Lifeboat Foundation

Push materials to their limits, and strange things can occur – such as the discovery of a previously unknown phase of liquid, which has been reported by scientists looking at the development of super-thin, high-density glass.

These types of glass are used in a variety of ways, including in OLED displays and optical fibers, but they can have stability problems. It’s through an effort to tackle those problems that this different type of material has come to light.

Crucially, the newly discovered liquid phase promises thin glass that’s more stable and denser than the materials that have come before – a progression that could open up different ways of using the glass, and even completely new types of devices.

Ever since Star Wars brought podracing and flying motorcycles to the forefront of TV, it’s fair to say most people have wanted to fly one. Luckily, we truly are entering an era of flying vehicles – after all, flying cars will be raced around a track by the end of the year – and flying motorcycles are next on that list.

Jetpack Aviation’s “The Speeder” is the answer to all our sci-fi prayers. A jet turbine-powered motorcycle that looks more like a flying jet ski, this new vehicle prototype has just completed the first test flight that will enable it to go into the next stage of production.

While it isn’t necessarily the completed vehicle that took flight, the company was testing its VTOL self-stabilizing jet platform that will make the basis for their Speeder vehicle. The tests showed it could hover, turn, move in various directions, and right itself after being knocked – all incredibly difficult feats when working with four jet engines.

Stretchable electrodes are essential components for wearable electronics. However, the stretchability of the electrodes is often achieved with the sacrifice of electronic conductivity along with huge variation in resistance. In this work, stretchable metallic glass electrodes (MG-electrodes) that have both h.

A new $7.9 million seed round boosts Butlr Technologies’ ability to apply its real-time people-sensing technology beyond commercial real estate and retail uses to monitor falls and other movements for active seniors who are aging in place.

Hyperplane led the round, with Founder Collective, Union Labs, 500 Startups, SOSV, E14 Fund, Tectonic Ventures, Scott Belsky, Chad Laurans and Sunny Vu participating.

The new funding comes one year after the Burlingame, California-based proptech company raised $1.2 million in convertible notes, which is included in the $7.9 million. It is developing a platform and Heatic sensors that detect someone’s body heat anonymously to determine occupancy, headcount and activity.

Fluorescent sensors glow brightly under UV light if infection starts to set in. Researchers have developed smart wound dressings with built-in nanosensors that glow to alert patients when a wound is not healing properly.

The multifunctional, antimicrobial dressings feature fluorescent sensors that glow brightly under UV light if infection starts to set in and can be used to monitor healing progress.

The smart dressings, developed by a team of scientists and engineers at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, harness the powerful antibacterial and antifungal properties of magnesium hydroxide.

Performance recovered!

Making good on its promise, Western Digital has deployed a new firmware for the company’s WD Black SN850 SSD, which is currently one of the best SSDs on the market. The latest firmware will restore the SN850’s write performance when the drive is installed on a M.2 slot that’s connected to AMD’s X570 chipset.

The SN850 is one of the fastest SSDs around right now. However, users were reporting a performance loss of over 40% if the SSD resided on a M.2 slot that doesn’t directly communicate with the Ryzen processor. We don’t see the issue affecting users that have the SN850 as their primary drive. But for users that have multiple SSDs and have the SN850 on an M.2 slot linked to the AMD X570 chipset, it could be a huge problem.

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Micron pops the parachute.

Micron announced today that it has entered into a definitive agreement to sell its Lehi, Utah fab to Texas Instruments for $900 million in cash. In March, Micron announced that it planned to sell off the fab, bringing an end to its production of the radical new 3D XPoint (Optane) memory technology that it developed with Intel. Texas Instruments plans to deploy its own technologies at the site, meaning that it will not be used for 3D XPoint production. Intel currently doesn’t have any known high-volume production of the strategically important storage/memory media. However, it is known to produce a small amount of the media for research and validation at its New Mexico facility. As a result, Intel will likely have to establish its own production lines to ensure the supply of its Optane based SSDs and persistent memory DIMMs for its data center clients, though demand has seemed tepid.

Micron chose to exit 3D XPoint manufacturing due to lackluster demand that the company said had “insufficient market validation to justify the ongoing high levels of investments required to successfully commercialize 3D XPoint at scale.” The company recently divulged that it lost $400 million this year alone due to the lack of demand for 3D XPoint.

Continue reading “Micron to Sell 3D XPoint Fab to Texas Instruments for $900 Million” »

Bismuth has been around for thousands of years, yet it’s only been used in a handful of applications — and mostly to treat stomach ailments. But as the world looks for cleaner and safer energy, bismuth might soon become the star of the heavy metals family.

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In principle, any pitch-shifting technique may be employed, provided that the frequency-dependent parameters analysed from the ultrasonic sound-field are mapped correctly to the frequency scale of the pitch-shifted signal. Since the spatial parameters are averaged over frequency in the currently employed configuration of the device, the frequency mapping is not required in this case. Instead, each time frame of the pitch shifted signal is spatialised according to a frequency-averaged direction. The pitch-shifting technique used for the application targeted in this article should be capable of large pitch-shifting ratios, while also operating within an acceptable latency. Based on these requirements, the phase-vocoder approach^15,16 was selected for the real-time rendering in this study, due to its low processing latency and acceptable signal quality with large pitch-shifting ratios. However, the application of other pitch-shifting methods is also demonstrated with recordings processed off-line and described in the Results section.

In summary, the proposed processing approach permits frequency-modified signals to be synthesised with plausible binaural and monaural cues, which may subsequently be delivered to the listener to enable the localisation of ultrasonic sound sources. Furthermore, since the super-hearing device turns with the head of the listener, and the processing latency of the device was constrained to 44 ms, the dynamic cues should also be preserved. Note that the effect of processing latency has been previously studied in the context of head-tracked binaural reproduction systems, where it has been found that a system latency above 50–100 ms can impair the spatial perception^17,18. Therefore, it should be noted that a trade-off must be made between: attaining high spatial image and timbral quality (which are improved through longer temporal windows and a higher level of overlapping) and having low processing latency (which relies on shorter windows and reduced overlapping). The current processing latency has been engineered so that both the spatial image and audio quality after pitch-shifting, as determined based on informal listening, remain reasonably high.

One additional advantage of the proposed approach is that only a single signal is pitch shifted, which is inherently more computationally efficient than pitch-shifting multiple signals; as would be required by the three alternative suggestions described in the Introduction section. Furthermore, the imprinting of the spatial information onto the signal only after pitch-shifting, ensures that the directional cues reproduced for the listener are not distorted by the pitch-shifting operation. The requirements for the size of microphone array are also less stringent compared to the requirements for an Ambisonics-based system. In this work, an array with a diameter of 11 mm was employed, which has a spatial aliasing frequency of approximately 17 kHz. This therefore prohibits the use of Ambisonics for the ultrasonic frequencies with the present array. By contrast, the employed spatial parameter analysis can be conducted above the spatial aliasing frequency; provided that the geometry of the array is known and that the sensors are arranged uniformly on the sphere.