Lifeboat Foundation

The unsung star of Jurassic Park was a mosquito frozen in amber. While you can’t really extract blood from specimens like that, you could be transported back in time if you looked at a specimen of fossilized tree sap and found a 110 million-year-old lizard staring back at you.

Creatures get trapped in amber all the time, but most prehistoric finds are insects. Amber is a great material for preserving arthropods because of their already tough shells that will hold on even if the insides disintegrate. But what about a lizard? Retinosaurus hkamentiensis is a new extinct species of lizard that was unexpectedly found trapped in Burmese amber. No one expected an entire reptile to be preserved so well, from its scaly skin down to its skeleton.

What are now the empty eyes of Retinosaurus may have once seen dinosaurs or giant ferns or dragonflies the size of your head. It was determined to be a juvenile that ran into a sticky situation when it ran into a glob of tree amber that it couldn’t escape. It was so well preserved that paleontologist Andrej Čerňanský of Comenius University and his team, who recently published a study in Scientific Reports, approached the prehistoric lizard almost as if it were alive.

Thermoelectric materials convert heat to electricity and vice versa, and their atomic structures are closely related to how well they perform.

Now researchers have discovered how to change the atomic structure of a highly efficient thermoelectric material, tin selenide, with intense pulses of laser light. This result opens a new way to improve thermoelectrics and a host of other materials by controlling their structure, creating materials with dramatic new properties that may not exist in nature.

“For this class of materials that’s extremely important, because their functional properties are associated with their structure,” said Yijing Huang, a Stanford University graduate student who played an important role in the experiments at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. “By changing the nature of the light you put in, you can tailor the nature of the material you create.”

And it’s a perfect fit. Enamel is an incredible material. It’s sturdy enough so that humans can chew but flexible enough that it doesn’t crack with every bite. Unfortunately, humans can not regenerate it. Once lost or damaged, it’s gone forever.

OpenAI’s chief scientist has admitted what we all fear — that artificial intelligence may be gaining consciousness.

It has elasto-magnetic properties that cause it to react to external forces or energy acting like a super rubber band.

Researchers using crushed concrete from demolished buildings to make calcium carbonate cement. Could reduce GHGs in the atmosphere by 2%.

But the benefits of fusion reaction are immense. Apart from generating much more energy, fusion produces no carbon emissions, the raw materials are in sufficient supply, produces much less radioactive waste compared to fission, and is considered much safer.

Over the years, scientists have been able to draw up the plan for a fusion nuclear reactor. It is called ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) and is being built in southern France with the collaboration of 35 countries, including India which is one of the seven partners, alongside the European Union, the United States, Russia, Japan, South Korea and China.

The production issues could impact SSD pricing.

Western Digital says it has lost at least 6.5 exabytes (6.5 billion gigabytes) of flash storage due to contamination issues at its NAND production facilities. The contamination could see the price of NAND — the main component of SSDs — spike up to 10 percent, according to market research firm TrendForce. Any potential NAND shortages or price fluctuations could affect the PC market over the next few months, which had another big year in 2021 despite global chip shortages and demand for GPUs.

The contamination of materials used in the manufacturing processes appears to have been detected in late January at two plants in Japan, with Western Digital’s joint venture partner, Kioxia (previously Toshiba), revealing it has affected BiCS 3D NAND flash memory.

Continue reading “SSD prices could spike after Western Digital loses 6.5 billion gigabytes of NAND chips” »

Only 17% of electronic waste, that they’re full of tiny, toxic materials that are hard and expensive to break down, is recycled.

That’s because devices aren’t designed to be recycled.