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By Jennifer Conrad | 08.30.21   | Scientists have known for decades that an extreme solar storm, or coronal mass ejection, could damage electrical grids and potentially cause prolonged blackouts, impacting global supply chains, transportation, and GPS access. As Lily Hay Newman reports, a new paper shows that the failures could also be catastrophic for internet infrastructure, particularly for the long undersea cables that connect continents and underpin the global internet. A fast-moving cloud of magnetized solar particles could disrupt the repeaters that relay data across the cables, potentially rendering them inoperable. If enough cables go down, mass internet outages could ensue. Countries would be cut off at the source, even though their local infrastructure would still be intact. Why the Alarm? "With the pandemic, we saw how unprepared the world was," says Abdu Jyothi, one of the paper's authors. "There was no protocol to deal with it effectively, and it's the same with internet resilience." Read about the destructive potential of an extreme solar storm. | .jpg "Employees assembling EUV system") | Dutch company ASML introduced the first extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines for mass production in 2017, after decades spent mastering a technique for etching the tiniest nanoscopic features into microchips with light. The machines have been used in the manufacture of the latest, most advanced chips, including those in new iPhones as well as computers used for artificial intelligence. As Will Knight reports, the company's next EUV system will use a new trick to minimize the wavelength of light it uses—shrinking the size of features on the resulting chips and boosting their performance—more than ever before. A Revolutionary Machine The technology promises to extend what's known as Moore's law. In 1965, electronics engineer Gordon Moore noted that the number of components on a silicon chip had roughly doubled each year until then. Whether the trend will continue has come into question in recent years, but ASML's innovations could allow chips to continue shrinking for years to come. Read about the groundbreaking machine. |  | For the past seven years, Hyunwoo Yuk and his team at MIT have been developing a novel way to stop dangerous levels of bleeding: glue inspired by barnacles. As Max G. Levy explains, bleeding bodies are wet, prone to infection, and need urgent care. Yet it's hard to create a seal on wet tissue, and most commercial products rely on coagulants that take minutes to work. Barnacles hold an evolutionary solution to the problem of sticking to surfaces that are resistant to getting stuck. First, lipids sweep contaminants away from the surface, then a cement of proteins secreted from glands along each animal's "forehead" are able to do their thing. A Novel Concept An inexpensive glue that stops major bleeding and goes on already-wet surfaces would be potentially lifesaving for patients. It would be particularly useful in places without a lot of surgical resources, like in wilderness areas and combat zones. Read how the MIT team developed and tested barnacle-inspired medical glue. | |
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