Water is not easily transported. It is heavy and cannot be compressed. One gallon alone weighs more than 8 pounds. And an enormous amount of electricity is required to help it move within the distribution system, making its transportation costly.

Laws such as the Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act set forth by the United States Environmental Protection Agency established quality standards to help protect public health, safety and the environment.

These quality standards are amongst the toughest in the world, and continue to evolve, so water utility companies are regularly investing in sophisticated and expensive treatment technologies, such as UV, membrane and reverse osmosis to keep us safe and ensure an adequate supply of drinking water. Today our drinking water is safer than it was 20 years ago.

Another challenge is that the systems and networks used to bring water to us do not last forever. All infrastructure ages, and the same is true of water’s unseen pipes and transport systems.

So let’s compare and contrast DNA with RNA. First you will find DNA and RNA in all living organisms.

In eukaryotic cells, DNA tends to be found in the nucleus while you can find RNA both in and out of the nucleus. Prokaryotic cells don’t have a nucleus. Both DNA and RNA are nucleic acids, which are a type of biomolecule. Nucleic acids have a monomer --which is a building block. The monomer for nucleic acids is a nucleotide so both DNA and RNA have nucleotides. The nucleotides of both RNA and DNA have three parts: a phosphate, sugar, and a base.

DNA is generally double stranded, and if focusing on these two strands of nucleotides here, you can see they run antiparallel to each other. RNA is generally single-stranded so you’re just seeing one strand here. The sugar in DNA is deoxyribose and the sugar in RNA is ribose. This makes sense because DNA stands for deoxyribonucleic acid. That’s helpful to know because the “deoxyribose” is a sugar, and “nucleic acid” is that type of biomolecule it is. RNA stands for ribonucleic acid as its sugar is ribose. The bases in DNA are adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine.

I actually never planned to go into computer science for a living. If you had told me growing up as a little girl that was going to be my career path I would have really thought you’d lost your mind. I was interested in biology because of the impact on human health, and I wanted to figure out how I could help cure different diseases, and I was really excited about that.

I only got into computer science out of necessity. It was during my PhD that I started on a project that required capturing a lot of images on a microscope. Basically, me sitting at the microscope for four hours a day, incredibly tedious, incredibly boring, and I thought, well, this microscope comes with some software that allows you to program it. And I ended up creating this monster of a blob of code that allowed it to capture images and analyze them. That really got me hooked, seeing the power to accelerate the biology was really enticing to me.

More than four billion years ago the outer core of Mars cooled, turning off the dynamo that maintained the magnetic field. As a result, the planet was exposed to the solar wind, which ripped away the atmosphere, allowing the planet’s water to evaporate into space. Mars currently appears to be a barren desert with riverbeds, deltas and deep ocean basins pointing to the water the once existed there. However, a recent discovery has experts both excited and perplexed. Scientists are ecstatic after discovering tons of secret water on Mars. Is it because it denotes the presence of life? Or, are we just a step closer to conquering Mars? Let’s find out.

A robotic rover recently discovered enormous amounts of water beneath the surface of Mars, which surprised many people who had previously thought of mars as nothing more than a rocky and dusty planet. Mars is one of the most fascinating planets in our solar system. Mars is a world onto itself. One theory suggests that there was once life on this planet, billions of years ago because the surface is solid. This red planet has been a popular subject to fiction and science fiction, but it is also a hotspot for researchers.

R: Tommy Moore is the oceanographer for Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission, which supports tribes in Washington State. He says in recent years repeated heatwaves off the coast there have damaged salmon and crab stocks.

T.M.: I know it is a concern, because it’s tough to maintain a fishery when making your way of life when it becomes increasingly uncertain.

R.: A way of life because in addition to economic benefits many native communities are culturally tied to specific marine animals. Worldwide indigenous communities are disproportionately affected by climate change. Moore says a side effect of being intimately involved in the ocean is that tribes have a lot of knowledge to offer scientists and policymakers.

T.M.: The fishermen are, you know, they’ve been out there working these areas for generations and they see changes that scientists wouldn’t see.

