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American electric bus maker Proterra made two important
announcements today. The company unveiled its new dual motor
all-electric drivetrain and it confirmed that it has been selected to
make the electric powertrains for Van Hool’s first all-electric coach.
The bus maker confirmed that their recent 1,100 miles on a single charge record was achieved with the new system, which they introduced at the American Public Transit Association (APTA) Annual Meeting today:
“Designed for durability, Proterra’s DuoPower drivetrain
features two electric motors that deliver an impressive 510 horsepower,
accelerating a Catalyst bus from 0-20 mph in 4.5 seconds, while also
achieving an industry-leading 26.1 MPGe. In addition, it can propel a
bus up a 26 percent grade, which is more than twice the performance of
the average 35- or 40-foot diesel bus, and 72 percent better than
competing electric transit vehicles, making it an ideal option for
transit agencies with steep hills.”
Here’s the impact of the new system on their 40-ft bus and in comparison to the competition:
Ryan Popple, CEO, Proterra, commented on the significance of the addition to their lineup:
“When Proterra originally introduced EV technology to the
transit industry, we proved that EVs could compete with fossil fuel
vehicles, and replace diesel buses in most cities. But we didn’t stop
there. We continued to innovate, and today we’re announcing a drivetrain
that completely outperforms an internal combustion diesel or CNG engine
in every major performance category – efficiency, reliability,
acceleration, hill climb and passenger-carrying power. In transit,
state-of-the-art vehicle performance is now defined by EV technology
like our new DuoPower driveline. For fleet customers that want the very
best speed, power, energy efficiency and reliability – EV is the
answer.”
Proterra’s solutions were mainly used for city transit, but the more
powerful powertrain will enable them to venture into the coach business.
They are partnering with major Belgium-based bus manufacturer Van
Hool to release new CX45E and CX35E coach models, based on their
existing diesel buses, using Proterra’s new powertrain technology.
Filip Van Hool, CEO of Van Hool, commented
“Van Hool is truly excited and proud to partner up with
Proterra, a pioneering company in the development and production of
battery technology. The diesel CX45 coach has a proven track record and
has become a benchmark coach in its own right in the industry.
Integrating Proterra’s proven battery technology in the CX will take
this coach to the next level. It is a clear statement as to Van Hool’s
long-term commitment to the North American coach market and a testament
to Van Hool’s responsiveness to the overall demand for zero-emission
vehicles at large and over-the-road coaches in particular.”
They expect the first buses to be ready for deliveries in 2019.
Small Collisions Make Big Impact on Mercury’s Thin Atmosphere
Mercury, our smallest planetary neighbor, has very little to
call an atmosphere, but it does have a strange weather pattern: morning
micro-meteor showers.
Recent modeling along with previously published results from NASA’s MESSENGER
spacecraft — short for Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry
and Ranging, a mission that observed Mercury from 2011 to 2015 — has
shed new light on how certain types of comets influence the lopsided
bombardment of Mercury’s surface by tiny dust particles called
micrometeoroids. This study also gave new insight into how these
micrometeoroid showers can shape Mercury’s very thin atmosphere, called
an exosphere.
The research, led by Petr Pokorný, Menelaos Sarantos and Diego
Janches of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland,
simulated the variations in meteoroid impacts, revealing surprising
patterns in the time of day impacts occur. These findings were reported
in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on June 19, 2017.
“Observations by MESSENGER indicated that dust must predominantly
arrive at Mercury from specific directions, so we set out to prove this
with models,” Pokorný said. This is the first such simulation of
meteoroid impacts on Mercury. “We simulated meteoroids in the solar
system, particularly those originating from comets, and let them evolve
over time.”
Earlier findings based on data from MESSENGER’s Ultraviolet and
Visible Spectrometer revealed the effect of meteoroid impacts on
Mercury’s surface throughout the planet’s day. The presence of magnesium
and calcium in the exosphere is higher at Mercury’s dawn — indicating
that meteoroid impacts are more frequent on whatever part of the planet
is experiencing dawn at a given time.
Scientists used models along with earlier findings
from the MESSENGER mission to shed light on how certain types of comets
influence the micrometeoroids that preferentially impact Mercury on the
dawn side of the planet. Here, data from the Mercury Atmosphere and
Surface Composition Spectrometer, or MASCS, instrument is overlain on
the mosaic from the Mercury Dual Imaging System, or MDIS.
Credits: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
This dawn-dusk asymmetry is created by a combination of Mercury’s
long day, in comparison to its year, and the fact that many meteroids in
the solar system travel around the Sun in the direction opposite the
planets. Because Mercury rotates so slowly — once every 58 Earth days,
compared to a Mercury year, a complete trip around the Sun, lasting only
88 Earth days — the part of the planet at dawn spends a
disproportionately long time in the path of one of the solar system’s
primary populations of micrometeoroids. This population, called
retrograde meteoroids, orbits the Sun in the direction opposite the
planets and comprises pieces from disintegrated long-period comets.
