The research is a combination of work from a student on fellowship at NASA from the University of Michigan and nearly a decade and a half of study on self-healing materials for both aircrafts and spacecrafts.
NASA scientists said it works much like a puncture healing in the body, but faster.
The organically designed polymers respond to energetic events such as space debris or bullets rapidly hitting the material.
The material chemistry activates on impact to help plug a hole or leak to repair the craft potentially within less than a second.
This is because the polymer reacts to heating. s the bullet goes in it actually raises the temperature around the region,
NASA scientists Mia Siochi explained in a video about the project. t was gratifying to see as we actually test this material on the field it actually works. his substance not only has lifesaving applications for astronauts,
Imagine getting a dent in your car and it immediately popping back to its original structure.
and it is working to improve on the tensile strength of these polymers, but there is progress here.
The material works well enough that it could be used on the next human space mission n
#Online Bank Simple Ditches All Its Fees When the online banking service Simple first got started,
one of its promises to customers was that it would eliminate many of the excessive fees that traditional banks charge
while also offering an improved and mobile-optimized banking experience. However, while Simple certainly did away with a number of the most common banking fees like maintenance fees, overdraft fees,
or minimum balance fees, for example it still charged fees for other, lesser-used services. But now Simple is ditching all its fees,
the company announced this week. Previously, Simple was still charging for things like over-the-counter cash withdrawals ($1 per transaction
Going forward, Simple says it will continue to generate revenue from interest and interchange fees that is,
it splits the interest margin with its partner banks and it splits the service fee merchants pay to the issuing bank.
This is the same way it always made money, to be clear, but now it eating the cost of even more fees in an effort to improve the overall customer experience. his revenue model is a manifestation of our belief that you should have access to your money
when you need it, without paying fees, explains Simple cofounder and CEO Josh Reich. oday elimination of all fees is one example of how wee constantly working to remove any inconvenience our customers feel from using a branchless service,
he adds. t also the right thing to do. You shouldn have to worry about how much it going to cost to access your money. o some extent,
Simple is able to do this because it no longer operating as a startup in need of funding to stay alive the company was acquired last year by financial services corporation BBVA for $117 million.
At the time Simple said it had over 100,000 customers. A later report revealed the number of active customers was leaked lower,
and has an in industry low CPA (for personal retail checking accounts) by a significant margin.
Wee also heard that Simple current growth rate is roughly on par with a bank that would have 5, 600 branch employees,
Simple may appeal to those who are fed up with their current bank and looking for a more affordable alternative.
they do miss out on some of the options bigger banks provide like high-yield checking and savings accounts, for example.
That means at some point, a portion of Simple customers may consider other online banking options perhaps opting for bank that does profit from overdraft fees in exchange for better interest rates, for example.
Like most banks, there are fees for using out-of-network ATMS and Simple won reimburse for those.
its customers have access to more than 55,000 fee-free ATMS twice the number of Chase and Bank of america combined
Juan M. Banda, a biomedical informatics researcher at Stanford, has created a tool that helps patients
and doctors search through pharmaceutical research, sourced from eight NIH-and FDA-approved medical databases,
while youe still taking those antibiotics you were prescribed last week for your sinus infection. The hack is potentially a lot more useful for patients with serious conditions who are taking multiple prescription drugs for an extended period of time.
Banda says he hopes to automate some of this in the future to make it easier for patients to interact with medical research. y hope is to make this bigger
Late last week the agency trailed a ajor science findingfrom its ongoing exploration of the red planet showing continued savvy at NASA social media mission to sustain public interest in space exploration.
and unearthed clay minerals after drilling Martian rock again suggesting an aquatic environment in the planet past.
Investigating the RSL sites themselves to probe for life is challenging, according to NASA, because the streaks have so far only been observed on steep slopes.
DOM Indoors is a robotic system that can reconfigure any room within minutes. Seriously: It looks like a cross between a Terminator movie and LEGOS.
Little blocks rise out of the floor to create walls, tables and surfaces, and sink back down again in a fluid motion.
That because all of the building materials enough 5-inch tiles and aluminum studs construct thousands of 6-inch cubes are packed flat
The robots are powered battery so they can go back to a charging dock (similar to a Roomba)
when theye running low on energy. t like 3d printing upside down, says ASMBLD cofounder Petr Novikov.
