Lifeboat Foundation

Swine fever has made its way into China, home to half the world’s pigs. Farmers in Estonia are already counting the cost.

Nanoporous metals are superior catalysts for chemical reactions due to their large surface area and high electrical conductivity, making them perfect candidates for applications such as electrochemical reactors, sensors and actuators.

In a study published today in the journal Science Advances, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers, along with their counterparts at Harvard University, report on the hierarchical 3D printing of nanoporous gold, a proof of concept that researchers say could revolutionize the design of chemical reactors.

“If you consider traditional machining processes, it’s time consuming and you waste a lot of materials—also, you don’t have the capability to create complex structures,” said LLNL postdoctoral researcher Zhen Qi, a co-author on the paper. “By using 3D printing we can realize macroporous structures with application-specific flow patterns. By creating hierarchical structures, we provide pathways for fast mass transport to take full advantage of the large surface area of nanoporous materials. It’s also a way to save materials, especially precious metals.”

Continue reading “Hierarchical 3D printing of nanoporous gold could ‘revolutionize’ electrochemical reactor design” »

Close to 800,000 records from about a dozen plant collections or “herbaria” are being digitized, allowing researchers broad access to data on plant species collected and preserved in past centuries.

A far better approach, then, is the middle course. Rather than prejudge the products of biotechnology, regulators should screen new plants and single out those that might need special monitoring or restrictions. In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration does something similar on a voluntary basis for foods made from plants with engineered proteins. Companies submit data about their new products, and if the FDA decides it has no further questions, they can claim their foods are “generally recognized as safe.”

Europe and the U.S. should avoid an all-or-nothing approach to regulating plants made with Crispr.

The ocean cleanup starts in 5 days.

Develops advanced technologies to rid the world’s oceans of plastic. Full-scale deployment will remove 50% of the North Pacific gyre debris in 5 years.

Countries should quickly agree a treaty banning the use of so-called killer robots “before it is too late”, activists said Monday as talks on the issue resumed at the UN.

They say time is running out before weapons are deployed that use lethal force without a human making the final kill-order and have criticised the UN body hosting the talks—the Convention of Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW)—for moving too slowly.

“Killer robots are no longer the stuff of science fiction,” Rasha Abdul Rahim, Amnesty International’s advisor on artificial intelligence and human rights, said in a statement.

Continue reading “Activists urge killer robot ban ‘before it is too late’” »

Findings from the UCLA study could lead to new treatments for patients.

It’s the state’s biggest step yet in the fight against global warming.

In this Viewpoint, Geoffrey Hinton of Google’s Brain Team discusses the basics of neural networks: their underlying data structures, how they can be trained and combined to process complex health data sets, and future prospects for harnessing their unsupervised learning to clinical challenges.