Day: October 10, 2023

Could Moon Dust Help Reduce Global Temperatures?

October 10, 2023 by 66 Comments

The impacts of climate change continue to mount on human civilization, with warning signs that worse times are yet to come. Despite the scientific community raising an early warning as to the risks of continued air pollution and greenhouse gas output, efforts to stem emissions have thus far had minimal impact. Continued inaction has led some scientists to consider alternative solutions to stave off the worst from occurring.

Geoengineering has long been touted as a potential solution for our global warming woes. Now, the idea of launching a gigantic dust cloud from the moon to combat Earth’s rising temperatures is under the spotlight. However, this very sci-fi solution has some serious implications if pursued, if humanity can even achieve the feat in the first place.

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Raspberry Pi Reveals A Little About Their RP1 Peripheral

October 10, 2023 by 50 Comments

The Raspberry Pi 5 is the new hotness from the Cambridge-based single board computer vendor, thanks in part to its new wonder-chip peripheral that speeds up much of its interfacing with the world. The RP1 hangs of the CPU’s PCIe bus and takes on many functions previously in the SoC, and those curious about it now have a little bit of information. Eben Upton has posted an article about the chip, and there’s a partial datasheet and a video in which the engineers talk about the chip as well.

The datasheet is intended to help anyone wishing to write a hardware driver for a Pi 5, and they admit that it doesn’t reveal everything on the silicon. We don’t expect them to put this chip up for sale on its own because doing so would enable their competitors to produce something much closer to a Pi 5 clone. It does reveal a few nuggets, though; there are a couple of Cortex M3 cores for housekeeping, and alongside all the interfaces we know from earlier boards it has, perhaps most interestingly for Hackaday readers, a 12-bit analogue-to-digital converter. This has always been on our Pi wishlist and is a welcome addition.

So, if you read the datasheet and watch the video below, you’ll learn a lot about the interfaces and how to talk to them, but not quite so much about the full workings of the chip itself. They hint that there’s more to be released, but since the Pi people have a history of not letting go of the family silver, we won’t expect the keys to the kingdom.

Have a read of our Pi 5 launch coverage.

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Implant Fights Diabetes By Making Insulin And Oxygen

October 10, 2023 by 13 Comments

Type 1 diabetes remains a problem despite having an apparently simple solution: since T1D patients have lost the cells that produce insulin, it should be possible to transplant those cells into their bodies and restore normal function. Unfortunately, it’s not actually that simple, and it’s all thanks to the immune system, which would attack and destroy transplanted pancreas cells, whether from a donor or grown from the patient’s own stem cells.

That may be changing, though, at least if this implantable insulin-producing bioreactor proves successful.  The device comes from MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering, and like earlier implants, it relies on encapsulating islet cells, which are the insulin-producing cells within the pancreas, inside a semipermeable membrane. This allows the insulin they produce to diffuse out into the blood, and for glucose, which controls insulin production in islet cells, to diffuse in. The problem with this arrangement is that the resource-intensive islet cells are starved of oxygen inside their capsule, which is obviously a problem for the viability of the implant.

The solution: electrolysis. The O2-Macrodevice, as the implant is called, uses a tiny power-harvesting circuit to generate oxygen for the islet cells directly from the patient’s own interstitial water. The circuit applies a current across a proton-exchange membrane, which breaks water molecules into molecular oxygen for the islet cells. The hydrogen is said to diffuse harmlessly away; it seems like that might cause an acid-base imbalance locally, but there are plenty of metabolic pathways to take care of that sort of thing.

The implant looks promising; it kept the blood glucose levels of diabetic mice under control, while mice who received an implant with the oxygen-generating cell disabled started getting hyperglycemic after two weeks. What’s really intriguing is that the study authors seem to be thinking ahead to commercial production, since they show various methods for mass production of the cell chamber from standard 150-mm silicon wafers using photolithography.

Type 1 diabetics have been down the “artificial pancreas” road before, so a wait-and-see approach is clearly wise here. But it looks like treating diabetes less like a medical problem and more like an engineering problem might just pay dividends.