#MIT refreshes fusion reactor with modern superconductors Rare-earth barium copper oxide (REBCO) superconducting tapes could mean earlier practical fusion reactors, according to MIT.
The key is stronger magnetic fields, which shrink the size of tokamak chamber required, and subsequently simplify all that follows.
It ust ripples through the whole design. It changes the whole thing, said MIT nuclear scientist Professor Dennis Whyte.
Fusion power increases with the fourth power of magnetic field, so 2x field produces 16x power. ny increase in the magnetic field gives you a huge win,
said post-grad Brandon Sorbom. 2x magnetic field is not available with REBCO, but there is enough for 10x fusion power,
said MIT. By combining REBCO magnets with known fusion principles, the team has designed a research reactor,
and potential prototype power plant, and described it in a paper in the journal Fusion Engineering and Design.
It is half the diameter of the ITER fusion reactor to be built in France (designed before the REBCO superconductors),
power output would be the same without any any new physics. ee not extrapolating to some brand-new regime,
said Whyte. As with ITER, continuous operation would be possible. Suiting it to research the core of the MIT reactor can be removed without dismantling the entire machine.
Liquid rather than solid materials surround the fusion chamber allowing easy circulation and replacement. t an extremely harsh environment for solid materials, said Whyte. evices of a similar complexity
and size have been built within about five years, said MIT. Estimates are that power out would be 3x power in,
increasing to five or six times with improvements in the design. UK firm Tokamak Energy is proposing something very similar
#Why This Hearing Device Is Making Noise With Investors Ear surgeon Rodney Perkins has an impressive track record building companies around
what he calls edtech to mainstream. In the past few decades, he founded 12 health and life sciences companies, three
of which have gone public. In total, his firms are worth several billion dollars. His latest enterprise, the Soundhawk Smart Listening System, raised $11. 2 million in funding.
Users of Soundhawk Scoop earpiece can customize settings for various situationsutdoors, dining, drivingsing a free ios or Android app.
The Smart Listening Systemncluding device, wireless microphone and charging caseetails for $299 through soundhawk. com and Amazon
and is available in two color schemes. Mike Kisch, president and CEO of Cupertino, Calif.-based Soundhawk, says the company works with advanced wireless
and wearable technology that helps consumers in subtle, everyday ways. f you believe youe serving a higher purposehat people will benefit from your work
or producthat allows you to make it through the bad times that come with a startup, says Kisch,
formerly of Cisco. f youe investing multiple years of your life, the goal has to be bigger than bringing a product to market.
The target Soundhawk customer doesn have severe hearing loss but rather a situational needhe inability to hear during a lecture or in a noisy restaurant,
or difficulty listening to the radio or TV at a socially acceptable volume. To address those needs,
the Soundhawk team developed a product meant for occasional use that would feel like a reasonable impulse purchase.
Regarding customers with even minimal hearing loss, Kisch explains, ou want to motivate people to be able to do something about it very quickly.
and Foxconn Technology Group. r. Perkins saw the opportunity to create an entirely new market around hearing augmentation via an elegantly designed wearable device that powered by the user and financially accessible,
potentially impacting the hundreds of millions of people experiencing hearing loss globally who do not qualify for existing solutions.
and can afford traditional hearing aids n
#Forget Toothpaste. This Nifty Toothbrush Scrubs Teeth Clean With Nanotech. If you think about it, toothpaste is pretty gnarly stuff.
It ooey, gooey and sticks to everything but youe teeth. How sweet would it be
Now, thanks to the wonders of nanotechnology, we can. A group of Japanese techies have designed a toothbrush that uses super skinny nylon bristles wrapped in nano-size mineral ions to scrub teeth squeaky clean.
and the enamel that defends your teeth from decay is protected. Same old circular brushing pattern.
users need only dip it into a cup filled with plain, old water before brushing.
