Show Notes 11 August 2023
Story 1: Company develops remarkable technology that uses the power of waves to turn saltwater into clean, drinkable freshwater
Source: The Cool Down Story by Brittany Davies
See also: https://www.onekawater.com/
See video [with a lot of technical details] here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cab2znx2cnc
- Water scarcity is one of the greatest threats we face, as 1.1 billion people around the world do not have access to clean water, and more than 2.7 billion experience water scarcity for at least one month of the year.
- UNICEF estimates that as early as 2025, nearly half the world’s population could face water scarcity.
- Canadian company Oneka Technologies is tackling water scarcity by harnessing the power of ocean waves to run its groundbreaking wave-powered desalination process — turning ocean water into freshwater that can be used by the coastal communities that need it most.
- Here’s how it works:
- Oneka deploys desalination buoys off the coast where the movement of the water activates the process.
- My note, you really need to see the company’s video to understand how the wave action is used to initiate a step-by-step process that results in drinkable water.
- From there, a series of self-cleaning strainers and filters remove salt, bacteria, and other particles from the seawater to produce clean, drinkable water that can be piped to shore for storage and use.
- Water quality and performance are carefully monitored by solar-powered sensors that provide data in real-time to ensure the water meets or exceeds local water standards.
- Oneka buoys improve upon previous desalination systems by producing no polluting emissions and requiring no dangerous chemicals, electricity, or land use, according to Oneka’s website.
- The company’s mesh filters protect marine life and plants while the brine management system maintains proper salt levels in the surrounding seawater. The buoy anchors can even be used as artificial reefs to help restore damaged underwater ecosystems.
- After a successful demonstration of its proof-of-concept buoys in ocean waters off the coast of Chile, Oneka is now set to start developing its next evolutionary system, the Oneka Glacier, a utility-scale desalination buoy.
- My note, for more on the demonstration in Chile, see this article: https://www.offshore-energy.biz/oneka-sets-foot-in-chile-with-wave-powered-desalination-technology/
- Currently, the company’s largest model is the iceberg-class unit [named the Glacier buoy] capable of producing 8,000-13,000 gallons a day, or enough to support up to 1,500 people, per the website. The Glacier buoy aims to provide enough clean water to meet the needs of large population centers.
Story 2: MIT researchers develop energy-storing concrete that could form foundations for solar-powered homes
Source: New Scientist Story by Jeremy Hsu
- According to the results of a recently conducted set of experiments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a mixture of cement and charcoal powder could enable houses to store a full day’s worth of energy in their concrete foundations.
- This represents a new way of creating a supercapacitor – an alternative to batteries that can discharge energy much faster – could be incorporated into the foundations of both buildings and wind turbines.
- When paired with renewable energy sources, it could also someday allow concrete road foundations to wirelessly recharge electric vehicles as they drive along.
- MIT’s Franz-Josef Ulm notes, “The materials are available for everyone all over the place, all over the world. Which means we don’t have the same restriction as with batteries.”
- Ulm and his colleagues showed how cement and carbon black – a very fine version of charcoal – can mix with water to create a hardened block containing many branching, wire-like structures filled with the carbon.
- When the concrete is soaked in a common electrolyte solution such as potassium chloride, the charged particles from the electrolyte settle on the carbon wire-like structures to provide energy-storing potential.
- Side note: What is an electrolyte? Electrolyte, in chemistry and physics, substance that conducts electric current as a result of a dissociation into positively and negatively charged particles called ions, which migrate toward and ordinarily are discharged at the negative and positive terminals (cathode and anode) of an electric circuit, respectively. The most familiar electrolytes are acids, bases, and salts, which ionize when dissolved in such solvents as water or alcohol. Many salts, such as sodium chloride, behave as electrolytes when melted in the absence of any solvent; and some, such as silver iodide, are electrolytes even in the solid state. Source: https://www.britannica.com/science/electrolyte
- They then turned two thin slabs of the material just 1 centimeter wide and 1 millimeter thick into a supercapacitor by separating them with a thin insulating layer such as paper. Connecting three of these supercapacitors produced the equivalent of a 3-volt battery capable of lighting up a small LED.
