159 articles from FRIDAY 17.1.2020

Amazon Web Services enlists AI to help NASA get ahead of solar superstorms

If the sun throws out a radiation blast of satellite-killing proportions someday, Amazon Web Services may well play a role in heading off a technological doomsday. That's the upshot of a project that has NASA working with AWS Professional Services and the Amazon Machine Learning Solutions Lab to learn more about the early warning signs of a solar superstorm, with the aid of artificial...

US dumps huge amounts of sand on Miami Beach to tackle climate change erosion

Dozens of trucks have started dumping hundreds of thousands of tons of sand on Miami Beach as part of US government measures to protect Florida's tourist destinations against the effects of climate change. "We have erosion hotspots," said Stephen Leatherman, an expert on beaches and the environment at Florida International University. Leatherman -- known locally as "Dr Beach" -- said that rising...

Teens feel the heat of climate change

In 2017, when the drought in Cape Town was at its worst in over a century, aid organisation Gift of the Givers made an urgent call to South Africans to help farmers; suicide rates, amongst both small- and large-scale farmers, had surged in the few months prior. This and other evidence paints a bleak future picture in the context of climate change, and southern Africa is one of the areas that will...

LEDs used in tests to replace invasive medical procedures

Researchers produce gadgets such as gastric balloons that break down when lit by swallowable lightsThe days of needing to have medical devices removed through an invasive procedure could be numbered. Researchers have produced gadgets such as gastric balloons that break down when light from a swallowable LED shines upon them.The team say the approach could be extended to a broader range of medical...

Walking with atoms—chemical bond making and breaking recorded in action

Ever since it was proposed that atoms are building blocks of the world, scientists have been trying to understand how and why they bond to each other. Be it a molecule (which is a group of atoms joined together in a particular fashion), or a block of material or a whole living organism, ultimately, everything is controlled by the way atoms bond, and the way bonds break.

Ingestible medical devices can be broken down with light

A variety of medical devices can be inserted into the gastrointestinal tract to treat, diagnose, or monitor GI disorders. Many of these have to be removed by endoscopic surgery once their job is done. However, MIT engineers have now come up with a way to trigger such devices to break down inside the body when they are exposed to light from an ingestible LED.

Microsoft and Univ. of Washington join Georgia Tech team in $25M DNA data storage project

The University of Washington and Microsoft will take part in a federally funded effort to develop data storage techniques using synthetic DNA. The Molecular Information Storage program (also known as MIST) was launched this week by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (also known as IARPA), which is within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It's a multiyear...

The Guardian view on ‘flight shaming’: face it – life must change | Editorial

Individual choices will not solve the climate crisis but ministers should not be encouraging flyingIt started in Sweden, where the term flygskam (flight shame) was coined in 2018 to describe the unease about flying experienced by environmentally conscious travellers. The hashtag #jagstannarpåmarken (which translates as #stayontheground) came into use around the same time, as groups sprang up to...

Spider-Man-style robotic graspers defy gravity

Specially designed vacuum suction units allow humans to climb walls. Scientists have developed a suction unit that can be used on rough surfaces, no matter how textured, and that has applications in the development of climbing robots and robotic arms with grasping capabilities.

Scientists measure the evolving energy of a solar flare's explosive first minutes

Toward the end of 2017, a massive new region of magnetic field erupted on the Sun's surface next to an existing sunspot. The powerful collision of magnetic energy produced a series of potent solar flares, causing turbulent space weather conditions at Earth. These were the first flares to be captured, in their moment-by-moment progression, by NJIT's then recently opened Expanded Owens Valley Solar...

Chemists allow boron atoms to migrate

Organic molecules with atoms of the semi-metal boron are among the most important building blocks for synthesis products that are needed to produce drugs and agricultural chemicals. However, during the usual chemical reactions used in industry, the valuable boron unit, which can replace another atom in a molecule, is often lost. Chemists at the University of Münster have now succeeded in...

A new method for dating ancient earthquakes

Constraining the history of earthquakes produced by bedrock fracturing is important for predicting seismic activity and plate tectonic evolution. In a new study published in the Nature journal Scientific Reports Jan 17, 2020, a team of researchers presents a new microscale technique to determine the age of crystals grown during repeated activation of natural rock fractures over a time range of...

Material developed which is heat-insulating and heat-conducting at the same time

Styrofoam or copper—both materials have very different properties with regard to their ability to conduct heat. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (MPI-P) in Mainz and the University of Bayreuth have now jointly developed and characterized a novel, extremely thin and transparent material that has different thermal conduction properties depending on the direction. While...