R.: Today’s report addresses the importance of that knowledge as countries adapt to warming oceans, because while eliminating greenhouse gas emissions immediately would help lessen the impacts on the oceans in the long term there is no way out in the short term. The oceans will keep getting hotter and higher, and they will require dramatic, sometimes painful changes to help people live along the world’s coast

They’re weird, fuzzy, and in a lot of trouble. These insects are actually all bees – wild ones. And they’re debatably more important than the honey-making kind. People are really worried about bees, but what most people don’t know: Honeybee numbers are increasing worldwide. Not just that, but the way humans use honeybees makes them a problem. Putting a honeybee hive in your backyard doesn’t help. Because we are saving the wrong bees.

Animals are involved in the pollination of 90% of the world’s flowering plants. And when you think of pollinators, the honeybee probably comes to mind. That’s because honeybees and humans have an ancient relationship. Bees have been managed for thousands of years.

Honeybees are native to Asia, Europe, and Africa, but nowadays are everywhere except Antarctica. Apis mellifera is the most common honeybee and the best-studied, although there are another 10 known species. They are general pollinators, meaning they will pollinate most plants. And although honeybees are at risk from pests and disease, the number of colonies worldwide is actually growing. According to the FAO, managed hives have increased worldwide by 83% since 1961.

Deep in the bowels of the animal kingdom, farts can serve as tools of intimidation, acts of self-defence, and even weapons of malodorous murder.

The smelliest farts in the animal kingdom aren’t lethal, but they might ruin your trip to the beach. Seals and sea lions are well-known for having truly foul farts due to their diet. Fish and shellfish are incredibly high in sulphur. And during digestion, mammalian gut bacteria breaks down sulphur and amino acids containing sulphur to produce hydrogen disulphide, a gas with a smell resembling rotten eggs.

Seals and sea lions can’t help their funky flatulence, but some animals deploy their farts strategically. Both the Eastern hognose snake and the Sonoran coral snake use a tactic called cloacal popping. This involves sucking air into their cloaca -a hole used for urinating, defecating and reproduction- and then shooting it back out with a loud pop. These pops are no more dangerous than a sea lion’s stench, but they are effective at scaring off would-be predators.

Meanwhile, the flatulence of beaded lacewing larvae are silent and deadly. Their farts contain a class of chemical known as allomone, that has evolved specifically to paralyze termites. In fact , this allomone is so powerful, a single fart can immobilize multiple termites for up to three hours, or even kill them outright..

We love the idea of fictional elements with miraculous properties that science has yet to discover. But is it really possible that new elements exist beyond the periodic table?

Science fiction in particular often imagines artificial, or yet-to-be-discovered elements whose incredible properties will propel us into our star-faring future. But for anyone who has studied a bit of chemistry, this may seem far fetched.

The elements of the periodic table are defined by the number of protons in the atomic nucleus - the atomic number - so how can there be gaps for new elements?

Sure, we could keep adding protons at the top end of the periodic table - but those seem to be hopelessly unstable, and so hardly useful for building warp drives. But the fact is, gaps in the periodic table did exist - atomic numbers that did not seem to appear naturally.

And it may be that the current upper end of the periodic table is just another such gap, beyond which there may exist an island of stability containing useful elements never before encountered.

To understand the possibility of new artificial elements let's start with the story of the first artificial element.

In Click chemistry, you take two spring-loaded molecules and react them with each other very efficiently, without generating any waste. It's a little bit like taking a safety belt in your car and just clicking the two bits together. So, that's how efficient and great these reactions were.

You can even do these reactions in water, which for us climate chemists is often very, very difficult because water is quite reactive itself. So, you can do these reactions in water; they're very efficient, you get very good reaction outcomes, and as I said, you generate no waste, which is great because we're interested in sustainable reactions that don't generate a lot of waste.

Caroline Bertozzi became really interested in Click Chemistry because she wanted to be able to image the sugar layer around our cells. And at the time, you could only do this very destructively. So, imagine taking a cell, throwing it into a blender, and then looking at the bits of sugar floating around in your smoothie. That obviously is very destructive. So, what she wanted to do was take chemistry, take chemical tools, and be able to look at the sugar layer around cells without destroying them.

Did you know that atoms can actually breathe. Well, not like us, but scientists at the University of Washington discovered something fascinating.

They were studying phonons, which are movements of atoms and materials. There’s a type of phonon called the breathing mode, but wait, to gets even cooler. Our planet Earth even has its own breathing mode, expanding and contracting every ten minutes.

