New ecofriendly way to make ammonia could be boon for agriculture, hydrogen economy

By University of New South Wales - Thursday, February 4th, 2021

Chemical engineers at UNSW Sydney have found a way to make ‘green’ ammonia from air, water and renewable electricity that does not require the high temperatures, high pressure and huge infrastructure currently needed to produce this essential compound.

New metamaterial offers reprogrammable properties

By Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne - Wednesday, January 20th, 2021

Over the past 20 years, scientists have been developing metamaterials, or materials that don’t occur naturally and whose mechanical properties result from their designed structure rather than their chemical composition. They allow researchers to create materials with specific properties and shapes. Metamaterials are still not widely used in everyday objects, but that could soon change. Tian Chen, a post-doc at two EPFL labs — the Flexible Structures Laboratory, headed by Pedro Reis, and the Geometric Computing Laboratory, headed by Mark Pauly — has taken metamaterials one step further, developing one whose mechanical properties can be reprogrammed after the material has been made. His research appears in Nature.

Crimes Against Humanity

By Ted Smillie - Sunday, January 10th, 2021

It seems Trump’s failed attack on US democracy is insignificant when compared to previous successful US Government attacks on US and third world democracies. Here are some examples:
“In 1965, with the aid of weapons and intelligence from the United States, Suharto hunted down and killed between 500,000 and a million of Sukarno’s supporters in one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century”
“The US felt it had no choice but to shift to a more aggressive stance and resorted to the tactic they had used in Guatemala and Indonesia – the good old-fashioned coup. It was executed on 11 September 1973, by General Augusto Pinochet with CIA support under the code name Operation Fubelt.

New approach can improve COVID-19 predictions worldwide

By Technical University of Denmark - Tuesday, December 15th, 2020

Methods currently used around the world for predicting the development of COVID-19 and other pandemics fail to report precisely on the best and worst case scenarios. Newly developed prediction method for epidemics, published in Nature Physics, solve this problem.

“It is about understanding best and worst-case scenarios — and the fact that worst case is one of the most important things to keep track of when navigating through pandemics — regardless whether it be in Denmark, the EU, the USA or the WHO. If you are only presented with an average estimate for the development of an epidemic — not knowing how bad it possible can get, then it is difficult to act politically,” says Professor Sune Lehmann, one of four authors of the article Fixed-time descriptive statistics underestimate extremes of epidemic curve ensembles just published in Nature Physics.