Implantable stimulator device combines with body power to treat disease, damage and sports injury

Researchers at CÚRAM, the SFI Research Centre for Medical Devices based at NUI Galway, have shown how the simple act of walking can power an implantable stimulator device to speed up treatment of musculoskeletal diseases.

The results of have been published in the prestigious journal Advanced Materials.

The research establishes the engineering foundations for a new range of stimulator devices that enable control of musculoskeletal tissue regeneration to treat tendon damage and disease and sports injuries, without the use of drugs or external stimulation.

Lead researcher on the study, CÚRAM Investigator Dr Manus Biggs, said: "One of the most exciting parts of our study is that these implantable devices may be tailored to individual patients or disorders and may show promise in accelerating the repair of sport-related tendon injuries, particularly in athletes."

The study investigated whether electrical therapy, coupled with exercise, would show promise in treating tendon disease or ruptures. It showed that tendon cell function and repair can be controlled through electrical stimulation from an implantable device which is powered by body movement.

SOTT Editors: We are publishing below, with permission, an email from a top executive at an American company whose clients include 100 of the Fortune 500 companies. The email was sent in reply to another executive asking for the writer's thoughts on whether he plans to be vaccinated himself or mandate it for his employees as a requirement for returning to the office. All names and company references have been redacted for privacy reasons.

Unlike most of us who are worried about being on the receiving end of vaccine mandates by employers, this executive also has to worry about pressure from other executives and investors to mandate it on others. Few such business leaders are actively fighting for the rights, dignity, peace, and financial security of their employees. This exec is currently the only voice in his company opposing the madness.

Email to the executive:

Hey [REDACTED] - are you giving any thoughts to getting vaccinated with all this Delta variant stuff going on? We've been having management committee discussions here about mandatory vaccinations to be able to come in to the office. We have office support people coming in most days that are not vaccinated and some of those with kids don't want to come in when they are in the office or invite clients into the office for meetings. Just curious as to how you are approaching it. Thx, [REDACTED]

The executive's reply:

From: [REDACTED]
Date: Fri, Aug 27, 2021 at 9:56 PM
Subject: MY POV on Mandating Employee Vaccinations
To: [REDACTED]

I appreciate you reaching out. What follows is admittedly lengthy (though I do provide my "summary POV" a couple paragraphs down before I dive into supporting detail). I tried to be succinct, but practically speaking your question for me was akin to "hey, so what's your take on management?" The analogy here being I'm passionate about both subjects so it was hard to choose between sending back a brief 2-minute POV, or filling this email with enough content fit for a university level course. I didn't know what you had an appetite for, so I just simply did my best to try and be helpful (and heck, even had some fun while I was at it...).

My framework for this entire POV: in the famous words of W. Edwards Deming, "In God we trust. All others must bring data." As I hope you've come to know me by now, I care more deeply about facts & morals than I do ideology or identity politics (for the latter I just don't give a shit). If you give me a good reason to do something, I am 100% all over it. But if you give me either faulty reasoning or an unethical ultimatum, I simply cannot get on board out of a moral obligation to do what's right.

Astronauts on the International Space Station have found a crack on the planet's only inhabited satellite, just five months after they fixed another leakage back in March this year, a Russian space rocket designer has revealed.

Speaking to RIA Novosti, Vladimir Solovyov, the chief designer of the 'Energia' Rocket and Space Corporation, revealed a crack was found in the station's oldest segment.

"Several non-penetrating cracks were found in the Zarya module," he explained.

The Zarya is the first module of the ISS to have been launched, having been sent up by the Russian space agency in 1998. Zarya - which means 'dawn' in Russian - provided the initial electrical power and propulsion to the station, and guided the ISS through its early stage.

According to Solovyov, the discovery of the new crack has sparked fears that new ones will begin to spread throughout the module, as they did in another Russian-built segment. In September 2019, a small air leak was discovered on the ISS, which was discovered over a year later to be coming from a chamber of the Zvezda module. It was fixed in March this year.

Scientists have known for decades that an extreme solar storm, or coronal mass ejection, could damage electrical grids and potentially cause prolonged blackouts. The repercussions would be felt everywhere from global supply chains and transportation to internet and GPS access. Less examined until now, though, is the impact such a solar emission could have on internet infrastructure specifically. New research shows that the failures could be catastrophic, particularly for the undersea cables that underpin the global internet.

At the SIGCOMM 2021 data communication conference on Thursday, Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi of the University of California, Irvine presented "Solar Superstorms: Planning for an Internet Apocalypse," an examination of the damage a fast-moving cloud of magnetized solar particles could cause the global internet. Abdu Jyothi's research points out an additional nuance to a blackout-causing solar storm: the scenario where even if power returns in hours or days, mass internet outages persist.

Few geological mysteries are as perplexing as the 'Great Unconformity' riddle at the Grand Canyon: More than a billion years of missing rock layers that for some reason weren't deposited and stacked like the rest of the geological record. It's as though those years never happened.

This strange gap was first spotted by geologist John Wesley Powell in 1869, as he journeyed down the Colorado River. Later, we would be able to date those layers. In some places, rocks dated to 1.4-1.8 billion years ago sit next to rocks that are just 520 million years old.