Wish your studio apartment could be a bedroom at night and an open workspace during the day?
ASMBLD is in talks with a large co-working space to implement the robotic flooring in its facilities. hink about a business space where the large conference rooms that are used once a day are the biggest spaces in the building,
and save a lot of money in the long term. hile it sounds complex, the installation process is actually rather simple.
For a 500-square-foot room, it would cost around $12, 000 to install, Asmbld reports,
when labor and material costs are zero for each subsequent wall configuration. If a robot senses something above it that heavier than usual,
Construction and demolition waste comprises 40 percent of landfill mass in the U s, . and 60 percent of building demolition is due to changes in tenant requirements, not physical condition.
And this doesn account for the massive savings in time and labor costs when you replace human workers with DOM robots. hen youe building a building there coordination,
you can have the framer, the plumber, the electrician and all of the different contractors working at the same time,
you don just have walls, you have electrical conduits, lights, and outlets. n order for DOM Indoors to be viable in real life,
A plastic tiled wall is one thing, but tables and beds clearly require a different composition. ee not expecting people to start using this right away as daily reconfiguration,
and it going to save a lot of money and make things much more efficient. g
#Business models For Cars Need To Evolve Beyond Ownership Annie Hsu is the strategy director at global design and strategy firm frog.
A host of new car sharing and ride-hailing services have chipped away at the landscape of car ownership over the past several years.
Alixpartners, a global advisory firm, estimates that car sharing services have cannibalized sales of 500,000 vehicles over the past decade,
with another 1. 2 million units expected to be lost by 2021. U s. car sales in 2014 totaled 16.5 million units.
These estimates do not even account for the impact from ride-hailing services such as Uber or Lyft.
While the economic crisis of 2008 is certainly a backdrop to the decline, a trend toward moving back into cities where public transportation is often a preferable alternative to sitting on congested freeways is also a contributing factor.
, fuel, maintenance and parking expenses) are continued also a pain point for owners. Many car manufacturers are responding by concentrating efforts on improving the product itself,
incorporating new features from semi-autonomous driving modes to interior scent release. What entrepreneurs behind car sharing and ride-hailing services have identified
however, is the fact that consumers are hungry for new ways to access the car, perhaps more than changes to the car itself.
While we believe there is still significant opportunity to improve upon the automotive user experience, the vehicle itself is just one part of
what it means to own a car. A few companies have partnered with startup services to create e toohourly models,
but they are late to the game. Manufacturers can reframe their current definition of innovation by taking inspiration from other markets and pushing automotive boundaries in the following ways:
While these are simply a handful of potential possibilities, they require significant shifts in the business model to expand the total offering that cars provide to drivers.
To reverse the current trajectory, where consumers see cars as purely utilitarian tools, manufacturers need to push beyond the current model cross product, business model and culture d
#Jahn-Teller metal: New state of matter found TOKYO: Scientists have discovered a new state of matter that appears to be an insulator, superconductor, metal and magnet all rolled into one.
The research could help develop new molecular materials that are superconductors at even higher temperatures,
researchers said. An international team of researchers made the discovery by studying a superconductor made from carbon-60 molecules or"buckyballs".
"The team found the new state after changing the distance between neighbouring buckyballs by doping the material with rubidium,'physicsworld. com'reported.
The study shows that the material has a rich combination of insulating, magnetic, metallic and superconducting phases including the otherwise unknown state,
"The study, led by Kosmas Prassides of Tohoku University in Japan, provides important clues about how the interplay between the electronic structure of the molecules
and their spacing within the lattice can strengthen interactions between electrons that cause superconductivity. TOKYO:
Scientists have discovered a new state of matter that appears to be an insulator, superconductor, metal and magnet all rolled into one.
The research could help develop new molecular materials that are superconductors at even higher temperatures,
An international team of researchers made the discovery by studying a superconductor made from carbon-60 molecules or"buckyballs".
"The team found the new state after changing the distance between neighbouring buckyballs by doping the material with rubidium,'physicsworld. com'reported.
