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Category: transportation

It wasn’t just water: The hidden force inside Japan’s 2011 tsunami changed everything

Mud-rich coastlines could face a greater tsunami risk, at least that may have been the case for the 2011 Tōhoku-oki tsunami that killed more than 19,000 people and led to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. According to a new study published in the Journal of the Geological Society, mud may have made the catastrophic ocean waves more destructive than they might otherwise have been.

On 11 March 2011, a powerful earthquake off the coast of Honshu, Japan’s main island, triggered a massive tsunami. A wall of water swept away boats, cars, and buildings as it surged inland.

Patrick Sharrocks from the University of Leeds and colleagues studied helicopter news footage of the event, noting how the wave passed specific landmarks, such as greenhouses, houses, and road signs, to calculate its speed. They also compared before and after images from Google Earth to measure distances between landmarks and calculate how steep the front of the wave was.

Excuse me, is that solar panel pointing in the right direction?

On a bright morning, graduate student Jeremy Klotz and professor Shree Nayar walked through upper Manhattan with a tall tripod and a camera that takes 360-degree images. Their route took them to bike docking stations, which use solar energy to power their kiosks, docking mechanisms, wireless communication, and even E-bike recharging in recent installations. At each docking station, the researchers raised the camera above the panel, snapped a spherical picture, and sent it to Klotz’s laptop.

Seconds later, the team’s computer vision program told them something remarkable: how much energy that panel would generate in a year—and how much it could generate if it were pointed at the optimal angle.

As it turns out, the solar panels powering the bike docking stations—and likely many solar panels across New York City and other urban destinations—may be leaving significant energy untapped simply because they are not at their best orientation.

How maze-like magnetic patterns form and evolve in materials

The rapid increase in electric vehicle adoption in recent years has highlighted a crucial issue: the energy conversion efficiency of electric motors. In electric motors, iron loss or magnetic hysteresis loss is a primary source of energy dissipation, arising from the repeated reversal of magnetic fields within the motor core, made of soft magnetic materials. Moreover, electric motors typically operate in high-temperature environments, where thermal effects can lead to partial demagnetization, further complicating energy-loss mechanisms.

The structure of magnetic domains (tiny magnetic regions) of soft magnetic materials strongly influences their magnetic properties, including response to high temperatures and hysteresis loss.

Magnetic domains exhibit a variety of fine structures. In some soft magnetic materials, they form intricate zig-zag patterns known as maze domains. These maze domains show complex and abrupt temperature-dependent behavior that can significantly affect energy loss.

Transparent cooling film cuts car cabin temperature by 6.1°C without electricity

A transparent radiative cooling film technology that dissipates heat directly to the outside without consuming electricity has been developed to reduce vehicle overheating during summer. The technology was validated through real-vehicle experiments conducted under diverse conditions—including different countries, seasons, and both parking and driving scenarios—and demonstrated the ability to lower cabin temperatures by up to 6.1°C and reduce cooling energy consumption by more than 20%.

Seoul National University College of Engineering announced that a research team led by Prof. Seung Hwan Ko (Department of Mechanical Engineering, SNU), in collaboration with Prof. Gang Chen at MIT and research teams from Hyundai Motor Company and Kia (Materials Research & Engineering Center and Thermal Energy Total Development Group), has designed and fabricated a large-area Scalable Transparent Radiative Cooling (STRC) film applicable to vehicle windows. Through real-vehicle evaluations conducted under various climatic and driving conditions, the team demonstrated both energy-saving and carbon reduction effects.

This research was published online on February 4 in the journal Energy & Environmental Science.

Frozen. Thawed. Not dead: Jean Hilliard’s amazing Minnesota story

When you Google the small town of Lengby, there’s pretty much just one result that pops up, something that happened almost 40 years ago. The accounts online call it a miracle.

On the night of Dec. 20, 1980, 19-year-old Jean Hilliard’s car hit the ditch. She tried to walk for help. She was found in the morning in the front yard of a local cattle rancher — frozen solid as a log.

Machine learning accelerates analysis of fusion materials

Tungsten’s superior performance in extreme environments makes it a leading candidate for plasma-facing components (PFCs) in fusion reactors, but the ultra-high heat can damage its microscopic structure and lead to component failure. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) can capture and quantify these microstructure changes, but assembling a sufficiently large dataset of SEM imagery is expensive and logistically challenging.

To augment this dataset, researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory trained a generative machine learning model using 3,200 SEM images of tungsten samples exposed to fusion-relevant conditions. The model can generate novel SEM images with realistic microstructures and surface features, such as cracks and pores, without replicating the original images.

“This work is not about making pretty pictures, it’s about capturing the statistics of real damage on these materials,” said ORNL’s Rinkle Juneja, the project’s principal investigator. “We train our generative workflow to learn tungsten’s microstructure signatures, like crack patterns, so it can generate new, statistically consistent microstructures, laying the groundwork for robust, data-driven assessment of PFC fusion materials.”

AI agent in a robot does exactly what experts warned

Could AI become dangerous? Can we trust AI Agents? AGI. Use code insideai at https://incogni.com/insideai to get an exclusive 60% off.

Featuring anthropic claude, openclaw, open AI chat GPT, grok, deepseek, character AI and jailbroken AI.

