Category Archives: News

This is the Lightest Paint in the World

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WIRED

An energy-saving coating needs no pigments, and it keeps the surface beneath it 30 degrees cooler.

DEBASHIS CHANDA HAD trouble finding a physicist who could paint. The researchers in his nanoscience lab at the University of Central Florida had already worked out the kinks in the high-end machinery needed to create a revolutionary new kind of cooling paint. They had filled vials with vivid colors. But when it came time to show it off, they hit a wall. “We could barely draw a butterfly by hand, which is kind of a kid’s drawing,” says Chanda.

They did it anyway. The shape and the four-color design do look basic, but the simplicity is deceptive. If you zoom in deep—to invisible dimensions—this paint is almost nothing at all like the paint you know.

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Can We Destroy ‘Forever Chemicals’?

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INVERSE

Emerging tech could wipe out tiny toxic substances from drinking water.

To ensure that drinking water is safe for consumption, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is proposing the first-ever federal restrictions on six “forever chemicals” known to harm human health. The agency will hold a public comment session on May 4 and expects to finalize the regulation by the end of this year.

Previously, the EPA recommended limiting the levels of two varieties of PFAS — perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) — to 70 parts per trillion in drinking water. Now, the agency wants to mandate stricter levels: 4 ppt for PFOA and 4 ppt for PFOS. Four other kinds of PFAS will also be regulated on a proposed “hazard index” to determine their cumulative risk.

“EPA anticipates that if fully implemented, the rule will prevent thousands of deaths and reduce tens of thousands of serious PFAS-attributable illnesses,” the agency wrote in a statement.

Scientists and environmental groups are praising the proposal, which they say is long overdue. But setting limits is just half the battle: Scientists are now hunting for ways to filter and destroy the chemicals before they can make it into our water.

Read the full story in Inverse

This Lab-Grown Skin Could Revolutionize Transplants

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WIRED

A new kind of “edgeless” engineered tissue can fit any irregular shape, paving the way for hand and face grafts that look and move better.

ALBERTO PAPPALARDO WAS nervous the morning before the transplant. He’d spent the previous month nurturing a cluster of skin cells until they reached their final form: a pinkish-white tissue in the shape of a mouse’s hindlimb that could be slipped onto the animal like a pant leg. If all went according to plan, the mouse’s surrounding skin would accept the lab-grown stuff as its own.

In the end, it took less than 30 seconds to position the new skin, and under 10 minutes to complete the whole procedure. “It was a perfect fit,” recalls Pappalardo, a medical doctor and postdoc focusing on dermatology and tissue engineering at Columbia University Medical Center. That’s a big deal, because it could help solve a persistent challenge in treating burns and other large wounds: how to cover irregular shapes with real, functional skin.

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This Fake Skin Fools Mosquitoes With Real Blood

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WIRED

Research on new repellents and the viruses these insects carry relies on lab animals and human volunteers. What if there was a better option?

THE WORLD’S DEADLIEST animal is a picky eater. Because they transmit viral diseases like Zika and chikungunya, and the parasites that cause malaria, mosquitoes like blood-sucking Aedes aegypti are responsible for over 700,000 deaths worldwide every year.

But in Omid Veiseh’s lab at Rice University, his team of bioengineers was struggling to get mosquitoes to eat. Typically, researchers study mosquitoe feeding by letting them bite live animals—lab mice, or grad students and postdocs who offer up their arms for science. That’s not ideal, because lab animals can be expensive and impractical to work with, and their use can raise ethical issues. Student arms don’t scale well for large tests.

In collaboration with entomologists from Tulane University, the Rice team wanted to develop a way of studying mosquito behavior without the challenges of experimenting on large numbers of animals. Their solution was something totally different: real blood encased in a lifeless hydrogel. “It feels like jello,” Veiseh says. “The mosquitoes have to bite through the jello to get to the blood.” 

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The Case of the Incredibly Long-Lived Mouse Cells

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WIRED

In a bizarre experiment, scientists kept the rodents’ immune T cells active four times longer than mice can live—with huge implications for cancer, vaccination, and aging research.

DAVID MASOPUST HAS long imagined how to push immune systems to their limits—how to rally the most powerful army of protective cells. But one of the big mysteries of immunology is that so far, nobody knows what those limits are. So he hatched a project: to keep mouse immune cells battle-ready as long as possible. “The idea was, let’s keep doing this until the wheels fall off the bus,” says Masopust, a professor of immunology at the University of Minnesota.

