Joe Biden has given Ukraine the green light to use long-range weapons against Russia for the first time. Could pond-life power future space missions to Mars? We speak to Erik Gauger, professor in quantum theory at Heriot-Watt university’s Institute of photonics and quantum sciences.
Here’s a fully automated transcript:
Hey, I’m Rachelle Abbott, and you’re listening to The Standard’s Tech and Science Daily podcast.
If you’re new here, make sure to hit follow.
Coming up, pond life future space lasers, and the voice of King Richard III.
But first, Joe Biden has given Ukraine the green light to use long range weapons against Russia for the first time.
Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has said missiles will speak for themselves.
The decision marks a major US policy shift as Biden is about to leave office.
The move in the US also comes after months of speculation over whether Britain would grant permission for UK-supplied Storm Shadow missiles to be used by Ukraine against targets inside Russia.
On Monday morning, a cabinet minister stressed Britain was giving full backing to Ukraine amid a report that it will join America, allowing Kyiv to fire West-supplied Long-Range missiles into Russia.
The Kremlin has accused the outgoing Biden administration of adding fuel to the fire and seeking to escalate the conflict in Ukraine.
Scientists are creating eco-friendly technology that harnesses the power of bacteria that’s more usually found in ponds on Earth to directly convert sunlight into laser beams, which could sustainably power future missions to Mars.
Erik Gauger, Professor in Quantum Theory at Heriot-Watt University’s Institute of Photonics and Quantum Sciences in Edinburgh, explains the study.
We’re hoping to piggyback on natural antenna structures which exist in photosynthetic bacteria.
Some of these bacteria live in extreme conditions where there isn’t very much light, and they’ve developed an amazing apparatus for capturing the little light that’s there and funneling its energy to where it needs to go, in their case to produce chemical energy or chemical food.
What we’d like to do is we’d like to piggyback on that and use it to power our laser.
And essentially these photosynthetic antenna take their lenses but at the nanoscale.
So they replace the big, heavy, bulky stuff with something which is just a few nanometers big and has been designed by evolution to do just what we needed to do.
The technique they’re developing could allow power to be sent over vast distances.
Professor Gauger explains how they plan to harness the power of photosynthesis.
We get photosynthesis everywhere.
could say it ultimately powers almost all life on Earth.
But the ones we’re interested in, they live in bacteria.
And there’s two types we’re targeting.
One is green fossil bacteria.
They live very deep in the water.
So within these bacteria, they’re large molecular structures which produce the food for the bacteria and the energy for the bacteria from the little light in their environment.
So what we’re looking to do is to extract these natural molecular structures and repurpose them.
Another bacterium we’re interested in is what’s known as the purple bacterium.
You find that in all sorts of ponds and waterways, and they have beautiful power plants inside.
It’s got a molecular ring-like arrangements of molecules which can again absorb light and funnel the energy to the reaction center where it gets converted into something that’s more permanent.
And what’s next in the four-year project?
They appear to be using quantum mechanical effects, so there’s a suggestion that quantum mechanical effects might play a role in making them as efficient as they are.
So there’s a lot of expertise in growing these bacteria, we’re extracting the relevant complexes.
Ultimately, the idea is yes, to grow them on space.
And as part of our research project in the consortium, we’ve got Professor Gisela de Trell from the Technical University in Munich, and her research area is human space technology.
She’s an expert on growing plants and bacteria on the ISS and in space.
So ultimately, down the line, the plan is to actually grow the structures and produce that in a space environment.
At the moment, we’re doing it in our laboratories.
You can hear more of this interview on Monday’s episode of The Standard Podcast with Mark Blunden.
The clarity and charity of the sun’s light is so great that when it is poor…
That’s the sound of King Richard III, created using state-of-the-art technology, giving him a Yorkshire accent and played in front of an audience of history fans at York Theatre Royal.
His voice is said to have been created to “90% accuracy” by Professor David Crystal, a leading linguist in 15th-century pronunciation.
A team at FaceLab at Liverpool John Moores University created the avatar based on a reconstruction of Richard III’s head, led by craniofacial identification expert Professor Caroline Wilkinson.
Experts from various fields output the pieces of the puzzle together, including speech and language therapy, dentistry, forensic psychology and archaeology.
Richard III was the King of England from 1483 until his death at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 at the age of 32, and his remains were found underneath a Leicester car park in 2012.
Coming up in part two, the timeline of active volcanoes on the far side of the moon revealed.
See you back here in just a minute.
The far side of the moon was volcanically active approximately 2.8 billion years ago, according to samples returned on the Chang’e 6 mission.
A robotic probe collected 1.9 kilograms of lunar soil from the Apollo Basin, located in the northeastern South Pole Aitken Basin, an area with the thinnest crust on the moon in June before returning to Earth.
Previous lunar samples returned to Earth have established that volcanism took place on the near side of the moon between 4 to 2 billion years ago.
However, there was a lack of understanding from the far side of the lunar surface, meaning it has not been possible to confirm the timing of volcanic activity for this region.
The scientists also found a sample that dated back 4.2 billion years, implying that volcanoes were active on the far side of the moon for at least 1.4 billion years.
The research was conducted by a team from the Institute of Geology and Geophysics and the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
You can read more in the journal Nature.
Next, now if you’re likely to reach for a fat-rich treat when stressed, a small study has found that adding a cup of minimally processed cocoa could make a real difference for your health.
That’s according to scientists at the University of Birmingham, who say that drinking cocoa high in flavonols with a fatty meal can mitigate some of the impact the food has on the body.
Flavonols, which are found in some foods and drinks, are considered to have a range of different benefits, including being good for regulating blood pressure and protecting cardiovascular health.
They say that high-fat foods can negatively affect the function of blood vessels and oxygen delivery to the brain, while flavonols, found in abundance in cocoa, can protect this function during periods of everyday stress.
But if you’re not a fan of cocoa, you can try green tea, black tea or berries.
The study is published in the journal Food and Function Found.
And finally, to help continue celebrating 50 years of creating digital watches, Casio has designed the CRW001-1JR Smart Ring.
This watch stays true to its recognisable features.
There’s a light for the digital screen, a stopwatch and an alarm function.
The light will flash instead of a sound though.
The ring is manufactured as a single piece using a metal injection molding process that starts with powdered metal.
Sizing wise, it’s permanently a US size 10.5.
There are options to resize but not by too much.
Now, that’s not quite the plastic one I had in the 90s.
You’re up to date, come back at 4pm for The Standard podcast.
For all the latest news, head to standard.co.uk.