Here a look at how it works. If you speak Japanese, maybe you can tell us what the super-enthused actors are sayingmisoka creators--consumer electronics designer Kosho Ueshima,
working in collaboration with the tech firm Yume Shokunin--claim you need only one typical brushing session with the futuristic toothbrush in the morning
though you just walked out of a teeth-cleaning session at the dentist's, Misoka designers said in a recent interview.
We found the toothbrush for as low as $35 on ebay and for only $14 on Amazon.
dead batteries and charging cords will soon be a quaint memory, much like rotary dial telephones.
this vibration is converted back into an electrical charge to power anything with a battery, no wires or wall plugs required.
Meredith Perry, who began tinkering with wireless charging as a paleobiology undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania,
who could have powered his pacemaker remotely, or my other grandpa, who can hear if he forgets to change his hearing-aid battery,
she notes of the technology broad potential. Areas where ubeam could reshape business include powering tablets at retail, wireless headsets at warehouses,
battery-powered tools at construction sitesevices would always be charged and ready to go. Offices too, now designed by necessity around fixed infrastructure like wall sockets,
would be open to reinterpretation. Because of that vast potential, Perry nabbed $10 million in 2014 in a Series A round led by Upfront Ventures, with investment from Andreessen Horowitz, Marissa Mayer, Tony Hsieh and Mark Cuban, among others.
Total funding to date is $13. 2 million. The money is going into the first product, a transmitter that will automatically recharge smartphones,
scheduled for release in 2016. But Perry is looking beyond handhelds to the world of connected appliances, cars and other everyday tools. or us
the goal is to have control over the entire charging experience for the entire Internet of things,
she says. Perry does not have the field to herself. She competing against Wattup from Silicon valley Energous Corp,
. which beams a 5. 8 GHZ radio frequency that wireless devices convert into DC power, and may debut in early 2016 in devices developed by SK Telesys (a Korean rival of Samsung)
and manufactured by Taiwanese tech giant Foxconn. While Wattup may win the race to market,
Perry and her investors are counting on ubeam technology to win the war. Wattup can transmit power only up to 15 feet
and signal strength degrades as it moves away from the transmitter; ubeam transmitter reaches significantly farther
and delivers more juice, resulting in speedier charges. Ultimately, Perry says, consumers will be the real winners,
as recharging gadgets becomes as simple as walking into a store, office or home f
#This iphone Screen Protector Can Reverse Scratches in a Second The folks who came up with the self-healing iphone case is now back with something a lot more impressive.
Innerexile's earlier technology could repair light scratches within about half a minute (given the right temperature, that is),
which proved to be tricky in our brass brush test video after the break. So what's the secret sauce behind this new coating?
and when damaged, the liquid will fill the void so quickly that you probably won't even realize you've just scratched your case or screen protector.
Innerexile's first products to use its new coating is the"Self-repair screen protectors"for the iphone 6s and iphone 6s Plus.
For those who care about benchmarks, these can apparently resist brass brush weight of up to 2kg
Innerexile's iphone 6s screen protector is available on Amazon for $23. 99 per piece,
and the iphone 6s Plus version costs an extra $2. Both are backward compatible with their iphone 6 counterparts.
If you'd prefer using a case with the same self-healing property, stay tuned for another announcement in Mid-november,
as Innerexile decided to make a new tooling to ensure a perfect fit for the teeny-bit-larger iphone 6s series.
Other brands may claim their iphone 6 cases fit the 6s just fine but a forced squeeze--the caliper never lies--may eventually ruin the phone's anodized coating,
so watch out t
#New Building material Twice as Strong as Concrete, Low Carbon footprint Watershed Materials, a California-based building materials technology startup, has developed technology to produce high-strength masonry with a low carbon footprint
using natural mineral-based geopolymers. The technology, funded by the National Science Foundation, allows for natural clays found readily all over the planet to be turned into reliable masonry products and offers a sustainable alternative to traditional concrete masonry,
the company says. Recent test samples have achieved compressive strengths of 7, 000psi twice the strength of ordinary concrete and have demonstrated resistance to water and chemical erosion.