Now, back to the researchers. They created a breathing mode in an atomic lattice, using a tiny packet of light called a photon. They stacked layers of a Tungsten compound, hit it with a laser and observed the breathing mode, but that’s not all. They found they could control the interaction between the phonon and the photon with a voltage. And get this! They did it on a small chip.

This breakthrough could revolutionize quantum information technology like quantum computing and data storage. It’s a whole new world of possibilities, and here’s the best part, the tungsten atoms were blown away too. They found it breathtaking. It’s incredible how these discoveries shape our future.

Scientists have used a first-of-its-kind technique to visualize two entangled light particles in real time — making them appear as a stunning quantum yin-yang symbol. The new method, called biphoton digital holography, uses an ultra high-precision camera and could be used to massively speed up future quantum measurements.

The researchers published their findings August 14 in the journal Nature Photonics. Quantum entanglement — the weird connection between two far-apart particles that Albert Einstein objected to as 'spooky action at a distance' — enables two light particles, or photons, to become inextricably bound to each other, so that a change to one causes a change in the other, no matter how far apart they are.

To make accurate predictions about a quantum object, physicists need to find its wavefunction: a description of its state existing in a superposition of all the possible physical values a photon can take.

Entanglement makes finding the wavefunction of two connected particles a challenge, as any measurement of one also causes an instantaneous change in the other. Physicists usually approach this hurdle through a method known as quantum tomography.

Mercury. It's a really beautiful substance. It's the only metal that's a liquid at room temperature and pressure. It doesn't become a solid until it goes below -38 degrees Celsius. In its liquid state, the atoms have enough thermal energy to overcome the rigid metallic bonds that confine most metals to solid structures at room temperature. Because of this, the atoms have enough energy to jiggle about and flow past one another.

And it's the third law of thermodynamics which links the temperature to the level of entropy in a system. So, as the temperature of a system reaches absolute zero, the level of entropy reaches its lowest possible value. When the mercury atoms in the liquid have enough thermal energy they can break free from the surface in the form of a vapour. This vapour has a higher entropy state, meaning there are more ways in which the atoms can arrange themselves in the space around them.

The less energy there is in a substance, the more ordered the atoms are within it. This is why when you cool the liquid, it turns into a solid.

Let’s start our basic computation in state |00>, and then apply a quantum gate. Now the qubits are in a superposition. There is a one-half probability, or 50% chance, of being |01>, and a one-half probability of being |10>. Ignore the square roots, I’ll explain them in a minute. The particular superposition it’s in is a result of the quantum gate we chose to apply.

Here is one more quantum gate changing the state of our computation. At the end of a quantum computation we observe -or measure- the system. But we can’t see these delicate superpositions. Remember, a superposition is like a limbo between basic states. When you observe the computation, and look at it from the perspective of these basic states, it must pick one, collapsing the wave function and revealing a single basic state. In this case it collapsed to state |01>.

If you run the same computation repeatedly the final result will be |01> half the time, It’ll be |10> one-sixth of the time, and |11> one-third of the time.

The mathematics curriculum that we have is based on a foundation of arithmetic and algebra, and everything we learn after that is building up towards one subject, and at the top of that pyramid it’s calculus. And I’m here to say that I think that that is the wrong summit of the pyramid. At the correct summit, that all of our students every high school graduate should know, should be statistics. Probability and statistics.

I mean... don’t get me wrong, calculus is an important subject. It’s one of the great products of the human mind, the laws of nature are written in the language of calculus, and every student who studies math, science, engineering, economics, they should definitely learn calculus by the end of their freshman year of college, but I’m here to say, as a professor of mathematics, that very few people actually use calculus in a conscious meaningful way in their day-to-day lives. On the other hand, statistics, that’s a subject that you could and should use on a daily basis, right? It’s risk, it’s reward, it’s randomness, it’s understanding data.

All of the Egyptian sciences and arts seem to have been in place at the very beginning of Egypt, even if they weren’t fully realized for a couple of centuries.

One example is the mathematics. Egyptian mathematics is sometimes called cumbersome and primitive by modern scholars; However, upon examination, we find that rather than primitive fumbling the Egyptians were using a method of calculation, precisely like our modern computers.

Michael Schneider, mathematician, geometer, author of the beginners guide to constructing the universe provides an insight into these Egyptian methods.