These retrograde meteroids are traveling against the flow of planetary
traffic in our solar system, so their collisions with planets — Mercury,
in this case — hit much harder than if they were traveling in the same
direction.
These harder collisions helped the team further key in on the source
of the micrometeoroids pummeling Mercury’s surface. Meteroids that
originally came from asteroids wouldn’t be moving fast enough to create
the observed impacts. Only meteoroids created from two certain types of
comets — Jupiter-family and Halley-type — had the speed necessary to
match the obseravations.
“The velocity of cometary meteoroids, like Halley-type, can exceed
224,000 miles per hour,” Pokorný said. “Meteoroids from asteroids only
impact Mercury at a fraction of that speed.”
Jupiter-family comets, which are primarly influenced by our largest
planet’s gravity, have a relatively short orbit of less than 20 years.
These comets are thought to be small pieces of objects originating in
the Kuiper Belt, where Pluto orbits. The other contributor, Halley-type
comets, have a longer orbit lasting upwards of 200 years. They come from
the Oort Cloud, the most distant objects of our solar system — more
than a thousand times farther from the Sun than Earth.
The orbital distributions of both types of comets make them ideal
candidates to produce the tiny meteoroids that influence Mercury’s
exosphere.
Pokorný and his team hope that their initial findings will improve
our understanding of the rate at which comet-based micrometeoroids
impact Mercury, further improving the accuracy of models of Mercury and
its exosphere. Related:
Eugene N. Parker, professor emeritus at the University of
Chicago, today visited the spacecraft that bears his name: NASA’s Parker
Solar Probe. This is the first NASA mission that has been named for a
living researcher, and is humanity’s first mission to the Sun.
Parker proposed the existence of the constant outflow of solar
material from the sun, which is now called the solar wind, and theorized
other fundamental stellar science processes. On Oct. 3, 2017, he viewed
the spacecraft in a clean room at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics
Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, where the probe was designed and is
being built. He discussed the revolutionary heat shield and instruments
with the Parker Solar Probe team and learned how the spacecraft will
answer some of the crucial questions Parker identified about how stars
work.
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is scheduled for launch on July 31, 2018,
from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. The spacecraft will
explore the Sun’s outer atmosphere and make critical observations that
will answer decades-old questions about the physics of stars. The
resulting data will also improve forecasts of major eruptions on the sun
and subsequent space weather events that impact life on Earth, as well
as satellites and astronauts in space.
Eugene Parker, professor emeritus at the University
of Chicago, visiting the spacecraft that bears his name, NASA’s Parker
Solar Probe, on Oct. 3, 2017. Engineers in the clean room at the Johns
Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, where the probe
was designed and is being built point out the instruments that will
collect data as the mission travels directly through the Sun’s
atmosphere.
Credits: NASA/JHUAPL
Eugene Parker (center), professor emeritus at the
University of Chicago, visits the spacecraft that bears his name: NASA’s
Parker Solar Probe. Thomas Zurbuchen (bottom right), the associate
administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, and Ralph Semmel
(behind Parker), the director for the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics
Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, where the probe was designed and is
being built, joined the tour.
Credits: NASA/JHUAPL
Nicola Fox (bottom left), project scientist for
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics
Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, describes the mission to the scientist
for whom it’s named: Eugene Parker (middle). Eugene Parker first
proposed the existence of the constant outflow of solar material from
the sun — now called the solar wind — through which the spacecraft will
travel. The red frame on the end of the spacecraft is a stand-in for the
mission’s thermal protection system, which will reach temperatures of
2,500 degrees F during its journey.
Credits: NASA/JHUAPL
Eugene Parker, professor emeritus at the University
of Chicago, visits the spacecraft that bears his name, NASA’s Parker
Solar Probe, at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel,
Maryland, where the probe was designed and is being built. The
spacecraft is humanity’s first mission to a star — it will travel
directly through the Sun’s atmosphere.
OUR INTERNATIONAL INDEX OF BEST WEB SITES. IF SOME LINKS DON'T WORK, TRY COPYING AND PASTING DIRECTLY INTO GOOGLE. THIS WEEK WE CELEBRATE HIGH INTELLIGENCE! I RECOMMEND YOU START FROM THE BOTTOM OF THE LIST AND CLICK UP TO THE TOP OF THE LIST
Parkinson’s disease in a dish: Researchers reproduce brain oscillations that characterize the disease
Abnormal oscillations in neurons that control movement, which likely cause the tremors that characterize Parkinson’s disease, have long been reported in patients with the disease. Now, University at Buffalo researchers working with stem cells report that they have reproduced these oscillations in a petri dish, paving the way for much faster ways to screen for new treatments or even a cure for Parkinson’s disease.