Traditional concrete masonry has a high carbon footprint due to its reliance on Portland cement a material responsible for 6 percent of the world CO2 EMISSIONS.
Geopolymers are a new technology that provide an alternative to Portland cement used in concrete and masonry.
Until now, geopolymers have relied mostly on fly ash, a byproduct of burning coal, or blast furnace slag, a byproduct of iron and steel production.
These industrial waste products are available only adjacent to coal fired power plants and steel production facilities, and the world does not produce enough to meet demand for concrete products.
In place of these materials, Watershed Materialstechnology activates globally abundant natural clay-based minerals to form strong geopolymer reactions.
Applications for Watershed Materials geopolymer technology include: Mass production of sustainable masonry made from locally sourced,
often recycled mine and quarry waste. On-site local production of structural masonry from excavation or demolition materials.
Disaster relief and remote production of reliable building materials from locally sourced abundant materials. Researchers at Switzerland Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne are also testing a low-carbon cement that could reduce the carbon footprint of construction sites by 40 percent, Forbes reported last year s
#Wastewater treatment Captures Carbon emissions, Produces Energy A wastewater treatment process developed by engineers at the University of Colorado Boulder mitigates carbon dioxide emissions and actively captures greenhouse gases.
The treatment method, known as microbial electrolytic carbon capture (MECC), purifies wastewater by using an electrochemical reaction that absorbs more CO2 than it releases
while creating renewable energy in the process. his energy-positive, carbon-negative method could potentially contain huge benefits for a number of emission-heavy industries,
said Zhiyong Jason Ren, an associate professor of civil, environmental, and architectural engineering at CU-Boulder and senior author of the new study,
which was published recently in the journal Environmental science and Technology. Wastewater treatment typically produces CO2 EMISSIONS in two ways: the fossil fuels burned to power the machinery,
and the decomposition of organic material within the wastewater itself. Plus, existing wastewater treatment technologies consume high amounts of energy.
Public utilities in the US treat an estimated 12 trillion gallons of municipal wastewater each year and consume about 3 percent of the nation grid energy.
Existing carbon capture technologies are energy-intensive and often entail costly transportation and storage procedures.
MECC uses the natural conductivity of saline wastewater to facilitate an electrochemical reaction that is designed to absorb CO2 from both the water and the air.
The process transforms CO2 into stable mineral carbonates and bicarbonates that can be used as raw materials by the construction industry,
used as a chemical buffer in the wastewater treatment cycle itself or used to counter acidity downstream from the process such as in the ocean.
The reaction also yields excess hydrogen gas, which can be stored and harnessed as energy in a fuel cell.
The findings offer the possibility that wastewater could be treated effectively on-site without the risks or costs typically associated with disposal.
Further research is needed to determine the optimal MECC system design and assess the potential for scalability.
A carbon-negative wastewater treatment system could benefit power companies, the authors say, as the EPA Clean Power Plan requires power plants to comply with reduced CO2 EMISSION levels e
#General mills Pledges Supply Chain Emissions Cuts General mills has pledged to reduce absolute greenhouse gas emissions by 28 percent,
compared to a 2010 baseline, across its full value chain from farm to fork to landfill by 2025.
General Millsfocus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions formally began within its direct operations in 2005. Over the last 10 years, General mills has reduced absolute emissions within its operations by 13 percent,
compared to a 2005 baseline. The company accomplished this by using energy more efficiently across its facilities and by converting to less greenhouse gas-intensive forms of energy.
However nearly two-thirds of the company total greenhouse gas emissions occur upstream of its direct operations. e know our greatest impact is outside our four walls particularly in agriculture,
ingredients and packaging, says Ken Powell, chairman and CEO of General mills. o reduce emission levels,
we must work across our value chain with growers, suppliers, customers and industry partners. n 2013,
General mills made a commitment to sustainably source 100 percent of its 10 priority ingredients by 2020.
