Science

Self-healing plastic repairs itself in 10 seconds even under waterA new type of plastic can rapidly heal itself under water, even in harsh conditions. It maintains its strength after self-healing, so it may be useful in emergencies at sea. Read more: Self-healing plastic repairs itself in 10 seconds even under water Published at Wed, 20 Oct 2021 14:10:27 +0000 Article source: https://www.newscientist.com/video/2294415-self-healing-plastic-repairs-itself-in-10-seconds-even-under-water/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=technology

Chemistry Nobel awarded for technique to produce mirror molecules By Michael Le Page Benjamin List and David MacMillanNiklas Elmehed / Nobel Prize Outreach The 2021 Nobel prize in chemistry has been awarded to Benjamin List and David MacMillan for developing an entirely new kind of catalyst for making chemical reactions take place, and allowing chemists to choose the “handedness” of their molecules. “This new toolbox is used widely today, for instance in drug discovery. It’s already benefiting humankind greatly,” said Pernilla Wittung-Stafshede, a member of the Nobel committee, during the prize announcement. Up until 2000, said Wittung-Stafshede, we only knew about two kinds of catalysts for making chemical reactions take place. One kind is enzyme...

New galaxy images reveal a fitful start to the UniverseNew images have revealed detailed clues about how the first stars and structures were formed in the Universe and suggest the formation of the Galaxy got off to a fitful start. An international team of astronomers from the University of Nottingham and Centro de Astrobiología (CAB, CSIC-INTA) used data from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), the so-called Frontier Fields, to locate and study some of the smallest faintest galaxies in the nearby universe. This has revealed the formation of the galaxy was likely to be fitful. The first results have just been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS). One of the most interesting questions that astronomers have be...

Watch a wooden knife that is sharper than steel cut through steak By Carissa Wong [embedded content] Wooden knives that are three times sharper than steel ones could help cut energy use and plastic cutlery waste. Teng Li at the University of Maryland and his colleagues developed a material called hardened wood which is 23 times harder than raw wood and can be carved to make knives three times sharper than standard steel ones. A coating of mineral oil makes the knives resistant to water. “The hardened wood knives can be washed, dried and resharpened if needed, so that an extended lifetime is expected,” says Teng. The key to making the knives so sharp was using strong cellulose fibres found in plant cell walls, which make up almost half the mass of ...

Microsoft and Nvidia build largest ever AI to mimic human language By Matthew Sparkes Nvidia’s Selene supercomputerNvidia Microsoft and chip manufacturer Nvidia have created a vast artificial intelligence that can mimic human language more convincingly than ever before. But the cost and time involved in creating the neural network has called into question whether such AIs can continue to scale up. The new neural network, known as the Megatron-Turing Natural Language Generation (MT-NLG) has 530 billion parameters, more than tripling the scale of OpenAI’s groundbreaking GPT-3 neural network that was considered the state of the art up until now. This progress required more than … Published at Mon, 18 Oct 20...