As the COVID-19 pandemic wears on, newer variants of SARS-CoV-2 have been evolving ways to evade the antibodies our bodies make in response to vaccination or prior infections. Breakthrough cases have resulted, and antibody treatments that once worked also have become less effective over time.

Image: Scientists have been searching for an antibody that would be broadly neutralizing — able to fight off any viral variant that might emerge. (CREDIT: Creative Commons)

Vaccines that target cancer could be available before the end of the decade, according to the husband and wife team behind one of the most successful Covid vaccines of the pandemic.

Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci, who co-founded BioNTech, the German firm that partnered with Pfizer to manufacture a revolutionary mRNA Covid vaccine, said they had made breakthroughs that fuelled their optimism for cancer vaccines in the coming years.

Image: Profs Uğur Şahin and and Özlem Türeci of BioNTech are interviewed by Laura Kuenssberg. Photograph: BBC

A retrofit system that converts diesel engines to operate on 90% hydrogen has been prototyped and tested by University of South Wales (UNSW) researchers. This system drastically reduces emissions of nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide while also increasing efficiency by an astonishing 26%, as reported first by New Atlas.

Image: (Photo : Prof. Shawn Kook)

A typical wind turbine is massive—roughly as tall as the Statue of Liberty, with blades that stretch wider than a football field. (Some are even bigger, like a new offshore turbine from Siemens that has a 774-foot-wide rotor.) By contrast, a new 10-by-10 foot turbine is relatively tiny. And without moving blades, it isn’t immediately recognizable as wind energy tech.

Image: courtesy Aeromine

A big chunk of our clean-energy pie will be wind and solar. Somewhat smaller slices will be geothermal and nuclear and hydropower. But the last part, maybe the last 10 percent or so, might come down to more niche technologies like hydrogen fuel cells and marine power. The latter represents the cutting edge of clean energy R&D, and it’s primarily happening at the Department of Energy, where the Water Power Technologies Office is seeking to develop, test, and tinker with different devices until they’re commercially viable, at which point private firms will take it away. In general, these devices fit into a few main categories: wave, tidal, river current, and gradients.

Executives and managers are tasked with juggling increasing pressures in the marketplace and workforce, managing a hybrid workplace, addressing challenges such as global warming through workplace strategies, and persisting in the face of uncertainty. Beyond that, the increase in social and political unrest and violence means that broader world concerns are affecting their employees in a variety of ways.

After billions of years of being pummeled by asteroids, Earth struck back. To test a strategy that could knock a potentially hazardous asteroid off of a collision course with Earth, NASA slammed a spacecraft into a 500-foot-wide asteroid called Dimorphos, which orbits a much larger asteroid called Didymos—and the test was a smashing success.

After text-to-image, text-to-video, and AI-generated video in general, is definitely the next big thing. Shortly after introducing its own text-to-video AI, Google introduced another AI-powered video tool -and it’s pretty darn awesome!

Google’s new program InfiniteNature-Zero lets you “fly into” a landscape scene, similar to what we often see in drone landscape videos. But you don’t need a drone – all you need is a single landscape image and AI does all the magic, turning it into a video and giving you a three-dimensional feel.

Ancient Mars may have had an environment capable of harboring an underground world teeming with microscopic organisms, French scientists reported on Monday. But if they existed, these simple life forms would have altered the atmosphere so profoundly that they triggered a Martian Ice Age and snuffed themselves out, the researchers concluded.

Image: The researchers suggest the Jezero crater might be the best place to search for traces of this past life. Photograph: AP

The missing link isn’t a not-yet-discovered fossil, after all. It’s a tiny, self-replicating globule called a coacervate droplet, developed by two researchers in Japan to represent the evolution of chemistry into biology.

“Chemical evolution was first proposed in the 1920s as the idea that life first originated with the formation of macromolecules from simple small molecules, and those macromolecules formed molecular assemblies that could proliferate,” said first-author Muneyuki Matsuo, assistant professor of chemistry in the Graduate School of Integrated Sciences for Life at Hiroshima University.

Image: A team of Japanese scientists found the missing link between chemistry and biology in the origins of life. (CREDIT: Creative Commons)

We need energy. We want to transition from significant emissions of greenhouse gases toward more sustainable, climate-neutral sources of energy. We believe foreseeing the demand for batteries dropping at any point in the near future is difficult.

