the mellow tigger's musings

• 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

# this command is only to verify that Python3 is installed.  if it isn't, go find a command to install it
/usr/bin/python3 -V

# install wine and the core Windows fonts in it
wget -nc https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/winehq.key
sudo apt-key add winehq.key
sudo apt-get install --install-recommends winehq-stable
sudo apt install winetricks
winetricks corefonts

# install the latest version of graphics drivers for my NVidia card, including 32-bit architecture
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
sudo apt update
sudo apt install nvidia-driver-435 libnvidia-gl-435 libnvidia-gl-435:i386
sudo apt install libvulkan1 libvulkan1:i386
sudo apt update

# take advantage of the Lutris configuration work already done by other Linux gamers for Star Citizen
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:lutris-team/lutris
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install lutris