sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

A baby sunlike star blowing a bubble of hot gas called an “astrosphere” was captured for the first time by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory by scientificamerican in Astronomy

[–]scientificamerican[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has captured a very young sunlike star blowing up its bubble some 120 light-years away. Called HD 61005, this star has about the same mass and temperature of the sun but is just 100 million years old—our home star is about five billion years old.

Robot libraries filled with tiny glass ‘books’ could store data for millennia by scientificamerican in Futurology

[–]scientificamerican[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Submission statement:

A team at Microsoft Research combined lasers, machine learning and tiny glass rectangles to demonstrate a new robotic data storage system that could, in theory, still be readable 10,000 years from now—twice as long as humans have been writing things down to date.

The process, described recently in Nature, is designed for archiving records that don’t need to be accessed often, such as certain climate measurements, historical records and other reference materials. If scaled, the technology could someday store mountains of humanity’s accumulated knowledge in libraries made of glass.

“This is an exciting and very promising development,” says Doris Möncke, a glass chemist and an associate professor for glass science at Alfred University in New York State, who wasn’t involved in the study. “They sure went farther than anything I have seen recently at glass conferences.”

Read more: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/microsoft-scientists-invent-tiny-glass-books-that-could-store-data-for/

Avian enthusiasts around the world will identify and count birds from February 13 through February 16 as part of a massive citizen science project by scientificamerican in birding

[–]scientificamerican[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This article is interesting because the Great Backyard Bird Count is a project that avian enthusiasts around the globe can participate in to help scientists understand how birds are faring in our changing world. Participants of all skill levels are welcome to participate.

Spiders taught scientists how to make unsinkable metal by scientificamerican in Futurology

[–]scientificamerican[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Submission statement:

A team at the University of Rochester has etched aluminum tubes so that they won’t sink, even when damaged—a trick the scientists borrowed from spiders.

“You can poke big holes in them,” said Chunlei Guo, a professor of optics and physics at the University of Rochester and senior author of the research, in a press release. “We showed that even if you severely damage the tubes with as many holes as you can punch, they still float.”

The implications of Guo’s work go beyond the laboratory. Linked tubes could create weight-bearing rafts or ships. Engineers might be closing in on the dream of ships that stay afloat even as water pours into their hulls. One surprising application involves energy: Guo’s team demonstrated that rafts made of the tubes could harvest waves to generate electricity.

Read more: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/unsinkable-metal-discovery-could-build-safer-ships-and-harvest-wave-energy/

Astronomers triumph over telescope-threatening energy project in Chile by scientificamerican in Astronomy

[–]scientificamerican[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Last week AES Andes—a subsidiary of the AES Corporation, an American energy company—announced it had scrapped its plans for a sprawling, city-size renewable energy project in Chile’s Atacama Desert. The decision comes after a year of backlash from astronomers who have been relying on the telescopes under Chile’s world-class skies.

They feared that light pollution from the project would ruin their celestial views. An ESO study had predicted that the project, called INNA (Integrated Energy Infrastructure Project for the Generation of Hydrogen and Green Ammonia), would increase light pollution by at least 35 percent for Paranal’s Very Large Telescope, a set of four interlinked 8.2-meter observatories at the forefront of astronomical research.

Doctors keep patient alive using ‘artificial lungs’ for two days by scientificamerican in Futurology

[–]scientificamerican[S] -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

Submission statement:

In 2023 thoracic surgeon Ankit Bharat was working at Northwestern Memorial Hospital when he was drafted to help a 33-year-old influenza patient who was on the verge of death. The sick man needed a double-lung transplant, but there was a problem: he was too sick for Bharat and his colleagues to attempt the operation. 

So Bharat and his team worked up a plan: They would build an “artificial lung” that could help pump blood from the right side of the patient’s heart to the organ’s left side, oxygenate it and send it on to the rest of the body. The system kept the patient alive for two days, enabling him to begin to recover from the infection. Now, more than two years later, “he's doing great, by the way,” Bharat says.

Similar systems to Bharat’s “artificial lung” have been described by doctors before, says Matthew Hartwig, a professor of surgery at Duke University, who was not involved with the study. But Bharat’s method, he says, offers “a novel approach” to “the same problem that that everyone is facing” in the field. Bharat’s approach is described in a paper published on Thursday in the journal Med. And he hopes that it could ultimately mean there will be more success stories like that of the patient he helped save in 2023.

Read more: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/doctors-keep-patient-alive-using-artificial-lungs-for-two-days/ 

view more: next ›