"The study, led by Kosmas Prassides of Tohoku University in Japan, provides important clues about how the interplay between the electronic structure of the molecules
and their spacing within the lattice can strengthen interactions between electrons that cause superconductivity i
"said Melanie Bailey from the University of Surrey. By the very nature of the test, the identity of the subject is captured within the fingerprint ridge detail itself,
"said Melanie Bailey from the University of Surrey. By the very nature of the test, the identity of the subject is captured within the fingerprint ridge detail itself,
"The software for operating the system and analysing the data was developed in-house and around Rs 100 crore value could be put for that,
"said V Seshagiri Rao, the former project director. To the best of his knowledge only select group of countries have the capacity to build such radars in the world,
Prasad said Raythaeon, Northrop grumman, Lockheed martin, of the US, Thales, Canada-Europe, Elta of Israel and NEC of Japan have the capability to make such systems.
Currently Isro uses the space debris data provided by US space agency Nasa. The commissioning of MOTR would provide real-time data for Isro."
"The project got the green signal in 2012 with a target to get the radar ready by February 2015
Excepting the radome that houses the radar, all other systems were domestically sourced.""The radome which is radio frequency transparent was not available in the country,
"said P Vijaya Saradhi, group director, management system area. Elaborating on the features of the radar,
SV Subba Rao said the phased array radar antenna is stationary while its beam generated by 4,
"The software for operating the system and analysing the data was developed in-house and around Rs 100 crore value could be put for that,
"said V Seshagiri Rao, the former project director. To the best of his knowledge only select group of countries have the capacity to build such radars in the world,
Prasad said Raythaeon, Northrop grumman, Lockheed martin, of the US, Thales, Canada-Europe, Elta of Israel and NEC of Japan have the capability to make such systems.
Currently Isro uses the space debris data provided by US space agency Nasa. The commissioning of MOTR would provide real-time data for Isro."
"The project got the green signal in 2012 with a target to get the radar ready by February 2015
Excepting the radome that houses the radar, all other systems were domestically sourced.""The radome which is radio frequency transparent was not available in the country,
"said P Vijaya Saradhi, group director, management system area. Elaborating on the features of the radar,
SV Subba Rao said the phased array radar antenna is stationary while its beam generated by 4,
#First aqueous solar flow battery designed WASHINGTON: Researchers have designed the first aqueous flow battery with solar capability that can achieve a 20 per cent energy savings over traditional batteries.
Researchers at The Ohio State university had developed the world's first solar air battery last Fall in a new study,
the researchers have reported that their patent-pending design -which combines a solar cell and a battery into a single device-now achieves a 20 per cent energy savings over traditional lithium-iodine batteries.
The 20 per cent comes from sunlight, which is captured by a unique solar panel on top of the battery,
said Yiying Wu, professor at Ohio State. The solar panel is a solid sheet, rather than a mesh as in the previous design.
Another key difference comes from the use of a water-based electrolyte inside the battery.
Because water circulates inside it, the new design belongs to an emerging class of batteries called aqueous flow batteries."
"The truly important innovation here is that we've successfully demonstrated aqueous flow inside our solar battery,
"Wu said. As such, it is the first aqueous flow battery with solar capability. Or, as Wu and his team have dubbed it, the first"aqueous solar flow battery."
"It's also totally compatible with current battery technology, very easy to integrate with existing technology,
environmentally friendly and easy to maintain, "he added. Researchers around the world are working to develop aqueous flow batteries
because they could theoretically provide affordable power grid-level energy storage someday. The solar flow battery could thus bridge a gap between today's energy grid and sources of renewable energy."
"This solar flow battery design can potentially be applied for grid-scale solar energy conversion and storage, as well as producing'electrolyte fuels'that might be used to power future electric vehicles,
"said Mingzhe Yu, lead author of the paper and a doctoral student at Ohio State. The new solid solar panel is called a dye-sensitised solar cell,
because the researchers use a red dye to tune the wavelength of light it captures
and converts to electrons. Those electrons then supplement the voltage stored in the lithium-anode portion of the solar battery.
To carry electrons from the solar cell into the battery a liquid electrolyte is required, which is typically part salt, part solvent.
The researchers used lithium iodide as the salt, which offers a high-energy storage capacity with low cost,
and water as the solvent. In tests, the researchers compared the solar flow battery's performance to that of a typical lithium-iodine battery.
They charged and discharged the batteries 25 times. Each time, both batteries discharged around 3. 3 volts.
