Polymer Implant Trains Your Cells to Kill Cancer

One of cancer’s cleverest tricks is its ability to hide from the immune system. A new approach to cancer treatment called immunotherapy could spare patients at least some of the grueling battery of chemotherapy treatments by retraining the body’s own defenders–the cells of the immune system–to recognize and destroy tumors. Now researchers at Harvard University …

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Permanent nanoscale bubbles created

Engineers at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have whipped up, for the first time, permanent nanoscale bubbles—bubbles that endure for more than a year—from batches of foam made from a mixture of glucose syrup, sucrose stearate, and water. Future applications of these microbubbles could significantly extend the lifetimes of common gas-liquid products …

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New Cell processors, latest FGPAs, optimized Opterons

IBM has shifted cell processors to 65 nanometers and improved double precision performance by up to five times (PowerXCell 8i processors). Double precision performance is very important for scientific and supercomputing applications. New PowerXCell 8i processors in QS22 blades have :● 460 single precision (SP) GFLOPS/217 double precision (DP) GFLOPS per blade ● 6.4/3.0 TFLOPS …

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Certain Aluminum clusters appear to superconduct at 200K

Martin Jarrold,Indiana University in Bloomington, is claiming to have found evidence of superconductivity in aluminium nanoclusters at 200 K. Two years ago Yuri Ovchinnikov at the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics in Moscow and Vladimir Kresin at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California predicted that metal nanoclusters with exactly the right number of delocalised electrons …

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Overrated nuclear weapons and underrated conventional weapons

In response to the 2008 Edge question “when did facts change your mind”, Freeman Dyson describes the facts that changed his mind about the role of nuclear weapons in ending world war 2 I agree with the assessment that nuclear weapons are overrated and excessively feared. Nuclear weapons are devastating but conventional weapons and all …

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photonic crystal can increase the efficiency of solar cells by up to 37 percent

In conventional solar cells (a), light (dashed line) enters an antireflective layer (yellow) and then a layer of silicon (green) in which much of the light is converted into electricity. But some of the light (solid arrows) reflects off an aluminum backing, returns through the silicon, and exits without generating electricity. A new material (represented …

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