The mathematics used in modern computers is identical with the mathematics that was used in ancient Egypt, and I’ll show you how that works. Today when we write a number we work in powers of 10 and place value. We have the ones, the tens, the hundreds columns and, if we wanted to say four hundred and seventy-two, we are really saying four one hundreds, seven tens plus two ones.

But the way this occurs in modern computers is not place 10 value, but place two value, so the powers are ones, twos, fours, eights, sixteens and so forth.

So will today's AI do what we ask it to do? It will if it can, but it might not do what we actually want. So let's say that you were trying to get an AI to take this collection of robot parts and assemble them into some kind of robot to get from Point A to Point B.

Now, if you were going to try and solve this problem by writing a traditional-style computer program, you would give the program step-by-step instructions on how to take these parts, how to assemble them into a robot with legs then how to use those legs to walk to Point B. But when you're using AI to solve the problem, it goes differently. You don't tell it how to solve the problem, you just give it the goal, and it has to figure out for itself via trial and error how to reach that goal. And it turns out that the way the AI tends to solve this particular problem is by doing this: it assembles itself into a tower and then falls over and lands at Point B. And technically, this solves the problem. Technically it got to Point B.

There are lots of lists of different things that you could do with ChatGPT out there. A lot of them deal with things like building a resume, making a cover letter, practicing for an interview. It makes you wonder if a lot of people writing about ChatGPT are looking for jobs. Here are some other ideas that will be useful or entertaining to just about anyone.

So first, of course, ChatGPT is a website. You go to Chat.openAI.com. You don'f need any app or anything special like that. It just works with any browser. Signup for a free account and then you can just talk to ChatGPT. So first you can use ChatGPT as a great brainstorming tool. You can use it to brainstorm ideas for work, or your personal life. For instance, if you're looking for a gift for someone you can tell ChatGPT about that person and then have it suggest ideas. After describing the person you'll get a list of different suggestions. Remember the idea here is to chat, not just to throw a question out and get an answer. So if you don't get something you like at first just keep chatting.

Today, I'm going to talk about a shameful topic. This has happened to many of us, and it's embarrassing, but if we don't talk about it, nothing will ever change. It's about being hacked. Some of us have clicked on a phishing link and downloaded a computer virus. Some of us have had our identities stolen. And those of us who are software developers might have written insecure code with security bugs in it without realizing it.

As a cybersecurity expert, I have worked with countless companies on improving their cybersecurity. Cybersecurity experts like me have advised companies on good cybersecurity practices, monitoring tools and proper user behaviors. But I actually see a much bigger problem that no tool can fix: the shame associated with the mistakes that we make. We like to think of ourselves as competent and tech savvy, and when we make these mistakes that can have a really bad impact on us and our companies —anything from a simple annoyance, to taking a lot of time to fix, to costing us and our employers a lot of money.

Despite billions of dollars that companies spend on cybersecurity, practitioners like me see the same problems over and over again. Let me give you some examples. The 2015 hack of Ukrainian utilities that disconnected power for 225,000 customers and took months to restore back to full operations started with a phishing link. By the way, 225,000 customers is a lot more 225,000 people. Customers can be anything from an apartment building to an industrial facility to a shopping mall.

Julie Chang: So for those who may not have been following everything going on in the chip industry, can you explain to us why we are suddenly finding ourselves in a chip glut?

Asa Fitch: So there was a surge in demand at the outset of the pandemic and the result of that was chip companies said: ‘oh my gosh! We have to produce as many chips as possible to satisfy this demand!’ And so the people who are making phones and PCs to cater to all that demand they were buying lots of chips. They wanted to stock up essentially, and now demand has fallen off because of the shift back to working in offices and things like that. And those companies, those manufacturers of PCs and phones and things like that are sitting on huge piles of chips. And those manufacturers are responding by saying: ‘You know, we're not going to buy extra chips. We're just going to use what we have and draw down those inventories over time’, but for the chip companies that's bad because it means new orders aren't coming in.

A Faradion battery cell consists of three main components: a positive electrode, a negative electrode, and an electrolyte. The positive electrode is made of sodium iron phosphate, which is a stable and low-cost material that provides high capacity and long cycle life. The negative electrode is made of hard carbon, which is a cheap and abundant material that can store sodium ions efficiently. The electrolyte is made of an organic solvent and a sodium salt, which enables fast and reversible sodium ion transport between the electrodes.

