Tag: resistance

Silicon ‘Sandwiches’ Make For Lightweight, High-Capacity Batteries

A team at Clemson University has come up with a new design that overcomes some of the problems with incorporating silicon into lithium-ion batteries, “enabling them to demonstrate a lightweight and multipurpose device that could be used to power satellites and spacesuits,” reports New Atlas. From the report: Scientists have been investigating the potential of silicon in lithium-ion batteries for a…

1.5% of All Americans Have Been Infected With Coronavirus – 5 Million Cases

Confirmed coronavirus cases in the U.S. hit 5 million on Sunday, reports the Associated Press, “by far the highest of any country…” “The failure of the most powerful nation in the world to contain the scourge has been met with astonishment and alarm in Europe.”
Perhaps nowhere outside the U.S. is America’s bungled virus response viewed with more consternation than in Italy,…

Social Movements Are Pushing Google Sheets To the Breaking Point

In the past decade, Google’s suite of collaborative tools has steadily gained prominence in social movements and other forms of widespread collaboration. From a report: It was used to organize Occupy Wall Street movements in 2011, disseminate resources for protesting after the U.S. election in 2016, and assemble response to the California wildfires in 2017. During 2020, these tools have earned…

How Google Docs Became the Social Media of the Resistance

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: In just the last week, Google Docs has emerged as a way to share everything from lists of books on racism to templates for letters to family members and representatives to lists of funds and resources that are accepting donations. Shared Google Docs that anyone can view and anyone can edit,…

A ‘breath of nothing’ provides a new perspective on superconductivity

Zero electrical resistance at room temperature? A material with this property, i.e. a room temperature superconductor, could revolutionize power distribution. But so far, the origin of superconductivity at high temperature is only incompletely understood. Scientists from Universität Hamburg and the Cluster of Excellence “CUI: Advanced Imaging of Matter” have succeeded in observing strong evidence of superfluidity in a central model system,…

A fresh twist in chiral topology

The concept of chirality is well-established in science: when an object cannot be superimposed on its mirror image, both the object and its mirror image are called chiral. In the drug industry, for instance, more than 50% of the pharmaceutically active molecules used nowadays are chiral molecules. While one of the ‘enantiomers’ is life-saving, its counterpart with opposite handedness may be…

Has the Time Finally Come for Generics in Golang?

An anonymous reader quotes technology columnist Mike Melanson: The debate around adding generics to the Go programming language has been going on for years now, often with much resistance, but it’s starting to look like one proposal finally has some backing and general acceptance from the greater Go community — much to the surprise of some involved. Introduced this week…

The four major public health threats we need to act on now

Viral pandemics aren’t the only worry: antibiotic resistance, a drop in vaccination and other issues could rapidly put the world’s health in peril Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2246265-the-four-major-public-health-threats-we-need-to-act-on-now/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…

Study: 100% Face Mask Use Could Crush Second, Third COVID-19 Wave

“A new modeling study out of Cambridge and Greenwich universities suggests that face masks may be even more important than originally thought in preventing future outbreaks of the new coronavirus,” reports SFGate: To ward off resurgences, the reproduction number for the virus (the average number of people who will contract it from one infected person) needs to drop below 1.0. Researchers…