The paper is published online in Cell Reports.
“With this new finding, we can now generate in a dish the neuronal misfiring that is similar to what occurs in the brain of a Parkinson’s patient,” said Jian Feng, PhD, senior author on the paper and professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at UB. “A variety of studies and drug discovery efforts can be implemented on these human neurons to speed up the discovery of a cure for Parkinson’s disease.”
The work provides a useful platform for better understanding the molecular mechanisms at work in the disease, he added.
Will the New Democratic Party or the Liberal Party or the Conservative party of Canada do what is best for Canadians?
Joseph Raglione<human4usbillions@gmail.com>
1:00 AM (2 minutes ago)
to Robert
I can help you win your election but not with money.
Invite people into your party free of charge and listen to their ideas.
List the best ideas and publicize them across Canada.
For examples:
1.Bring Dentists into the Medicare programs and help millions of Canadians save their teeth without emptying their bank accounts.
2. Allow generic drugs to be sold across Canada.
3. Create Green schools across Canada and teach children to grow vegetables within the school classrooms and within the school buildings. Hungry children will learn to feed themselves and learn important life secrets at the same time. Find Stephen Fritz and his Green Machines in New York and he will provide you with full instructions.
4. Create one standard for Electric Car charging stations across Canada and create a government commission to run the stations. All Electric cars sold in Canada must adhere to the standard and the government can charge a small fee for using the stations. In other words, the Canadian government can own and operate the system with funds going back into the government.
Slowly remove gas burning cars from the open market. Fossil fuels are dangerous polluters and only the selfish and ignorant continue to drive these vehicles.
Save
for the occasional burning pain that accompanies a run, most people
don’t pay much attention to the two-leafed organ puffing away in our
chests.
But lungs are feats of engineering wonder: with over 40 types of
cells embedded in a delicate but supple matrix, they continuously pump
oxygen into the bloodstream over an area the size of a tennis field.
Their exquisite tree-like structure optimizes gas exchange efficiency;
unfortunately, it also makes engineering healthy replacement lungs a
near-impossible task.
Rather than building lungs from scratch, scientists take a “replace
and refresh approach”: they take a diseased lung, flush out its sickly,
inflamed cells and reseed the empty matrix with healthy ones.
It’s an intricate procedure—nevertheless, the delicate branches of
blood vessels are often completely destroyed during the process. Without
blood to deliver nutrients and molecules to the newly seeded cells, the
graft fails.
What if, thought Dr. Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic at Columbia University,
rather than removing all cells from a donor lung, we gently clean out
only the diseased cells in the airway without touching blood
circulation?
This week, Vunjak-Novakovic’s team published a “radically new approach” to bioengineering lungs: making scaffolds with blood vessels intact.
When researchers added back therapeutic human cells that line the
lung’s airways to a rat lung scaffold, the foreign cells—in this case,
epithelium cells—homed to the correct location, attached, and thrived.
Because lung failure often stems from diseased epithelium cells, says study author Dr. N. Valerio Dorrello, this new method allows us to regenerate lungs by treating just the injured cells.
Dr. Matthew Bacchetta, who also worked on the project, sees the method as a “transformative”
way to obtain lungs ready for transplant. Because lungs are notoriously
bad at repairing themselves, in severe cases the only real option is a
transplant.
Image Credit: N. Valerio Dorrello and Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic, Columbia University
It’s a hard sell—only up to 20 percent of patients are still alive ten years later, the procedure is expensive, and the demand for donor lungs far exceeds the supply.
These new “vascularized” lungs bring us one step closer to the
penultimate goal: transplanting lungs made from a patient’s own cells,
seeded onto a donor scaffold from a cadaver or even primate or pig.
The patients’ cells give the scaffold a complete immune makeover,
lowering the risk of immune rejection—a main reason why transplants
fail.
“As a lung transplant surgeon, I am very excited about the great potential of our technique,” he says.
First Breath
Engineering functional lungs is nothing short of a moonshot, even in the ambitious field of regenerative medicine.
The lung is a real jungle: at the microscopic level, the tree-like
airways contain alveoli, tiny bubble-like structures where the lungs
exchange gas with our blood. Both arteries and veins enwrap the alveoli
like two sets of mesh pockets.
At least a half dozen cellular denizens work in tandem to keep the
alveoli spheres inflated, to guard the organ against infections, and to
enforce the structure of its many branches.
This three-dimensional complexity is why we ruled out the possibility of growing lungs from scratch, explains Dr. Laura Niklason, a biomedical engineer at Yale University who was not involved in the new study.
