Lifeboat Foundation

Imagine a wearable patch that tracks your vital signs through changes in the color display, or shipping labels that light up to indicate changes in temperature or sterility of food items.

These are among the potential uses for a new flexible display created by UBC researchers and announced recently in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

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For many, the word “crystals” conjures images of shimmering suncatchers that create a prism of rainbow colors or semi-transparent stones thought to possess healing abilities. But in the realm of science and engineering, crystals take on a more technical definition. They’re perceived as materials whose components – be it atoms, molecules, or nanoparticles –are arranged regularly in space. In other words, crystals are defined by the regular arrangement of their constituents. Familiar examples include diamonds, table salt, and sugar cubes.

When Nicola Spaldin began studying natural sciences at the University of Cambridge in 1988, she planned on becoming a physicist, but then quickly reconsidered. “After about the second lecture I completely changed my mind,” she recalls. “I thought ‘I’m absolutely not clever enough to be a physicist.’ Everybody was very brilliant and I was not.”

Yet it seems Spaldin was vastly underestimating herself. Now a professor of materials science at ETH Zurich, she won two major awards for physics last year: the EPS Europhysics Prize and the Hamburg Prize for Theoretical Physics. Both accolades cited Spaldin’s pioneering work on the theory of magnetoelectric multiferroics – materials that are both ferromagnetic and ferroelectric. These properties are rarely found together, making it very difficult to engineer substances with both, but they have many exciting potential applications, from microelectronics to medicine.

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Developing Novel DNA-Based Mechano-Technologies For Human Health — Dr. Khalid Salaita, Ph.D. — Emory University

Dr. Khalid Salaita, Ph.D. (https://www.salaitalab.com/salaita) is a Professor of Chemistry at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia (USA), program faculty in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory, program member of Cancer Cell Biology at Winship Cancer Institute, and most recently is the recent winner Future Insight Prize given by Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany (https://www.emdgroup.com/en/research/open-innovation/futurei…aming.html) for his cutting edge work in the area of mechanobiology.

Continue reading “Dr. Khalid Salaita, PhD — Emory University — Developing Novel DNA-Based Mechano-Technologies” »

Researchers in the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering have demonstrated control over an emerging material, which they consider as a possible future alternative to silicon in microelectronics. This is a timely development, because scientists and engineers face challenges in continuing the transistor shrinking trend, an important driver of computer chip performance.

The continuous performance improvement of these chips has been driven by shrinking the size of the most basic logic “Lego” piece – the transistor. Transistors are miniature switches that control the flow of electric currents, analogous to a faucet controlling the flow of water. Already in the early 1960s, Gordon Moore, the founder of Intel, proposed that the transistors’ miniaturization rate should allow doubling of the number of transistors per area every 2 years.

Stevens’ School of Systems and Enterprises (SSE) held a reception at Northrop Grumman’s Space Systems headquarters in Dulles, Va., to congratulate its 21 employees who received their Master of Engineering in Space Systems Engineering through the SSE Corporate Education program.

SSE’s Dr. Wiley Larson was able to congratulate the cohort of graduates, and Marcos Stephens, director, technical staff development for NGC Space Systems, served as the program emcee. Stephens and Carol Ruiz, director, online and corporate engagement for SSE, planned the event with the assistance of Julie Godby, executive assistant at NGC. The School of Systems and Enterprises has partnered with Northrup Grumman since 2006 and is excited to be engaged with their Space Systems segment.

This benefits customers by accelerating access to future vehicles that feature the latest technology while also enabling their current vehicles to be eligible to receive updates and improvements over time—unlocking additional value beyond the initial point of purchase. And for large enterprises, shorter development cycles with less ground-up engineering can equate to significant cost savings and allow more investment in innovation.

Beyond vehicles themselves, the tools, techniques and processes that are required to engineer and manufacture at scale are also benefitting from developments in the latest hardware technology. Advancements in raw material chemistry and processing, fabrication and physical sciences are leading to lighter, stronger and better-performing vehicle applications in parallel with greater connectivity.

As advancements in transportation technology continue to evolve, it’s important for companies to balance their focus on the continual development of both hardware and software technologies. Forgoing advancements in one without investing in the development of the other can lead to significant risks and missed opportunities for long-term success.

Which types of cells can be located in various human tissues, and where? Which genes show activity in these individual cells, and which proteins can be identified within them? Detailed answers to these inquiries and more are expected to be supplied by a specialized atlas. This atlas will particularly elucidate how different tissues take shape during embryonic development and the underlying causes of diseases.

In the process of developing this atlas, the researchers have the goal to chart not just tissues directly procured from humans but also structures referred to as organoids. These are three-dimensional tissue aggregates that are grown in the lab and develop in a manner similar to human organs, albeit on a smaller scale.

“The advantage of organoids is that we can intervene in their development and test active substances on them, which allows us to learn more about healthy tissue as well as diseases,” explains Barbara Treutlein, Professor of Quantitative Developmental Biology at the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering at ETH Zurich in Basel.

The Titan’s lack of credentials was noted in legal waivers OceanGate asked customers to sign before voyages. The company reportedly warned that its newest submersible had “not been approved or certified by any regulatory body” and that a dive “could result in physical injury, disability, emotional trauma or death.”

You do realize carbon fiber is very weak with compression. Tensile strength is superior to the compression strength. No one is talking about regulation for some reason, which disturbs me. Many things are not on the market because of regulations, like FAA regulations. However some geniuses make a sub out of carbon fiber and other cheap materials, they make people sign waivers telling occupants they are going in an unregulated craft, and people act suprised that something went wrong. Something was going to go wrong, the sub was made of carbon fiber. I don’t even know how the fibers were aligned.

This paper examines the compressive strength data of a recent experimental study [Smith FC. The effect of constituents’ properties on the mechanical performance of fibre-reinforced plastics. PhD thesis. Centre for Composite Materials, Imperial College, April 1998] concerned with the evaluation of a range of engineering properties of continuous carbon fibre/epoxy composites subjected to static tensile and compressive loading. A plastic fibre kinking analysis [Budiansky B. Micromechanics. Comput Struct 1983;16:3–12] and a linear softening cohesive zone model (CZM) [Soutis C. Compressive failure of notched carbon fibre–epoxy panels. PhD thesis. Cambridge University Engineering Department, UK, 1989; Soutis C, Fleck NA, Smith PA.