Show Notes November 24, 2023
Story 1: Scientist Invents Potato That Could Warn Us About Nuclear Leaks
Source: Newsweek Story by Aristo Georgiou
Link: https://www.newsweek.com/scientists-invent-potato-could-warn-nuclear-leaks-1845348
- Globally, there is a renewed interest in using nuclear power as a cleaner alternative to fossil fuel energy sources, such as coal plants, to meet climate goals. As a result, the use of nuclear energy will likely increase over the next few decades. This is expected to be accompanied by a surge in demand for effective and easily accessible radiation detection methods.
- With this in mind, a researcher has developed a bioengineered potato plant that can detect potentially harmful levels of gamma radiation.
- Time out, what is gamma radiation – A gamma ray, also known as gamma radiation, is a penetrating form of electromagnetic radiation arising from the radioactive decay of atomic nuclei. It consists of the shortest wavelength electromagnetic waves, typically shorter than those of X-rays.
- Rob Sears, a Ph.D. student at the University of Tennessee’s Herbert College of Agriculture, has engineered the potato plant to indicate high radiation levels by changing the color of its leaves. When exposed to gamma radiation, the plant’s leaves produce a green glow, providing a reliable indication of harmful levels without complex monitoring technologies.
- Gamma radiation, which is produced during the fission process, is ionizing, meaning it removes electrons from atoms and molecules from materials such as air, water and living tissue. Ionizing radiation can pass through these materials, potentially causing damage to living tissue and DNA, particularly at high levels of exposure.
- At present, gamma radiation is detected using mechanical sensors that have several drawbacks, including limited availability, reliance on a power supply and the requirement for a human presence in a potentially dangerous area.
- In an attempt to address some of these limitations, Sears and his colleagues developed the potato plant biosensor, otherwise known as a phytosensor, to detect ionizing gamma radiation.
- Plant biosensors are emerging as an option to detect and report the presence of environmental disturbances. Compared with mammals, plants have a much higher radiation tolerance, allowing them to persist and monitor far greater exposures than their animal counterparts can.
- The researchers chose to modify potato plants because this crop is grown across the world in both hospitable and adverse climates. In addition, they reproduce through tubers in the soil, producing genetically identical offspring that provide consistent results.
- Sears and his colleagues used bioengineering techniques to harness the plant’s DNA damage response machinery to produce a fluorescent light when exposed to gamma radiation. In the study, the team found that the plant responded to a wide range of gamma radiation.
- Given that potato plant-based phytosensors are affordable, cheaply scalable across a landscape, easy to interpret and require no mechanical maintenance, they could be used in the environment to improve the safety and well-being of workers and residents close to radiation sources.
Story 2: United States Opens First Facility to Suck CO2 Out of the Air
Source: Futurism.com Story by Noor Al-Sibai
Link: https://futurism.com/the-byte/us-direct-air-capture-facility
- For the first time, a commercial facility that can suck carbon out of the air and store it underground has opened in the United States.
- In a November 9 press release, the team behind Heirloom Carbon Technologies said their newly opened direct air capture facility near San Francisco will be able to siphon CO2 out of the atmosphere and store it securely underground in concrete for paying customers.
- From the press release: Fully powered by renewable energy – supplied locally by Ava Community Energy – and constructed with union labor, our Tracy, California facility has been operational for nearly 1,000 hours and is actively capturing atmospheric CO2, which will be permanently sequestered in concrete through a partnership with CarbonCure Technologies.
- The facility has a capture capacity of up to 1,000 tons of CO2 per year and will deliver net removals to early, catalytic buyers of Heirloom’s CO2 removal credits, including Microsoft, Stripe, Shopify, and Klarna.
- Though dozens of carbon capture and storage facilities have been operational around the world for more than a decade, most of the carbon capture and storage plants are involved in capturing and storing new emissions [on location] made by other pollutive processes like coal mining, leading to the so-called “clean coal” technology that experts and activists argue is anything but.
- Direct air capture, meanwhile, sucks out ambient carbon from the air without any other industrial process alongside it. In the case of Heirloom, it’s stored in what the company insists are secure concrete repositories underground.
