Intranasal Vaccines: A Potential Off-Ramp For Coronavirus Pandemics

September 29, 2022 by Maya Posch 54 Comments

An interesting and also annoying aspect about the human immune system is that it is not a neat, centralized system where you input an antigen pattern in one spot and suddenly every T and B lymphocyte in the body knows how to target an intruder. Generally, immunity stays confined to specific areas, such as the vascular and lymph system, as well as the intestinal and mucosal (nasal) parts of the body.

The result of this is that specific types of vaccines have a different effect, as is demonstrated quite succinctly with the polio vaccines. The main difference between the oral polio vaccine (OPV) and inactivated vaccine (injected polio vaccine, or IPV) is that the former uses a weakened virus that induces strong immunity in the intestines, something that the latter does not. The effect of this is that while both protect the individual, it does not affect the fecal-oral infection route of the polio virus and thus the community spread.

The best outcome for a vaccine is when it both protects the individual, while also preventing further infections as part of so-called sterilizing immunity. This latter property is what makes the OPV vaccine so attractive, as it prevents community spread, while IPV is sufficient later on, as part of routine vaccinations. The decision to use a vaccine like the OPV versus the IPV is one of the ways doctors can tune a population’s protection against a disease.

This is where the current batch of commonly used SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are showing a major issue, as they do not provide significant immunity in the nasal passage’s mucosal tissues, even though this is where the virus initially infects a host, as well as where it replicates and infects others from. Here intranasal vaccines may achieve what OPV did for polio.

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Self-Driving Laboratories Do Research On Autopilot

September 29, 2022 by Lewin Day 16 Comments

Scientific research is a messy business. The road to learning new things and making discoveries is paved with hard labor, tough thinking, and plenty of dead ends. It’s a time-consuming, expensive endeavor, and for every success, there are thousands upon thousands of failures.

It’s a process so inefficient, you would think someone would have automated it already. The concept of the self-driving laboratory aims to do exactly that, and could revolutionize materials research in particular.

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2022 Hackaday Prize: Congratulations To The Winners Of The Climate-Resilient Communities Challenge

September 28, 2022 by Kristina Panos 1 Comment

Holy humanitarian hacking, Batman! We asked you to come up with your best climate-forward ideas, and you knocked it out of the ionosphere! Once again, the judges had a hard time narrowing down the field to just ten winners, but they ultimately pulled it off — and here are the prize-winning projects without much further ado.

In the Climate-Resilient Challenge, we asked you to design devices that help build communities’ resilience to severe weather and the increasing frequency of natural disasters due to climate change, and/or devices that collect environmental data that serves as hard evidence in the fight for changes in local infrastructure. While several people focused on air quality, which is something we tend to think of as a human need, plenty others thought of the flora and fauna with which we share this planet.

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Mining And Refining: Sulfur

September 28, 2022 by Dan Maloney 23 Comments

When you think of the periodic table, some elements just have a vibe to them that’s completely unscientific, but nonetheless undeniable. Precious metals like gold and silver are obvious examples, associated as they always have been with the wealth of kings. Copper and iron are sturdy working-class metals, each worthy of having entire ages of human industry named after them, with silicon now forming the backbone of our current Information Age. Carbon builds up the chemistry of life itself and fuels almost all human endeavors, and none of us would get very far without oxygen.

But what about sulfur? Nobody seems to think much about poor sulfur, and when they do it tends to be derogatory. Sulfur puts the stink in rotten eggs, threatens us when it spews from the mouths of volcanoes, and can become a deadly threat when used to make gunpowder. Sulfur seems like something more associated with the noxious processes and bleak factories of the early Industrial Revolution, not a component of our modern, high-technology world.

And yet despite its malodorous and low-tech reputation, there are actually few industrial processes that don’t depend on massive amounts of sulfur in some way. Sulfur is a critical ingredient in processes that form the foundation of almost all industry, so its production is usually a matter of national and economic security, which is odd considering that nearly all the sulfur we use is recovered from the waste of other industrial processes.

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Japan Wants To Decarbonize With The Help Of Ammonia

September 27, 2022 by Lewin Day 59 Comments

With climate change concerns front of mind, the world is desperate to get to net-zero carbon output as soon as possible. While direct electrification is becoming popular for regular passenger cars, it’s not yet practical for more energy-intensive applications like aircraft or intercontinental shipping. Thus, the hunt has been on for cleaner replacements for conventional fossil fuels.

Hydrogen is the most commonly cited, desirable for the fact that it burns very cleanly. Its only main combustion product is water, though its combustion can generate some nitrogen oxides when burned with air. However, hydrogen is yet to catch on en-masse, due largely to issues around transport, storage, and production.

This could all change, however, with the help of one garden-variety chemical: ammonia. Ammonia is now coming to the fore as an alternative solution. It’s often been cited as a potential way to store and transport hydrogen in an alternative chemical form, since its formula consists of one nitrogen atom and three hydrogen atoms.However, more recently, ammonia is being considered as a fuel in its own right.

Let’s take a look at how this common cleaning product could be part of a new energy revolution.

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Cursing The Curse Of Cursive

September 27, 2022 by Kristina Panos 114 Comments

Unlike probably most people, I enjoy the act of writing by hand — but I’ve always disliked signing my name. Why is that? I think it’s because signatures are supposed to be in cursive, or else they don’t count. At least, that’s what I was taught growing up. (And I’m really not that old, I swear!)

Having the exact same name as my mother meant that it was important to adolescent me to be different, and that included making sure our signatures looked nothing alike. Whereas her gentle, looping hand spoke to her sensitive and friendly nature, my heavy-handed block print was just another way of letting out my teen angst. Sometime in the last couple of decades, my signature became K-squiggle P-squiggle, which is really just a sped-up, screw-you version of my modern handwriting, which is a combination of print and cursive.

D’Nealian print. Notice the ‘monkey tails’ on every possible lowercase letter.

D’Nealian cursive. Notice the stroke order and the ridiculous capital Q.

But let’s back up a bit. I started learning to write in kindergarten, but that of course was in script, with separate letters. Me and my fellow Xennial zeigeistians learned a specific printing method called D’Nealian, which was designed to ease the transition from printing to cursive with its curly tails on every letter.

We practiced our D’Nealian (So fancy! So grown-up!) on something called Zaner-Bloser paper, which is still used today, and by probably second grade were making that transition from easy Zorro-like lowercase Zs to the quite mature-looking double-squiggle of the cursive version. It was as though our handwriting was moving from day to night, changing and moving as fast as we were. You’d think we would have appreciated learning a way of writing that was more like us — a blur of activity, everything connected, an oddly-modular alphabet that was supposed to serve us well in adulthood. But we didn’t. We hated it. And you probably did, too.

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Linux Fu: Atomic Power

September 26, 2022 by Al Williams 12 Comments

People are well aware of the power of virtual machines. If you want to do something dangerous — say, hack on the kernel — you can create a virtual machine, snapshot it, screw it up a few times, restore it, and your main computer never misses a beat. But sometimes you need just a little shift in perspective, not an entire make belive computer. For example, you are building a new boot disk and you want to pretend it is the real boot disk and make some updates. For that there is chroot, a Linux command that lets you temporarily open processes that think the root of the filesystem is in a different place than the real root. The problem is, it is hard to manage a bunch of chroot environments which is why they created Atoms.

The system works with several common distributions and you install it via Flatpak. That means you can launch, for example, a shell that thinks it is running Gentoo or Centos Linux under Ubuntu.

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