The Microbiome Immunity Project is a new, IBM-facilitated citizen science project by scientists from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Massachusetts General Hospital, University of California San Diego, and the Simons Foundation’s Flatiron Institute. It will use the surplus processing power on volunteers’ computers to conduct millions of virtual experiments on behalf of the …
Facebook and Google compete intensely for your time online and for the ad dollars of corporations. But now the two companies are collaborating on efforts to use balloons and drone aircraft to expand Internet access to the four billion people that don’t have it. Documents filed with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission show that both …
A new kind of nanoscale rectenna (half antenna and half rectifier) can convert solar and infrared into electricity, plus be tuned to nearly any other frequency as a detector. Right now efficiency is only one percent, but professor Baratunde Cola and colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech, Atlanta) convincingly argue that they …
Imagine a battery-powered plane that has 10 engines and can take off like a helicopter and fly efficiently like an aircraft. That is a concept being developed by NASA researchers called Greased Lightning or GL-10. NASA Langley researchers designed and built a battery-powered, 10-engine remotely piloted aircraft. The Greased Lightning GL-10 prototype has a 10-foot …
Liquid water collects in the Martian soil each night, before evaporating during the day, according to NASA’s Curiosity rover. If future missions can confirm this water cycle, it means astronauts could one day farm moisture to provide drinking water on Mars. Planetary scientists have seen a lot of evidence for frozen water at the Martian …
Exciting progress towards spin-based quantum computing has recently been made with qubits realized using nitrogen-vacancy centres in diamond and phosphorus atoms in silicon. For example, long coherence times were made possible by the presence of spin-free isotopes of carbon and silicon. However, despite promising single-atom nanotechnologies6, there remain substantial challenges in coupling such qubits and …
George Church of Harvard’s Stem Cell Institute led the conference off with a summary of progress in CRISPR technology. A questioner asked George about interaction with “chromatin state”. In any given cell, at any given time, some of the DNA is unwrapped and available for expression, called euchromatin, while the rest, called heterochromatin, is spooled …
[Eurekalert] With the rise of emerging economies around the world and a concomitant upgrade of health care systems, the global population has been rapidly expanding. As a consequence, worldwide demand for agricultural products is also growing. Crops now provide food and the other important resources for seven billion humans. Food supplies are primarily based on …
CNET – Columbia researcher Nina Tandon believes that the era of engineered tissues — think ultimately of a replacement kidney grown in the lab — is just beginning. Medical science, boosted by manufacturing and information technology, is on the cusp of being able to grow human tissue. So believes Nina Tandon, a senior fellow at …
NY Times gets behind a proposal to fix soot and methane as the faster way to address climate change while also improving public health. Science – Simultaneously Mitigating Near-Term Climate Change and Improving Human Health and Food Security Tropospheric ozone and black carbon (BC) contribute to both degraded air quality and global warming. We considered …
James Woodward reviews the scientific history of inertia, gravity and Mach Effect at Centauri Dreams. What is Mach’s principle? Well, lots of people have given lots of versions of this principle, and protracted debates have taken place about it. Its simplest expression is: Inertial reaction forces are produced by the gravitational action of everything that …