Lifeboat Foundation

Using a new time-based method to control light from an ultrafast laser, researchers have developed a nanoscale 3D printing technique that can fabricate tiny structures 1000 times faster than conventional two-photon lithography (TPL) techniques, without sacrificing resolution.

Despite the high throughput, the new parallelized technique—known as femtosecond projection TPL (FP-TPL)—produces depth resolution of 175 nanometers, which is better than established methods and can fabricate structures with 90-degree overhangs that can’t currently be made. The technique could lead to manufacturing-scale production of bioscaffolds, flexible electronics, electrochemical interfaces, micro-optics, mechanical and optical metamaterials, and other functional micro- and nanostructures.

The work, reported Oct. 3 in the journal Science, was done by researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Sourabh Saha, the paper’s lead and corresponding author, is now an assistant professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The Netherlands’ Nuclear Research and Consultancy Group (NRG) has completed a major milestone irradiation test of molten nuclear fuel salts in its High Flux Reactor at Petten 37 mi (60 km) north of Amsterdam. The first test of its kind since the ones carried out at Oak Ridge, Tennessee in the 1960s, its purpose is to learn more about the safe operation of a future Molten Salt Reactor (MSR).

First developed in the United States in the 1950s and ’60s, MSRs differ from conventional light-water nuclear reactors in a number of significant ways that make them potentially a safer and more efficient alternative. This is because, though a light-water reactor and an MSR work on the same principle of nuclear fission, they have a fundamentally different engineering design.

The wheels are in motion to send the first humans to Mars. For many, the first image that calls to mind may be of a spaceship touching down in a vast, red desert. But arriving on Mars is only half the picture. People also need to live there, something that can be difficult to imagine because there are so many unknowns. Martian habitation presents one of the greatest scientific challenges of the 21st century. And it is a challenge synthetic biology will be integral in solving.

One of the most exciting ventures tackling this problem is CUBES, the Center for the Utilization of Biological Engineering in Space. SynBioBeta recently spoke with Adam Arkin, the director of CUBES and professor of bioengineering at UC Berkeley. Arkin, who will also speak at SynBioBeta 2019, described the goals of the CUBES project and how their work could enable human life on Mars.

CUBES is a five-year NASA Science Technology Research Institute. Veteran researchers, postdocs, and undergraduates have come together across six universities to develop biomanufacturing systems for Mars missions. But, explains Arkin, “since there isn’t a specified reference mission architecture for a real mission to Mars, we don’t know precisely what our constraints are.” Over the next five years, CUBES will build increasingly realistic models of what it will take to make integrated bio-systems feasible in space.

Other approaches to space involve moving some or all the engineering activities out of government into the private sector, in the hopes that the private sector will be able to produce otherwise unavailable efficiencies. This sounds good in practice, but we must recognize that shifting some management responsibilities does not alleviate the government responsibility to regulate and look out after the public good.

But imprudent regulation impairs private sector efforts, simply because they may have a harder time getting relief from government rules than, let’s say, the DoD might. Unnecessarily stringent rules, requirements, and regulations discourage success. The precautionary principle has its appeal, but when the underlying activity itself is relatively new and uncertain, precautionary restrictions quickly turn into outright prohibition. Any arbitrary prohibition limits the diversity of our national spaceflight portfolio.

It may seem that this or that actor might benefit from favoritism, permissive oversight, or other unfair advantages. But while everybody trying to do something new in space benefits from distinct benefits and advantages, they also face unique obstacles and difficulties.

A professor at the University of Chicago believes he is on his way to creating a wearable for market that will manipulate your muscles with electrical impulses to cause you to move involuntarily so you can perform a physical task you otherwise didn’t know how to do, like playing a musical instrument or operating machinery.

Dr. Pedro Lopes, who heads the Human Computer Integration lab at the university, is all about integrating humans and computers, closing the gap between human and machine. His team, which focuses on engineering the next generation of wearable and haptic devices, is exploring the endless possibilities if wearables could intentionally share parts of our body for input and output, allowing computers to be more directly interwoven in our bodily senses and actuators.

