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Category: engineering – Page 153

Calling All Couch Potatoes: This Finger Wrap Can Let You Power Electronics While You Sleep

A new wearable device turns the touch of a finger into a source of power for small electronics and sensors. Engineers at the University of California San Diego developed a thin, flexible strip that can be worn on a fingertip and generate small amounts of electricity when a person’s finger sweats or presses on it.

What’s special about this sweat-fueled device is that it generates power even while the wearer is asleep or sitting still. This is potentially a big deal for the field of wearables because researchers have now figured out how to harness the energy that can be extracted from human sweat even when a person is not moving.

This type of device is the first of its kind, said co-first author Lu Yin, a nanoengineering Ph.D. student at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. “Unlike other sweat-powered wearables, this one requires no exercise, no physical input from the wearer in order to be useful. This work is a step forward to making wearables more practical, convenient and accessible for the everyday person.”

World’s deepest pool with underwater city, caves for exploration opens

It makes an Olympic swimming pool look like a puddle.

As if Dubai wasn’t filled with enough record-breaking attractions, the United Arab Emirates metropolis is now home to the world’s deepest pool, complete with an underwater city, caves and more.

“An entire world awaits you at Deep Dive Dubai, the world’s deepest pool,” wrote crown prince of Dubai Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, on Instagram. He was one of the first to visit the engineering marvel on July 7.

‘Angel Particle’ found which could lead to 100 MILLION times faster computers

Quantum computers could make modern day Macs look like the very first Commodore computer.

Initial tests on Google and NASA’s quantum computing system D-Wave showed that it was a staggering one hundred million times faster than a traditional desktop.

Hartmut Nevan, director of engineering at Google, claimed: “What a D-Wave does in a second would take a conventional computer 10000 years to do.”

Inside the Impossible Dream of the Nuclear-Powered 1958 Ford Nucleon

In 1958, Ford showed the world a car like it had never seen before, one powered by a small nuclear reactor. The Ford Nucleon, as it was christened, was envisioned as a car capable of driving more than 5000 miles between fueling stops, appealing to a postwar fixation with convenience that has dominated American consumerism since. Like some other midcentury nuclear fantasies, though, the Nucleon never came to fruition, in part due to engineering problems we still struggle with to this day.

Before we examine why the Nucleon could never be, let’s get a better grasp of the car itself, starting with its utterly comical dimensions. Ford’s press materials envisaged the Nucleon stretching 200.3 inches long and 77.4 wide, making it as long as the new Ford Maverick compact pickup, but slightly wider. Its roof was said to measure just 41.4 inches high, making it less than an inch taller than the legendarily low-slung Ford GT40.

Engineering Breakthrough Paves Way for Chip Components That Could Serve As Both RAM and ROM

Year after year, the explosive growth of computing power relies on manufacturers’ ability to fit more and more components into the same amount of space on a silicon chip. That progress, however, is now approaching the limits of the laws of physics, and new materials are being explored as potential replacements for the silicon semiconductors long at the heart of the computer industry.

New materials may also enable entirely new paradigms for individual chip components and their overall design. One long-promised advance is the ferroelectric field-effect transistor, or FE-FET. Such devices could switch states rapidly enough to perform computation, but also be able to hold those states without being powered, enabling them to function as long-term memory storage. Serving double duty as both RAM and ROM, FE-FET devices would make chips more space efficient and powerful.

The hurdle for making practical FE-FET devices has always been in manufacturing; the materials that best exhibit the necessary ferroelectric effect aren’t compatible with techniques for mass-producing silicon components due the high temperature requirements of the ferroelectric materials.

Speedy nanorobots could someday clean up soil and water, deliver drugs

University of Colorado Boulder researchers have discovered that minuscule, self-propelled particles called “nanoswimmers” can escape from mazes as much as 20 times faster than other passive particles, paving the way for their use in everything from industrial clean-ups to medication delivery.

The findings, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, describe how these tiny synthetic nanorobots are incredibly effective at escaping cavities within maze-like environments. These nanoswimmers could one day be used to remediate contaminated soil, improve water filtration or even deliver drugs to targeted areas of the body, like within dense tissues.

“This is the discovery of an entirely new phenomenon that points to a broad potential range of applications,” said Daniel Schwartz, senior author of the paper and Glenn L. Murphy Endowed Professor of chemical and biological engineering.

MIT Makes a Significant Advance Toward the Full Realization of Quantum Computation

MIT researchers demonstrate a way to sharply reduce errors in two-qubit gates, a significant advance toward fully realizing quantum computation.

MIT researchers have made a significant advance on the road toward the full realization of quantum computation, demonstrating a technique that eliminates common errors in the most essential operation of quantum algorithms, the two-qubit operation or “gate.”

“Despite tremendous progress toward being able to perform computations with low error rates with superconducting quantum bits (qubits), errors in two-qubit gates, one of the building blocks of quantum computation, persist,” says Youngkyu Sung, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science who is the lead author of a paper on this topic published on June 16, 2021, in Physical Review X. “We have demonstrated a way to sharply reduce those errors.”

New Fusion Engine Could Cut Travel Time To Mars Down To Six Weeks

Circa 2012 Dilithium crystal created.

Fusion Engine Space

Brace yourselves: Researchers at University of Huntsville in Alabama say they are using “Dilithium Crystals” in a new fusion impulse engine that could cut the travel time to Mars down to as little as six weeks, not the six months it takes now.

Txchnologist, an online magazine sponsored by General Electric, talked to team member and aerospace engineering PH.D. candidate Ross Cortez, he said “The fusion fuel we’re focusing on is deuterium [a stable isotope of hydrogen] and Li6 [a stable isotope of the metal lithium] in a crystal structure.”

“That’s basically dilithium crystals we’re using,” he said.

Helion Energy Achieves 100 Million Degrees Celsius Fusion Fuel Temperature and Confirms 16-Month Continuous Operation of Its Fusion Generator Prototype

REDMOND, Wash.—()—Helion Energy (Helion), a clean electricity company committed to creating a new era of clean energy through fusion, today became the first private company to announce exceeding 100 million degrees Celsius in their 6th fusion generator prototype, Trenta. Reaching this temperature is a critical engineering milestone as it is considered the ideal fuel temperature at which a commercial power plant would need to operate. Helion will be presenting these operational results at the 63rd Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics. See abstract below.

“These achievements represent breakthroughs with major implications for how the world meets its expanding future electricity needs while dramatically reducing climate impact on a relevant timescale” Tweet this

Helion also announced their Trenta prototype recently completed a 16-month testing campaign, which pushed fusion fuel performance to unprecedented levels and performed lifetime and reliability testing on key components of the fusion system. Helion will be presenting these results at the 2021 IEEE Pulsed Power Conference & Symposium on Fusion Engineering. See abstract below.

Scientists at LIGO are one step closer to solving general relativity’s biggest problem

Scientists are one step closer to solving general relativity’s biggest problem.

To do this, scientists used a new kind of observatory called LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) that is fine-tuned to hunt for small disturbances in the fabric of spacetime caused by cosmic collisions, like black hole or neutron star mergers.

But this is only just the beginning of what LIGO can do, a team of international researchers reports in a new study published Thursday in the journal Science. Using new techniques to quantum cool LIGO’s mirrors, the team says that LIGO may soon also help them understand the quantum states of human-sized objects instead of just subatomic particles.

Vivishek Sudhir is a coauthor on the paper and assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He tells Inverse that physicists have long theorized that gravity may be the culprit behind why large items don’t exhibit quantum behavior.

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