"There are beautiful lines," says geologist Barra Peak from the University of Colorado Boulder. "At the bottom, you can see very clearly that there are rocks that have been pushed together. Their layers are vertical. Then there's a cutoff, and above that, you have these beautiful horizontal layers that form the buttes and peaks that you associate with the Grand Canyon."

Where did the rest of these rocks go?

Climate scientist Dr. Ronan Connolly, Dr. Willie Soon and 21 other scientists claim the conclusions of the latest "code red" IPCC climate report, and the certainty with which those conclusions are expressed, are dependent on the IPCC authors' narrow choice of datasets. The scientists assert that the inclusion of additional credible data sets would have led to very different conclusions about the alleged threat of anthropogenic global warming.

Challenging UN, Study Finds Sun — not CO2 — May Be Behind Global Warming

New peer-reviewed paper finds evidence of systemic bias in UN data selection to support climate-change narrative

By Alex Newman August 16, 2021 Updated: August 16, 2021

The sun and not human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) may be the main cause of warmer temperatures in recent decades, according to a new study with findings that sharply contradict the conclusions of the United Nations (UN) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The peer-reviewed paper, produced by a team of almost two dozen scientists from around the world, concluded that previous studies did not adequately consider the role of solar energy in explaining increased temperatures.

The new study was released just as the UN released its sixth "Assessment Report," known as AR6, that once again argued in favor of the view that man-kind's emissions of CO2 were to blame for global warming. The report said human responsibility was "unequivocal."

But the new study casts serious doubt on the hypothesis.

Calling the blaming of CO2 by the IPCC "premature," the climate scientists and solar physicists argued in the new paper that the UN IPCC's conclusions blaming human emissions were based on "narrow and incomplete data about the Sun's total irradiance."

Indeed, the global climate body appears to display deliberate and systemic bias in what views, studies, and data are included in its influential reports, multiple authors told The Epoch Times in a series of phone and video interviews.

"Depending on which published data and studies you use, you can show that all of the warming is caused by the sun, but the IPCC uses a different data set to come up with the opposite conclusion," lead study author Ronan Connolly, Ph.D. told The Epoch Times in a video interview.

"In their insistence on forcing a so-called scientific consensus, the IPCC seems to have decided to consider only those data sets and studies that support their chosen narrative," he added.

The full article here and the statement released by the scientists can be found here.

People have known about magnets since ancient times, but the physics of ferromagnetism remains a mystery. Now a familiar puzzle is getting physicists closer to the answer.

The 15-puzzle asks players to slide numbered tiles around a grid. When the numbers are replaced by the spins of electrons, the puzzle can be used to explain how permanent magnets work.

For a few months in 1880, entire swaths of the United States succumbed to an addiction the likes of which had never been seen. "It has become literally an epidemic all over the country," wrote The Weekly News-Democrat in Emporia, Kansas, on March 12, 1880. "Whole cities are distracted, and men are losing sleep and going crazy over it." The epidemic spread to Europe and as far as Australia and New Zealand.

A woman buried 7,200 years ago in what is now Indonesia belonged to a previously unknown human lineage that doesn't exist anymore, a new genetic analysis reveals.

The ancient woman's genome also revealed that she is a distant relative of present-day Aboriginal Australians and Melanesians, or the Indigenous people on the islands of New Guinea and the western Pacific whose ancestors were the first humans to reach Oceania, the researchers found.

WEAK IMPACT

As predicted, a CME hit Earth's magnetic field on Aug. 27th (0100 UT). The impact was weak, lifting the solar wind speed by less than 50 km/s. Nevertheless, the CME's arrival did power a magnetic substorm over Canada with some brief but beautiful auroras. A stronger CME may be on the way, propelled by the "solar tsunami" explosion described below.

SOLAR TSUNAMI AND CME

Sunspot AR2859 erupted on Aug. 26th, producing a C3-class solar flare: movie. The flare, however, was not the main attraction. The eruption also caused a massive "solar tsunami." Watch the shadowy wave ripple across the sun in this false-color ultraviolet movie from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory:

A beam of light can only be seen when it hits matter particles and is scattered or reflected by them. In a vacuum, however, it is invisible. Physicists at the University of Bonn have now developed a method that allows laser beams to be visualized even under these conditions. The method makes it easier to perform the ultra-precise laser alignment required to manipulate individual atoms. The researchers have now presented their method in the journal Physical Review Applied.
When individual atoms interact with each other, they often exhibit unusual behavior due to their quantum behavior. These effects can, for instance, be used to construct so-called quantum computers, which can solve certain problems that conventional computers struggle with. For such experiments, however, it is necessary to maneuver individual atoms into exactly the right position. "We do this using laser beams that serve as conveyor belts of light, so to speak," explains Dr. Andrea Alberti, who led the study at the Institute of Applied Physics at the University of Bonn.

Such a conveyor belt of light contains countless pockets, each of which can hold a single atom. These pockets can be moved back and forth at will, allowing an atom to be transported to a specific location in space. If you want to move the atoms in different directions, you usually need many of these conveyor belts. When more atoms are transported to the same location, they can interact with each other. In order for this process to take place under controlled conditions, all pockets of the conveyor belt must have the same shape and depth. "To ensure this homogeneity, the lasers must overlap with micrometer precision," explains Gautam Ramola, the study's lead author.