Tag: research

New York state to invest in $10B chip research complex

New York state is joining tech giant IBM and semiconductor manufacturer Micron Technology to invest $10 billion in a state-of-the-art chip research facility at the University of Albany, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced.

NY Creates, a nonprofit entity that oversees The Albany NanoTech Complex where the 50,000-square-foot facility will be built, will supervise the project, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Upon its completion in 2026, the facility is expected to include some of the most advanced chip-making equipment in the world courtesy of ASML Holding, a Dutch company that sells machines worth upwards of hundreds of millions of dollars, The Journal reported.

Once the machinery is installed, the project and its partners — including material-engineering company Applied Materials and electronics firm Tokyo Electron — will work on next-generation chip manufacturing there, per The Journal, citing Hochul’s office.

ASML’s advanced machines use lasers and drops of tin in a highly-complex process that uses silicon and ultraviolet light to turn semiconductor materials into chips, according to the company’s website — all while keeping the chip “about 10,000 cleaner than the outside air.”

New York state is joining semiconductor leaders including IBM, Micron Technology, Applied Materials and Tokyo Electron in their investment in a $10 billion chip research facility at the University of Albany. Gregory P. Mango
The 50,000-square-foot manufacturing destination will feature multimillion-dollar chip-making equipment courtesy of ASML Holding. REUTERS

Acquiring machines capable of this advanced technology at this Albany complex expansion is part of the $53 billion Chips Act, which the Commerce Department initiated earlier this year to counter technological advances in China while boosting national security by slashing America’s reliance on imported chips.

New York state has committed $1 billion to the project, which will be used to purchase the ASML equipment and construct the building, The Journal reported.

The facility could also help New York’s bid to be the designated research hub under the Chips Act — which included $11 billion for a National Semiconductor Technology Center designed to advance domestic chip research and development, according to The Journal.

The University of Albany’s new building is set to have a larger impact on the economy.

Hochul’s office predicts its opening will create some 700 new jobs and bring in at least $9 billion in private money.

The Post has sought comment from Hochul’s office, as well as the University of Albany.

The Albany NanoTech Complex — which was first constructed in the late ’90s as a lone 70,000-square-foot facility and has since ballooned into a 1.65 million square-foot complex — has already made headway on its chip research efforts.

The University of Albany is set to welcome the chip-making facility in two years. It will be a part of its Albany NanoTech Complex. The first building in the complex opened in the 1990s.

New York boasts a number of large chip factories, including ones operated by semiconductor manufacturer GlobalFoundries, which works with San Diego, Calif.-based Qualcomm, the maker of chips that come in Android, Asus and Sony devices.

Fellow semiconductor manufacturing company Onsemi also boasts a manufacturing facility in Rochester, NY, and Wolfspeed, a semiconductor manufacturer that focuses on silicon carbide, expanded to the East Coast with the opening of its Marcy, NY, facility last year.

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Talking to strangers as well as friends makes you happier: study

No stranger danger here.

A new study suggests that people who talk to strangers as well as family and friends are happier. 

It’s well known that there is a link between happiness and social connection, but researchers from Harvard University wanted to know which type of relationships and how many interactions with each type is best for one’s well-being. 

“Indeed, the amount of social interaction in an individual’s daily life is one of the most consistent predictors of psychological well-being,” the researchers wrote in the journal PNAS.

They studied the “social portfolio” of more than 50,000 people from eight different countries to find if people with a diverse set of relationships are happier than those who don’t expand their social circles.

The study found that the people who branched out had a greater wellbeing, life satisfaction and quality of life. Talking to a wider range of people turned out to be more important to one’s happiness than total number of interactions or time spent interacting. 

It’s well known that there is a link between happiness and social connection.
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“Recent work suggests that individuals discuss important topics with their weak ties more often than traditional network theory would predict — especially in one-on-one conversation when relational stakes are lower,” the researchers wrote. 

Researchers even found that participants who interacted with a random stranger were just as happy as those who were paired to interact with their significant other. 

“Different types of social support — for example emotional, instrumental, financial and informational — tend to be provided by different social relations, for example your partner, immediate kin, friends or colleagues,” the authors wrote. 

They found that “weak ties,” or people you’re not close to, play a critical role at the network level, providing information and resources that might not be available in your inner circle. 

“Diversity in social portfolios may be associated with greater access to different types of social support, resulting in enhanced well-being,” researchers wrote.

However, they acknowledged that, for some, having these kinds of interactions might be difficult. “People’s time is scarce, such that increasing the number or frequency of social interactions can prove challenging.”

They explained that future research could be done to examine what people intuitively think of the correlation between an expansive social portfolio and well-being. For example, people might believe the results to be true, but don’t have the ability to expand their circles for varying reasons, or people simply might not believe they need to branch out in order to be happier. 

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New research facility shows how to live with rising tides

NORFOLK, Va. — The Elizabeth River Project’s latest work doesn’t fight the rising tide. It will roll with it.

The environmental group is constructing a 6,500-foot resilience lab along Colley Avenue and Knitting Mill Creek. The building has an intentional life span of about 30 to 50 years; when sea levels reach a certain height, the structure can be disassembled and moved to allow a living shoreline, that’s part of the design, to take its place.

The outdoor pavilion will float when the area floods and is meant as a refuge for people who canoe down the river-like streets after a deluge or for those caught outside.

