Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: engineering – Page 2

Oobleck droplets reveal 5 ways cornstarch ‘goo’ behaves when hitting water

Cornstarch can thicken soup or serve as a base for a DIY shampoo, but there’s more to the humble pantry staple. Given the right conditions, it seems to defy the laws of physics. Mixing cornstarch with water creates “oobleck”—a shape-shifting substance classified as a non-Newtonian fluid that changes states when subjected to a force.

Leave it alone, and it oozes like liquid. Stir it up, and it gets more viscous before locking into a solid. Under certain conditions, if it’s punctured, it can even fracture, according to Northeastern University researchers. The thickening phenomenon is known as the oobleck effect.

Back in 1949, Seuss made oobleck famous as the “green goo” wreaking havoc on a fictional kingdom that a boy named Bartholomew endeavors to rescue. But today, Northeastern mechanical and industrial engineering scientist Xiaoyu Tang and Ph.D. student Boqian Yan are using the same mix of ingredients for a different purpose.

Reimagining the furnace: How a new magnetic design could supercharge industrial plasma

Imagine trying to trap a miniature star inside a machine without letting it touch the walls or burn itself out. This is the central, high-stakes challenge of high-temperature plasma engineering.

High-temperature plasma systems are crucial for modern industry. They serve as the foundation for manufacturing semiconductors, synthesizing advanced nanomaterials and testing materials meant for extreme environments. However, for decades, these systems have been held back by three major engineering bottlenecks: low energy-conversion efficiency, chaotic plasma instability and rapid material degradation caused by punishing heat.

In my recent paper published in IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science, I set out to tackle these limitations by designing a completely new type of non-nuclear reactor: the Spherical Magnetically Stabilized Plasma Furnace, or SMSPF. My initial goal was to step away from traditional linear or cylindrical reactor designs to see whether a spherical geometry could inherently solve containment issues.

New imaging method reveals how electric fields reshape ferroelectric materials

New research is shedding light on longstanding debates over the behavior of ferroelectric materials when those materials are exposed to electric fields. The findings stem from the use of a novel technique that allows researchers to observe the real-time behavior of domain walls in ferroelectric materials as they are “poled” and “depoled.”

Ferroelectric materials are used in a wide range of technologies, from sensors to actuators, and their electrical properties are critical to their utility. It’s well established that you can bring the various domains in a ferroelectric material into alignment by applying an electric field—either direct current (DC) or alternating current (AC). This is called “poling.” However, there has been significant debate about what exactly is taking place during the poling process.

“We’re now able to observe what is happening in real time, which gives us deeper insights into the mechanisms at play—which will inform our ability to engineer materials in order to produce the electrical characteristics we’re looking for,” says Jun Liu, co-corresponding author of two papers on the work and an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at North Carolina State University.

3D-printed battery electrolyte could let devices store power in almost any shape

Researchers at The University of Texas at El Paso have developed a way to 3D-print an essential battery component in nearly any shape. Their innovation could free engineers from the constraints of standard rechargeable battery sizes and allow energy storage to be built directly into the devices the batteries power.

The work, detailed in a study published in Communications Engineering, centers on gel polymer electrolytes, the material inside a battery that carries the ions (the particles that carry the electrical charge) between the electrodes—the two terminals where chemical reactions occur and electricity enters or leaves the battery.

From liquid limits to printable gel Conventional electrolytes are liquids that must be sealed inside rigid casings, a design that limits battery shapes and raises safety concerns about leaks. The UTEP team instead created a printable gel by combining a light-curable resin with a lithium-based liquid electrolyte, then hardening it layer by layer using a technique called vat photopolymerization.

New CRISPR method makes it possible to control protein production in cells

The speed at which a cell produces proteins is a decisive factor in determining whether it divides, specializes or retains its stem cell properties. A team of researchers led by Professor Stefan H. Stricker, professor of epigenetic engineering at LMU’s Biomedical Center and research group leader at Helmholtz Munich, has worked with international partners to demonstrate directly for the first time that the amount of ribosomal RNA (rRNA) directly regulates these processes. Their results were published in the journal Science.

It has been established for some time that the amount of ribosomal RNA differs among different types of cells and is altered in a number of diseases. But it remained unclear whether these specific characteristics are the cause or merely the result of biological processes.

