Recycling Tough Plastics Into Precursors With Some Smart Catalyst Chemistry

October 8, 2024 by 33 Comments

Plastics are unfortunately so cheap useful that they’ve ended up everywhere. They’re filling our landfills, polluting our rivers, and even infiltrating our food chain as microplastics. As much as we think of plastic as recyclable, too, that’s often not the case—while some plastics like PET (polyethylene terephthalate) are easily reused, others just aren’t.

Indeed, the world currently produces an immense amount of polyethylene and polypropylene waste. These materials are used for everything from plastic bags to milk jugs and for microwavable containers—and it’s all really hard to recycle. However, a team at UC Berkeley might have just figured out how to deal with this problem.

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Printed Rack Holds Pair Of LattePandas In Style

October 8, 2024 by 25 Comments

ARM single-board computers like the Raspberry Pi are great for some applications — if you need something that’s energy efficient or can fit into a tight space, they’re tough to beat. But sometimes you’re stuck in the middle: you need more computational muscle than the average SBC can bring to the table, but at the same time, a full-size computer isn’t going to work for you.

Luckily, we now have options such as the LattePanda Mu powered by Intel’s quad-core N100 processor. Put a pair of these modules (with their associated carrier boards) on your desktop, and you’ve got considerable number-crunching capabilities in a relatively small package. Thanks to [Jay Doscher] we’ve got a slick 3D printed rack that can keep them secure and cool, complete with the visual flair that we’ve come to expect from his creations.

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Barbie’s Video Has Never Looked So Good

October 8, 2024 by 8 Comments

For those who missed it, there’s been something of a quiet revolution in the world of analogue video over the last year, due to the arrival of inexpensive “MiniDVR” devices. These little modules are a complete video recorder including battery, recording PAL or NTSC composite video and audio to SD card. They’ve become the box of choice for camcorder enthusiasts, but that’s not where the fun ends. [Max Vega] has taken a Barbie video camera toy from 2001 and added a MiniDVR to make it into a fully self-contained novelty camcorder. But this isn’t a simple case of duct-taping the DVR to the toy, instead it’s a comprehensive upgrade resulting in a device which could almost have been a real product.

The original toy had a small transmitter which could send over a short distance to a receiver that connected to a domestic VCR, so all that circuitry had to go. The camera itself is a small enough module in the fake lens assembly, with an easily identifiable output cable with the required composite signal. The video below the break steps through the proces of making the space for the MiniDVR module, and putting in extensions for all its buttons, and the SD card. Finally it has a new power supply module with an associated USB-C input, providing juice to both DVR and camera.

The result has what we can only describe as a pleasingly retro feel, in that it’s not of high quality and the colour is, well, Never The Same. But when a smartphone can record HD video that’s not the point, instead it’s there to be a retro toy, and in that it succeeds completely.

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GPS Tracking In The Trackless Land

October 7, 2024 by 17 Comments

Need a weekend project? [Cepa] wanted a GPS tracker that would send data out via LTE or the Iridium network. Ok, maybe that’s one for a very long weekend. However, the project was a success and saw service crossing the Barents Sea in the Arctic. Not bad.

Apparently, [Cepa] is very involved in sharing tracks to odd and remote places. While you may not have cell service in the middle of the Barents Sea, you can always see Iridium. The device does make some sacrifices to the expense of satellite communications. On LTE, the system pings your location every ten seconds. Without it, it dials up the sat connection once an hour. However, it does store data on a SD card, so — presumably — you get caught up when you have a connection.

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Using Donor Immune Cells To Mass-Produce CAR-T Autoimmune Therapies

October 7, 2024 by 3 Comments

As exciting as immunotherapies are in terms of fighting cancer, correcting autoimmune disorders and so on, they come with a major disadvantage. Due to the current procedure involving the use of a patient’s own immune (T) cells, this making such therapies rather expensive and involved for the patient. Recent research has therefore focused on answering the question whether T cells from healthy donors could be somehow used instead, with promising results from a recent study on three human patients, as reported in Nature.

The full study results (paywalled) by [Xiaobing Wang] et al. are published in Cell, with the clinical trial details available on the ClinicalTrials.gov website. For this particular trial the goal was to attempt to cure the autoimmune conditions of the three study participants (being necrotizing myopathy (IMNM) and diffuse cutaneous systemic sclerosis (dcSSc)). The T cells used in the study were obtained from a healthy 21-year old woman, and modified with chimeric antigen receptors targeting B (memory) cells. Using CRISPR-Cas9 the T cells were then further modified to prevent the donor cells from attacking the patient’s cells and vice versa.

After injection, the CAR-T cells got to work, multiplying and seeking out the target B cells, including the pathogenic ones underlying the autoimmune conditions. This persisted for a few weeks until the CAR-T cells effectively vanished and new B cells began to emerge, with a clear decrease in autoantibodies. Two months after beginning treatment, all three participants noted marked improvements in their conditions, which persisted at 6 months. For the woman with IMNM, muscle strength had increased dramatically with undetectable autoantibody levels, and the two men with dcSSc saw scar tissue formation reversed and their skin condition improve massively.

It remains to be seen whether this period of remission in these patients is permanent, and whether there any side effects of CAR-T cell therapy. We previously reported on CAR-T cell therapies and the many promises which they hold. Depending on the outcome of these early trials, it could mean that autoimmune conditions, allergies and cancer will soon be worries of the past, marking another massive medical milestone not unlike the invention of vaccines and the discovery of antibiotics.

The Piezoelectric Glitching Attack

October 7, 2024 by 18 Comments

Many readers will be familiar with the idea of a glitching attack, introducing electrical noise into a computer circuit in the hope of disrupting program flow and causing unexpected behaviour which might lead to hitherto unavailable access to memory or other system resources. [David Buchanan] has written a piece investigating glitching attacks on PC memory, and the tool he’s used is the ubiquitous piezoelectric lighter.

Attaching a short piece of wire to one of the lines on a SODIMM memory module, he can glitch a laptop at will with the lighter through the electromagnetic noise its discharge creates. It’s a cool trick, but the real meat of the write-up lies in his comprehensive description of how virtual memory works, and how a glitch can be used to break out of the “sandbox” of memory allocated to a particular process. He demonstrates it in a video which we’ve placed below the break, in which he gains root access and runs an arbitrary piece of code on a Linux laptop. It’s probable that not many of us have the inclination to do this for ourselves, but even so it’s fascinating to know how such an attack works.

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The Turing Machine Made Real, In LEGO

October 7, 2024 by 19 Comments

The British mathematician and pioneer of computing Alan Turing published a paper in 1936 which described a Universal Machine, a theoretical model of a computer processor that would later become known as a Turing Machine. Practical computers don’t quite follow the design of a Turing Machine, but if we are prepared to sacrifice its need for an infinitely long paper tape it’s quite possible to build one. This is what [The Bananaman] has done using LEGO as a medium, and if you’d like one for yourself you can even vote for it on the LEGO ideas website.

There’s a video for the project which we’ve placed below, and it goes into quite some detail on the various mechanisms required. Indeed for someone used to physical machinery it’s a better explanation through seeing the various parts than many paper explanations. Not for the first time we’re bowled over by what is possible through the use of the LEGO precision mouldings, this is a machine which would have been difficult and expensive to build in the 1930s by individually machining all its parts.

With just shy of six thousand supporters and a hefty 763 days left at time of writing, there’s plenty of time for it to garner support. But if you want one don’t delay, boost the project by voting for it early.

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