Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers find an unusual property of a bacteria that can breathe in metal.

Circa 2008

Using superconducting nanowires and lasers, a new camera system can produce high-resolution 3D images of objects from up to a kilometer away.

Apparently, military electronics can give away their location.

In recent years, researchers have been trying to develop new types of highly performing electronic devices. As silicon-based devices are approaching their maximum performance, they have recently started exploring the potential of fabricating electronics using alternative superconductors.

Two-dimensional (2-D) semiconductors, such as graphene or tungsten diselenide (WSe₂), are particularly promising for the development of electronics. Unfortunately, however, controlling the electronic properties of these materials can be very challenging, due to the limited amount of space within their lattices to incorporate impurity dopants (a process that is critical for controlling the carrier type and electronic properties of semiconductor materials).

Researchers at University of California, Los Angeles, have recently devised an approach that could enable the development of programmable devices made of 2-D semiconductors. This approach, presented in a paper published in Nature Electronics, leverages a superionic phase transition in silver iodide to tailor the carrier type within devices made of WSe₂ via a process called switchable ionic doping.

Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder are developing a wearable electronic device that’s “really wearable”—a stretchy and fully-recyclable circuit board that’s inspired by, and sticks onto, human skin.

The team, led by Jianliang Xiao and Wei Zhang, describes its new “electronic skin” in a paper published today in the journal Science Advances. The device can heal itself, much like real skin. It also reliably performs a range of sensory tasks, from measuring the body temperature of users to tracking their daily step counts.

And it’s reconfigurable, meaning that the device can be shaped to fit anywhere on your body.

O,.o!

Canon reveals new industrial cameras that can see in the dark, in illumination less than 0.0005 lux!

Point your phone’s camera at taking a picture and translate it… and the wizard in the app automatically translates the word(s) for you.

DARPA’s effort to track undersea life’s behavior as a means to detect enemy submarines has just entered its second phase. In the first phase, DARPA’s Persistent Aquatic Living Sensors (PALS) program sought to prove that sea life would respond to the presence of a submarine in a measurable way. With that seemingly confirmed, the second stage of the program will focus on developing sensors that can identify that behavior and relay a warning back to manned locations aboard a ship or onshore.

While the science is complex, the premise behind the PALS program is fairly simple. Undersea life tends to behave in a certain way when it senses the presence of a large and foreign object like a submarine. By broadly tracking the behavior of sea life, PALS aims to measure and interpret that behavior to make educated guesses about what must be causing it. In other words, by constantly tracking the behavior of nearby wildlife, PALS sensors can notice a significant change, compare it to a library of known behaviors, and predict a cause… like an enemy submarine, even if a submarine was stealthy enough to otherwise evade detection.

With enough data about how animals react to the presence of an enemy vessel as compared to how animals react to the presence of a large predator or more common undersea threat, PALS could serve as an early warning system when enemy subs approach.