Lifeboat Foundation

Enhanced electric fields at curved carbon structures makes them better catalysts.

English below. — Mirages & miracles / Exposition / Création décembre 2017, Les Subsistances, Lyon, France. Une série d’installations qui abritent un animisme numérique. Les œuvres, du petit au grand format, offrent toutes une coïncidence finement organisée entre virtuel et matériel : dessins augmentés, dispositifs d’illusions holographiques, casques de réalité virtuelle, projections grande échelle. Elles donnent à vivre un ensemble de scénarios improbables qui tiennent à la fois du mirage et du miracle, qui jouent à la frontière entre le vrai et le faux, l’animé et l’inanimé, l’authentique et l’imposture, la magie, le merveilleux, et l’inouï. — Mirages & miracles / Live Exhibition / New work December 2017, Les Subsistances, Lyon, France. Series of installations inhabited by digital animism. Ranging from small to large-scale work, this corpus of installations offers a delicate coincidence between the virtual and the material using augmented drawings, holographic illusions, virtual-reality headsets, large-scale projections. It offers a unique ensemble of improbable scenarios that takes root in both the mirage and the miracle, and plays with the boundaries between true and false, the animate and the inanimate, the authentic and the deceptive, the magical, the wondrous, and the indescriptible.

Équipe Conception et direction artistique : Claire Bardainne et Adrien Mondot Dessin : Claire Bardainne Conception informatique : Adrien Mondot Développement informatique : Rémi Engel Composition et conception sonore : Olivier Mellano Danse : Bérangère Fournier, Samuel Faccioli, Akiko Kajihara Régie d’exposition : Laurent Cuzin, Elvire Tapie Menuiserie : DeFacto / Julien Quartier, Charles Robin — Atelier Gautier.

Serrurerie acier : Mathieu Laville, Rémy Mangevaud, Elvis Dagier Serrurerie aluminium : Teviloj / Ludovic Laffay Lithographie : URDLA Sérigraphie : Olivier Bral Impression : Artprint Verre soufflé : Nicolas Sartor

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Humans have generated nearly 10 billion tons of plastic in the last 70 years (via NowThis)

For many, it’s the material of nightmares: machines capable of continuously refining themselves. What if they turn malevolent? Will they enslave humanity? Fortunately, given the current status of machine learning research, we will not have to worry about such a scenario for quite some time.

Researchers at MIT in the US and DESY (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron) in Germany have developed a technology that could shrink particle accelerators by a factor of 100 or more. The basic building block of the accelerator uses high-frequency electromagnetic waves and is just 1.5 cm (0.6 in) long and 1 mm (0.04 in) thick, with this drastic size reduction potentially benefitting the fields of medicine, materials science and particle physics, among others.

Think of it as Material Design for data visualization.

[Image: courtesy Google].

If true, the study would complete a decades-long quest to find the elusive material. But such claims have been made prematurely many times before.

Phase transitions occur when a substance changes from a solid, liquid or gaseous state to a different state—like ice melting or vapor condensing. During these phase transitions, there is a point at which the system can display properties of both states of matter simultaneously. A similar effect occurs when normal metals transition into superconductors—characteristics fluctuate and properties expected to belong to one state carry into the other.

Scientists at Harvard have developed a bismuth-based, two-dimensional superconductor that is only one nanometer thick. By studying fluctuations in this ultra-thin material as it transitions into superconductivity, the scientists gained insight into the processes that drive superconductivity more generally. Because they can carry electric currents with near-zero resistance, as they are improved, superconducting materials will have applications in virtually any technology that uses electricity.

The Harvard scientists used the new technology to experimentally confirm a 23-year-old theory of superconductors developed by scientist Valerii Vinokur from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory.

A formerly little-known molecule created in labs by scientists could help future buildings withstand even the most ferocious of storms, tornadoes, and hurricanes by making walls that are virtually indestructible, according to new research from a team of British scientists at the University of Exeter.

The substance is known to researchers and construction experts as graphene, a combination of the prefix graphite and the suffix –ene, coined by the German scientist who pioneered it. The product has a wide array of potential applications including anti-corrosive coatings, lubricants, and motor oils. But in the last two decades, a radical new application has become apparent to those who study this innovative new product. The application of graphene in construction became apparent when researchers established that the inclusion of graphene oxide significantly increases both tensile and compressive strength in concrete composites—in other words, the world’s most common construction material can be fortified to become a kind of “super-concrete.”