Scientists created a “radioactive powered diamond battery” that can last up to 28,000 years. What is actually going on here? |
- Scientists created a “radioactive powered diamond battery” that can last up to 28,000 years. What is actually going on here?
- AskScience AMA Series: We are the Molecular Programming Society. We are part of an emerging field of researchers who design molecules like DNA and RNA to compute, make decisions, self-assemble, move autonomously, diagnose disease, deliver therapeutics, and more! Ask us anything!
- Ask Anything Wednesday - Physics, Astronomy, Earth and Planetary Science
- How do we know the false positive rate of various covid-19 tests?
- Does the ISS just dump its airlock air?
- What’s the difference between PLLA and L-PLA (PLA means polylactic acid)?
- How do the lipid nanoparticles used in mRNA vaccines get inside cells?
- Is iterative vaccination possible, using the same vaccine or a different brand made for the same disease?
- Recent studies among vaccine makers are looking at administering the COVID vaccine to children. What are the differences (if any) between a vaccine given to an adult, as opposed to a child?
- If the Initial Singularity had all mass and space-time in it for a long, long time before the Big Bang, why hasn't protons decayed yet?
- Why was the 2009 H1N1 pandemic less deadly than the H1N1 pandemic in 1918? Was it a less dangerous disease, or did we just have better medicine?
- Why are vaccines in small vials instead of big bottles if the aim is to mass vaccinate people?
- Has a causal link been established between the Astrazeneca vaccines and the blood clot issue?
- Is there an increase in worldwide earthquake activity?
- How do they put all the ingredients into the vaccine?
- Is there any reason to believe cannabis consumption would lead to adverse side effects from the COVID-19 vaccine?
| Posted: 31 Mar 2021 01:50 AM PDT |
| Posted: 31 Mar 2021 04:00 AM PDT We are the Molecular Programming Society, an international grassroots team of scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs, who are programming the behavior of physical matter. We build liquid computers that run on chemistry, instead of electricity. Using these chemical computers, we program non-biological matter to grow, heal, adapt, communicate with the surrounding environment, replicate, and disassemble. The same switches that make up your laptops and cell phones can be implemented as chemical reactions [1]. In electronics, information is encoded as high or low voltages of electricity. In our chemical computers, information is encoded as high or low concentrations of molecules (DNA, RNA, proteins, and other chemicals). By designing how these components bind to each other, we can program molecules to calculate square roots [2], implement neural networks that recognize human handwriting [3], and play a game of tic-tac-toe [4]. Chemical computers are slow, expensive, error prone, and take incredible effort to program... but they have one key advantage that makes them particularly exciting: The outputs of chemical computers are molecules, which can directly bind to and rearrange physical matter. Broad libraries of interfaces exist [5] that allow chemical computers to control the growth and reconfiguration of nanostructures, actuate soft robotics up to the centimeter scale, regulate drug release, grow metal wires, and direct tissue growth. Similar interfaces allow chemical computers to sense environmental stimuli as inputs, including chemical concentrations, pressure, light, heat, and electrical signals. In the near future, chemical computers will enable humans to control matter through programming languages, instead of top-down brute force. Intelligent medicines will monitor the human body for disease markers and deliver custom therapeutics on demand. DNA-based computers will archive the internet for ultra-long term storage. In the more distant future, we can imagine programming airplane wings to detect and heal damage, cellphones to rearrange and update their hardware at the push of a button, and skyscrapers that grow up from seeds planted in the earth. Currently our society is drafting a textbook called The Art of Molecular Programming, which will elucidate the principles of molecular programming and hopefully inspire more people (you!) to help us spark this second computer revolution. We'll start at 1pm EDT (17 UT). Ask us anything! Links and references:Our grassroots team (website, [email](hello@molecularprogrammers.org), twitter) includes members who work at Aalto University, Brown, Cambridge, Caltech, Columbia, Harvard, Nanovery, NIST, National Taiwan University, Newcastle University, North Carolina A&T State University, Technical University of Munich, University of Malta, University of Edinburgh, UC Berkeley, UCLA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, UT Austin, University of Vienna, and University of Washington. Collectively, our society members have published over 900 peer-reviewed papers on topics related to molecular programming. Some of our Google Scholar profiles:
Referenced literature:[1] Seelig, Georg, et al. "Enzyme-free nucleic acid logic circuits." science 314.5805 (2006): 1585-1588. [2] Qian, Lulu, and Erik Winfree. "Scaling up digital circuit computation with DNA strand displacement cascades." Science 332.6034 (2011): 1196-1201. [3] Cherry, Kevin M., and Lulu Qian. "Scaling up molecular pattern recognition with DNA-based winner-take-all neural networks." Nature 559.7714 (2018): 370-376. [4] Stojanovic, Milan N., and Darko Stefanovic. "A deoxyribozyme-based molecular automaton." Nature biotechnology 21.9 (2003): 1069-1074. [5] Scalise, Dominic, and Rebecca Schulman. "Controlling matter at the molecular scale with DNA circuits." Annual review of biomedical engineering 21 (2019): 469-493. [link] [comments]  |
