Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: materials – Page 304

Interesting read; however, the author has limited his view to Quantum being only a computing solution when in fact it is much more. Quantum technology does offer faster processing power & better security; but, Quantum offers us Q-Dots which enables us to enrich medicines & other treatments, improves raw materials including fuels, even vegetation.

For the first time we have a science that cuts across all areas of technology, medical & biology, chemistry, manufacturing, etc. No other science has been able to achieve this like Quantum.

Also, the author in statements around being years off has some truth if we’re suggesting 7 yrs then I agree. However, more than 7 years I don’t agree especially with the results we are seeing in Quantum Networking.

Not sure of the author’s own inclusion on some of the Quantum Technology or Q-Dot experiements; however, I do suggest that he should look at Quantum with a broader lens because there is a larger story around Quantum especially in the longer term as well look to improve things like BMI, AI, longevity, resistent materials for space, etc/.

I recently read Seth Lloyd’s A Turing Test for Free Will — conveniently related to the subject of the blog’s last piece, and absolutely engrossing. It’s short, yet it makes a wonderful nuance in the debate over determinism, arguing that predictable functions can still have unpredictable outcomes, known as “free will functions.”

I had thought that the world only needed more funding, organized effort, and goodwill to solve its biggest threats concerning all of humanity, from molecular interactions in fatal diseases to accessible, accurate weather prediction for farmers. But therein lies the rub: to be able to tackle large-scale problems, we must be able to analyze all the data points associated to find meaningful recourses in our efforts. Call it Silicon Valley marketing, but data analysis is important, and fast ways of understanding that data could be the key to faster solution implementation.

Continue reading “Quantum Algorithms and Their Discontents” | >

Satellites and spacecraft are generally complex to build on the ground, expensive to launch and obsolete in a decade or less.

These objects end up floating in orbit around the planet contributing to the pollution surrounding the Earth. But what if there was an alternative?

That’s the question David Barnhart, director of USC’s Space Engineering Research Center and lead for the Space Systems and Technology group for the USC Information Sciences Institute, is contemplating. What if we could just “grow” spacecraft, repurpose a hybrid of inorganic and organic materials and even allow food to grow in space?

Read more

Graphene is too delicate to be produced commercially, but it seem that scientists have now stumbled upon the correct method of tuning it.

Graphene has many extraordinary properties. It is carbon, but it comes in the form of a two-dimensional, atomic thick, honeycomb lattice.

Remarkably, it is 100 times stronger than the strongest steel known to man, and is a very efficient conductor of heat and electricity. The possible applications for graphene-based electronics are myriad: they include better solar cells, OLEDs, batteries and supercapacitors, and they can also be used to make faster microchips that run on very little power.

Read more

Sometimes, it seems like the tech world is inexorably bending towards a future full of curved devices. At MWC in Barcelona, we saw yet another prototype display, this time from English firm FlexEnable. Now, this isn’t a working device of any kind — it’s essentially just a screen running a demo — and neither is FlexEnable a consumer electronics company. But the firm says its technology is ready to go, and it’s apparently in talks with unnamed hardware partners who want to make this sort of device a reality. How long until we see fully-fledged wristbands like this on the market? Eighteen months is the optimistic guess from FlexEnable’s Paul Cain.

The prototype uses plastic transistors to achieve its flexibility, creating what the company calls OLCD (organic liquid crystal display) screens. FlexEnable says these can achieve the same resolutions as regular LCD using the same amount of power, but, of course, they have that added flexibility. These transistors can be wrapped around pretty much anything, and also have uses outside of display technology. FlexEnable was also showing off thin flexible fingerprint sensors, suggesting they could be wrapped around a door handle to add security without it being inconvenient to the user.

The prototype we saw at MWC was encased in a stiff metal frame, like a lot of flexible displays, and although OLCD can flex a little, it’s not the sort of material you can endlessly bend and crease. That, says, Cain, will have to wait for flexible OLED displays, a technology that is going to need more development. Still, we are seeing truly flexible OLED prototypes popping up here and there, such as this device from Queen’s University, which lets you flex a screen to flick through the pages of a digital book. The future bends ever closer.

Read more

A major goal in renewable energy research is to harvest the energy of the sun to convert water into hydrogen gas, a storable fuel. Now, with a nanoparticle-based system, researchers have set a record for one of the half-reactions in this process, reporting 100% efficiency for the reduction of water to hydrogen (Nano Lett. 2016, DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.5b04813).

To make such water-splitting systems, researchers must find the right materials to absorb light and catalyze the splitting of water into hydrogen and oxygen. The two half-reactions in this process—the reduction of water to hydrogen gas, and the oxidation of water to oxygen gas—must be isolated from each other so their products don’t react and explode. “Completing the cycle in an efficient, stable, safe fashion with earth-abundant elements is an ongoing challenge,” says chemist Nathan S. Lewis of Caltech, who was not involved in this study.

Until recently, the efficiency of the reduction step had maxed out at 60%. One challenge is that electrons and positive charges formed in the light absorption process can rapidly recombine, preventing the electrons from reducing water molecules to form hydrogen. To overcome this problem, several years ago, Lilac Amirav of Technion–Israel Institute of Technology and her colleagues designed a nanoparticle-based system (J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 2010, DOI: 10.1021/jz100075c) that would physically separate the charges formed during photocatalysis.

Read more

Physicists have zoomed in on the transition that could explain why copper-oxides have such impressive superconducting powers.

Settling a 20-year debate in the field, they found that a mysterious quantum phase transition associated with the termination of a regime called the “pseudogap” causes a sharp drop in the number of conducting electrons available to pair up for superconductivity. The team hypothesizes that whatever is happening at this point is probably the reason that cuprates support superconductivity at much higher temperatures than other materials—about half way to .

“It’s very likely that the reason superconductivity grows in the first place, and the reason it grows so strongly, is because of that ,” CIFAR Senior Fellow Louis Taillefer (Université de Sherbrooke) says. The new findings are published in Nature.

Read more

Anjan Contractor’s 3D food printer might evoke visions of the “replicator” popularized in Star Trek, from which Captain Picard was constantly interrupting himself to order tea. And indeed Contractor’s company, Systems & Materials Research Corporation, just got a six month, $125,000 grant from NASA to create a prototype of his universal food synthesizer.

But Contractor, a mechanical engineer with a background in 3D printing, envisions a much more mundane—and ultimately more important—use for the technology. He sees a day when every kitchen has a 3D printer, and the earth’s 12 billion people feed themselves customized, nutritionally-appropriate meals synthesized one layer at a time, from cartridges of powder and oils they buy at the corner grocery store. Contractor’s vision would mean the end of food waste, because the powder his system will use is shelf-stable for up to 30 years, so that each cartridge, whether it contains sugars, complex carbohydrates, protein or some other basic building block, would be fully exhausted before being returned to the store.

Ubiquitous food synthesizers would also create new ways of producing the basic calories on which we all rely. Since a powder is a powder, the inputs could be anything that contain the right organic molecules. We already know that eating meat is environmentally unsustainable, so why not get all our protein from insects?

Read more