The Pru and Louis Ryan Resilience Lab and Learning Park is scheduled to open next fall. The $8 million project is funded by Pru and Louis Ryan of Norfolk and donations through the ERP’s Next Wave Campaign. The group picked the location because it is a notorious flood zone and the creek is an important tributary.

Marjorie Mayfield, executive director of ERP, said the lab is meant to be an example of how to live with rising tides and not against them, while also reducing the environmental footprint.

The lab was designed by the Norfolk firm Work Program Architects and will be constructed to protect against a 3-foot increase in sea level. It is also being built using “off-the-shelf materials that any business owner or resident has access to,” said Sam Bowling, lead architect and project manager.

The lab will be equipped with solar panels, rainwater collection barrels and gray water collection systems. It also will employ natural cooling techniques such as a “green wall” of ivy.

The proposed living shoreline will be at the back of the property and planted to restore wetland and oyster habitats. Once in place, it will help trap contaminants and filter the water.

There will be two storage sheds, one of which will float, a research dock and a public boardwalk for people to look out over the creek. A kayak launch will be just off the boardwalk.

The Hampton Roads Sanitation District already built a dock on the property and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science has put in a water monitoring station there. Other institutions are planning to conduct research at the lab when construction is completed.

ERP is also planning to host workshops, in collaboration with Old Dominion University, that teach about coastal adaptation.

Mayfield hopes the project will be the start of something bigger — an “eco-district” of businesses and homes that are able to adjust to rising tides with sustainable infrastructure and reduce stormwater runoff pollution.

The “cornerstone will be our Ryan Resilience Lab, and I think it will be a really cool place to come to enjoy environmentally minded people and businesses,” Mayfield said.

The group plans to work with businesses in the area to improve eco-friendliness using techniques like rainwater collection and extending permeable sidewalks along the north Colley corridor. The ERP also plans to plant more trees, install rain gardens and walkways around the lab that will permit rainwater to seep into the ground and prevent runoff.

Concrete sidewalks allow water to flow over them and send pollutants into nearby bodies of water.

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New Asthma Research May Be a Possible Breakthrough for Better Treatment

Scientists have made an important discovery that may lead to better treatment for those suffering from asthma. In a study led by scientists from Edith Cowan University, Australia, it was discovered that those suffering from severe cases of asthma have a distinct biochemical profile in their urine when compared to individuals suffering from mild or moderate asthma and healthy individuals. The research, which was published in the European Respiratory Journal, was a part of the broader U-BIOPRED study, a larger pan-European initiative that is looking to investigate asthma and its different subtypes.

The team of researchers led by Dr Stacey Reinke (ECU) and Dr Craig Wheelock (Karolinska Institute, Sweden), found that severe asthmatics had lowered levels of carnitines, a specific type of metabolite. Carnitines are a crucial part of the body’s cellular energy generation process along with the immune response. Further analysis found that carnitine is metabolised slower in the body of severe asthmatics.

Researchers hope that the breakthrough will help develop better treatment methodologies. “Severe asthma occurs when someone’s asthma is uncontrolled, despite being treated with high levels of medication and/or multiple medications. To identify and develop new treatment options, we first need to better understand the underlying mechanisms of the disease,” explained Dr Reinke.

One of the trouble spots in research into asthma is the difficulty that scientists have in investigating the lungs directly. With invasive procedures being difficult, it becomes tough for scientists to investigate what’s going on within the lungs. But as the lungs are densely packed with blood vessels, scientists can investigate the profile of the blood that passes through the lung. Any chemical changes in the blood are then excreted from the urine, which scientists can investigate easily.

“In this case, we were able to use the urinary metabolome of asthmatics to identify fundamental differences in energy metabolism that may represent a target for new interventions in asthma control,” Dr Reinke added.

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Researchers Develop Machine That Can Preserve Human Liver Outside Body for Several Days

In a first, researchers have been able to preserve and repair a human liver, which was considered too damaged for transplant, in a machine over three days and then implanted the recovered organ into a cancer patient. Their success is set to have far-reaching consequences in the field of medicine as human livers for transplant are in short supply across the globe and this technology could increase their numbers. The multidisciplinary Liver4Life research team from Zurich has developed a special machine that can stretch the lifecycle of human livers.

In January 2020, the researchers demonstrated for the first time that perfusion technology makes it possible to store a liver outside the human body for several days. They say the perfusion machine mimics the human body as accurately as possible, in order to provide ideal conditions for the liver. For instance, a pump serves as a replacement heart and an oxygenator as the lungs. They used a dialysis unit to perform the functions of the kidneys.

For the intestine and pancreas, the researchers went for numerous hormone and nutrient infusions. The machine moves the liver to the rhythm of human breathing, just as the diaphragm would do in the human body.

Current organ preservation methods provide less than 12 hours to assess, transport and implant donor grafts for human transplantation. “Here we report the transplantation of a human liver discarded by all centres, which could be preserved for several days using ex-situ normothermic machine perfusion,” the researchers wrote in a study published in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

Professor Pierre-Alain Clavien, from the University Hospital Zurich and a part of the research team, said the machine developed by them has shown that it is “possible to alleviate the lack of functioning human organs and save lives.”

The treated liver was transplanted in May 2021 to a cancer patient on the Swiss transplant waiting list after his consent. The patient was able to leave the hospital a few days after the transplantation and he is now doing well.

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