| Ask Anything Wednesday - Physics, Astronomy, Earth and Planetary Science Posted: 31 Mar 2021 07:00 AM PDT Welcome to our weekly feature, Ask Anything Wednesday - this week we are focusing on Physics, Astronomy, Earth and Planetary Science Do you have a question within these topics you weren't sure was worth submitting? Is something a bit too speculative for a typical /r/AskScience post? No question is too big or small for AAW. In this thread you can ask any science-related question! Things like: "What would happen if...", "How will the future...", "If all the rules for 'X' were different...", "Why does my...". Asking Questions: Please post your question as a top-level response to this, and our team of panellists will be here to answer and discuss your questions. The other topic areas will appear in future Ask Anything Wednesdays, so if you have other questions not covered by this weeks theme please either hold on to it until those topics come around, or go and post over in our sister subreddit /r/AskScienceDiscussion , where every day is Ask Anything Wednesday! Off-theme questions in this post will be removed to try and keep the thread a manageable size for both our readers and panellists. Answering Questions: Please only answer a posted question if you are an expert in the field. The full guidelines for posting responses in AskScience can be found here. In short, this is a moderated subreddit, and responses which do not meet our quality guidelines will be removed. Remember, peer reviewed sources are always appreciated, and anecdotes are absolutely not appropriate. In general if your answer begins with 'I think', or 'I've heard', then it's not suitable for /r/AskScience. If you would like to become a member of the AskScience panel, please refer to the information provided here. Past AskAnythingWednesday posts can be found here. Ask away! [link] [comments]  |
| How do we know the false positive rate of various covid-19 tests? Posted: 31 Mar 2021 06:39 AM PDT As far as I understand, covid-19 is diagnosed exclusively on the basis of a positive covid-19 test, regardless of the presentation of symptoms or lack thereof. Given that, how could we know if a test is a false positive? To be clear, this isn't a skeptics post since I have read about false positive tests and how some testing forms are more or less likely to produce false positives, so I know that they understand how many are false positives, but I don't understand how they determine that. Is one type of testing considered definitive while others are less so? [link] [comments]  |
| Does the ISS just dump its airlock air? Posted: 31 Mar 2021 12:32 AM PDT Does the ISS just dump its airlock air or do they in some way recycle the evacuated air of the QUEST-Airlock module? I could not find any information on that. [link] [comments]  |
| What’s the difference between PLLA and L-PLA (PLA means polylactic acid)? Posted: 31 Mar 2021 06:48 AM PDT I know it has something to do with isomers, but I found nothing explaining it. [link] [comments]  |
| How do the lipid nanoparticles used in mRNA vaccines get inside cells? Posted: 31 Mar 2021 08:01 AM PDT How do the lipid nanoparticles that contain the mRNA used to create the spike proteins get inside cells once injected? It is my understanding that cells don't just allow any old molecule to cross the membrane so what allows these lipids to cross. Compared to viral vector vaccines where this makes sense I have a lack of understanding around these particles. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 31 Mar 2021 08:51 AM PDT Say you vaccinate a population and 90% are protected, could you do antibody tests to find the 10%. Then re-vaccinate those people? Say everyone gets the Pfizer vaccine, then those not protected gets the astra zenica vaccine. Would the second round have any effect? And if it does is it worthwhile? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 31 Mar 2021 06:12 AM PDT I imagine this varies by vaccine type and how the bodies registers the immune response, which means the way they change the Pfizer vaccine is different from AstraZeneca? And so forth. Also assuming this does not strictly relate to the COVID vaccines, although i would think it's the most relevant example. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 31 Mar 2021 01:11 AM PDT As time goes, well. Forever, why hasn't protons disappeared by decay yet? Proton decay is still unproven but this a question I couldn't answer myself. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 30 Mar 2021 04:14 PM PDT |
| Why are vaccines in small vials instead of big bottles if the aim is to mass vaccinate people? Posted: 30 Mar 2021 11:11 PM PDT Was thinking about this since all you see on TV nowadays are the production lines of the various vaccines. Is there a physical/chemical/practical reason for this? [link] [comments]  |
| Has a causal link been established between the Astrazeneca vaccines and the blood clot issue? Posted: 30 Mar 2021 11:25 AM PDT It seems more and more countries are suspending the Oxford/Astrazeneca vaccine for young people. For eg https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/29/americas/canada-astrazeneca-vaccine-intl/index.html Has it been conclusively established that the vaccine was, in rare cases, indeed causing the blood clot issue? What is the background rate of this happening? None of the news pieces I have read seem to cover background rate, which surely must be the baseline against which this has to be judged? [link] [comments]  |
| Is there an increase in worldwide earthquake activity? Posted: 30 Mar 2021 10:13 AM PDT Recently I have noticed that the news outlets are bombarding us with earthquake news. We had one relatively big 5.5 magnitude earthquake here in Croatia and since then almost everything gets reported, from the world biggest earthquakes to sometimes even the insignificant local ones like 1.7 magnitude which is realistically barely noticeable. My question is for someone who closely follows this topic or is in this field of study: is the global seismic activity increased at all? If yes, is this an expected increase? Or is the news just producing mass hysteria for no reason but for gathering clicks? [link] [comments]  |
| How do they put all the ingredients into the vaccine? Posted: 30 Mar 2021 03:34 PM PDT When you see the vaccine, it just looks like a clear liquid. How do they put all the stuff inside it? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 30 Mar 2021 04:41 PM PDT |
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