Back in 2010, Niklason had a brilliant idea: rather than relying on synthetic templates that mimic the organ’s intricate structure—a “very tall order,” she says—scientists could use nature’s own template, the lung’s matrix, as a jumping off point.
Niklason’s approach is similar to stripping down a house to its bare
bones—weight-bearing beams, struts and bolts—and reworking the rest to
its new owner’s tastes.
As a proof-of-concept, Niklason’s team used a detergent that washed
away the cells and blood vessels from a rat lung. They then soaked the
lung matrix scaffold inside a “bioreactor” that mimics the conditions of
a growing fetus.
When the team reseeded the scaffold with a cocktail of cells, the
lung regrew its blood vessels, alveoli and tiny airways with the right
types of cells—all within four days.
In the ultimate test of functionality, Niklason’s team transplanted
the regrown lungs back into living rats. A few seconds later, the lung
inflated, turning bright red as it took in oxygen and blood supply.
It’s just an initial step, the team wrote
at the time. The lungs only survived up to two hours in the donor’s
body, and subsequent analysis revealed bleeding and blood clots within
the airway and regrown capillaries.
One potential reason is this: the blood vessels may not have formed
proper junctions with the alveoli. While still allowing gas exchange,
this eventually causes blood leaks into the lungs.
Breath of Fresh Air
If newly-grown blood vessels form malfunctioned junctions, why not preserve the originals instead?
That’s exactly what Vunjak-Novakovic’s team tackled in the new study published in Science Advances.
Adapting Niklason’s technique, the team inserted a tube into the
airway of a newly harvested rat lung and pumped through a gentle
detergent that only removed the lung’s epithelial cells—the inner
lining.
Blood vessels, in contrast, were washed with an electrolyte solution similar to Gatorade.
With this small change, we removed over 70 percent of epithelial
cells—which are often the root of lung diseases—but maintained the
vasculature, the authors say.
Like cartographers mapping a new land, the team next probed the
integrity of the vessels. Injecting tiny beads that glow under UV light
into the lung’s main artery, they watched as the beads flooded the
twisting capillaries, glowing bright within the larger vessels.
In contrast, there were no obvious signs of glowing beads within the
airway or alveoli, suggesting that the blood vessels were intact—no
leakage!
With scaffold in hand, the team next marinated the structure with
human lung epithelium cells. As a bonus, they also used lung cells
derived from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). iPSCs are made from
a patient’s own cells—often skin cells—and can be coaxed to become
nearly any other cell type with the right cocktail of signals.
Because iPSCs retain the person’s immune profile, scaffolds seeded with these cells have a much lower chance of being rejected.
Within a mere 24 hours, the team detected signs of the newly seeded
cells within the lung scaffolds. Under the microscope, the newcomers
attached to the right spot, stabilized and begun rapidly dividing to
repopulate the missing cells.
The lung grafts also had a boost in breathing power—they could expand
more fully—gaining back roughly 50 percent of what was lost during the
detergent treatment.
A Breath Away?
The study stops short at the final test: transplanting the engineered
lung back into a recipient. As with older generation scaffolds, the
newly minted lungs could also develop deadly blood clots or bleeding
once reintroduced into a living, breathing animal.
What’s more, the team only used a mild detergent in their preparation
to preserve the lung’s integrity. The result was a partial cleanout
with some of the rats’ own epithelial cells still intact.
These injured stragglers may provide important information to the
new, healthy cells, so this could be an unexpected bonus, the authors explain. Whether they are friend or foe will have to be tested in a future study.
The technology needs a lot more work before it could be used in
humans, but Vunjak-Novakovic and colleagues are already excited about
potential new treatment options.
This study provides proof-of-concept evidence that our approach works, the authors write. We show, for the first time, that it’s possible to wash out diseased lung epithelial cells without touching blood vessels.
What really gets the team excited is this: although freshly harvested
rat lungs were used in this study, in theory the method could be used
without removing the lung.
This is “transformative:”
patients with injured lung epithelial cells could be irrigated with the
detergent to remove the sickly cells. Doctors can then harvest their
skin cells and transform them into healthy lung cells to reseed the
lung.
“Every day, I see children in intensive care with severe lung disease who depend on mechanical ventilation support,” says Dorrello. We may be on our way to an entirely new treatment solution for these patients and regenerate their broken lungs, he says.
Image Credit: N. Valerio Dorrello and Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic, Columbia University
Shelly
Xuelai Fan is a neuroscientist at the University of California, San
Francisco, where she studies ways to make old brains young again. In
addition to research, she's also an avid science writer with an
insatiable obsession with biotech, AI and all things neuro. She spends
her spare time kayaking, bike camping and getting lost in the woods.
The bus maker confirmed that their recent 1,100 miles on a single charge record was achieved with the new system, which they introduced at the American Public Transit Association (APTA) Annual Meeting today:
