Lifeboat Foundation

Computers use switches to perform calculations. A complex film with “quantum wells”—regions that allow electron motion in only two dimensions—can be used to make efficient switches for high-speed computers. For the first time, this oxide film exhibited a phenomenon, called resonant tunneling, in which electrons move between quantum wells at a specific voltage. This behavior allowed an extremely large ratio (about 100,000:1) between two states, which can be used in an electronic device as an ON/OFF switch to perform mathematical calculations (Nature Communications, “Resonant tunneling in a quantum oxide superlattice”).

Efficient control of electron motion can be used to reduce the power requirements of computers. “Quantum wells” (QW) are regions that allow electron motion in only two dimensions. The lines (bottom) in the schematic show the probability of finding electrons in the structure. The structure is a complex oxide (top) with columns (stacked blue dots corresponding to an added element) where the electrons are free to move in only two dimensions. This is a special type of quantum well called a two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG). (Image: Ho Nyung Lee, Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

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“An increasing number of US landowners want to build commune-style villages that are completely self-sufficient and have a low carbon footprint”

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Long-term human colonization of Mars is feasible, as long as Red Planet pioneers “live off the land,” a recent NASA report concludes.

“There are massive resources on Mars obtainable from the atmosphere and extracted from the regolith which are capable of supporting human colonization,” write the authors of the report, which is called “Frontier In-Situ Resource Utilization for Enabling Sustained Human Presence on Mars.”

Using Martian resources, existing technologies could supply water, oxygen, fuel and building materials, the report adds, “to relax the dependence on Earth during the buildup of a colony on Mars.” [Red Planet or Bust: 5 Crewed Mars Mission Ideas].

If you’ve seen the dystopian nightmare fuel that is BBC’s Black Mirror, you might be getting the “No no nos” about Sony’s latest patent application — ‘smart’ contact lenses with a built-in camera that can record, play, and even store videos right before your eyes.

With Google and Samsung having already filed patents for contact lenses with tiny, built-in cameras, these things seem inevitable, and they have the potential to change everything about the way we interact with each other… for better or worse.

So yep, that means in the future we could all be playing back recordings of old conversations to our friends and family to win an argument, or, you know, watching a ‘greatest hits’ compilation while having sex with our significant other. But we have more faith in the good of mankind than that, right?

Continue reading “Sony has filed a patent for contact lenses that record and store videos with the blink of an eye” »

Dirty water has a use.

New technology doesn’t always look great, but researchers at Binghamton University are aiming to prove that function and style don’t have to be at odds with a new bacteria-powered battery that takes its design cues from origami.

Seokheun “Sean” Choi, an assistant professor of computer and electrical engineering at Binghamton, and two of his students recently published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics a report on their invention of a microbial fuel cell that runs on nothing more than the bacteria found in just a few drops of dirty water.

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The University of Bristol’s Quantum Technology Enterprise Centre (QTEC) is looking to recruit its first cohort of Enterprise Fellows that will be the next generation of quantum technology entrepreneurs.

Merging training in systems thinking, quantum engineering and entrepreneurship, QTEC will provide the necessary skills for budding innovators to develop their own business ideas and for them to branch out into the emerging field of quantum technologies.

The Centre, which is the first of its kind in the world, was funded as part of the UK’s £270 million investment into quantum technologies. These technologies exploit the laws of quantum mechanics to create practical and useful technologies that will outperform their classical rivals and that have the potential to transform artificial intelligence, healthcare, energy, finance, cyber security and the internet.

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Google announced on Wednesday that it has been using a DeepMind-built AI system to control certain parts of its power-hungry data centres over the last few months as it looks to make its vast server farms more environmentally friendly.

Last year, a Greenpeace report predicted that the electricity consumption of data centres is set to account for 12% of global electricity consumption by 2017 and companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple have some of the biggest data centres in the world.

Google said it has been able to reduce the energy consumption of its data centre cooling units — used to stop Google’s self-built servers from overheating — by as much as 40% with the help of a DeepMind AI system.

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The portable battery can be fully recharged within 15 minutes, about 20 times faster than a Li-ion battery.

For years, scientists and engineers have synthesized materials at the nanoscale level to take advantage of their mechanical, optical, and energy properties, but efforts to scale these materials to larger sizes have resulted in diminished performance and structural integrity.

Now, researchers led by Xiaoyu “Rayne” Zheng, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech have published a study in the journal Nature Materials that describes a new process to create lightweight, strong and super elastic 3D printed metallic nanostructured materials with unprecedented scalability, a full seven orders of magnitude control of arbitrary 3D architectures.

Strikingly, these multiscale metallic materials have displayed super elasticity because of their designed hierarchical 3D architectural arrangement and nanoscale hollow tubes, resulting in more than a 400 percent increase of tensile elasticity over conventional lightweight metals and ceramic foams.

Continue reading “Scientists develop way to upsize nanostructures into light, flexible 3D printed materials” »