Tickets for the last lecture in this series sold out in less five minutes! Here’s more from the Perimeter Institute’s January 17, 2020 event notice (received via email), Warp Drive and Aliens: The Scientific PerspectiveWEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 5 at 7 PM ETBryan Gaensler, Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and AstrophysicsScience fiction and science both inspire wonder and awe, albeit in very different ways. At its best, science fiction asks profound questions about the human condition. In contrast,…

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An August 5, 2019 news item on Nanowerk announces a new technology for detecting killer bacteria (Note: A link has been removed), A combination of off-the-shelf quantum dots and a smartphone camera soon could allow doctors to identify antibiotic-resistant bacteria in just 40 minutes, potentially saving patient lives. Staphylococcus aureus (golden staph), is a common form of bacterium that causes serious and sometimes fatal conditions such as pneumonia and heart valve infections. Of particular concern…

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If I understand this research rightly, they are creating a film made of carbon nanotubes that can stimulate the growth of nerve cells (neurons) thus creating a ‘living/nonliving’ hybrid or as they call it in the press release a ‘biosynthetic hybrid’. An August 2, 2019 news item on Nanowerk introduces the research (Note 1: There seem to be some translation issues; Note 2: Links have been removed), Carbon nanotubes able to take on the desired…

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An August 2, 2019 news item on ScienceDaily features some new work on wearable technology that was a bit of a surprise to me, Wearable human-machine interfaces — devices that can collect and store important health information about the wearer, among other uses — have benefited from advances in electronics, materials and mechanical designs. But current models still can be bulky and uncomfortable, and they can’t always handle multiple functions at one time.Researchers reported Friday,…

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176 people died on the Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 bound for Kyiv when it was shot down in what now appears to have been a tragic mistake. 138 of those people were scheduled to take connecting flights to Canada. I extend my profound sympathies to these and all the families that must endure this loss. National Post’s January 11, 2020 In Memoriam tribute (in the print edition) provides a glimpse of the impact this…

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A new treatment for wood could make renewable salt-separating membranes. Courtesy: University of Maryland An August 6, 2019 article by Adele Peters for Fast Company describes a ‘wooden’approach to water desalinization (also known as desalination), …“We are trying to develop a new type of membrane material that is nature-based,” says Z. Jason Ren, an engineering professor at Princeton University and one of the coauthors of a new paper in Science Advances about that material, which…

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The gold sheets in question are effectively 2D. I’m surprised they haven’t named them ‘goldene’ as everything else that’s 2D seems to have an ‘ene’ suffix (e.g. graphene, germanene, tellurene). Of course, these gold sheets are not composed of single atoms but of two according to an August 6, 2019 news item on Nanowerk, Scientists at the University of Leeds [UK] have created a new form of gold which is just two atoms thick –…

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Scientists at Northwestern University (Chicago, Illinois) and the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) have developed what could be a more sustainable way to produce electricity. From a July 31, 2019 news item on Nanowerk, Scientists from Northwestern University and Caltech have produced electricity by simply flowing water over extremely thin layers of inexpensive metals, including iron, that have oxidized. These films represent an entirely new way of generating electricity and could be used to develop…

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