Juliet - Marshall Beach, San Francisco

Novel laminated nanostructure gives steel bone-like resistance to fracturing under repeated stress

Metal fatigue can lead to abrupt and sometimes catastrophic failures in parts that undergo repeated loading, or stress. It’s a major cause of failure in structural components of everything from aircraft and spacecraft to bridges and powerplants. As a result, such structures are typically built with wide safety margins that add to costs.

Now, a team of researchers at MIT and in Japan and Germany has found a way to greatly reduce the effects of fatigue by incorporating a laminated nanostructure into the steel. The layered structuring gives the steel a kind of bone-like resilience, allowing it to deform without allowing the spread of microcracks that can lead to fatigue failure.

The findings are described in a paper in the journal Science by C. Cem Tasan, the Thomas B. King Career Development Professor of Metallurgy at MIT; Meimei Wang, a postdoc in his group; and six others at Kyushu University in Japan and the Max Planck Institute in Germany.

“Loads on structural components tend to be cyclic,” Tasan says. For example, an airplane goes through repeated pressurization changes during every flight, and components of many devices repeatedly expand and contract due to heating and cooling cycles. While such effects typically are far below the kinds of loads that would cause metals to change shape permanently or fail immediately, they can cause the formation of microcracks, which over repeated cycles of stress spread a bit further and wider, ultimately creating enough of a weak area that the whole piece can fracture suddenly.

Read more.

Chances are you or somebody you know has recently become the owner of an Instant Pot, the multifunction electric pressure cooker that can produce fork-tender pot roasts in less than an hour, as well as brown meat, cook beans without soaking, and even do the job of a rice cooker or crockpot. The Instant Pot­­ isn’t advertised on TV or in the newspapers, and yet it’s become a viral marketing success story, with owners often describing themselves as “addicts” or “cult members.” That’s the kind of word-of-mouth publicity Instant Pot founders dreamed of when they first began designing the countertop appliances.

The Instant Pot electric pressure cooker has been around since 2010, but really became the buzz during the last six months of 2016. While the company’s electric pressure cookers are sold at Wal-Mart, Target and Kohl’s, the bulk of its sales come from Amazon, driven by social media. Deep discounts on Amazon Prime Day and again on Black Friday, along with the viral online sharing of these sales, turned Instant Pot into a household name. With 215,000 units sold on Prime Day alone, the Instant Pot Duo is Amazon’s top-selling item in the U.S. market. Not bad for a company that does no TV or print advertising and only recently began the process of hiring a marketing agency.

Not Just A Crock: The Viral Word-Of-Mouth Success Of Instant Pot

Photo: Grace Hwang Lynch

Being the only audience member at a panel, the grad student pities everyone in the room.

Zillertal Alps // Tom Klocker

Man dies. Come from darkness, into darkness he returns, and is reabsorbed, without a trace left, into the illimitable void of time.

Leonid Andreyev. (via drunk-on-books)

“That is the one unforgivable sin in any society. Be different and be damned!” -Rhett Butler

Perfect

(NDT Facebook)

May 18, 1969 — Inside mission control at the Johnson Space Center, Houston, during the first day of the Apollo 10 mission. (NASA)

New discovery could be a major advance for understanding neurological diseases

The discovery of a new mechanism that controls the way nerve cells in the brain communicate with each other to regulate our learning and long-term memory could have major benefits to understanding how the brain works and what goes wrong in neurodegenerative disorders such as epilepsy and dementia. The breakthrough, published in Nature Neuroscience, was made by scientists at the University of Bristol and the University of Central Lancashire.   The findings will have far-reaching implications in many aspects of neuroscience and understanding how the brain works.

The human brain contains around 100-billion nerve cells, each of which makes about 10,000 connections to other cells, called synapses. Synapses are constantly transmitting information to, and receiving information from other nerve cells. A process, called long-term potentiation (LTP), increases the strength of information flow across synapses. Lots of synapses communicating between different nerve cells form networks and LTP intensifies the connectivity of the cells in the network to make information transfer more efficient. This LTP mechanism is how the brain operates at the cellular level to allow us to learn and remember. However, when these processes go wrong they can lead to neurological and neurodegenerative disorders.

Precisely how LTP is initiated is a major question in neuroscience. Traditional LTP is regulated by the activation of special proteins at synapses called NMDA receptors. This study, by Professor Jeremy Henley and co-workers reports a new type of LTP that is controlled by kainate receptors.

This is an important advance as it highlights the flexibility in the way synapses are controlled and nerve cells communicate. This, in turn, raises the possibility of targeting this new pathway to develop therapeutic strategies for diseases like dementia, in which there is too little synaptic transmission and LTP, and epilepsy where there is too much inappropriate synaptic transmission and LTP.

Jeremy Henley, Professor of Molecular Neuroscience in the University’s School of Biochemistry in the Faculty of Biomedical Sciences, said: “These discoveries represent a significant advance and will have far-reaching implications for the understanding of memory, cognition, developmental plasticity and neuronal network formation and stabilisation. In summary, we believe that this is a groundbreaking study that opens new lines of inquiry which will increase understanding of the molecular details of synaptic function in health and disease.”

Dr Milos Petrovic, co-author of the study and Reader in Neuroscience at the University of Central Lancashire added: “Untangling the interactions between the signal receptors in the brain not only tells us more about the inner workings of a healthy brain, but also provides a practical insight into what happens when we form new memories. If we can preserve these signals it may help protect against brain diseases.

“This is certainly an extremely exciting discovery and something that could potentially impact the global population. We have discovered potential new drug targets that could help to cure the devastating consequences of dementias, such as Alzheimer’s disease. Collaborating with researchers across the world in order to identify new ways to fight disease like this is what world-class scientific research is all about, and we look forward to continuing our work in this area.”