- The researchers say that the next step might be to create 12-volt supercapacitors that can also be connected to provide more charging power for larger devices.
- They calculated that a concrete block equivalent to a cube 3.5 meters [11 feet, six inches] on each side could store 10 kilowatt-hours of energy. That is about a third of the average daily household energy use in the US and about two-thirds of the average in the UK.
- The mixture of cement and charcoal powder material maintained its charging and discharging capabilities beyond 10,000 cycles, which means, in theory, that it could provide energy storage for a solar-powered home for more than 27 years.
- Admir Masic at MIT noted, “The fundamental aspect of this technology is it’s two historical, ancient materials that come together, that we have known for millennia.”
- The MIT team expressed optimism about how many people worldwide could start experimenting with this relatively simple blueprint for a low-cost supercapacitor.
Story 3: NASA Will Land Three Autonomous Mapping Robots on the Moon – The CADRE rovers will demonstrate the potential of multi-robot missions for NASA’s new era of lunar exploration
Source: Extremetech.com Story by Ryan Whitwam
Link: https://www.extremetech.com/science/nasa-will-land-three-autonomous-mapping-robots-on-the-moon
Visit the JPL site here: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/pia25667-cadre-mini-rover-drives-over-a-rock
See video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M56RDPZ-2sw&list=PLKWlaxzCh8uLH4yrhPY35Vac2vhYPZpV3
- With its Artemis program NASA is headed back to the Moon, and this time the goal is to set up a long-term human presence on Earth’s natural satellite. Astronauts spending time on and around the Moon may find an army of robotic helpers at their disposal, the first of which is being built and tested at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
- The Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration project [a.k.a. CADRE] will deploy a trio of autonomous mapping robots on the Moon, and if successful, they could help NASA understand how best to build that army of bots.
- The three CADRE rovers are currently in the engineering prototype phase. NASA plans to deploy CADRE in 2024 via the Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative. The lander will touch down in the Reiner Gamma region of the Moon, but unlike past rover missions, NASA does not intend to control exactly what each robot does.
- Side note: What is the Reiner Gamma region? Reiner Gamma is a geographical feature of the Moon known as a lunar swirl. It is one of the most visible lunar swirls from Earth, visible from most telescopes. It was originally thought to be a lunar highland, but scientists eventually realized that it cast no shadow on the moon. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiner_Gamma
Image source: http://lunarnetworks.blogspot.com/2010/05/local-topography-and-reiner-gamma.html
- Unlike the expensive and complex Perseverance Mars rover where the NASA team must carefully plan each maneuver, the low-cost CADRE bots are designed to operate autonomously.
- NASA hopes to simply tell the robots which area of the landscape to investigate with their stereo mapping cameras, and they’ll figure out the rest, even electing a “leader” rover based on which is the most fit for the task.
- My comment – for more on the concept of AI-based, autonomous swarms of bots with a “leader” I highly recommend watching a great documentary on Netflix “UNKNOWN: Killer Robots”
- Mission managers will, however, be watching what the rovers do after being unleashed. The lander will have a control base station with a camera poking upward to keep tabs on the robots.
- Here’s how the CADRE bots share something in common with the Mars Ingenuity helicopter:
- CADRE partially owes its existence to the smashing success of the Mars Ingenuity helicopter. Originally envisioned as a technology demonstrator, the helicopter was built using many off-the-shelf components that JPL did not expect to survive long on Mars. However, Ingenuity is still online, having recently completed its 50th flight.
- Ingenuity ran on the Snapdragon 801 smartphone processor, and NASA says CADRE uses a newer version of that chip. JPL confirms that the CADRE rovers use the VOXL single-board computer, which runs a Snapdragon 821 chip. That’s the same processor that powered the Samsung Galaxy Note 7….
