Lifeboat Foundation

Already, 1,000 smart city pilots are under construction or in their final urban planning stages across the globe, driving forward countless visions of the future.

As data becomes the gold of the 21st century, centralized databases and hyper-connected infrastructures will enable everything from sentient cities that respond to data inputs in real time to smart public services that revolutionize modern governance.

Connecting countless industries—real estate, energy, sensors and networks, and transportation, among others—tomorrow’s cities pose no end of creative possibilities and stand to completely transform the human experience.

Continue reading “The Smart Cities of the Future Are Already Taking Off” »

A trio of researchers at Columbia University has found more evidence showing that sound waves carry mass. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, Angelo Esposito, Rafael Krichevsky and Alberto Nicolis describe using effective field theory techniques to confirm the results found by a team last year attempting to measure mass carried by sound waves.

For many years physicists have felt confident that sound waves carry energy—but there was no evidence to suggest they also carry mass. There seemed to be no reason to believe that they would generate a gravitational field. But that changed last year when Nicolis and another physicist Riccardo Penco found evidence that suggested conventional thinking was wrong. They had used quantum field theory to show that sound waves moving through superfluid helium carried a small amount of mass with them. More specifically, they found that phonons interacted with a gravitational field in a way that forced them to carry mass along as they moved through the material. In this new effort, the researchers report evidence that suggests the same results hold true for most materials.

Using effective field theory, they showed that a single-watt sound wave that moved for one second in water would carry with it a mass of approximately 0.1 milligrams. They further note that the mass was found to be a fraction of the total mass of a system that moved with the wave, as it was displaced from one site to another.

Testing a rail gun in the middle of a field has never been so fun! This rail gun includes 9-volt batteries as a portable source of power to charge the capacitors. The capacitors provide instantaneous amperage to the rail gun. When triggered, the rail gun fires an aluminum projectile.

And, it’s a success! The first test, run at 350 volts, successfully fires the projectile. The team will have to make some modifications for the next phase. Any suggestions for making the capacitors or the cables more stable?

Continue reading “Fire Light Speed Power Electric Railgun” »

Under normal electron band theory, Mott insulators ought to conduct electricity, but they do not due to interactions among their electrons. But now, scientists from the RIKEN Cluster for Pioneering Research have shown that pulses of light could be used to turn these materials beyond simple conductors to superconductors—materials that conduct electricity without energy loss. This process would happen through an unconventional type of superconductivity known as “eta pairing.”

Using numerical simulations, the researchers found that this unconventional type of conductivity, which is believed to take place under non-equilibrium conditions in strongly correlated materials such as high-Tc cuprates and iron-pnictides, arises due to a phenomenon known as eta pairing. This is different from the superconductivity observed in the same strongly correlated materials under equilibrium conditions, and is thought to involve repulsive interactions between certain electrons within the structure. It is also different from traditional superconductivity, where the phenomenon arises due to interactions between electrons and vibrations of the crystal structure, inducing mutual interactions between electrons through vibrations and thus overcoming the repulsion between the electrons.

Thirty years ago, the mathematical physicist Chen-Ning Yang originally proposed the idea of eta-pairing, but because it was a purely mathematical concept, it was understood as a virtual phenomenon that would not take place in the real world. But for the present study, the researchers used non-equilibrium dynamics to analyze the effect of pulses of light on a Mott insulator, and found that the effect would in fact happen in the real world. “What is interesting,” says first author Tatsuya Kaneko, a postdoctoral researcher at the RIKEN Cluster for Pioneering Research, “is that our calculations showed that this takes place based on the beautiful mathematical structure that Yang and his followers formulated so many years ago.”

When was the last time you thought about your breathing? Take a breath right now and think about it. You breathe because you need oxygen, a gas which makes up 21 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere. All that oxygen has to come from somewhere. You might already know that it comes from photosynthetic organisms like plants. But did you know that most of the oxygen you breathe comes from organisms in the ocean?

That’s right—more than half of the oxygen you breathe comes from marine photosynthesizers, like phytoplankton and seaweed. Both use carbon dioxide, water and energy from the sun to make food for themselves, releasing oxygen in the process. In other words, they photosynthesize. And they do it in the ocean.

Continue reading “With Every Breath You Take, Thank the Ocean” »

The attack threatens users with location-tracking, DoS, fake notifications and more.

Privacy-breaking flaws in the 4G and 5G mobile protocols could allow attackers to intercept calls, send fake amber alerts or other notifications, track location and more, according to a research team from Purdue University and the University of Iowa.

In a paper presented at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, the researchers explained that the issues arise from weaknesses in the cellular paging (broadcast) protocol. They started with the fact that when a mobile device is in its idle, low-power state, it will conserve battery life partly by polling for pending services only periodically.

Mice with vision enhanced by nanotechnology were able to see infrared light as well as visible light, reports a study published February 28 in the journal Cell. A single injection of nanoparticles in the mice’s eyes bestowed infrared vision for up to 10 weeks with minimal side effects, allowing them to see infrared light even during the day and with enough specificity to distinguish between different shapes. These findings could lead to advancements in human infrared vision technologies, including potential applications in civilian encryption, security, and military operations.

Injectable photoreceptor-binding nanoparticles with the ability to convert photons from low-energy to high-energy forms allow mice to develop infrared vision without compromising their normal vision and associated behavioral responses.

Phinergy is a leading developer of breakthrough, absolutely zero emission, high energy density systems based on metal air energy technologies, mainly Aluminum-Air and Zinc-Air. Unlike conventional batteries that carry oxygen, these batteries freely breathe oxygen from the ambient air to release the energy contained in metals.

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Category: Innovation

Continue reading “Say Goodbye to Arab Oil and Hello to Israel’s Car That Runs on Air and Water” »

Energy storage could prove an inexpensive way for power companies to handle heat waves and other times when consumers use more electricity than usual.