Welcome to The Week of Technology. This week you'll see: see how tattoo pins pierce the skin; make pizza with high-pressure inflatables; unbreakable displays; new technologies to boost food production; sonar's lethal threat to cetaceans.
Look at the tattoo from another angle
How does the ink get into the skin when I get a tattoo? The process may not be quite what you think. In the video below, researchers at Texas Tech University use gel simulation experiments to show what happens after a tattoo needle is stuck into the skin.
Slow Motion Video: Tattoo needle pierced into a transparent gel used to simulate tissue | IDERA LAWAL/TEXAS TECH UNIVERSITY
Unlike syringes, tattoo needles do not inject ink directly into the skin. From the slow-motion video, we can see that the tattoo needle is only responsible for opening a small hole in the skin with a depth of about 2 mm, and then as the needle retracts, the ink will automatically be "sucked" into the empty hole. Researchers speculate that the main mechanism of the ink inhalation process is capillary self-priming [1].
The details of the tattoo needle's work are looked at because the researchers want to turn it into a new way of intradermal delivery — for example, perhaps in this way to administer certain vaccine preparations that are too sticky to inject. Getting immunity through tattoos sounds cool too?
Inflatable pizza
Italian materials scientists invented a new way to make pizza without yeast: "fermenting" the dough with high-pressure aeration.
A slice of air-inflated pizza freshly baked from an automovul | Ernesto Di Maio
This particular pizza was born in an autoclave: researchers put yeast-free dough into it, pressurized it with carbon dioxide or helium, and then gradually decompressed to form a rich bubble, while heating the dough to set the shape. Through careful debugging of the experimental parameters, the researchers obtained a dough cake with a density and texture that was close to that of a traditional pizza.
This laborious approach isn't appealing to the average diner, but it benefits yeast allergists who can't taste traditional pizza — Ernesto Di Maio, who led the research team, is one of them. Next, the researchers hope to make a 10-inch pizza with a larger autoclave and more tuning its flavor.
Elastic display
Researchers at Stanford University have developed a stretch-and-pull-free elastic LED display that works even if stretched to twice its original length.
The full polymer LED, which does not break when pulled hard, | Zhitao Zhang, Jiancheng Lai/Zhenan Bao Research Group
This display device, which combines high brightness and high elasticity, has a total of 7 layers of structure, all of which are made of organic polymer materials. The most critical of these is the luminous layer located in the middle: it is a film composed of a network of luminescent polymer nanofibers and a polyurethane matrix. This elastic LED display can be attached to the skin or fingers and emit light through wireless power, and the researchers have also demonstrated that the body's pulse information is displayed in real time through it.
Elastic LED devices can be attached to the | of the finger joints Zhitao Zhang, Jiancheng Lai/Zhenan Bao Research Group
In addition to medical monitoring, this technology is also expected to be used to create deformable interactive screens that allow people to touch 3D graphics on the screen while watching.
Increased throughput
In this week's Science, researchers from China Agricultural University reported a new way to boost food yields: Through CRISPR gene editing, they increased corn and rice yields by 10% and 8%, respectively [4].
pixabay
Through the analysis of corn and its wild ancestral genomes, the researchers locked in a gene called "KRN2." This gene is associated with the number of grain rows on the ear of maize, which increases when its expression decreases. Experiments have shown that artificially "turning off" this gene through CRISPR gene editors can increase maize yields, and editing the homologous gene OsKRN2 in rice can also have a similar effect. At the same time, this operation did not have a significant negative impact on other traits of the crop. This finding promises to open up new opportunities for increasing global food production.
Noise fear
When encountering sonar, many whales flee in a hurry, even stranding on the beach and taking their lives. Why are cetaceans so afraid of sonar? Researchers have recently found that this may be because the sonar reminds them of the fear of being chased by predators [5].
Human activities have brought potentially deadly noise pollution to marine animals| Saana Isojunno
The researchers tracked sperm whales, humpback whales, long-limbed pilot whales, and northern bottlenose whales to see how they responded to three sounds: sonar in the 1-4 kHz band (similar to naval sonar), the clicks of killer whales that preyed only on mammals (including whales), and the clicks of killer whales that only preyed on fish. It was found that when the first two sounds were played, the northern bottle nose whale completely stopped foraging activities, and the feeding rate of humpback whales and long-limbed pilot whales was also greatly reduced; the most indifferent were sperm whales, but they also reduced their foraging activity by about 50%.
Northern bottlenose whales cannot fight killer whales, long-limbed pilot whales can use their group advantage to deal with predators, and sperm whales and male humpback whales can fight killer whales. Regardless of their combat power, when they hear the sounds of predators and sonars, they choose to run first, even if they are hungry. The researchers stress that these animals do not confuse sonar with the sounds of killer whales; but loud noises are seen as a threat by them, so they choose to flee.
bibliography
[1] https://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/MAR22/Session/D09.9
[2] https://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/5.0081038
[4] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg7985
Author: Mai Mai, window knocking rain
EDIT: Window knocking rain
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