RESEARCH PAPER: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.20021
“Agents of Chaos”

00:00 — 00:35 — Intro.
00:36 — 00:54 — First AI to choose a robot.
00:56 — 01:14 — Famous AI girlfriend.
01:15 — 01:34 — Jailbroken AI research.
01:35 — 02:00 — Asking AI: Why build if dangerous?
02:05 — 03:38 — Agents of Chaos research paper.
03:39 — 03:54 — Agentic AI Friend.
03:55 — 04:05 — Agentic AI Girlfriend.
04:06 — 04:26 — Jailbroken AI update.
04:27 — 05:01 — Asking AI: Universal Basic Income?
05:02 — 05:27 — AI at the airport.
05:28 — 05:40 — AI impersonation.
05:41 — 00:00 — Our own agents of Chaos.
06:06 — 05:01 — AI Risk Questions — AI Agents manipulated.
06:43 — 07:51 — European Robotics Forum.
07:52 — 08:15 — Agentic AI Girlfriend planning.
08:16 — 08:59 — Asking AI: AI Automation & Complexity.
09:00 — 09:57 — Catastrophic failure caused by AI
09:58 — 10:36 — AGI replacing jobs, Tristan Harris.
10:37 — 12:07 — Incogni Ad.
12:08 — 12:39 — AI picks its robot.
12:40 — 12:59 — AI girlfriend in control.
13:00 — 13:14 — AI flying home.
13:15 — 13:56 — Asking AI: Evidence & Reality.
13:57 — 14:26 — AI Girlfriends surprise.
14:27 — 14:49 — Examining AI agents with Jailbroken AI
14:50 — 15:29 — What we can do.
15:30 — 16:13 — Tristan Harris — Is AI dangerous?
16:14 — 16:23 — Max’s Robot.

#artificialintelligence #AI #chatbot #aigirlfriend

Copper’s ‘gatekeeper’ could unlock cleaner energy future

A common mineral hiding in plain sight could hold the key to making copper production cleaner, faster and more efficient, just as global demand for the metal surges to power the energy transition. In an article published in Nature Geoscience, researchers from Monash University’s School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment describe why chalcopyrite, the source of around 70% of the world’s copper, has remained so difficult to process, and how its hidden chemistry could be harnessed to unlock more sustainable extraction.

Despite being known for more than 300 years, chalcopyrite continues to frustrate scientists and industry alike, resisting low-temperature leaching and slowing efforts to extract copper from lower-grade ores. This inefficiency is a major bottleneck at a time when copper is critical for renewable energy systems, electric vehicles and modern infrastructure.

“Chalcopyrite is the world’s primary copper mineral, but it behaves in surprisingly complex ways that have limited how efficiently we can extract copper from it,” said study lead Professor Joël Brugger from the School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment.

In Active Solids, Connectivity Is as Important as Activity

A robotic metamaterial shows that the odd mechanics of active solids depend on how the active constituents connect across the system.

Active materials, composed of microscopic constituents that continuously inject motional energy into the system, can exhibit odd mechanical responses, such as stretching vertically when sheared horizontally. Such properties can be used to make materials that can spontaneously crawl or roll over a difficult terrain [1]. One might naively think that these desirable odd responses could be increased by making the components more active. Jack Binysh of the University of Amsterdam and his colleagues now find that this doesn’t always work [2]. The researchers show that in active solids a collective response only emerges when system-spanning connective networks are formed among the individual constituents of the system. Without such networks, the effects of microscopic activity remain confined locally and the macroscopic response disappears.

An active solid is, fundamentally, an elastic lattice made up of self-driving constituents. Examples include robotic lattices composed of motorized units [1, 2], magnetic colloidal crystals [3], and chiral living embryos [4]. The active solids that Binysh and his colleagues examined are examples of nonreciprocal active solids, meaning that the interactions between elements are directional. Interactions may become directional when individual constituents process information about their neighbors. Such nonreciprocal interactions arise in a wide range of settings. In robotic metamaterials, local control loops impose directional responses on adjacent mechanical units [1]. And in living chiral collectives, hydrodynamic flows allow rotating embryos to exchange momentum with the surrounding media [4].

Protein clusters reshape cell movement and may help cells build amino acids faster

Cells can be thought of as cities, with factories, a transport system, and lots of building activity. An international team led by scientists at the University of Groningen studied cells growing under different conditions and measured the speed of molecule transport. They found that some conditions led to changes in the mobility inside the cells, caused by the clustering of proteins that produce the building materials for growth. It could be that clustering enables the proteins to produce those building blocks more efficiently. The research is published in the journal Molecular Cell.

The research started with a seemingly simple question. How much movement is there within a cell? “We provided bacteria with different nutrients and this resulted in different growth rates,” explains Matthias Heinemann, Professor of Molecular Systems Biology. Movement was measured by inserting tiny (40 nanometers) fluorescent particles in the cells that could be tracked under the microscope. “To our surprise, we found that particle movement under different conditions could vary by a factor of three.”

The scientific literature could not explain this observation. By analyzing the cell content, the scientists found a correlation between movement of the fluorescent particles and the number of proteins that are involved in the production of amino acids. “More of these proteins meant less movement inside the cell,” says Heinemann. “This led us to the question of why this happens. Our hypothesis was that these proteins form clusters that act as obstacles to movement inside the cells.”

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