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Category: energy – Page 429

‘Very Close’: Pentagon’s Death Laser Right Around the Corner

A new laser tag coming our way; however, this time when you’re tagged, you really are dead.

US officials tout the ‘unprecedented power’ of killing lasers to be released by 2023.

The US Army will deploy its first laser weapons by 2023, according to a recently released report.

Mary J. Miller, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Research and Technology, speaking before the House Armed Services Committee on Monday, stated that, “I believe we’re very close,” when asked about progress with directed-energy, or laser, weapons.

New Drone System Will Warn Aussie Swimmers of Great White Sharks

Image by www.travelbag.co.uk

Australia’s coast, being both great surf territory as well as a primo shark habitat, is getting a technological upgrade to keep the swimmer-fish twain from meeting: A shark-spotting drone nicknamed the “Little Ripper.”

A joint venture between Aussie philanthropist Ken Weldon and Aussie bank Westpac, the $250,000 battery-powered unmanned helicopter will be deployed in the skies above New South Wales. On Sunday, New South Wales Premier Mike Baird heralded the drone as the future of oceanic search and rescue.

The Little Ripper will be able to monitor the shore for an hour before its battery kaputs, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. It’s part of a push for non-lethal, greener shark attack deterrents in Australia, where encounters are reportedly rising. They’re still fairly rare — as of November, there were 14 shark attacks off the Australian coast in 2015, reports The Guardian — but that’s a spike from the typical average of five or so. A separate $16 million shark detection initiative in New South Wales also includes buoys with advanced sonar that can, according to its creators, detect sharks 90 percent of the time.

Quantum dot solids: a new era in electronics?

Connecting the dots: Playing ‘LEGO’ at the atomic scale to build atomically coherent quantum dot solids (credit: Kevin Whitham, Cornell University)

Just as the single-crystal silicon wafer forever changed the nature of communication 60 years ago, Cornell researchers hope their work with quantum dot solids — crystals made out of crystals — can help usher in a new era in electronics.

The team has fashioned two-dimensional superstructures out of single-crystal building blocks. Using a pair of chemical processes, the lead-selenium nanocrystals are synthesized into larger crystals, then fused together to form atomically coherent square superlattices.

Cornell University | Quantum dot solids

The difference between these and previous crystalline structures is the atomic coherence of each 5-nanometer crystal (a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter). They’re not connected by a substance between each crystal — they’re connected to each other directly. The electrical properties of these superstructures are potentially superior to existing semiconductor nanocrystals, with anticipated applications in energy absorption and light emission.

Researchers upgraded their smart glasses with a low-power multicore processor to employ stereo vision and deep-learning algorithms, making the user interface and experience more intuitive and convenient

K-Glass, smart glasses reinforced with augmented reality (AR) that were first developed by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in 2014, with the second version released in 2015, is back with an even stronger model. The latest version, which KAIST researchers are calling K-Glass 3, allows users to text a message or type in key words for Internet surfing by offering a virtual keyboard for text and even one for a piano.

Currently, most wearable head-mounted displays (HMDs) suffer from a lack of rich user interfaces, short battery lives, and heavy weight. Some HMDs, such as Google Glass, use a touch panel and voice commands as an interface, but they are considered merely an extension of smartphones and are not optimized for wearable smart glasses. Recently, gaze recognition was proposed for HMDs including K-Glass 2, but gaze is insufficient to realize a natural user interface (UI) and experience (UX), such as user’s gesture recognition, due to its limited interactivity and lengthy gaze-calibration time, which can be up to several minutes.

As a solution, Professor Hoi-Jun Yoo and his team from the Electrical Engineering Department recently developed K-Glass 3 with a low-power natural UI and UX processor to enable convenient typing and screen pointing on HMDs with just bare hands. This processor is composed of a pre-processing core to implement stereo vision, seven deep-learning cores to accelerate real-time scene recognition within 33 milliseconds, and one rendering engine for the display.

ATR 72 prototype tests all-electrical energy management system

European turboprop aircraft manufacturer ATR said a prototype ATR 72 conducted a demonstration flight to test an all-electrical energy management system that aims to optimize electrical power distribution.

The flight is the second the ATR 72 demonstration aircraft has flown as part of the European Union’s “Clean Sky Joint Undertaking” program. The first test flight by the ATR 72 prototype, conducted in July 2015, trialed “new and more effective composite insulation materials and new vibro-acoustic sensors integrated into a large panel of the ATR aircraft fuselage,” ATR said in a statement.

The manufacturer said the two demonstration flights “also tested new generation optical fibers for improved identification of micro-cracks and easier maintenance.”

Building Living, Breathing Supercomputers

The substance that provides energy to all the cells in our bodies, Adenosine triphosphate (ATP), may also be able to power the next generation of supercomputers. The discovery opens doors to the creation of biological supercomputers that are about the size of a book. That is what an international team of researchers led by Prof. Nicolau, the Chair of the Department of Bioengineering at McGill, believe. They’ve published an article on the subject earlier this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), in which they describe a model of a biological computer that they have created that is able to process information very quickly and accurately using parallel networks in the same way that massive electronic super computers do.

Except that the model bio supercomputer they have created is a whole lot smaller than current supercomputers, uses much less energy, and uses proteins present in all living cells to function.

Doodling on the back of an envelope

“We’ve managed to create a very complex network in a very small area,” says Dan Nicolau, Sr. with a laugh. He began working on the idea with his son, Dan Jr., more than a decade ago and was then joined by colleagues from Germany, Sweden and The Netherlands, some 7 years ago. “This started as a back of an envelope idea, after too much rum I think, with drawings of what looked like small worms exploring mazes.”

Photonic propulsion cuts Mars travel time

Recent advances in lasers suggest that we may see rockets propelled by light earlier than we had imagined. NASA scientist Philip Lubin and his team are working on a system that would use Earth-based lasers to allow space travel to far-away places in just a fraction of the time needed with current technology.

Using earth based lasers to push along a spacecraft instead of on board hydrocarbon-based fuel could dramatically reduce travel time to Mars, within our lifetime. Currently, it takes five months for a space craft to reach Mars. But, with photonic propulsion, it is likely that small crafts filled with experiments will reach Mars in just 3 days. Large spaceships with astronauts and life support systems will take only one month, which is about 20% of the duration of a current trip.

What’s next? Lubin believes that we may be able to send small crafts with scientific experiments to exoplanets as fast as 5% light speed in, perhaps, 30 years. Eventually, he claims that the technology will carry humans at speeds up to 20% light speed.

Read about it here.

Google robot opens doors, picks itself up after getting knocked over in crazy video

Boston Dynamics, a robotics company that Google bought back in 2013, has routinely wowed the world by releasing videos of robots that are growing ever closer to resembling the humanoid robots we see in science fiction movies. The company this week released what might be its craziest robot video yet that shows its next-generation Atlas robot opening doors on its own, walking through snowy terrains, and picking up 10-pound boxes. This is the move impressive robot design I’ve seen from Boston Dynamics yet, which is really saying something.

FROM EARLIER: Man buys $700 battery, discovers it’s just $30 worth of batteries stuffed in a big case

The robot starts out the video by coming to life and exiting Boston Dynamics’ headquarters on its own by opening up the front door…

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