Lifeboat Foundation

BEC was kind enough to share a parts list of everything used to create this project. It’s operated primarily by a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, with most components housed neatly inside an acrylic cylinder. It’s driven by a drone propeller alongside a couple of Pololu 2,130 DRV8833 Dual H-bridge motor drivers. The sensors include both a pressure sensor and a distance sensor, while a Lego Rechargeable 9V Battery Box supplies the power with the assistance of a Pololu 2,123 S7V8F5 5V voltage regulator.

The Raspberry Pi runs Raspberry Pi OS, while the code used to operate the submarine functions is handled using a custom Python script. BEC explains that Thonny was used to run the Python code, which is open-source and available for anyone to explore.

Continue reading “Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W Lego-Powered Submarine Makes a Splash” »

Circa 2020

By utilizing a process that Einstein famously called “spooky,” scientists have successfully caught “ghosts” on film for the first time using quantum cameras.

The “ghosts” captured on camera weren’t the kind you might first think; scientists didn’t discover the wandering lost souls of our ancestors. Rather, they were able to capture images of objects from photons that never actually encountered the objects pictured. The technology has been dubbed “ghost imaging,” reports National Geographic.

Continue reading “New Quantum Camera Capable of Snapping Photos of ‘Ghosts’” »

An AI-powered camera system reduces wind turbine bird fatalities by stopping the turbine as soon as it spots birds. Read it here.

As our tech needs grow and the Internet of Things increasingly connects our devices and sensors together, figuring out how to provide power in remote locations has become an expanding field of research.

Professor Seokheun “Sean” Choi—a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Binghamton University’s Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science—has been working for years on biobatteries, which generate electricity through bacterial interaction.

One problem he encountered: The batteries had a lifespan limited to a few hours. That could be useful in some scenarios but not for any kind of long-term monitoring in remote locations.

An international team of researchers has developed a scanning tool to make websites less vulnerable to hacking and cyberattacks.

The black box security assessment prototype, tested by engineers in Australia, Pakistan and the UAE, is more effective than existing web scanners which collectively fail to detect the top 10 weaknesses in web applications.

UniSA mechanical and systems engineer Dr. Yousef Amer is one of the co-authors of a new international paper that describes the development of the tool in the wake of escalating global cyberattacks.

TSMC this afternoon has disclosed that it will expand its production capacity for mature and specialized nodes by about 50% by 2025. The plan includes building numerous new fabs in Taiwan, Japan, and China. The move will further intensify competition between TSMC and such contract makers of chips as GlobalFoundries, UMC, and SMIC.

When we talk about silicon lithography here at AnandTech, we mostly cover leading-edge nodes used produce advanced CPUs, GPUs, and mobile SoCs, as these are devices that drive progress forward. But there are hundreds of device types that are made on mature or specialized process technologies that are used alongside those sophisticated processors, or power emerging smart devices that have a significant impact on our daily lives and have gained importance in the recent years. The demand for various computing and smart devices in the recent years has exploded by so much that this has provoked a global chip supply crisis, which in turn has impacted automotive, consumer electronics, PC, and numerous adjacent industries.

Single-molecule electronic devices, which use single molecules or molecular monolayers as their conductive channels, offer a new strategy to resolve the miniaturization and functionalization bottlenecks encountered by traditional semiconductor electronic devices. These devices have many inherent advantages, including adjustable electronic characteristics, ease of availability, functional diversity and so on.

To date, single-molecule devices with a variety of functions have been realized, including diodes, field-effect devices and optoelectronic devices. In addition to their important applications in the field of functional devices, single-molecule devices also provide a unique platform to explore the intrinsic properties of matters at the single-molecule level.

Regulating the electrical properties of single-molecule devices is still a key step to further advance the development of molecular electronics. To effectively adjust the molecular properties of the device, it is necessary to clarify the interactions between electron transport in single-molecule devices and external fields, such as external temperature, magnetic field, electric field, and light field. Among these fields, the use of light to adjust the electronic properties of single-molecule devices is one of the most important fields, known as “single-molecule optoelectronics.”

Amber Alerts are an important tool in helping locate abducted children. They’re authorized by law enforcement and broadcast via TVs, text messages, and other means. Now, Instagram will also push Amber Alerts into users’ feeds with the feature rolling out in the US today and set to be available in 25 total countries “in the next couple of weeks.” It shows how apps like Instagram have become basic communication infrastructure in the modern world.

Adding Amber Alerts to Instagram makes sense for a few reasons. First, younger generations may well ignore text messages but scroll through Instagram with some regularity. Second, while text alerts require people to click a link to get more information and photos of the missing child, Instagram’s alerts will include this info directly. It doesn’t seem the alerts will be issued as notifications — they’ll just appear in users’ regular feeds.