Lifeboat Foundation

Announced at CES 2019, Seagate is about to ship the first line of SSDs optimized for network server (NAS) workloads. We put a couple of review units through their paces.

A pair of researchers at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) describes a way of making a submicron-sized cylinder disappear without using any specialized coating. Their findings could enable invisibility of natural materials at optical frequency and eventually lead to a simpler way of enhancing optoelectronic devices, including sensing and communication technologies.

Making objects invisible is no longer the stuff of fantasy but a fast-evolving science. ‘Invisibility cloaks’ using metamaterials—engineered materials that can bend rays of light around an object to make it undetectable—now exist, and are beginning to be used to improve the performance of satellite antennas and sensors. Many of the proposed metamaterials however only work at limited wavelength ranges such as microwave frequencies.

Now, Kotaro Kajikawa and Yusuke Kobayashi of Tokyo Tech’s Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering report a way of making a cylinder invisible without a cloak for monochromatic illumination at optical frequency—a broader range of wavelengths, including those visible to the human eye.

Continue reading “Study opens a new route to achieving invisibility without using metamaterials” »

However, we are not there yet and we have to take it step-by-step, says Dr Anna Anund from the Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute (VTI). She and her team are developing sensor-based systems as part of the ADAS&ME project to move towards level three, in which the driver can rest and would only be expected to drive when the car requests it.

When you’re sleepy, stressed or have had a few drinks, you’re not in the best position to drive – or even make that decision. But automated cars could soon make that call for you.

The LG Wallpaper TV is the thinnest display I’ve ever seen or held. It’s thinner than a smartphone and I can easily pick up the 65-inch! It uses LG’s OLED technology so you’ve got super dark blacks, vibrant colors and the overall picture quality you’ve come to expect from OLED. Because the Wallpaper TV is so thin it connects to an external sound bar speaker for power and video connections. The speaker is louder than standard TV speakers and features Dolby Atmos capabilities.

LG Signature OLED TV W product page — http://geni.us/UnboxW7US
LG Signature OLED TV W on Amazon — http://geni.us/UnboxW7a

Continue reading “Unboxing The Mind Bending Wallpaper TV… — YouTube” »

Circa 2017

It’s there… and it’s not there.

Creating a lithium-ion battery that can charge in a matter of minutes but still operate at a high capacity is possible, according to research from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute just published in Nature Communications. This development has the potential to improve battery performance for consumer electronics, solar grid storage, and electric vehicles.

To read a man’s mind, first you have to outline his skull.

Last November, I watched a psychologist use a digital pen to draw the circumference of a man’s head. The coordinates of his brain were quickly mapped, pinpointing the precise areas within his skull that process emotions. Behind him, a massive magnetic mind-reader—a neuroimaging device called a magnetoencephalography, or MEG—emerged from the wall, funneling into an oversized white helmet. It took two scientists to slowly maneuver the apparatus into position around his head.

Continue reading “Inside the lab using mind-changing psychology experiments to solve the Israel-Palestine conflict” »

An electron spin resonance spectrometer using an artificial atom (a superconducting flux qubit) is realized, featuring both high sensitivity (400 spins/√Hz) and high spatial resolution (0.05 pL).

Hiraku Toida

Continue reading “A single superconducting artificial atom senses solid-state spins” »

In February, the CMS and MoEDAL collaborations at CERN signed an agreement to hand over to MoEDAL a section of the LHC beam pipe that was located inside CMS between 2008 and 2013. The delicate object, 6 metres long and made of beryllium, will now be sliced and fed into a highly precise magnetic sensors in order to allow MoEDAL to look for magnetic monopoles: hypothetical particles with only a single magnetic pole – north or south – unlike north-south dipoles we are familiar with.

Paul Dirac posited the existence of magnetic monopoles in 1931, and, although never observed, they could be produced in collisions within the LHC. They would not travel very far after being produced, binding with the beryllium nuclei of the beam pipe and remaining there awaiting discovery.

The MoEDAL collaboration will cut the beam pipe at a special facility at the Centre for Particle Physics at the University of Alberta in Canada and ship the pieces back across the Atlantic to ETH Zurich in Switzerland to look for electromagnetic anomalies in them. Many theories attempting to unify all of the known forces into a single force (so-called “Grand Unified Theories”) require the existence of monopoles and finding them could open the door to all-new physics.

Continue reading “LHC beam pipe to be mined for monopoles” »