The difference was that the solar flow battery could produce the same output with less charging.
The study was published in Journal of the American Chemical Society. WASHINGTON: Researchers have designed the first aqueous flow battery with solar capability that can achieve a 20 per cent energy savings over traditional batteries.
Researchers at The Ohio State university had developed the world's first solar air battery last Fall in a new study,
the researchers have reported that their patent-pending design -which combines a solar cell and a battery into a single device-now achieves a 20 per cent energy savings over traditional lithium-iodine batteries.
The 20 per cent comes from sunlight, which is captured by a unique solar panel on top of the battery,
said Yiying Wu, professor at Ohio State. The solar panel is a solid sheet, rather than a mesh as in the previous design.
Another key difference comes from the use of a water-based electrolyte inside the battery.
Because water circulates inside it, the new design belongs to an emerging class of batteries called aqueous flow batteries."
"The truly important innovation here is that we've successfully demonstrated aqueous flow inside our solar battery,
"Wu said. As such, it is the first aqueous flow battery with solar capability. Or, as Wu and his team have dubbed it, the first"aqueous solar flow battery."
"It's also totally compatible with current battery technology, very easy to integrate with existing technology,
environmentally friendly and easy to maintain, "he added. Researchers around the world are working to develop aqueous flow batteries
because they could theoretically provide affordable power grid-level energy storage someday. The solar flow battery could thus bridge a gap between today's energy grid and sources of renewable energy."
"This solar flow battery design can potentially be applied for grid-scale solar energy conversion and storage, as well as producing'electrolyte fuels'that might be used to power future electric vehicles,
"said Mingzhe Yu, lead author of the paper and a doctoral student at Ohio State. The new solid solar panel is called a dye-sensitised solar cell,
because the researchers use a red dye to tune the wavelength of light it captures
and converts to electrons. Those electrons then supplement the voltage stored in the lithium-anode portion of the solar battery.
To carry electrons from the solar cell into the battery a liquid electrolyte is required, which is typically part salt, part solvent.
The researchers used lithium iodide as the salt, which offers a high-energy storage capacity with low cost,
and water as the solvent. In tests, the researchers compared the solar flow battery's performance to that of a typical lithium-iodine battery.
They charged and discharged the batteries 25 times. Each time, both batteries discharged around 3. 3 volts.
The difference was that the solar flow battery could produce the same output with less charging.
The study was published in Journal of the American Chemical Society y
#Cells that regenerate liver without cancer risk NEW YORK: Scientists have discovered new type of cells which are an important part of liver regeneration.
When healthy liver cells are depleted by long-term exposure to toxic chemicals, the newly discovered cells,
known as hybrid hepatocytes, generate new tissue more efficiently than normal liver cells. Importantly, they divide
and grow without causing cancer, which tends to be a risk with rapid cell division.""Hybrid hepatocytes represent not only the most effective way to repair a diseased liver,
but also the safest way to prevent fatal liver failure by cell transplantation,"lead researcher professor Michael Karin from University of California, San diego (UCSD) School of medicine.
The liver is the only organ regenerates after being damaged. Exactly how it repairs itself remained a mystery until recently,
when researchers discovered a type of cell in mice essential to the process. The researchers also found similar cells in humans.
The researchers studied liver function in mice. They were able to isolate the hybrid hepatocytes after observing how the tissue regenerated.
They then exposed healthy mice to three known cancer-causing pathways and watched the hybrid hepatocytes closely.
Liver cancer never originated from these cells s
#Cells in mice restore liver damage without cancer risk In a breakthrough discovery, medical researchers have discovered a type of cell in mice
which restores liver damage without the risk of cancer. The researchers have also found the similar cells in human.
When healthy liver cells are depleted by long-term exposure to toxic chemicals, the newly discovered cells,
known as hybrid hepatocytes, generate new tissue more efficiently than normal liver cells. In the study, the researchers studied liver function in mice following long-term exposure to carbon tetrachloride, a chemical commonly associated with Superfund sites.
They were able to isolate the hybrid hepatocytes after observing how the tissue regenerated and then exposed healthy mice to three known cancer-causing pathways and watched the hybrid hepatocytes closely.
