Lifeboat Foundation

Chinese company, Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd. (CATL), this week announced a new battery technology that could revolutionise the electric vehicle market.

Established in 2011 and headquartered in Ningde, eastern China, CATL employs more than 24,000 people and has grown to become the world’s largest maker of lithium batteries. Amid surging demand for electric vehicles, its revenue soared by 54% last year. China, as a whole, installed 62.2 GWh of battery storage capacity last year, according to the China Automotive Battery Industry Innovation Alliance, of which CATL supplied 31.5 GWh for a market share of nearly 51%.

In addition to domestic sales, CATL supplies a wide range of carmakers internationally – including Tesla, BMW, Toyota, Honda, and Volkswagen. While sales have slumped more recently, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, CATL and its clients are expecting demand to return in 2021.

Like most galaxies, the Milky Way hosts a supermassive black hole at its center. Called Sagittarius A*, the object has captured astronomers’ curiosity for decades. And now there is an effort to image it directly.

Catching a good photo of the celestial beast will require a better understanding of what’s going on around it, which has proved challenging due to the vastly different scales involved. “That’s the biggest thing we had to overcome,” said Sean Ressler, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Santa Barbara’s Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP), who just published a paper in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, investigating the magnetic properties of the accretion disk surrounding Sagittarius A*.

In the study, Ressler, fellow KITP postdoc Chris White and their colleagues, Eliot Quataert of UC Berkeley and James Stone at the Institute for Advanced Study, sought to determine whether the black hole’s magnetic field, which is generated by in-falling matter, can build up to the point where it briefly chokes off this flow, a condition scientists call magnetically arrested. Answering this would require simulating the system all the way out to the closest orbiting stars.

Paris (AFP) — Scientists have developed a human embryo “blueprint” using human stem cells, in a breakthrough that could provide vital insight into the early stages of infant development, new research showed Thursday.

Teams from the University of Cambridge and the Netherlands-based Hubrecht Institute said their model will allow them to observe never-before-seen processes underlying the formation of the human body.

The layout of humans — known as the body plan — happens through a process known as gastrulation, where three distinct layers of cells are formed in the embryo that will later give rise to the body’s three main systems: nervous, musculoskeletal and digestive.

The Italian sports-car company teamed up with MIT researchers to produce custom supercapacitors, an alternative to lithium batteries.

Lipitoids, which self-assemble with DNA and RNA, can serve as cellular delivery systems for antiviral therapies that could prevent COVID-19 and other coronavirus infections. Credit: Illustration courtesy of R.N. Zuckermann.

Have you ever wanted a grill that you can carry anywhere and it doesn’t need fuel? Well, then we present to you the GoSun Grill. This innovative solution to everyone’s need for a cool-looking, fuelless, clean portable oven should be a must on every “outdoorsy” person’s wishlist. Impress your friends with this device and your personal cooking skills at the beach, in the park or wherever you’d like really.

Let’s have a closer look at this solar cooker.

The story of GoSun Grill.

Researchers suggest that an innovative handheld UV light device could effectively sanitize surfaces, killing pathogens including SARS-CoV-2.

You can watch this video at https://koreanow.com

With North Korean leader Kim Jong-un pulling back out his nuclear card for the first time since 2018, a very natural and perhaps even urgent question is, what next? There are signs that the North is getting closer to unveiling its strategic weapon promised by Kim at the end of last year. But with the U.S. constrained and South Korea committed to global sanctions, there’s no sign of a dialogue breakthrough. We could be about to witness Pyongyang’s new way.

Continue reading “Kim Jong-un pulled out his nuclear card…what next?” »