- Reality Check: As the New York Times acknowledges in its reporting on the new plant, Heirloom’s first facility in Tracy, California is pretty small and only able to capture 1,000 tons of CO2 from the air per year — though as CEO and co-founder Shashank Samala points out in the press release, that number “has gone from [one] kilogram of CO2 to up to one million, or 1000 metric tons, in just over two years.”
- “We want to get to millions of tons per year,” Samala told the NYT. “That means copying and pasting this basic design over and over.”
Story 3: AI chemist finds molecule to make oxygen on Mars after sifting through millions
Source: Space.com on MSN.com Story by Charles Q. Choi
Source: A robot powered by artificial intelligence may be able to make oxygen on Mars, study finds – Story by Eric Lagatta
- Using meteorites from Mars, an AI-powered robot chemist at the University of Science and Technology of China synthesized compounds that could be used to generate oxygen from water, scientists announced on November 13.
- Potential future crewed missions to Mars will need oxygen — not just for astronauts to breathe, but also for use as rocket propellant.
- One key way to make such missions cost-effective in the long run is to use resources that already exist on the Red Planet to create the oxygen.
- That would be much easier than lugging a bunch of oxygen, and oxygen-producing materials, all the way from Earth.
- The idea is promising because Mars does possess significant reserves of frozen water ice — because water is made of hydrogen and oxygen, scientists have been looking for ways to harvest the latter element from those Martian reserves. In particular, compounds known as catalysts are capable of spurring chemical reactions that “split” water molecules to generate oxygen and hydrogen gas.
- The AI-powered robot chemist at the University of Science and Technology of China developed by a research team led by Jun Jiang used a robot arm to collect samples from the Martian meteorites, then it employed a laser to scan the ore.
- From there, it calculated more than 3.7 million molecules it could make from six different metallic elements in the rocks — iron, nickel, manganese, magnesium, aluminum and calcium.
- Within six weeks, without any human intervention, the AI-powered robot chemist selected, synthesized and tested 243 of those different molecules. The best catalyst the robot found could split water at minus 34.6 degrees F (minus 37 degrees C), the kind of cold temperature found on none other than Mars.
- The researchers estimate it would have taken a human scientist something like 2,000 years to find that “best” catalyst using conventional trial-and-error techniques.
- The scientists now aim to see if their AI chemist can operate under Martian conditions other than temperature, “in which the atmospheric composition, air density, humidity, gravity and so on are so different than those on Earth,” Jiang said.
- The researchers detailed their findings online on Monday (Nov. 13) in the journal Nature Synthesis.
Story 4: MIT tests new ingestible sensor that records your breathing through your intestines
Source: Engadget.com Story by Malak Saleh
See also: https://news.mit.edu/2023/ingestible-electronic-device-detects-breathing-depression-patients-1117
See video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faqD5gosuXo
- MIT researchers have developed an ingestible capsule that can monitor vital signs including heart rate and breathing patterns from within a patient’s gastrointestinal tract. The scientists also say that the novel device has the potential to also be used to detect signs of respiratory depression during an opioid overdose.
- Giovanni Traverso, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT who has been working on developing a range of ingestible sensors, said that the device will be especially useful for sleep studies.
- Conventionally, sleep studies [to diagnose sleep apnea] require patients to be hooked up to a number of sensors and devices. In labs and in at-home studies, sensors can be attached to a patient’s scalp, temples, chest and lungs with wires. A patient may also wear a nasal cannula, chest belt and pulse oximeter which can connect to a portable monitor. Ingestible sensor technology eliminates the need for that.
- This trial, which used a capsule made by Celero Systems — A start-up led by MIT and Harvard researchers — marks the first time ingestible sensor technology was tested in humans. Aside from the start-up and MIT, the research was spearheaded by experts at West Virginia University and other hospital affiliates.
- The capsule contains two small batteries and a wireless antenna that transmits data. The ingestible sensor, which is the size of a vitamin capsule, traveled through the gastrointestinal tract, and collected signals from the device while it was in the stomach.