The researchers noticed that liver cancer never originated from these cells. Lead author Michael Karin of the University of California said that the hybrid hepatocytes represented not only the most effective way to repair a diseased liver,
but also the safest way to prevent fatal liver failure by cell transplantation. The study is published in the journal Cell l
#Robot otherbuilds babies that can evolve Scientists have created a'mother'robot that can build babies out of mechanised blocks,
and then create new ones that evolve from the previous generation. The findings show that robots could be able to evolve on their own, in the same way in
which animals and humans have. Like biological evolution, the robots mother could look out for the best traits in her children,
and then use those to improve the following generations of robots. In five different experiments, robot set the mother
which looks like a big robotic arm to work building generations of ten different children. They were built out of small plastic cubes with motors inside.
Each of the robots carries a"genome""made up of different genes, like humans do.
As the generations were built, they passed them down, mutated and crossed over, deleting and merging genes to choose the most effective."
"Natural selection is basically reproduction, assessment, reproduction, assessment and so on,"said lead researcher Fumiya Iida of Cambridge's department of engineering."
"That's essentially what this robot is doing we can actually watch the improvement and diversification of the species."During the experiment,
the children were tested to see how far they could travel in a given time. The characteristics of the winning robots would be kept,
while the losing ones would be discarded. The process of robot evolution could give us some insight into how humans came about too, according to the researchers r
#Microwave diamonds':'Girl's new best friend The 2. 62 carat diamond Calvin Mills bought his fiancee in November is a stunner.
Pear-shaped and canary-yellow, the gem cost $22, 000-a bargain. Mills, the chief executive officer of CMC Technology Consulting in Baton rouge, La.
says he could have spent tens of thousands more on a comparably sized diamond mined out of the earth,
but his came from a lab ."I got more diamond for less money, "says the former Southern University football player. who proposed last year at halftime during one of his alma mater's games at the Superdome in New orleans
. While man-made gems make up just a fraction of the $80 billion global diamond market, demand is increasing as buyers look for cheaper stones that are cheaper-and free of ethical taint.
Human-rights groups, with help from Hollywood have popularized the term"blood diamonds"to call attention to the role diamond mining has played in fuelling conflicts in Africa.
Unlike imitation diamonds such as cubic zirconia, stones that are grown"(the nascent industry's preferred term) in labs have the same physical characteristics and chemical makeup as the real thing.
They're made from a carbon seed placed in a microwave chamber with methane or another carbon-containing gas and superheated into a glowing plasma ball.
That creates particles that crystallize into diamonds, a process that can take 10 weeks. The technology has progressed to the point that experts need a machine to tell synthesized gems apart from those extracted from mines or rivers.
North american consumers from 18 to 35 who say they prefer natural and untreated diamonds: 45%Retailers, including Wal-mart Stores
and Warren Buffett's Helzberg Diamonds are beginning to stock the artificial gems.""To a modern consumer,
if they get a diamond from above the ground or in the ground, do they really care?"
"asks Chaim Even-Zohar, a principal at Tacy, an industry consulting firm in Ramat Gan, Israel.
In a survey by Gemdax, an Antwerp-based consultant, only 45%of North american consumers from 18 to 35 said they prefer natural diamonds."
"Some substitution for natural diamonds is inevitable, "says Anish Aggarwal, a partner at the firm,
which wouldn't disclose who paid for the study. Gemdax says more research is needed to better gauge consumer attitudes.
The companies that dominate the market for natural gems, including Russia's Alrosa and De beers,
a unit of London-based Anglo American, don't see it the upstarts as much of a threat,
because"it's such a small fraction"of the market, says Neil Koppel, the CEO of Renaissance Diamonds.
His company, in Boca raton, Fla. is supplying Helzberg stores in 10 US cities. Last year only about 3, 60,000 carats of man-made diamonds were produced,
compared with 146 million carats of natural gems mined in 2013, estimates researcher Frost & Sullivan.
The Supply of lab-grown stones will probably jump to 2 million carats in 2018 and 20 million by 2026."
"The value of a diamond is linked inextricably to the inspirational and unique narrative that lies behind each one, from its formation to its history to its emotional significance,
which lab-grown diamonds simply don't have said, "the company. in a statement. In July, mining companies won a major marketing victory when the International organization for Standardization ruled that man-made gems must be called synthetic, lab-grown,
or lab-created-not real, cultivated, or cultured d
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