But the wheels never fell off. He was able to keep those mouse cells alive longer than anyone thought possible—indeed, much longer than the mice themselves.

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The World’s Farms Are Hooked on Phosphorus. It’s a Problem

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WIRED

Half of the globe’s crop productivity comes from a key fertilizer ingredient that’s non-renewable—and literally washing away.

DISRUPTING EARTH’S CHEMICAL cycles brings trouble. But planet-warming carbon dioxide isn’t the only element whose cycle we’ve turned wonky—we’ve got a phosphorus problem too. And it’s a big one, because we depend on this element to grow the world’s crops. “I don’t know if it would be possible to have a full world without any mineral phosphorus fertilizer,” says Joséphine Demay, a PhD student at INRAE, France’s National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment.

Since the 1800s, agriculturalists have known that elemental phosphorus is a crucial fertilizer. Nations quickly began mining caches of “phosphate rock,” minerals rich in the element. By the middle of the 20th century, companies had industrialized chemical processes to turn it into a form suitable for supercharging crops, hardening them against disease and making them able to support more people and livestock. That approach worked remarkably well: The post-World War II “Green Revolution” fed countless people thanks to fertilizers and pesticides. But sometimes there’s too much of a good thing.

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Physicists Controlled Lightning with Lasers on a Mountaintop

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INVERSE

The car-sized laser can shoot up to 1,000 pulses per second.

LAST YEAR MARKED the 270th anniversary of Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rod — but it’s more than a relic of history. The Franklin rod remains in use today because the simple design exploits some powerful physics: A tall metal rod lures in lightning and chunky wires dissipate the storm’s energy into the earth, sparing humans and surrounding structures.

But thanks to recent physics breakthroughs, a wild new technology could end the rod’s lightning safety monopoly.

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Florida Is Fighting to Feed Starving Manatees This Winter

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WIRED

As the state’s residents step up to save the sea cows, advocacy organizations believe the solution is less about lettuce—and more about leaders.

FEW VIGNETTES SHOW how much human activity has affected wildlife more than the scene at Florida Power & Light’s plant in Cape Canaveral. Hundreds of manatees bask in an intake canal on its southeast edge, drawn by the warm waters. These manatees are hungry. Pollution has decimated their usual menu of seagrasses in the Indian River Lagoon. Many have starved: 1,101 died in Florida in 2021, and as of December, 2022’s official estimate was nearly 800 deaths. So along the canal, members of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission are tossing them lettuce.

“It’s just emblematic of how dire the situation is,” says Rachel Silverstein, the executive director of environmental nonprofit Miami Waterkeeper. “The point where we would need to artificially feed a wild animal because their ecosystem is so destroyed that they cannot find food for themselves is pretty extreme.”

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The Mystery of Nevada’s Ancient Reptilian Boneyard

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WIRED

Whale-sized shonisaurs dominated the ocean 230 million years ago. A fossil cluster offers a fascinating glimpse at how they lived—based on where they died.

BERLIN, NEVADA, IS a treasure chest for paleontologists. Just down the road from now-abandoned gold and silver mines, a rockbound collection of bones hints at an even richer past. The Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park is teeming with dozens of fossils of ancient marine reptiles. That bone bed is so abundant and weird that researchers have been scratching their heads over it for decades.

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How the UN’s ‘Sex Agency’ Uses Tech to Save Mothers’ Lives

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WIRED

Big Data, drones, diagnostics—the United Nations and other groups hope to innovate the world out of a maternal and reproductive health crisis.

TOWARD THE END of 2020, on a work trip to Chocó, Colombia, Jaime Aguirre came across a girl—perhaps 11 or 12 years old—holding a newborn.

“Is this your baby?” Aguirre asked. Yes, she said. He was shocked. “Can I ask you—sorry—why did you get pregnant so young?”

“My boyfriend at the time told me that the first time that you have sex, you don’t get pregnant,” he says she replied.

Aguirre is the innovation coordinator for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in Colombia, a human rights agency focused on reproductive health. It’s the UN’s “sex agency,” and Aguirre describes his job as bolstering health in his country by supporting new technologies. Making them accessible to young people is especially important, because pregnancy is the number one killer of girls aged 15 to 19 worldwide, according to data from Save The Children and UNFPA.

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