For the record, this is spider mite silk (I have many posts about spider silk and its possible applications on this blog; just search ‘spider silk’).. The international collaborative team includes a Canadian university in combination with a Spanish university and a Serbian university. The composition of the team is one I haven’t seen here before. From a December 17, 2020 news item on phys.org (Note: A link has been removed), An international team of…

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Courtesy: Arte Institute Plans for last year’s FACTT (Festival of Art and Science) 2020 had to be revised at the last minute due to COVID-19. This year, organizers were prepared so no in person sessions have to be cancelled or turned into virtual events. Here’s more from the Jan. 25, 2021 announcement I received (via email) from one of the festival partners, the ArtSci Salon at the University of Toronto, Join us! Opening of FACTT…

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The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars has planned a US-centric event, in this case, but I think it could be of interest to anyone interested in low-cost and open source tools. For anyone who’s unfamiliar with the term ‘open source’, as applied to a tool and/or software, it’s pretty much the opposite of a tool/software that’s kept secret by a patent. The Webopedia entry for Open Source Tools defines the term this way (Note:…

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Caption: A color map illustrates the inherent colors of 466 types of carbon nanotubes with unique (n,m) designations based their chiral angle and diameter. Credit: Image courtesy of Kauppinen Group/Aalto University This is, so to speak, a new angle on carbon nanotubes (CNTs). It’s also the first time I’ve seen two universities place identical news releases on EurekAlert under their individual names. From the Dec. 14, 2020 Rice University (US) news release or the Dec.…

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Usually when a company is featured in a news item, there’s some reason why it’s considered newsworthy. Even after reading the article twice, I still don’t see what makes the Precision Nanosystems Inc. (PNI) newsworthy. Kevin Griffin’s Jan. 17, 2021 article about Vancouver area Precision Nanosystems Inc. (PNI) for The Province is interesting for anyone who’s looking for information about members of the local biotechnology and/or nanomedicine community (Note: Links have been removed), A Vancouver…

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I have two items, both concerning sound but in very different ways. Phones in your ears Researchers at the University of Illinois are working on smartphones you can put in your ears like you do an earbud. The work is in its very earliest stages as they are trying to establish a new field of research. There is a proposed timeline, Caption: Earable computing timeline, according to SyNRG. Credit: Romit Roy Choudhury, The Grainger College…

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There’s a lot of arsenic in the world and it’s often a factor in making water undrinkable. When that water is used in farming It also pollutes soil and enters food-producing plants. A December 11, 2020 news item on Nanowerk announces research into arsenic detectors in plants, Researchers have developed a living plant-based sensor that can in real-time detect and monitor levels of arsenic, a highly toxic heavy metal, in the soil. Arsenic pollution is…

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A December 12, 2020 news item on Nanowerk announces a step forward in the development of artificial retinas, “The biohybrid retina is a cell therapy for the reconstruction of the damaged retina by implanting healthy cells in the patient’s eye,” says Fivos Panetsos, director of the Neuro-computation and Neuro-robotics Group of the UCM and member of the Institute of Health Research of the Hospital Clínico San Carlos de Madrid (IdISSC). A December 11, 2020 Universidad…

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Teaching grammar and syntax to artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms (specifically natural language processing (NLP) algorithms) has helped researchers understand and predict viral mutations more speedily. This facility is especially useful at a time when the Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus seems to be mutating into more easily transmissible variants. Will Douglas Heaven’s Jan. 14, 2021 article for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s MIT Technology Review describes the work that links AI, grammar,…

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This December 9, 2020 news item on Nanowerk announces research into a nanodiamond filter which can clean hot wastewater, Although most of the planet is covered by water, only a fraction of it is clean enough for humans to use. Therefore, it is important to recycle this resource whenever possible. Current purification techniques cannot adequately handle the very hot wastewater generated by some industries.… A December 9, 2020 American Chemical Society (ACS) news release, which…

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