Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers have created tiny, vehiclelike structures which can be maneuvered by microscopic algae. The algae are caught in baskets attached to the micromachines, which have been carefully designed to allow them enough room to continue swimming. Two types of vehicles were created: the “rotator,” which spins like a wheel, and the “scooter,” which was intended to move in a forward direction but in tests moved more surprisingly. The team is planning to try different and more complex designs for their next vehicles. In the future, these mini algae teams could be applied to assist with micro-level environmental engineering and research.

You’ve likely heard of horsepower, but how about algae power? Like a sled drawn by a team of dogs or a plough pulled by oxen, researchers have created microscopic machines which can be moved by lively, tiny, single-celled green algae.

“We were inspired to try and harness Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, a very common algae found all over the world, after being impressed by its swift and unrestricted swimming capabilities,” said Naoto Shimizu, a student from the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology at the University of Tokyo (at the time of the study), who initiated the project. “We’ve now shown that these algae can be trapped without impairing their mobility, offering a new option for propelling micromachines which could be used for engineering or research purposes.”

UChicago Pritzker Molecular Engineering Prof. Y. Shirley Meng’s Laboratory for Energy Storage and Conversion has created the world’s first anode-free sodium solid-state battery.

With this research, the LESC – a collaboration between the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the University of California San Diego’s Aiiso Yufeng Li Family Department of Chemical and Nano Engineering – has brought the reality of inexpensive, fast-charging, high-capacity batteries for electric vehicles and grid storage closer than ever.

“Although there have been previous sodium, solid-state, and anode-free batteries, no one has been able to successfully combine these three ideas until now,” said UC San Diego PhD candidate Grayson Deysher, first author of a new paper outlining the team’s work.

A newly designed catalyst created by University of Toronto Engineering researchers efficiently converts captured carbon into valuable products—even in the presence of a contaminant that degrades the performance of current versions.

The discovery is an important step toward more economically favorable techniques for carbon capture and storage that could be added on to existing industrial processes.

“Today, we have more and better options for low-carbon electricity generation than ever before,” says Professor David Sinton, senior author on a paper published in Nature Energy that describes the new catalyst.

WASHINGTON — The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has announced that the agency is seeking assistance from industry as it begins a study into its Geostationary Littoral Imaging and Monitoring Radiometer (GLIMR) Access to Space (ATS) approach.

The GLIMR mission aims to provide transformative rapid observations of dynamic coastal zone ecosystems throughout the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) and coastal continental U.S. (CONUS). Its goal is to observe and monitor ocean biology, chemistry, and ecology to help protect ecosystem sustainability, improve resource management, and enhance economic activity. This includes identifying and tracking harmful algal blooms and oil spills, while also observing, quantifying, and understanding processes associated with rapid changes in phytoplankton growth.

The GLIMR ATS scope is expected to include several key components and activities: the spacecraft itself, the launch vehicle, the integration and testing of the GLIMR payload with the spacecraft, and the integration of the spacecraft with the launch vehicle and subsequent launch. It will also cover the command uplink from the industry-provided Mission Operations Center (MOC), the downlink of GLIMR engineering and science telemetry to industry-allocated ground stations, and the delivery of error-checked GLIMR data to various mission partners. Additionally, it encompasses all related tasks and support required during the planned GLIMR Mission, such as pre-launch planning, launch support, in-orbit check-out, and operations.

A new microscopy method has allowed researchers to detect tiny changes in the atomic-level architecture of crystalline materials like advanced steels for ship hulls and custom silicon for electronics. It could advance our ability to understand the fundamental origins of materials properties and behaviour.

In a paper published today in Nature Materials, researchers from the University of Sydney’s School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering introduced a new way to decode the atomic relationships within materials.

The breakthrough could assist in the development of stronger and lighter alloys for the aerospace industry, new generation semiconductors for electronics, and improved magnets for electric motors. It could also enable the creation of sustainable, efficient and cost-effective products.

Power plants, factories, car engines—everything that consumes energy produces heat, much of which is wasted. Thermoelectric devices could capture this wasted heat and convert it into electricity, but their production has been prohibitively costly and complex.

Yanliang Zhang, the Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Collegiate Professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame, and colleagues from a multi-institutional team have devised an ink-based manufacturing method making feasible the large-scale and cost-effective manufacturing of highly efficient thermoelectric devices.

Their finding were recently published in Energy & Environmental Science.

Johns Hopkins research sheds new light on how mammals track their position and orientation while moving, revealing that visual motion cues alone allow the brain to adjust and recalibrate its internal map even in the absence of stable visual landmarks.

Their results are published in Nature Neuroscience.

“When you move through space, you have a lot of competing sensory information telling you where you are and how fast you are going, and your brain has to make sense of that,” said study co-leader Noah Cowan, professor of mechanical engineering at the Whiting School of Engineering and director of the Locomotion in Mechanical and Biological Systems (LIMBS) Laboratory.

Could we identify an alien terraformed planet through the detection of greenhouse gases? This is what a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal hopes to address as a team of international researchers investigated whether artificial greenhouse gases could be detected from an exoplanet whose alien inhabitants could be attempting to terraform that world, either from trying to control its climate or terraforming an uninhabitable planet into a habitable one. This study holds the potential to help scientists better understand the criteria and methods for identifying an extraterrestrial civilization, especially with the number of confirmed exoplanets increasing almost weekly.

“For us, these gases are bad because we don’t want to increase warming” said Dr. Edward Schwieterman, who is an Assistant Professor of Astrobiology at the University of California Riverside and lead author of the study. “But they’d be good for a civilization that perhaps wanted to forestall an impending ice age or terraform an otherwise-uninhabitable planet in their system, as humans have proposed for Mars.”

Researchers from MIT and the University of Texas have developed a prototype for a handheld, chip-based 3D printer using a photonic chip that emits beams of light to cure resin into solid objects. This innovative technology could revolutionize the production of customized, low-cost objects on-the-go and has potential applications in medical and engineering fields.

Portable 3D Printing Technology

Imagine a portable 3D printer you could hold in the palm of your hand. The tiny device could enable a user to rapidly create customized, low-cost objects on the go, like a fastener to repair a wobbly bicycle wheel or a component for a critical medical operation.