Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: engineering – Page 53

An international team of scientists is rethinking the basic principles of radiation physics with the aim of creating super-bright light sources. In a new study published in Nature Photonics, researchers from the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) in Portugal, the University of Rochester, the University of California, Los Angeles, and Laboratoire d’Optique Appliquée in France proposed ways to use quasiparticles to create light sources as powerful as the most advanced ones in existence today, but much smaller.

Quasiparticles are formed by many moving in sync. They can travel at any speed—even faster than light—and withstand intense forces, like those near a black hole.

“The most fascinating aspect of quasiparticles is their ability to move in ways that would be disallowed by the laws of physics governing individual particles,” says John Palastro, a senior scientist at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and an associate professor at the Institute of Optics.

Read more | >

The Georgia Institute of Technology course teaches engineering students to create art using brainwaves, either their own or someone else’s.

An uncanny course is being taught in the halls of the Georgia Institute of Technology. While the course, called Arts and Geometry, itself isn’t uncanny, it’s the distinct approach taken by the professor that is making waves, literally and figuratively.

The course teaches engineering students to create art using brainwaves, either their own or someone else’s. When the ions and neurons go about their business inside our brains, brainwaves are created in a pattern of electrical activity in the brain.

Read more | >

Nanozymes are synthetic materials that mimic the properties of natural enzymes for applications in biomedicine and chemical engineering. Historically, they are generally considered too toxic and expensive for use in agriculture and food science. Now, researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have developed a nanozyme that is organic, non-toxic, environmentally friendly, and cost effective.

In a newly published paper, they describe its features and its capacity to detect the presence of glyphosate, a common agricultural herbicide. Their goal is to eventually create an user-friendly test kit for consumers and agricultural producers.

“The word nanozyme is derived from nanomaterial and enzyme. Nanozymes were first developed about 15 years ago, when researchers found that may perform catalytic activity similar to natural enzymes (peroxidase),” explained Dong Hoon Lee, a doctoral student in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering (ABE), part of the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) and The Grainger College of Engineering at U. of I.

Read more | >

Researchers at Tokyo Tech have demonstrated that in-cell engineering is an effective method for creating functional protein crystals with promising catalytic properties. By harnessing genetically altered bacteria as a green synthesis platform, the researchers produced hybrid solid catalysts for artificial photosynthesis.

Photosynthesis is how plants and some microorganisms use sunlight to synthesize carbohydrates from carbon dioxide and water.

Read more | >

Ceramic nanowires could essentially be used even for car tires reducing even hazardous rubber waste.

A team of MIT-led engineers found a simple, inexpensive way to strengthen Inconel 718 with ceramic nanowires to be used in metal PBF AM processes. The team believes that their general approach could be used to improve many other materials. “There is always a significant need for the development of more capable materials for extreme environments. We believe that this method has great potential for other materials in the future,” said Ju Li, the Battelle Energy Alliance Professor in Nuclear Engineering and a professor in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE).

Li, who is also affiliated with the Materials Research Laboratory (MRL), is one of three corresponding authors of a paper on the work that appeared in the April 5 issue of Additive Manufacturing. The other corresponding authors are Professor Wen Chen of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Professor A. John Hart of the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Co-first authors of the paper are Emre Tekoğlu, an MIT postdoc in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE); Alexander D. O’Brien, an NSE graduate student; and Jian Liu of UMass Amherst. Additional authors are Baoming Wang, an MIT postdoc in DMSE; Sina Kavak of Istanbul Technical University; Yong Zhang, a research specialist at the MRL; So Yeon Kim, a DMSE graduate student; Shitong Wang, an NSE graduate student; and Duygu Agaogullari of Istanbul Technical University. The study was supported by Eni S.p. A. through the MIT Energy Initiative, the National Science Foundation, and ARPA-E.

Read more | >

With the successful development of the Jiuzhang 3.0 quantum computer prototype, which makes use of 255 detected photons, China continues to hold a world-leading position in the field of quantum computer research and development, lead scientists for the program told the Global Times on Wednesday.

The research team, composed of renowned quantum physicists Pan Jianwei and Lu Chaoyang from the University of Science and Technology of China in collaboration with the Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the National Parallel Computer Engineering Technology Research Center, announced the successful construction of a 255-photon-based prototype quantum computer named Jiuzhang 3.0 early Wednesday morning.

The quantum computing feat accomplished by the team of talents achieves a speed that is 10 quadrillion times faster in solving Gaussian boson sampling (GBS) problems compared with the world’s fastest supercomputers.

Read more | >

Researchers from the Institute of Process Engineering (IPE) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Kyoto University have proposed a strategy to grow “face-on” and “edge-on” conductive metal-organic frameworks (cMOF) nanofilms on substrates by controlling the “stand-up” behaviors of ligands on various surfaces to overcome the difficulty in the orientation control of such films.

They established operando characterization methodology using and X-ray to demonstrate the softness of the crystalline nanofilms and reveal their unique conductive functions. The study was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Sept. 25.

CMOFs have great potential for use in modern electrical devices due to their porous nature and the ability to conduct charges in a regular network. cMOFs applied in normally hybridize with other materials, especially substrates. Therefore, precisely controlling the between a cMOF and a substrate is crucial.

Read more | >

Researchers who have been working for years to understand electron arrangement and magnetism in certain semimetals have been frustrated by the fact that the materials only display magnetic properties if they are cooled to just a few degrees above absolute zero.

A new MIT study led by Mingda Li, associate professor of nuclear science and engineering, and co-authored by Nathan Drucker, a graduate research assistant in MIT’s Quantum Measurement Group and Ph.D. student in applied physics at Harvard University, along with Thanh Nguyen and Phum Siriviboon, MIT graduate students working in the Quantum Measurement Group, is challenging that conventional wisdom.

The open-access research, published in Nature Communications, for the first time shows evidence that topology can stabilize , even well above the magnetic transition temperature—the point at which normally breaks down.

Read more | >

Quantum communications have rapidly progressed toward practical, large-scale networks based on quantum key distributions that spearhead the process. Quantum key distribution systems typically include a sender “Alice,” a receiver “Bob,” who generate a shared secret from quantum measurements for secure communication. Although fiber-based systems are well-suited for metropolitan scale, a suitable fiber infrastructure might not always be in place.

In a new report in npj Quantum Information, Andrej Kržič and a team of scientists developed an entanglement-based, free-space quantum . The platform offered a practical and efficient alternative for metropolitan applications. The team introduced a free-space quantum key distribution system to demonstrate its use in realistic applications in anticipation of the work to establish free-space networks as a viable solution for metropolitan applications in the future global quantum internet.

Quantum communication typically aims to distribute quantum information between two or more parties. A series of revolutionary applications of quantum networks have provided a roadmap towards engineering a full-blown quantum internet. The proposed invention provides a heterogeneous network of special purpose sub-networks with diverse links and interconnects. The concept of quantum key distribution networks have driven this development to pave the way for other distributed processing methods to benchmark the technological maturity of quantum networks in general.

Read more | >