The global climate is in a state of emergency! There are only three last years left to stop the disaster| week of technology

Welcome to The Week of Technology. This week you'll see: tight time to control greenhouse gases; magnetic slimes; the world's smallest mini-racing car; new messages for aliens; leeches.

Last chance

How can the warming range of global warming be controlled within 1.5°C? The next 3 years are our last chance!

Clean energy is the hope of curbing global warming| Pixabay

On 4 April, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a report renewing its call for immediate action by countries to control greenhouse gases[1]. Although the growth rate of global greenhouse gas emissions slowed between 2010 and 2019, emissions remain very high; in 2021, carbon emissions even increased by 5.5%. If the heating range is controlled within 1.5°C, only 500 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions can be tolerated by the earth. This means that greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2025 and then start to decline.

To effectively control warming, global greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced by 43% and methane emissions by 1/3 compared to 2019; by 2050, coal use needs to be reduced by 95% compared with 2019, oil use needs to be reduced by 60%, and natural gas need to be reduced by 45%. Achieving these numbers will not be easy, and if action is not taken immediately, humanity will no longer have a chance to meet its original climate control goals.

Magnetic slimes

Strange things this week: See how a "magnetic slime" stretches its metamorphosis, passing through narrow passages and mazes.

Video: Magnetic Slime Robot | Mengmeng Sun et al.

This is a kind of "magnetic slime robot" developed by researchers at hong Kong Chinese University and Harbin Institute of Technology, and its matrix composition is actually the same as that of slimes as a net red toy, except that it also adds NdFeB magnetic particles. Under the control of an applied magnetic field, this magnetic material can deform and move, completing the task of grasping, wrapping and moving objects, and also controlling the circuit to turn on or off. It is more deformable than magnetic devices made of elastic rubber and can pass through narrow pipes that are only 1.5 mm wide.

This magnetic slime may be used in biomedicine or wearable devices in the future, but researchers have only conducted preliminary tests on its material properties.

Molecular Racing

A racing car set a brand new world record: it traveled through the track at speeds of up to 44 nanometers per hour, traveled a total distance of up to 1054 nanometers, and completed 54 turns to win the world championship.

The Japanese team's "Molecular Racing" is based on the porphyrin structural design | Nims-Mana team

The record comes from the world's smallest drag racing competition, the Nanocar Race, which was just held for the second time last month. The "racing cars" on the field are actually molecular machines designed by scientists, and they are only about 2 nanometers large. The race lasted 24 hours, relying on a scanning tunneling microscope, and the participating research teams had to observe the "racing car" under the microscope and operate the probes to power the molecular trolleys and control them forward and turn.

The Spanish/Swedish team's "molecular racing car", which consists of anthracene ring "chassis", benzene and toluene "wheels" | Nanohispa team

In the second edition, two "Molecular Races" from Japan and the Spanish/Swedish team together became the winners. Both trolleys completed 54 turns and traveled 1054 nm and 678 nm respectively. This competition can help scientists refine their molecular machine design techniques, and these molecular machines are expected to be used in areas such as drug carriers in the future.

Interstellar information

Scientists want to send messages to aliens again: recently, an international team of researchers designed a completely new version of radio messages for extraterrestrial communications.

The researchers wanted to send pixel pattern information to the aliens, including male and female human figures, base structures, the position of the Earth in the solar system, and other | Jiang et al./NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Like the Arecibo message in 1974, this new piece of information, known as the "lighthouse in the Milky Way," is a binary-encoded pixel pattern, but the accuracy and amount of information are greatly improved. These pixel patterns include basic mathematical and physical knowledge, the chemical structure of DNA and bases, human male and female figures, and a map of the world and the earth's position in the solar system. In addition to this information, the researchers also added more easily locatable Earth coordinates: they replaced pulsars with globular clusters to indicate our location in order to facilitate the sending of replies from possible alien civilizations.

The team hopes to send this information in the future with the Allen Telescope Array or fast radio telescopes, but these facilities do not yet have the conditions to launch. Whether this information can actually be transmitted to the universe is still unknown.

Leeches are useful

Blood-sucking leeches are shunned, but researchers have found new uses for them: by extracting DNA from the blood sucked by leeches, they can tell which animals live in their surroundings.[5]

Unspicious leeches inadvertently become biodiversity samplers | Naomi Pierce and Chris Baker

Researchers tested the role of leeches on the analysis of biodiversity at the Ailao Mountain Nature Reserve in Yunnan, China. They mobilized 163 rangers, caught a total of 30,468 leeches at different locations in the reserve, and analyzed the blood of the animals they sucked into their stomachs. As a result, the researchers identified a total of 86 vertebrate species, including mammals, birds and amphibians, through leeches. At the same time, these analysis results also reflect the distribution law of the animals.

Researchers believe that catching leeches is expected to be a more convenient and efficient biodiversity survey method than directly tracking haunted wild animals.

bibliography

[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/2022/04/04/ipcc-ar6-wgiii-pressrelease/

[2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/adfm.202112508

[3] https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/japanese-and-spanish-swedish-teams-named-joint-winners-in-worlds-smallest-car-race/4015470.article

[4] https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2203/2203.04288.pdf

[5] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28778-8

Author: Mai Mai, window knocking rain

EDIT: Window knocking rain

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