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Power of Grassroots Innovation: How a Nondescript Box Has Been Saving Lives During the COVID Pandemic

Lead Image: A do-it-yourself air purifier in use in a classroom. Credit: Douglas Hannah, CC BY-ND One afternoon, a dozen Arizona State University students gathered to spend the morning cutting cardboard, taping fans, and assembling filters in an effort to build 125 portable air purifiers for local schools. That same morning, staff members at a homeless shelter in Los Angeles were setting up 20 homemade purifiers of their own, while in Brookline, Massachusetts, another DIY air purifier was whirring quietly in the back of a daycare classroom as children played. The technology in all three cases – an unassuming duct…

“Missile Row” pads at Cape Canaveral returning to action

Cape Canaveral has always been at the heart of America’s space program since the very beginning. A hub for rocketry research and development in its early days, the Cape served as a test center not just for spaceflight and research but also for the US missile development programs. With so many projects, the landscape was littered with launch complexes, and along the eastern coastline, the iconic “missile row” of Atlas and Titan launch complexes dominated the skyline. Many of the Cape’s launch facilities have long since fallen silent, but with newcomers Firefly and Relativity preparing for their first launches from…

Stunning Subsurface Images of Yellowstone National Park Reveal “Mystery Sandwich” Plumbing System

The SkyTEM instrument being flown over Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park. Credit: Photo by Jeff Hungerford, Yellowstone National Park; supplied by Carol Finn of U.S. Geological Survey The geysers and fumaroles of Yellowstone National Park are among the most iconic and popular geological features on our planet. Each year, millions of visitors travel to the park to marvel at the towering eruptions of Old Faithful, the bubbling mud cauldrons of Artists Paint Pots, the crystal-clear water, and iridescent colors of Grand Prismatic Spring, and the stacked travertine terraces of Mammoth Hot Springs. Those who have visited the park may…

New High-Speed 3D Microscope Could Make Biopsies a Thing of the Past

MediSCAPE, a high-speed 3D microscope designed by Columbia Engineers, can see real-time cellular detail in living tissues to guide surgery, speed up tissue analyses, and improve treatments. A Columbia Engineering team has developed a technology that could replace conventional biopsies and histology with real-time imaging within the living body. Described in a new paper published today (March 28, 2022) in Nature Biomedical Engineering, MediSCAPE is a high-speed 3D microscope capable of capturing images of tissue structures that could guide surgeons to navigate tumors and their boundaries without needing to remove tissues and wait for pathology results. For many medical procedures,…

Scientists Work To Turn Noise on Quantum Computers to Their Advantage

A group of scientists from the University of Chicago and Purdue University constructed a unique “fingerprint” of the noise on a quantum computer as it is seen by a program run on the computer. Scientists simulate ‘fingerprint’ of noise on quantum computer. Unique study could point way to new approach, uses for quantum technology. For humans, background noise is generally just a minor irritant. But for quantum computers, which are very sensitive, it can be a death knell for computations. And because “noise” for a quantum computer increases as the computer is tasked with more complex calculations, it can quickly…