An Oct. 22, 2020 news item on Nanowerk heralds a simple, inexpensive method for making your mask more protective, The cloth masks many are sporting these days offer some protection against COVID-19. However, they typically provide much less than the professional N95 masks used by healthcare workers.That may soon change. Recently, students from BYU’s [Brigham Young University; Utah, US] College of Engineering teamed up with Nanos Foundation [emphasis mine] to develop a nanofiber membrane that…

Continue reading

Things past A year later i still don’t know what came over me but I got the idea that I could write a 10-year (2010 – 2019) review of science culture in Canada during the last few days of 2019. Somehow two and half months later, I managed to publish my 25,000+ multi-part series. Part 1 covers science communication, science media (mainstream and others such as blogging) and arts as exemplified by music and dance:…

Continue reading

I’ll start off with the COVID-19 billionaire since I imagine that excites the most interest. AbCellera billionaire No less an authority than the business magazine Forbes has produced a list of COVID-19 billionaires in its December 23, 2020 article (Meet The 50 Doctors, Scientists And Healthcare Entrepreneurs Who Became Pandemic Billionaires In 2020) by Giacomo Tognini (Note: Links have been removed), Nearly a year after the first case of Covid-19 was reported in the Chinese…

Continue reading

I have two items and an exploration of the Canadian scene all three of which feature governments, artificial intelligence, and responsibility. Special issue of Information Polity edited by Dutch academics, A December 14, 2020 IOS Press press release (also on EurekAlert) announces a special issue of Information Polity focused on algorithmic transparency in government, Amsterdam, NL – The use of algorithms in government is transforming the way bureaucrats work and make decisions in different areas,…

Continue reading

Christmas Eve 2020: There haven’t been enough frog stories here this year and this December 21, 2020 essay by James B. Barnett, postdoctoral fellow inbBehavioural ecology at McMaster University (Ontario, Canada), for The Conversation helps fill that void, …Transparency may seem like the simplest form of camouflage, but in the last year, research has revealed new complexities behind what some animals do to vanish into their surroundings.In my research, I have experienced first-hand how effective…

Continue reading

Earlier this week, RaftsTheGame (@TheRaftsGame) popped up on my twitter feed, which was excellent timing since it’s getting close to Christmas in a year (2020) when I imagine a lot of people may be home and inclined to play games. The people (rafts4biotech) who produced Rafts The Game (also called Rafts!) are involved in a research project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme, RAFTS!Create the bacterium of your dreamsHave you ever wondered what…

Continue reading

A spiderweb-inspired fractal design is used for hemispherical 3D photodetection to replicate the vision system of arthropods. (Sena Huh image) This image is pretty and I’m pretty sure it’s an illustration and not a real photodetection system. Regardless, an Oct. 21, 2020 news item on Nanowerk describes the research into producing a real 3D hemispheric photodetector for biomedical imaging (Note: A link has been removed), Purdue University innovators are taking cues from nature to develop…

Continue reading