a little good news

It seems like the world is on fire.

How about some good news to restore some calm and hope?

• We finally have nanobots! Real, honest-to-goodness nanobots that could someday crawl through your bloodstream to address disease. They move at speeds up to 600 micrometers per second within a guiding magnetic field. Watch the 2-minute video to see it in action in a simulated blood vessel. This development is great news for medicine, especially cancer treatment! I hope they make progress quickly and start testing this service on humans.
  https://cen.acs.org/pharmaceuticals/drug-delivery/Video-Microrobots-roll-against-blood/98/web/2020/06

 

• There might be a breakthrough in figuring out how to prevent death due to COVID-19 infection! Alpha defensin levels seem to correlate with disease severity, and those levels can be moderated with drugs. I tried looking into alpha defensin, but I only got as far as figuring out that it has something to do with promoting phagocytosis in the human immune response. The rest of what I found is well beyond my skill level to comprehend. Still, though, a drug to reduce mortality due to COVID-19 would be a very good thing until we finally have widespread vaccine availability.
  https://www.jpost.com/health-science/hadassah-doctors-crack-the-cause-of-fatal-corona-blood-clots-631681

 

• A new kind of solar cell technology passed another milestone.  Perovskite is the darling of research these days, because it promises to be much cheaper to produce than traditional solar cells.  (And solar is already cheaper than coal or natural gas!) Unfortunately, perovskite has also proven less stable, degrading performance significantly when placed in real environments of extreme heat and cold.  Now, there may be a way around this limitation, which would make them commercially viable.  The new perovskite product would also be very thin (500 times thinner than typical silicon cells), making them flexible and lightweight.  It still doesn't overcome the hazardous chemical problem of producing solar cells, but people are working on that issue too.
  https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/05/200521151901.htm

The world can survive.  Humanity can survive.  We just have to make it through these tough times for the better days ahead.

#ScienceIsCool