These ingredients represent 50 percent of the company total raw material purchases and have a significant impact on its total environmental footprint.
As part of this commitment the company works closely with suppliers and farmers to strengthen sustainable farming practices.
This work addresses key growing dimensions including GHG emission reduction, water management, and soil quality in an effort to establish more climate resilient farms.
In addition to broadening existing partnerships with organizations like Field to Market, the Innovation Center for US Dairy and others, the company has outlined four specific actions to help fulfill its climate commitment over the next 10 years,
including:
#Waste-to-Energy project to Reduce GHGS by 40k Tons Annually The New york city metro area first large-scale waste-to-energy project will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about 40,000 tons annually, according to New york Gov. Andrew Cuomo,
who recently announced the launch of the anaerobic digester. The project is located at Long island Compost 62-acre facility in Yaphank,
New york. The state has awarded the $40 million project a $1. 3 million grant through the Regional Greenhouse gas Initiative, a program that supports multiple clean energy projects, Forester Daily news reports.
American Organic Energy will operate the digester which will process over twice as much food waste as currently processed at any existing privately owned food waste digesters accepting offsite food waste in New york state.
The project will accept about 120,000 tons of food waste, 30,000 tons of fats, oils and greases,
and 10,000 tons of grass clippings from the Long island region annually that would otherwise have been transported
and dumped into landfills. The digester will convert these waste streams to clean energy, clean water to be used for plant processes and solid-based fertilizer.
The electric power needed to run the digester and the existing facility will be generated using biogas from the project.
Long island Compost also plans to convert the biogas to renewable natural gas that will be used to fuel its trucks on-site, reducing diesel consumption by 200,000 gallons annually.
An additional 1. 9 million gallons of diesel per year will be offset by injecting the remaining renewable gas produced by the digester into the National grid natural gas pipeline on Long island.
This will enable the gas to be used to fuel compressed natural gas vehicles in other areas. The project is part of the Cleaner, Greener Communities program, a statewide initiative encouraging communities to incorporate sustainability goals and principles into local plans and projects.
It is scheduled to be completed in August 2016 6
#Environmental remediation Reagent Reduces Time to Regulatory Closure Environmental remediation technology company Regenesis has launched a first-of-its-kind liquid activated carbon technology that the company says captures
and biodegrades a range of contaminants, reducing time to regulatory closure. Plumestop Liquid Activated carbon was developed to stop migrating groundwater contaminant plumes
and designed to meet stringent groundwater standards at contaminated sites. Regenesis says the substrate reduces harmful chemicals and toxins,
while enhancing or accelerating microbial-driven biodegradation processes. Plumestop, effective on a wide range of contaminants, protects human health from groundwater contaminants
and prevents contaminant migration across property boundaries, the company says. This includes reducing chlorinated solvents at industrial dry cleaning sites as well as petroleum cleanup projects.
Plumestop is composed of very fine particles of activated carbon (1-2 m) suspended in water through the use of unique organic polymer dispersion chemistry.
Once in the subsurface, the material behaves as a colloidal biomatrix binding to the aquifer matrix,
rapidly removing contaminants from groundwater and expediting permanent contaminant biodegradation o
#Cleaning water one stroke at a time A material created by University of California, Riverside engineers is the key component of a swimsuit that won an international design competition for its ability to clean water as a person swims.
The reusable material, which they call Sponge, is derived from heated sucrose, a form of sugar.
It has a highly porous structure that is super hydrophobic, meaning it repels water, but also absorbs harmful contaminants."
"This is a super material that is not harmful to the environment and very cost effective to produce,
"said Mihri Ozkan, an electrical engineering professor at UC Riverside's Bourns College of Engineering. Ozkan, along with her husband and fellow engineering professor, Cengiz Ozkan, current Ph d. student, Daisy Patino,
and Hamed Bay, who recently earned his Ph d. after working with the Ozkan's, began developing the material about four years ago for applications such as cleaning up oil
They also believe the unique water-repelling nature of the material could be used in paint applied to airplanes and satellites or as part of electromagnetic shields for such things as unmanned aerial vehicles.
and encapsulates it in a netlike cage made of 3d printed elastomer that forms to the body.