- Keeping the solar-powered CADRE bots cool is another challenge JPL is working on. Temperatures in direct sunlight on the Moon can reach 237 degrees Fahrenheit (114 Celsius). So, the team decided to run CADRE in 30-minute cycles.
- They will operate for 30 minutes and then take another 30 to expel heat via radiators and recharge their batteries. Upon waking up, the rovers will again elect a leader and continue their autonomous operations. NASA hopes CADRE will prove the value of multi-robot missions for lunar exploration and development.
Story 4: Scientists intrigued by clever trick that makes cancer cells self-destruct
Source: Futurism.com Story by Victor Tangermann
Link: https://futurism.com/neoscope/clever-trick-cancer-cells-self-destruct
- Researchers have discovered a mechanism that forces cancer cells to self-destruct, hijacking their ability to replicate uncontrollably and turning it against themselves.
- The research team from Stanford University and gene therapy company Shenandoah Therapeutics recently published a paper in the journal Nature, describing how cancer cells can be rewired to “activate cell death,” not unlike flipping a switch.
- As the article’s author notes, “While we’re still a long way from developing a drug for humans that takes advantage of this gene hack — assuming it’s actually possible in a practical way — scientists are nonetheless intrigued by the prospect”.
- In a number of lab experiments, the research team built molecules that attach two proteins to each other: one being a mutated protein called BCL6 that allows cancer cells to survive and grow, and a normal protein that acts like a switch for genes near it.
- The resulting BCL6 and normal protein construct pushes cancer cells towards genes that kill them – effectively rewiring the cancer cells to kill themselves off – evoking a natural part of the DNA that clears old cells that have already fulfilled their duty.
- Here are some comments noted in the article based on a feature in the New York Times:
- Louis Staudt, director of the Center for Cancer Genomics at the National Cancer Institute, told the New York Times, “BCL6 is the organizing principle of these cancer cells. Once disrupted, the cell has lost its identity and says, something very wrong is happening here. I’d better die.’”
- The idea could be effective for half of all known cancers, lead author Gerald Crabtree, founder of Shenandoah Therapeutics, told the New York Times. Since it relies on mutated cancer cells, it could also be a highly targeted approach, potentially sparing healthy cells.
- So far, Shenandoah Therapeutics’ Crabtree and his colleagues have demonstrated that the hybrid molecule is safe to use in mice but was careful to note that it’s “not a drug — it still has a long way to go.”
Honorable Mentions:
- Giant Freshwater Deposits Hiding under the Sea – Scientific American – see: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/found-giant-freshwater-deposits-hiding-under-the-sea/
- Air Force Research Laboratory touts first successful Valkyrie flight powered by AI – The Hill – see: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/air-force-research-laboratory-touts-first-successful-valkyrie-flight-powered-by-ai/ar-AA1eOltY
- Guiding Vaccine Development with Machine Learning – PNNL website – story by Sarah Wong. See: https://www.pnnl.gov/news-media/guiding-vaccine-development-machine-learning
From tackling homework challenges to drafting emails, people are discovering a vast array of applications for natural language processing tools like generative artificial intelligence (AI) engines. Now, researchers from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and Harvard Medical School (HMS) are using this same kind of technology to build a knowledge base in order to guide decision-makers on vaccine development. Through the Rapid Assessment of Platform Technologies to Expedite Response (RAPTER) project, the scientists leverage machine learning and AI to search the scientific literature for knowledge on how to build effective vaccines against new infectious viruses and bacteria.
Historically, vaccine development is a lengthy and expensive process—often taking multiple years and millions of dollars to complete. Vaccines are typically made using one of several different strategies, or “platforms.” However, different strategies can generate different immune responses. With RAPTER, researchers figure out which strategy would work best for a specific virus or bacteria to maximize the value of immune responses from the host. The tool aims to help produce new vaccines more rapidly and with a reduced timeline and cost.