But there is a problem. Redwood Materials, a company that is focusing on battery recycling, articulates it very clearly in the title of figure 1 and then in their infographic. The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare the fact that many things have built toward highly globalized supply chains. Batteries are a critical example, and securing supply is a topic that many regions are thinking about today.

Image: https://seekingalpha.com

The coming wave of satellite constellations all need power, but solar panels built for space are extremely expensive and difficult to manufacture. Solestial is ready to change that with space-grade panels built using inexpensive, scalable processes, and it just raised $10 million to take its tech from lab to orbit.

The company, formerly known as Regher Solar, has its roots in years of academic research at Arizona State University into the possibility of achieving the performance of space-grade cells with the materials and methods used for terrestrial solar panels.

Image: Solestial

This is the 100th episode of Plain English! I don’t know how that’s possible. Thanks to all of you who have listened. This has been a ton of work and a ton of fun. I’m still figuring out what this show is; how to balance news and tech gossip and big society questions and war coverage. There are days I think I know exactly what I’m doing and days I think I know even less than when I started out. And I just want to say to all the folks who have, on any medium, offered negative feedback or positive feedback: I’m reading it.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=Elon+Musk&title=Special:MediaSearch&go=Go&type=image

Forty years ago, Mark Cuban wasn’t sitting courtside at Dallas Mavericks basketball games or fielding pitches on ABC’s “Shark Tank” — he was sharing a three-bedroom apartment with five roommates.

Then, he landed his first job in tech as a PC software salesperson at a company called Your Business Software. But in an old blog post, which Cuban recently shared on Twitter, the billionaire revealed he almost didn’t land the consequential role. He had no experience and was “trying to pull out every interview trick I knew.”

Image: Mark Cuban TechCrunch.jpg - Creative Commons

INNOVATORS and start-ups are often so enthusiastic about their great ideas that they forge ahead with their business without taking time to protect their intellectual property (IP), according to Dr Alwyn Bernard Dippenaar, a Senior Associate and Patent Attorney at KISCH IP. Attorneys.

The patent attorney said this could result in costly battles and losses in future. “Entrepreneurs and business owners often fail to ensure that their business structure has the necessary legal and administrative foundation to survive the challenges often experienced by successful ventures.”

In preparation of speaking at the Michigan Tech Week (MTW) on October 12 and 13, I discovered so many connections to the University of Michigan (U-M) that I decided to dig into what powers U-M’s entrepreneurial success.

Seemingly everyone knows that the University of Michigan (U-M) is the world’s leading public research institution. What’s not as widely known is how Ann Arbor has a storied and growing entrepreneurship ecosystem that shows no signs of slowing down.

Nasa has invented a new type of high-performance battery that researchers claim could be used to power fully electric airplanes.

The US space agency made the breakthrough following investigations into solid-state batteries, which hold more energy and are lighter than industry-standard lithium-ion batteries.

Image: Nasa’s X-57 ‘Maxwell’ is the US space agency’s first all-electric aircraft (Nasa)

In 2020, a team of scientists at Purdue University developed the world’s whitest white — a paint color so white it could reflect 98.1% of the sunlight that hits it. That paint formula was designed for hard surfaces like rooftops and pavement, to lower the surface temperature and help combat the urban heat island effect. Then NASA enquired about a space-friendly version of that paint: It had to reflect just as much sunlight, but it also had to be thinner in an industry where it costs $2,720 per kilogram to launch a payload into space (on a SpaceX Falcon 9).

Image: Xiulin Ruan, a Purdue University professor of mechanical engineering, and his students have created the whitest paint on record. (Photo: John Underwood/Purdue University)

A battery that has crucial parts made from seaweed could pave the way to greener energy storage.

Most batteries in smartphones, electric cars and laptops rely on lithium. This metal is in short supply, though, and is often mined by workers in poor conditions and is refined using methods that damage the environment. The shortage of lithium is only likely to worsen as the world shifts away from fossil fuels towards using more renewable electricity stored in …

Managing and navigating failure is integral to starting a new business venture. Failure is inevitable, but it’s also the quickest way to make an eventual success of your business idea. As Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk famously said, “If things aren’t failing, you’re not innovating enough.”