Lopes’ vision: a wearable EMS device that would look like a sleeve and be able to send electrical impulses in the right timing and in the right fashion to make a user’s muscles move involuntarily to perform a physical task. EMS stands for electrical muscle stimulation.

When the structure of DNA was elucidated in 1953, an unimaginable world of possibilities was opened. But we couldn’t even begin to dream about how we would go about using such powerful knowledge. Thirty years later, PCR — the process to replicate DNA in the lab — was developed, and innovation exploded. In 2001 — nearly twenty years ago — the first full human genome was sequenced and published.

The information we’ve uncovered through DNA is enabling us to explore and develop solutions for a variety of problems, from how to mimic human disease in animal models to finding new treatments and cures for devastating diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s.

Continue reading “DNA spells tomorrow: how DNA tech will impact our world” »

The ultimate way of building up space structures would be to use material sourced there, rather than launched from Earth. Once processed into finished composite material, the resin holds the carbon fibres together as a solid rather than a fabric. The beams can be used to construct more complex structures, antennae, or space station trusses. Image credit: All About Space/Adrian Mann.

The International Space Station is the largest structure in space so far. It has been painstakingly assembled from 32 launches over 19 years, and still only supports six crew in a little-under-a-thousand cubic metres of pressurised space. It’s a long way from the giant rotating space stations some expected by 2001. The problem is that the rigid aluminium modules all have to be launched individually, and assembled in space. Bigelow Aerospace will significantly improve on this with their inflatable modules that can be launched as a compressed bundle; but a British company has developed a system that could transform space flight, by building structures directly in space.

Magna Parva from Leicester are a space engineering consultancy, founded in 2005 by Andy Bowyer and Miles Ashcroft. Their team have worked on a range of space hardware, from methods to keep Martian solar panels clear of dust, to ultrasonic propellant sensors, to spacecraft windows. But their latest project is capable of 3D printing complete structures in space, using a process called pultrusion. Raw carbon fibres and epoxy resin are combined in a robotic tool to create carbon composite beams of unlimited length – like a spider creating a web much larger than itself. Building structures in space has a range of compounding virtues, it is more compact than even inflatables, as only bulk fibre and resin need to be launched. Any assembled hardware that has to go through a rocket launch has to be made much stronger than needed in space to survive the launch, printed structures can be designed solely for their in space application, using less material still.

Last year, Princeton researchers identified a disturbing security flaw in which hackers could someday exploit internet-connected appliances to wreak havoc on the electrical grid. Now, the same research team has released algorithms to make the grid more resilient to such attacks.

In a paper published online in the journal IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering, a team from Princeton’s Department of Electrical Engineering presented algorithms to protect against potential attacks that would spike demand from high-wattage devices such as air conditioners—all part of the “internet of things”—in an effort to overload the power grid.

“The cyberphysical nature of the grid makes this threat very important to counter, because a large-scale blackout can have very critical consequences,” said study author Prateek Mittal, an associate professor of electrical engineering.

Linear algebra is a field of mathematics that has been thoroughly investigated for many centuries, providing invaluable tools used not only in mathematics, but also across physics and engineering as well as many other fields. For years physicists have used important theorems in linear algebra to quickly calculate solutions to the most complicated problems.

This August, three theoretical physicists—Peter Denton, a scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory and a scholar at Fermilab’s Neutrino Physics Center; Stephen Parke, theoretical physicist at Fermilab; and Xining Zhang, a University of Chicago graduate student working under Parke—turned the tables and, in the context of particle physics, discovered a fundamental identity in linear algebra.

The identity relates eigenvectors and eigenvalues in a direct way that hadn’t been previously recognized. Eigenvectors and eigenvalues are two important ways of reducing the properties of a matrix to their most basic components and have applications in many math, physics and real-world contexts, such as in analyzing vibrating systems and facial recognition programs. The eigenvectors identify the directions in which a transformation occurs, and the eigenvalues specify the amount of stretching or compressing that occurs.