#Using optical fiber to generate a two-micron laser In recent years, two-micron lasers (0. 002 millimetre) have been of growing interest among researchers.
In the areas of surgery and molecule detection, for example, they offer significant advantages compared to traditional, shorter-wavelength lasers.
and not yet as mature as their telecom counterparts (1. 55-micron). Moreover sources currently used in labs are typically bulky and expensive.
Optical fibre-based 2 micron lasers are an elegant solution to these issues. This is where researchers at Photonics Systems Laboratory (PHOSL) come in.
by changing the way optical fibres are connected to each other. Thanks to the new configuration, they were able
Bloodless surgery and long-range molecule détection Two-micron spectral domain has potential applications in medicine, environmental sciences and industry.
In the realm of high precision surgery they can be used to target water molecules during an operation
What is more, the energy from the laser causes the blood to coagulate on the wound, which prevents bleeding.
Two-micron lasers are also very useful for detecting key meteorological data over long distances through the air.
At PHOSL, researchers built a thulium-doped fibre laser that works without an isolator. Their idea was to connect the fibres differently,
the result is a potentially fatal arrhythmia. Now, a team of researchers from Oxford and Stony Brook universities has found a way to precisely control these waves-using light.
Their results are published in the journal Nature Photonics on 19 october. Both cardiac cells in the heart and neurons in the brain communicate by electrical signals,
electrical devices (pacemakers or defibrillators) or drugs (eg beta blockers. However, these methods are relatively crude: they can stop
borrowing tools from the developing field of optogenetics, which so far has been used mainly in brain science.
'When there is scar tissue in the heart or fibrosis, this can cause part of the wave to slow down.
'Optogenetics uses genetic modification to alter cells so that they can be activated by light. Until now, it has mainly been used to activate individual cells
'A protein called channelrhodopsin was delivered to heart cells using gene therapy techniques so that they could be controlled by light.
Then, using a computer-controlled light projector, the team was able to control the speed of the cardiac waves,
In the short term, the ability to provide fine control means that researchers are able to carry out experiments at a level of detail previously only available using computer models.
potentially improving our understanding of how the heart works. The research can also be applied to the physics of such waves in other processes.
Dr Emilia Entcheva, from Stony Brook University, said:''The level of precision is reminiscent of what one can do in a computer model,
except here it was done in real heart cells, in real time.''Precise control of the direction, speed
This ideal therapy has remained in the realm of science fiction until now.''The team stresses that there are significant hurdles before this could offer new treatments-a key issue is being able to alter the heart to be light-sensitised
However, as gene therapy moves into the clinic and with miniaturization of optical devices, use of this all-optical technology may become possible.
Biomedical scientists at the Sanford-Burnham-Prebys Medical Discovery Institute (SBP) and UC Santa barbara (UCSB) have discovered now a mechanism by
which secreted proteins age and turnover at the end of their life spans. Their findings which shed light on a crucial aspect of health
and disease, appear today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).""This is a fundamental advance that is broadly applicable
normally undergo molecular aging and turnover,"said senior author Jamey Marth, Ph d.,professor in SBP's NCI-designated Cancer Center."
"When a secreted protein is made, it has a useful life span and then it must be degraded--the components are recycled then basically,"added Marth, also director of UCSB's Center for Nanomedicine and a professor in the campus's Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental biology."
"We can now see how the regulation and alteration of secreted protein aging and turnover is able to change the composition of the circulatory system
and thereby maintain health as well as contribute to various diseases.""This newly discovered mechanism encompasses multiple factors,
including circulating enzymes called glycosidases. These enzymes progressively remodel N-glycans, which are complex structures of monosaccharide sugars linked together and attached to virtually all secreted proteins.
