A January 19, 2021 news item on ScienceDaily highlights bioinspired 3D printing of concrete, New research shows that patterns inspired by lobster shells can make 3D printed concrete stronger, to support more complex and creative architectural structures.Digital manufacturing technologies like 3D concrete printing (3DCP) have immense potential to save time, effort and material in construction.They also promise to push the boundaries of architectural innovation, yet technical challenges remain in making 3D printed concrete strong enough…

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What a Monday morning! United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO; French: Organisation des Nations unies pour l’éducation, la science et la culture) and the World Economic Forum (WEF) hosted a live webcast (which started at 6 am PST or 1500 CET [3 pm in Paris, France]). The session is available online for viewing both here on UNESCO’s Girl Trouble webpage and here on YouTube. It’s about 2.5 hours long with two separate discussions…

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This post was going to be about new research into fetal therapeutics and mRNA.But, since I’ve been very intrigued by the therapeutic agent, mRNA, which has been a big part of the COVID-19 vaccine story; this seemed like a good opportunity to dive a little more deeply into that topic at the same time. It’s called messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) and until seeing this video I had only the foggiest idea of how it works,…

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When I was working on my undergraduate communications degree, we spent a fair chunk of time discussing the printed word; this introduction (below in the excerpt) brings back memories. I am going to start with an excerpt from the study (link and citation to follow at the end of this post) before moving on to the news item and press release. It’s a good introduction (Note Links have been removed), For a long time, paper…

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Two polar bears scored according to the Polar Bear Score Card Standard Fatness Index. The bear on the left is categorized as thin, a score of 2/5, while the bear on the right is considered very fat, 5/5. (Photo: Doug Clark, USask A March 1, 2021 news item on phys.org announced a call for volunteers from University of Saskatchewan (USask) polar bear researcher Doug Clark (the response was tremendous), University of Saskatchewan (USask) researcher Doug…

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The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI) sent a February 27, 2021 announcement (received via email) about an upcoming online event, The Invisible UniverseWEDNESDAY, MARCH 3 at 7 pm ET A hundred years ago, we believed that our own galaxy, the Milky Way, constituted the entire universe. We believed that the universe was stagnant. We did not know about the constituents of the universe – dark matter and dark energy – and we believed that…

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First off there’s news about an event, which is being hosted by the Ada Lovelace Institute’s Just AI initiative, from the Almost future AI event registration webpage, Topic: An evening salon and reading of specially commissioned pieces of fiction on AI futures Description: Artificial intelligence and data-driven technologies permeate all aspects of our lives. Their proliferation increasingly leads to encounters with ‘mutant algorithms’, ‘biased machine learning’, and ‘racist AIs’ that sometimes make familiar forms of…

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Researchers from Russia and France have developed a new material, based on graphene, that would allow supercapacitors to store more energy according to a January 15, 2021 news item on Nanowerk, Scientists of Tomsk Polytechnic University jointly with colleagues from the University of Lille (Lille, France) synthetized a new material based on reduced graphene oxide (rGO) for supercapacitors, energy storage devices. The rGO modification method with the use of organic molecules, derivatives of hypervalent iodine,…

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The ‘pair of scissors’ analogy is probably the most well known of the attempts to describe how the CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats)-Cas9 gene editing system works. It seems a new analogy is about to be added according to a January 19 2021 news item on ScienceDaily (Note: This October 30, 2019 posting features more CRISPR analogies), In a series of experiments with laboratory-cultured bacteria, Johns Hopkins scientists have found evidence that there…

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Length but no width or height? That’s a quantum nanowire according to a Jan. 18, 2021 news item on Nanowerk (Note: A link has been removed), Why is studying spin properties of one-dimensional quantum nanowires important?Quantum nanowires–which have length but no width or height–provide a unique environment for the formation and detection of a quasiparticle known as a Majorana zero mode.A new UNSW [University of New South Wales]-led study (Nature Communications, “New signatures of the…

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