Engineering – Lifeboat News: The Blog

Mar 13
2023

Uneven Circuit Aging Becoming A Bigger Problem

The industry is gaining ground in understanding how aging affects reliability, but more variables make it harder to fix.

Circuit aging is emerging as a first-order design challenge as engineering teams look for new ways to improve reliability and ensure the functionality of chips throughout their expected lifetimes.

The need for reliability is obvious in data centers and automobiles, where a chip failure could result in downtime or injury. It also is increasingly important in mobile and consumer electronics, which are being used for applications such as in-home health monitoring or for navigation, and where the cost of the devices has been steadily rising. But aging also needs to be assessed in the context of variation models from the foundries, different use cases that may stress various components in different ways, and different power and thermal profiles, all of which makes it harder to accurately predict how a chip will behave over time.

Mar 13
2023

New MIT/Caltech Ingestible Sensor Could Help Doctors Pinpoint GI Difficulties

The sensor sends out its location as it moves through the GI tract, revealing where slowdowns in digestion may occur.

Engineers at MIT

MIT is an acronym for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is a prestigious private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts that was founded in 1861. It is organized into five Schools: architecture and planning; engineering; humanities, arts, and social sciences; management; and science. MIT’s impact includes many scientific breakthroughs and technological advances. Their stated goal is to make a better world through education, research, and innovation.

Mar 12
2023

Using large language models (LLMs) to synthesize training data

Prompt engineering enables researchers to generate customized training examples for lightweight “student” models.

Mar 11
2023

‘World’s largest electrolyzer’ has the shape of a multi-bit screwdriver

HydrogenPro.

HydrogenPro’s electrolyzer will be assembled and installed in the coming weeks, according to a press release published by Chemical Engineering on Wednesday.

Mar 10
2023

New High-Speed Propulsion System Paves Way for Hypersonic Flight up to Mach 16

We humans have a wonderful ability to keep developing, innovating, and engineering bigger, better, and faster contraptions. Close to Earth, we’ve been soaring through the skies in airplanes since 1903 thanks to the Wright brothers, and we’ve been launching spacecraft into space since 1957 when the Soviet Union rocketed the Sputnik satellite above our heads.

The team discovered a way of stabilizing detonation for hypersonic propulsion by creating a hypersonic reaction chamber for jet propulsions.

Mar 10
2023

What Is Nanotechnology?

Nanotechnology is a field of science and engineering that focuses on the design and manufacture of extremely small devices and structures.

Mar 9
2023

Viable superconducting material created at low temperature and low pressure

In a historic achievement, University of Rochester researchers have created a superconducting material at both a temperature and pressure low enough for practical applications.

“With this material, the dawn of ambient superconductivity and applied technologies has arrived,” according to a team led by Ranga Dias, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and physics. In a paper in Nature, the researchers describe a nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride (NDLH) that exhibits superconductivity at 69 degrees Fahrenheit (20.5 degrees Celsius) and 10 kilobars (145,000 pounds per square inch, or psi) of pressure.

Although 145,000 psi might still seem extraordinarily high (pressure at sea level is about 15 psi), strain engineering techniques routinely used in chip manufacturing, for example, incorporate materials held together by internal chemical pressures that are even higher.

Mar 9
2023

A Brief History of Dirac Delta Function

From Cauchy to Dirac — A Century-Long Journey. “A Brief History of Dirac Delta Function” is published by Areeba Merriam in Cantor’s Paradise.

Mar 8
2023

Scientists invent superconductive material that works at practical temperatures

Ktsimage/iStock.

“With this material, the dawn of ambient superconductivity and applied technologies has arrived,” said the press release, which was published today by a team led by Ranga Dias, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and physics.

Mar 7
2023

Beyond COVID vaccines: what’s next for lipid nanoparticles?

Lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) transport small molecules into the body. The most well-known LNP cargo is mRNA, the key constituent of some of the early vaccines against COVID-19. But that is just one application: LNPs can carry many different types of payload, and have applications beyond vaccines.

Barbara Mui has been working on LNPs (and their predecessors, liposomes) since she was a PhD student in Pieter Cullis’s group in the 1990s. “In those days, LNPs encapsulated anti-cancer drugs,” says Mui, who is currently a senior scientist at Acuitas, the company that developed the LNPs used in the Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccine against SARS-CoV-2. She says it soon became clear that LNPs worked even better as carriers of polynucleotides. “The first one that worked really well was encapsulating small RNAs,” Mui recalls.

But it was mRNA where LNPs proved most effective, primarily because LNPs are comprised of positively charged lipid nanoparticles that encapsulate negatively charged mRNA. Once in the body, LNPs enter cells via endocytosis into endosomes and are released into the cytoplasm. “Without the specially designed chemistry, the LNP and mRNA would be degraded in the endosome,” says Kathryn Whitehead, professor in the departments of chemical engineering and biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.