Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have designed a new class of molten sodium batteries for grid-scale energy storage, Tech Xplore reports. Molten sodium batteries have been used for many years to store energy from renewable sources, such as solar panels and wind turbines. However, commercially available molten sodium batteries, called sodium-sulfur batteries, typically operate at 520-660 degrees Fahrenheit. Sandia's new molten sodium-iodide battery operates at a much cooler 230 degrees Fahrenheit instead. "We've been working to bring the...
Under the picturesque dawn sky of the West Texas desert, Jeff Bezos, the 57-year-old ex-Amazon CEO and founder of space tourism company Blue Origin, rocketed into space for a brief moment, calling it, "the first step of something big," CNET reports. It happened 52 years to the day since Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin pressed their boot prints into the moon. Atop the Blue Origin rocket, locked inside a gumdrop-shaped capsule, Bezos, his brother Mark, aeronautics...
Headlines across the world tell us that hundreds of people have died after the recent heat waves in Canada and the northwestern U.S. The stories invariably blame climate change and admonish us to tackle it urgently. What they mostly reveal, however, is how one-sided, alarmist reporting leaves us badly informed, writes Bjorn Lomborg in the Financial Post. The stories are based on a kernel of truth. Global warming is a real problem, and rising temperatures...
Videoconferencing firm Zoom, whose growth was supercharged by the pandemic over the past year, will buy the cloud call centre company Five9 in an all-stock deal valued at about $14.7 billion, reports Tech Xplore. That is far greater than Zoom's market valuation a little over two years ago when it went public for slightly more than $9 billion. Zoom founder and CEO Eric Yuan said in a blog post Sunday that the acquisition will accelerate the...
Lymph nodes are critical to the body's immune response against tumors but, paradoxically, cancer cells that spread, or metastasize, to lymph nodes often avoid being eliminated by immune cells. Recent experiments by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Boston University School of Medicine provide insights on the details behind this immune evasion, which could help scientists develop strategies to overcome it, reports Medical Xpress. "We know that lymph nodes are often the first place cancer spreads as it...
Tech Xplore reports that activists, journalists, and politicians around the world have been spied on using cellphone malware developed by a private Israeli firm, igniting fears of widespread privacy and rights abuses. The use of the software, called Pegasus and developed by Israel's NSO group, was reported on by the Washington Post, the Guardian, Le Monde, and other news outlets who collaborated on an investigation into a data leak. The leak was of a list of...
Cannabis was first domesticated around 12,000 years ago in China, researchers found, after analyzing the genomes of plants from across the world. The study, published in the journal Science Advances, said the genomic history of cannabis domestication had been under-studied compared to other crop species, largely due to legal restrictions. The researchers compiled 110 whole genomes covering the full spectrum of wild-growing feral plants, landraces, historical cultivars, and modern hybrids of plants used for hemp and drug purposes, reports Phys.org. The study said...
Just 7% of our genome is uniquely shared with other humans, and not shared by other early ancestors, according to a study published Friday in the journal Science Advances. "That's a pretty small percentage," said Nathan Schaefer, a University of California computational biologist and co-author of the new paper. "This kind of finding is why scientists are turning away from thinking that we humans are so vastly different from Neanderthals."
The research draws upon DNA extracted from fossil remains of Neanderthals...
Scientists at Sinai Health have found that all cancers fall into just two categories. Their findings could provide a new strategy for treating the most aggressive and untreatable forms of the disease, reports Medical Xpress. Researchers at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute (LTR) divide all cancers into two groups, based on the presence or absence of a protein called the Yes-associated protein, or YAP. Each classification exhibits different drug sensitivities or resistance. YAP plays an...
The possibility of a lake roughly 20 kilometers across under the Red Planet's southern polar ice cap was raised in 2018, when the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft detected bright spots on radar measurements, hinting at a large body of liquid water beneath 1.5 kilometers of solid ice that could be home to living organisms. Subsequent work found hints of additional pools surrounding the main lake basin. But the planetary science community has always held skepticism over the...
