Lifeboat Foundation

A quartet of chemists at the University of Oxford has, for the first time, found a way to get two beryllium atoms to bond with one another. In their paper published in the journal Science, Josef Boronski, Agamemnon Crumpton, Lewis Wales and Simon Aldridge, describe their process and how they managed to do it in a safe way—and at room temperature. Jason Dutton with La Trobe University, has published a Perspective piece in the same journal issue, outlining the work done by the team in England.

Beryllium is a strong but lightweight, alkaline earth metal. It is also brittle.

Beryllium only ever occurs naturally when mixed with other elements, forming minerals. It is often found in gemstones such as emeralds. And it is used in a variety of applications, from telecommunications equipment to computers and cell phones. It is also mixed with other metals to create alloys used in applications such as gyroscopes and electrical contacts.

Exponential Organizations 2.0: The New Playbook for 10x Growth and Impact — Kindle edition by Ismail, Salim, Diamandis, Peter H., Malone, Michael S., Kurzweil, Ray. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading Exponential Organizations 2.0: The New Playbook for 10x Growth and Impact.

Bought a $100 Android phone? Congrats: you’ve experienced the worst of Android. Please don’t base your opinion of Android on this.

Penn State researchers have discovered a protein found naturally in a bacterium (Hansschlegelia quercus) isolated from English oak buds exhibits strong capabilities to differentiate between rare earths. Harnessing its power could revolutionize the entire tech sector by fundamentally changing how critical minerals like rare earths are harvested and purified. Image Credit: Penn State. Creative Commons

The discovery is important because rare earth elements, like neodymium and dysprosium, are critical components to almost all modern technologies, from smartphones to hard drives, but they are notoriously hard to separate from the Earth’s crust and from one another.

By figuring out how this molecular handshake works at the atomic level, the researchers have found a way to separate these similar metals from one another quickly, efficiently, and under normal room temperature conditions. This strategy could lead to more efficient, greener mining and recycling practices for the entire tech sector, the researchers state. Related: U.S. Crude Trading At Big Discount To Dubai Oil.

Nanoscientists have developed a wearable textile that can convert body movement into useable electricity and even store that energy. The fabric potentially has a wide range of applications from medical monitoring to assisting athletes and their coaches in tracking their performance, as well as smart displays on clothing.

The research team responsible for the textile describe how it works in a paper published in Nano Research Energy.

From smart watches to cordless headphones, people already have access to a wide range of wearable electronic devices. A range of health, sport and activity monitors are now integrated into smartphones.

In today’s episode, we take a deeper look into what Apple’s Vision Pro could mean for the industry. It’s not the same class of product as an iPhone, people aren’t going to walk around with these on their head, but the headset is the IPhone’s 3D successor.

ColdFusion Podcast:

Continue reading “Why Apple’s Vision Pro is the Next iPhone (Analysis)” »

I’ve found a lot of reasons – from finding components that are overheating (which can indicate faulty components), identifying overheating wires and connectors (which can indicate damaged wires or connectors), diagnosing issues with HVAC, find draughts at home, and much, much more.

Also: This $10 gadget is my favorite repair tool of all time

Continue reading “Are smartphone thermal cameras sensitive enough to uncover PIN codes?” »

A study, published in PNAS Nexus, describes a fabric that can be modulated between two different states to stabilize radiative heat loss and keep the wearer comfortable across a range of temperatures.

Po-Chun Hsu, Jie Yin, and colleagues designed a fabric made of a layered semi-solid electrochemical cell deployed on nylon cut in a kirigami pattern to allow it to stretch and move with the wearer’s body. Modern clothes are made with a variety of insulating or breathable fabrics, but each fabric offers only one thermal mode, determined by the fabric’s emissivity: the rate at which it emits thermal energy.

The active material in the fabric can be electrically switched between two states—a transmissive dielectric state and a lossy metallic state—each with different emissivity. The fabric can thus keep the wearer comfortable by adjusting how much body heat is retained and how much is radiated away. A user would feel the same skin temperature whether the external temperature was 22.0°C (71.6°F) or 17.1°C (62.8°F). The authors call this fabric a “wearable variable-emittance device,” or WeaVE, and have configured it to be controlled with a smartphone app.

In one sense, it is undeniably new. Interactions with ChatGPT can feel unprecedented, as when a tech journalist couldn’t get a chatbot to stop declaring its love for him. In my view, however, the boundary between humans and machines, in terms of the way we interact with one another, is fuzzier than most people would care to admit, and this fuzziness accounts for a good deal of the discourse swirling around ChatGPT.

When I’m asked to check a box to confirm I’m not a robot, I don’t give it a second thought—of course I’m not a robot. On the other hand, when my email client suggests a word or phrase to complete my sentence, or when my phone guesses the next word I’m about to text, I start to doubt myself. Is that what I meant to say? Would it have occurred to me if the application hadn’t suggested it? Am I part robot? These large language models have been trained on massive amounts of “natural” human language. Does this make the robots part human?