- The participants stayed at a sleep lab overnight while the device recorded respiration, heart rate, temperature and gastric motility. The sensor was also able to detect sleep apnea in one of the patients during the trial.
- The findings suggest that the ingestible was able to measure health metrics on par with medical-grade diagnostic equipment at the sleep center.
- MIT says there were no adverse effects reported due to capsule ingestion. The capsule typically passes through a patient within a day or so, though that short internal shelf life may also limit how effective it could be as a monitoring device.
- Traverso told Engadget that he aims to have Celero, which he co-founded, eventually contain a mechanism that will allow the capsule to sit in a patient’s stomach for a week.
HONORABLE MENTIONS:
Story: Graphene ‘gold’: MIT finds new properties in pencil lead
Source: Interesting Engineering Story by Rizwan Choudhuruy
- A team of physicists from MIT has achieved a remarkable feat: They have transformed ordinary graphite, the material used in pencils, into a novel material with three extraordinary properties never seen before in natural graphite.
- The new material, pentalayer rhombohedral stacked graphene, is made of five ultrathin layers of graphene stacked in a specific order. Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb pattern. It is one of the thinnest and strongest materials known to science.
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Story: Vertical photovoltaics. Innovative set-up generates more electricity
Source: essanews.com via MSN.com Story by KLT
- Over Easy Solar, a Norwegian company has unveiled a unique approach for installing photovoltaic panels on rooftops. Instead of the traditional horizontal positioning, the company installs their panels vertically, creating what they term ‘green photovoltaic roofs.’
- Breaking from traditional practice, Over Easy Solar mounts panels vertically and not horizontally. The company recently installed a second 102 kW system, a few months after completing their first project—a 45 kW system. Both installations were undertaken on the roofs of another Norwegian company, Solenergi Fusen.
- As reported by PV Magazine, the installation by Over Easy Solar covers an approximate area of 13,000 square feet on the rooftop. Complementing the ‘green’ aesthetics, plants have also been planted under the panels. This makes the roofs ‘green’ — they generate ecological electric power and also boast of enhancing the local ecology with vegetation.
- The system developed by Over Easy Solar is designed to be installed at a low height on flat rooftops. The components of the installation are pre-assembled to a degree, thereby accelerating the installation process. The power plant employs unconventional, bilateral modules with heterojunctions.
- “The 102 kW installation was mounted in less than two days by four workers,” stated Trygve Mongstad, the CEO of Over Easy Solar, during an interview with PV Magazine.
- The vertical photovoltaic setup from Over Easy incorporates bilateral modules, each offering 200 W. These modules come in two sizes: 63 inches by 59 inches by 13.5 inches, weighing 57 pounds, and 63 inches by 59 inches by 10.4 inches, weighing 55 pounds. Each module is ballasted at a rate of around 22 pounds per square foot.
- Related research/information:
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Story: Scientists create world’s most water-resistant surface
Source: UK’s The Guardian
- Scientists have created the most water-resistant surface in the world, a development which could banish household tasks and revolutionise industry.
- A research team in Finland, led by Robin Ras, from Aalto University, and aided by researchers from the University of Jyväskylä, has developed a mechanism to make water droplets slip off surfaces with unprecedented efficacy.
- Cooking, transportation, optics and hundreds of other technologies are affected by how water sticks to surfaces or slides off them, and adoption of water-resistant surfaces in the future could improve many household and industrial technologies, such as plumbing, shipping and the auto industry.
- The research team created solid silicon surfaces with a “liquid-like” outer layer that repels water by making droplets slide off surfaces. The highly mobile topcoat acts as a lubricant between the product and the water droplets.
- The discovery challenges existing ideas about friction between solid surfaces and water, opening a new avenue for studying slipperiness at the molecular level.
- Sakari Lepikko, the lead author of the study, which was published in Nature Chemistry, said: “Our work is the first time that anyone has gone directly to the nanometer-level to create molecularly heterogeneous surfaces.”
- By carefully adjusting conditions, such as temperature and water content, inside a reactor, the team could fine-tune how much of the silicon surface the monolayer covered.