A Faradion battery pack consists of multiple cells connected in series or parallel to achieve the desired voltage and capacity. The battery pack also includes a battery management system, which monitors and controls the battery performance and safety. The battery pack can be customized to fit different shapes and sizes depending on the application.

Faradion has tested its sodium-ion batteries extensively in various conditions and scenarios and has demonstrated that they can match or exceed the performance of Lithium-ion batteries in terms of energy density, power density, cycle life, temperature range, and safety.

For a while now we've been looking forward to offering a fabric product based on our galvorn CNT yarns. We're happy to announce that we're almost ready to launch that product in our online store and we wanted to give you a look at one of our first fabric prototypes.

This is a six inch by six inch piece of fabric that was made using galvorn CNT yarn. As you can see, it's very flexible and, because it's made from galvorn yarn, it's electrically conductive strong and lightweight. The fabric was made using a criss-crossed pattern of yarn loops that run parallel to the straight edges of the square, so it does not have a lot of ability to stretch in those directions but, as you can see, it does have some ability to stretch along the diagonal direction.

This particular piece of fabric was made using 100-micron diameter galvorn yarn, and has a fabric weight of 80 grams per square meter. As we develop our manufacturing capability we'll offer fabrics with different yarn thicknesses, fabric weight and stretchability, etc.

When we make that product available, we'll have it in a few standard sizes, but we'll also be able to provide galvorn fabric in custom shapes and sizes.

Concrete is the most widely used construction material in the world. It can be found in swathes of city pavements, bridges that span vast rivers, and the tallest skyscrapers on earth.

But this sturdy substance does have a weakness: it’s prone to catastrophic cracking that costs tens of billions of dollars to repair each year.

But what if we could avoid that problem, by creating concrete that heals itself? This idea isn’t as far-fetched as it may seem. It boils down to an understanding of how concrete forms, and how to exploit that process to our benefit.

Concrete is a combination of coarse stone and sand particles, called aggregates, that mix with cement, a powdered blend of clay and limestone. When water gets added to this mix, the cement forms a paste and coats the aggregates, quickly hardening through a chemical reaction called hydration.

Eventually, the resulting material grows strong enough to prop up buildings that climb hundreds of meters into the sky. While people have been using a variety of recipes to produce cement for over 4,000 years, concrete itself has a surprisingly short lifespan. After 20 to 30 years, natural processes like concrete shrinkage, excessive freezing and thawing, and heavy loads can trigger cracking.

Before exploring more about the Golden Gate Bridge, let's first understand why the engineers chose a suspension design for this site. The distance between the two coastlines of the Golden Gate is a whopping 2.7 kilometers.

This design has one glaring issue. If you construct the bridge like this, the towers will bend inward. The main cable is under a huge tensile load, which applies force on the tower. When you resolve this force, you can see that there is an imbalanced horizontal force acting inward on the tower, which explains why the towers bend.

To cancel this horizontal force, we need the same force acting in the opposite direction. The straightforward solution is to extend the main cable and anchor it down to the ground via an anchorage system.

However, we can optimize the financial resources needed to construct this bridge with a simple idea. All we need to do is move the towers closer to one another. Now, the length of the unsupported bridge deck is reduced.

Due to this, tension in the cable will be reduced. This will obviously lead to a cable with less cross-sectional area. The width of the main cables are more than half the height of the average human.

Preparing raw timber for construction used to be a time-consuming manual task, but today it’s mostly done by machines in automated factories.

Parts can be made quickly, in almost any size or shape, for any project. Large elements like walls, floors and even whole sections of a building can be made in factory-controlled conditions before being transported to site.

Once there, they’re assembled on pre-built concrete foundations. It’s quieter, faster and safer than other building techniques.

Modern wood types like cross-laminated timber - known as CLT - and laminated veneer lumber – or LVL - enable whole buildings to be made out of wood, from the structural beams to the walls. CLT panels are made by fixing several lumber boards together in alternating layers using super-strong adhesive and compression techniques. Doing this gives the material high strength in two directions, making it sturdy and versatile.

Another kind of engineered wood known as glue laminated timber or glulam is made using a similar method, except the layers all face the same way. Glulam is therefore ideal when strength is only required in one direction, like with a column or a beam.