With the newly developed CRISPR-based method TAPIR (Targeted Activation of Protein Translation), researchers now have access to a tool that can boost the activity of ribosomal genes and, as a result, influence a cell’s protein production. “Our new study shows that targeted activation of rRNA production significantly increases protein synthesis,” explains Stricker, lead author of the publication.

Why some glasses break suddenly while others deform smoothly

If a liquid is cooled slowly to its freezing point, it becomes a crystal in which the constituent particles are arranged in an ordered pattern. In contrast, when the liquid is cooled very quickly, the particles are unable to arrange themselves in an ordered fashion, and it becomes glass. Glassy materials are all around us in everyday life. Common examples include window glass, certain metal alloys, polymers, foams, gels and even soft materials like emulsions and colloids.

These materials can behave very differently when an external force is applied to them, such as bending, stretching or compressing. Some materials change shape slowly and smoothly under strain (this property is called ductility). Some materials may resist deformation at first but then suddenly break or crack without warning (this property is called brittleness). Whether a material bends or breaks determines how safely and reliably it can be used in everyday objects and engineering applications.

Scientists broadly classify glasses into two types: strong and fragile glasses.

X-pinch plasma achieves radial proton acceleration for crisp imaging

Plasma pinches: From pursuits of nuclear fusion to an attractive point source of accelerated protons for proton radiography.

Protons accelerated in a radial direction were discovered and used for the first time from pinch plasmas—current-carrying plasma columns compressed by their own magnetic field—according to a study led by the Czech Technical University in Prague and University of Michigan Engineering.

The researchers accelerated protons to 3 mega electron volts (MeV) on relatively small-scale devices operating at a 400-kiloampere (kA) peak current. This expands access to proton radiography, a technique for imaging the ultra-fast evolution of electric and magnetic fields in plasma, once limited to sophisticated, expensive and often massive laser facilities like the OMEGA and OMEGA-EP laser systems at the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics.

Five Billion Years into Humanity’s Future

Enjoying this video? Dive even deeper into the world of science and discovery with Popular Science, the free streaming channel bringing you more of what you love from What If, plus epic explorations in engineering, rocket launches, movies, space, and Earth sciences https://underknown.com/popularscience/

Support us on Patreon: / membership.

00:00 What If Earth Became a Type III Civilization?
21:54 The Entire Kardashev Scale Explained in 20 Minutes.
39:10 What If We Relocated Humanity to Proxima B?
47:12 What If NASA Built a Moon City by 2032?
1:08:49 What If We Built a Dyson Sphere Around the Sun?
1:11:23 What If We Made These Exoplanets Habitable?
1:32:21 What If You Traveled Five Billion Years Into the Future?

Check out our other channels:
How to Survive: https://bit.ly/how-to-survive-show.
Animalogic: / @animalogic.
Aperture: https://bit.ly/aperture-show.

T-shirts and merch: http://bit.ly/whatifstore.

What If elsewhere:

Continue reading “Five Billion Years into Humanity’s Future” | >

Accenture confirms breach after hacker offers stolen data for sale

IT services giant Accenture has confirmed it suffered a security breach after a threat actor claimed to have stolen 35 GB of source code and other data from the company.

“We are aware of this isolated matter, and we have remediated its source. There is no impact to Accenture operations and service delivery,” Accenture told BleepingComputer.

Accenture is a global professional services company that provides consulting, technology, cloud, engineering, and managed services to businesses and governments worldwide.

Steering light in a flash: New chip redirects light beams in less than a trillionth of a second

Light can carry enormous amounts of information at extreme speeds, making photonic technologies promising for the development of faster communications, more powerful computing systems and more sensitive sensors. But for light to be useful for these purposes, engineers need to be able to control where it goes and redirect it quickly. A new device built by Caltech researchers uses a beam of light to steer another to a different angle in just 74 femtoseconds (74 quadrillionths of a second). That’s about the time it takes light to travel the width of a human hair.

“Steering light with light is very challenging because light typically interacts very weakly with matter. Using optical metasurfaces (ultrathin carefully nanoengineered sheets), we can up the interaction strength to make this possible with much higher efficiency,” says Harry Atwater, the Howard Hughes Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science and the Otis Booth Leadership Chair of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science at Caltech.

The team describes the work in a paper published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. The paper’s lead author, Claudio Hail, completed the work as a postdoctoral scholar in Atwater’s lab at Caltech and is now an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley.

/* */