Lifeboat Foundation

Much of human invention and innovation has been the result of our discovery and replication of natural phenomena, from birds in flight to whales that dive deep into the ocean. For the first time, researchers have captured at the nanometer level the gliding machinery of the bacterium Mycoplasma mobile. Their findings were published in mBio. It illuminates the origin and operating principle of motility, which could serve as a basis for the next generation of nanoscale devices and pharmaceuticals.

“My lab has been studying the molecular nature of bacteria from the Mycoplasma genus for years,” states Professor Makoto Miyata from the Graduate School of Science, Osaka City University and lead of the research group. “And we have developed a conceptualization of how some of these parasitic bacteria ‘glide’ around their hosts.”

For example, Mycoplasma mobile forms a protrusion at one end giving the bacterium a flask shape. At the tapered end are external appendages that bind to solid surfaces, and in concert with an internal mechanism, cause the bacterium to glide across the surface of its host to find nutrient-rich sites and escape the host’s immune response.

Europe’s medicines regulator on Friday backed the use of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for children as young as 12, paving the way for a broader roll-out in the region after similar clearances in the United States and Canada.

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Ingenuity lost just one navigation photo, but that made it tilt back and forth in the air on the way to its most daring Mars landing yet.

In March of 2014, I knew my eight year old daughter was sick. Once borderline overweight, she was now skeletally thin and fading away from us. A pre-dawn ambulance ride to the hospital gave us the devastating news – our daughter had Type 1 diabetes, and would be dependent on insulin injections for the rest of her life.

This news hit me particularly hard. I’ve always been a preparedness-minded kind of guy, and I’ve worked to free myself and my family from as many of the systems of support as possible. As I sat in the dark of the Pediatric ICU watching my daughter slowly come back to us, I contemplated how tied to the medical system I had just become. She was going to need a constant supply of expensive insulin, doled out by a medical insurance system that doesn’t understand that a 90-day supply of life-saving medicine is a joke to a guy who stocks a year supply of toilet paper. Plus I had recently read an apocalyptic novel where a father watches his 12-year old diabetic daughter slip into a coma as the last of her now-unobtainable insulin went bad in an off-grid world. I swore to myself that I’d never let this happen, and set about trying to find ways to make my own insulin, just in case.

Thermoelectric (TE) conversion offers carbon-free power generation from geothermal, waste, body or solar heat, and shows promise to be the next-generation energy conversion technology. At the core of such TE conversion, there lies an all solid-state thermoelectric device which enables energy conversion without the emission of noise, vibrations, or pollutants. To this, a POSTECH research team proposed a way to design the next-generation thermoelectric device that exhibits remarkably simple manufacturing process and structure compared to the conventional ones, while displaying improved energy conversion efficiency using the spin Seebeck effect (SSE).

A POSTECH joint research team—led by Professor Hyungyu Jin and Ph.D. candidate Min Young Kim of the Department of Mechanical Engineering with Professor Si-Young Choi of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering—has succeeded in designing a highly efficient thermoelectric device by optimizing the properties of both the interior and surface of the magnetic material that makes up the SSE thermoelectric device. This is a pioneering study to show the possibility of fabricating a next-generation thermoelectric device by utilizing the SSE, which has remained in fundamental research. These research findings were recently published in the online edition of Energy and Environmental Science, an international academic journal in the field of energy.

Conventional TE devices rely on the charge Seebeck effect, a thermoelectric effect wherein a charge current is generated in the direction parallel to an applied temperature gradient in a solid material. This longitudinal geometry complicates the device structure and limits manufacturing such TE devices.

At Google’s workshop on the conceptual understanding of deep learning, award-winning computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou discussed brain assemblies and their correspondence with artificial intelligence.

Wednesday, May 26 at 8 pm ET, discover what we hope to learn about Saturn’s fascinating moon Titan, featuring planetary scientist Zibi Turtle. Register: https://s.si.edu/2Q58d9N

Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is an ocean world with a dense atmosphere, abundant complex organic material on its icy surface, and a liquid-water ocean in its interior. The Cassini-Huygens mission revealed Titan to be surprisingly Earth-like, with active geological processes and opportunities for organic material to have mixed with liquid water on the surface in the past. These attributes make Titan a unique destination to seek answers to fundamental questions about what makes a planet or moon habitable and about the pre-biotic chemical processes that led to the development of life here on Earth.
NASA’s upcoming Dragonfly New Frontiers mission is a rotorcraft lander designed to perform long-range in situ investigation of the chemistry and habitability of this fascinating extraterrestrial environment. In this program, Planetary scientist Zibi Turtle from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory will discuss this fascinating new mission: Taking advantage of Titan’s dense atmosphere and low gravity, Dragonfly will fly from place to place, exploring diverse geological settings to measure the compositions of surface materials and observe Titan’s geology and meteorology. Dragonfly will make multidisciplinary science measurements at dozens of sites, traveling ~100 miles during a 3-year mission to characterize Titan’s habitability and to determine how far organic chemistry has progressed in environments that provide key ingredients for life.

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Since the start of the pandemic, scientists have been seeking to better understand immunity to the novel coronavirus. How long is a person immune after having Covid-19, after getting vaccinated, or both? And what could long-lasting immunity mean for booster shots?

It’s still too early to tell — but experts are getting closer to cracking the code.