Lifeboat Foundation

Organic farmers are returning to an unusual tool in the fight against weeds — fire. Called ‘flame weeding’ the process involves either using a small, handheld flamethrower, or installing a pretty hardcore row of flamethrowers onto the front of a tractor and slowly driving through fields of crops singeing the weeds in between the rows.

Flame Engineering, Inc. specializes in developing and selling flame weeding equipment and says the technique is rooted in science. The company’s website explains that the technique is not about blasting the weeds to kingdom come, but rather about focusing on destroying cell structure.

Continue reading “Flame-Throwing Tractor Needs No Chemicals to Get Rid of Weeds” »

Electro-optic modulators, which control aspects of light in response to electrical signals, are essential for everything from sensing to metrology and telecommunications. Today, most research into these modulators is focused on applications that take place on chips or within fiber optic systems. But what about optical applications outside the wire and off the chip, like distance sensing in vehicles?

Current technologies to modulate light in free space are bulky, slow, static, or inefficient. Now, researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), in collaboration with researchers at the department of Chemistry at the University of Washington, have developed a compact and tunable electro-optic modulator for free space applications that can modulate light at gigahertz speed.

“Our work is the first step toward a class of free-space electro-optic modulators that provide compact and efficient intensity modulation at gigahertz speed of free-space beams at telecom wavelengths,” said Federico Capasso, Robert L. Wallace Professor of Applied Physics and Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow in Electrical Engineering, senior author of the paper.

Circa 2019

Mark Lawrence (link is external), a postdoctoral scholar in materials science and engineering at Stanford, has moved a step closer to this future with a scheme to make a photon diode — a device that allows light to only flow in one direction — which, unlike other light-based diodes, is small enough for consumer electronics.

Our cells perform a marvel of engineering when it comes to packing information into small spaces. Every time a cell divides, it bundles up an amazing 4 metres of DNA into 46 tiny packages, each of which is only several millionths of a metre in length. Researchers from EMBL Heidelberg and the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg have now discovered how a family of DNA motor proteins succeeds in packaging loosely arranged strands of DNA into compact individual chromosomes during cell division.

The researchers studied condensin, a protein complex critical to the process of chromosome formation. Although this complex was discovered more than three decades ago, its mode of action remained largely unexplored. In 2018, researchers from the Häring group at EMBL Heidelberg and their collaborators showed that condensin molecules create loops of DNA, which may explain how chromosomes are formed. However, the inner workings by which the protein complex achieves this feat remained unknown.

Continue reading “How the Genome Shapes Up for Cell Division” »

A non-profit organization merges engineering and biology to accelerate drug development for childhood cancers.

Lamborghinis are already marvels of engineering but they become even more so when people decide to upgrade them. This is what designer Michael Hritzkrieg did with this new model called the Lamborghini LMXX2.

You can see from the pictures that it’s got some impressive treads that run all around the car making it clear that it can tackle even the most difficult terrains such as sands, rocks and soil. IE spoke to Hritzkrieg about his innovative design and he surprisingly described it as “a rush job to meet an Instagram competition deadline.”

The competition he is referring to is the AGP Contest on Instagram which asked participants to conceive of a design using the keywords “Desert + Lamborghini + Future”.

A model attributes the propagating bands that appear in a compressed porous medium to structural changes alone.

Porous media such as snow, sand, cereals—even bones—develop strikingly similar banded patterns when they’re squeezed. Those bands form when localized deformation zones propagate throughout the material. Understanding what triggers the universal and “material-agnostic” emergence of the bands is a common goal in disciplines including avalanche research, petroleum extraction, structural engineering, geophysics, and agriculture. Now, describing the phenomenon using a model based entirely on a collapsing-pore mechanism, Lars Blatny and his colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, and the University of Sydney, Australia, identify a common origin for these patterns. The result could lead to comprehensive continuum-mechanics models of porous media.

Blatny and his colleagues simulated a vertical 2D slice of an elastoplastic structure that was squeezed from above and below. The structure was perforated with regularly spaced square holes that composed 25% to 75% of its total area. By varying the solid area fraction and the structure’s elasticity and yield strength, the researchers examined how different porous structures deform when compressed at a constant speed. They identified six classes of compaction patterns and found that they could describe these classes entirely by two numbers that characterize the material’s properties and the speed at which the structure was compressed.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2125914059/revopoint-mi…m-precison Designers, architects, engineers, we’re all collectively known as creators. The Revopoint MINI handheld 3D scanner just amplifies our creating (or rather re-creating) abilities. Designed to be about the same size as a podcasting microphone (with the tripod and all), Revopoint MINI is an industrial-grade handheld 3D scanner with a staggering precision of 0.02mm. It uses a Class 1 Blue Light that lends it its high accuracy, while still allowing it to be safe on the skin. Just hold it against the object you want to scan and wave it around and like magic, the Revopoint MINI gives you a high-accuracy 3D model, complete with tolerances, textures, and even color information. This makes it perfect for a wide degree of applications, from 3D modeling and animation to medical design, automotive design, jewelry design, even archaeology.

Our cells perform a marvel of engineering when it comes to packing information into small spaces. Every time a cell divides, it bundles up an amazing 4 meters of DNA into 46 tiny packages, each of which is only several millionths of a meter in length. Researchers from EMBL Heidelberg and the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg have now discovered how a family of DNA motor proteins succeeds in packaging loosely arranged strands of DNA into compact individual chromosomes during cell division.

The researchers studied condensin, a protein complex critical to the process of chromosome formation. Although this complex was discovered more than three decades ago, its mode of action remained largely unexplored. In 2018, researchers from the Häring group at EMBL Heidelberg and their collaborators showed that condensin molecules create loops of DNA, which may explain how chromosomes are formed. However, the inner workings by which the protein complex achieves this feat remained unknown.

Continue reading “Uncovering the inner workings of the molecular machinery that shapes chromosomes during cell division” »