since the beginning of satellite observations in the 1970s, the tip of the shelf had been disintegrating into icebergs in a series of what glaciologists call calving events. Conger was already reduced to a 50km-long and 20km-wide strip attached to Antarctica’s vast continental ice sheet at one end and the ice-covered Bowman Island at the other....

In 2009 the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corp. (Embrapa) and the Brasilia Zoological Garden began scavenging and freezing blood, sperm and umbilical cord cells from roadkill and other wild animals that had died, mostly in the Cerrado savanna—an incredibly diverse collection of tropical forest and grassland ecosystems home to at least 10,000 plant species and more than 800 species of birds and mammals, some of which live nowhere else in the world....

What is actually happening at the atomic scale when two elements react? This year’s chemistry prize goes to three theoretical chemists who devised a way for computers to model and predict how such reactions take place: Martin Karplus of Harvard University and the Universite de Strasbourg in France; Michael Levitt of the Stanford University School of Medicine and Arieh Warshel of the University of Southern California. Or, as the Nobel Committee put it in awarding the prize: “for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems....

In early 2009 Mike Jones bought a newspaper at a convenience store in Louisville, Ky., and read about a local doctor who wanted to try something unprecedented: healing an ailing heart by harvesting and multiplying its native stem cells—immature cells with regenerative powers. Jones, then 65, had congestive heart failure: his heart was no longer pumping blood efficiently. He contacted the doctor, Roberto Bolli of the University of Louisville, and in July of that year Jones became the first person in the world to receive an infusion of his own cardiac stem cells....

From Nature magazine Loretta, Ricky, Tiffany and Torian lead increasingly quiet lives, munching peppers and plums, perching and swinging in their 16-cubic-metre glass enclosures. They are the last four chimpanzees at Bioqual, a contract firm in Rockville, Maryland, that since 1986 has housed young chimpanzees for use by the nearby National Institutes of Health (NIH). Now an animal-advocacy group is demanding that the animals’ roles as research subjects is brought to an end....

How does the slingshot effect work to change the orbit of a spacecraft? Jeremy B. Jones, Cassini Navigation Team chief at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., explains: Spacecraft taking advantage of a gravity assist use the same principles that underlie orbital changes occurring regularly among moons and smaller bodies in the solar system. Comets from outlying regions, for instance, are often thrown into the inner solar system by the major planets, frequently Jupiter....

Storing energy remains the missing link for many clean power technologies, but DOE researchers and startup companies are racing to fill the gap. Without a way to save electricity and heat for later use, intermittent renewable energy will struggle to close price and performance differences with fossil fuels. But stored energy has advantages. It can respond to increased power demands faster than a turbine can spool up, and it can also save excess power and then supply it when needed....

Loud, concussive explosions on the battlefield may last only a few seconds, but many soldiers returning from combat in the Middle East are experiencing lingering symptoms that cause them to perceive sounds even when it is quiet. Doctors can do little to treat the problem—typically described as a ringing in the ears—because they lack an effective way of delivering medication to the inner ear. That could change in a few years, in the form of an implantable polymer-based microscale drug-release system that delivers medicine to the inner ear....