It is the N-glycan structure itself that identifies the protein as nearing the end of its life span.
Marth and colleagues identified more than 600 proteins in the bloodstream that exhibit molecular signs of undergoing this aging and turnover process.
blood coagulation and immunity. Honing in on individual examples, the researchers were able to track each of them through time
"In these studies we further saw that the different life spans of distinct proteins are accounted for by the different rates of aging due to N-glycan remodeling,
"said lead author Won Ho Yang, Ph d.,a postdoctoral associate at SBP and at UCSB's Center for Nanomedicine."
"Altering this aging and turnover mechanism is the fastest way to change the abundance of a secreted protein,
which we increasingly note is occurring at the interface of health and disease, "Marth explained."
"In retrospect from published literature and from studies in progress, we can now see how sepsis,
diabetes and inflammatory bowel disorders can arise by the targeted acceleration or deceleration of secreted protein aging and turnover."
"The discovery of this mechanism provides a unique window into disease origins and progression,"Marth added."
"It has been known that circulating glycosidase enzyme levels are altered in diseases such as sepsis, diabetes, cancer and various inflammatory conditions.
The resulting changes in the composition and function of the circulatory systems, including the blood and lymphatic systems, can now be identified and studied.
We are beginning to see previously unknown molecular pathways and connections in the onset and progression of disease
#Sensing small molecules may revolutionize drug design Most pharmaceutical drugs consist of tiny molecules, which target a class of proteins found on the surfaces of cell membranes.
The new work has broad implications for basic research into biological function at the cellular level as well as providing an efficient platform for new drug design
Traditionally, such study has required proteins to be removed from their native environment on cell membranes. Once extracted from the cell
Unfortunately the behavior of membrane proteins may be altered following extraction from the cellular environment. Small molecules used for most drugs are on the order of a few hundred Daltons in size,
compared with biological molecules, which are often thousands of Daltons. A Dalton is roughly equal to the mass of a single nucleon--either a proton or neutron.
where interactions of small molecules and membrane proteins are examined in their native environment. With current technologies however, the sensitivity with which small molecules can be detected scales with the size.
it changes the membrane's surface tension.""That change is very tiny--as small as a few nanometers or less,
"Tao says.""We have a way to track that change with great precision--down to a fraction of a nanometer."
"Further, the technique is compatible with simple optical microscopy, though techniques including phrase contrast imaging
as the observed binding kinetics could be compared with experimental data derived by conventional means of detection.
while yielding new insights into foundational issues in cellular biology.""We're very excited by this technology
and Genistein, the compound found in soybean which has been suggested to play a role in prevention of steroid-hormone related cancers, particularly breast cancer.
and Dr Eugenio Butelli working in Professor Cathie Martin's lab at the John Innes Centre,
a plant found in most UK gardens and used as a model plant in scientific investigation.
and to influence the amount of energy and carbon the plant dedicated to producing these natural compounds.
and flavanoids and to devote more of energy to doing this in fruit. Introducing both Atmyb12
Tomatoes are a high yielding crop--producing up to 500 tonnes per hectare in countries delivering the highest yields (FAOSTAT 2013)
, grapes, soybeans, etc..The tomatoes can be harvested and juiced and the valuable compounds can be extracted from the juice.
The tomatoes themselves could potentially become the source of increased nutritional or medicinal benefit. Professor Cathie Martin said:"
"Our study provides a general tool for producing valuable phenylpropanoid compounds on an industrial scale in plants,
Our work will be of interest to different research areas including fundamental research on plants, plant/microbe engineering, medicinal plant natural products,
"Medicinal plants with high value are often difficult to grow and manage, and need very long cultivation times to produce the desired compounds.
Our research provides a fantastic platform to quickly produce these valuable medicinal compounds in tomatoes.
which are the major groups of medicinal compounds from plants
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