Arianne Cohen’s May 28, 2020 article for Fast Company concisely sums up the space junk problem and solution (Note: A link has been removed), Throwing money at problems works in space, too! A paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [PNAS] says that the space debris problem can be fixed once and for all, not by the engineers and scientists who consider space their domain, but with cold, hard cash: about $235,000…

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I love the part with the magnet, All of the main points are made in the video but for those who like text, there’s a May 28, 2020 news item on phys.org describing this new smart sponge for cleaning up oil spills (Note: Links have been removed), A Northwestern University-led [Chicago, Illinois, US] team has developed a highly porous smart sponge that selectively soaks up oil in water.With an ability to absorb more than 30…

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This research approach looks promising as three news releases trumpeting the possibilities indicate. First, there’s the June 17, 2020 American Chemical Society (ACS) news release, Scientists are working overtime to find an effective treatment for COVID-19, the illness caused by the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. Many of these efforts target a specific part of the virus, such as the spike protein. Now, researchers reporting in Nano Letters have taken a different approach, using nanosponges coated with…

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There must be some sweet satisfaction or perhaps it’s better described as relief for the Environmental Working Group (EWG) now that sunscreens with metallic (zinc oxide and/or titanium dioxide) nanoparticles are gaining wide acceptance. (More about the history and politics EWG and metallic nanoparticles at the end of this posting.) This acceptance has happened alongside growing concerns about oxybenzone, a sunscreen ingredient that EWG has long warned against. Oxybenzone has been banned from use in…

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I wonder what happens to geography and time when you hold your conference virtually? Part of the excitement of a conference or other meetings is the promise of the destination with new people and new adventures. Whether 2020 is a pause between in-person meetings, a moment when everything changed, or some combination is yet to be determined but perhaps ISEA2020 will be a harbinger. I received a June 10, 2020 notice (via email) with the…

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The Scientist is a magazine I do not feature here often enough. The latest issue (June 2020) features a May 20, 2020 opinion piece by Ruth Williams on a recent study about interpretating brain scans—70 different teams of neuroimaging experts were involved (Note: Links have been removed), In a test of scientific reproducibility, multiple teams of neuroimaging experts from across the globe were asked to independently analyze and interpret the same functional magnetic resonance imaging…

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I believe that China has more than two neuromorphic chips. The two being featured here are the ones for which I was easily able to find information. The Darwin chip The first information (that I stumbled across) about China and a neuromorphic chip (Darwin) was in a December 22, 2015 Science China Press news release on EurekAlert, Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is a type of information processing system based on mimicking the principles of biological…

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I’ve been meaning to get to this news item from late 2019 as it features work from a team that I’ve been following for a number of years now. First mentioned here in an October 17, 2011 posting, James Gimzewski has been working with researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and researchers at Japan’s National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) on neuromorphic computing. This particular research had a protracted rollout with…

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A close-up view of a new neuromorphic “brain-on-a-chip” that includes tens of thousands of memristors, or memory transistors. Credit: Peng Lin Courtesy: MIT It’s hard to believe that a brain-on-a-chip might need sleep but that seems to be the case as far as the US Dept. of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory is concerned. Before pursuing that line of thought, here’s some work from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) involving memristors and a brain-on-a-chip.…

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