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Category: mobile phones – Page 101

Forever Battery: QuantumScape’s Holy Grail of Energy

A “forever battery” is much smaller and more energy-dense than lithium-ion. They’ll change the world and unlock a trillion-dollar revolution.

In this week’s episode, Aaron and I discuss what could be the “holy grail” of energy: the solid-state — or forever battery. Obviously, lithium-ion cells are the status quo of today. And they power pretty much everything, like your smartphone, laptop and electric vehicle.

However, since they comprise liquids and can only be compressed so much, they aren’t the most energy-dense. And we see this limitation all around us. It’s why that EV in your parking space can’t drive long ranges or recharge very fast. And it’s why that smartphone in your pocket will run out of juice by the end of the day.

The truth about the EV Revolution that’s got everyone hyped is that it won’t boom until we make better batteries. Enter solid-state battery technology — much smaller, more effective and energy-dense than its liquid-state counterparts. This “forever battery,” as insiders have dubbed it, will fundamentally alter the way things work in society. And it’ll unlock a potentially multi-trillion-dollar revolution in the process.

A portable wind turbine that fits in your backpack? Yes please

Canadian company Aurea has developed a portable wind turbine that fits in your backpack. Called Shine, it weighs just three pounds, it’s about the size of a water bottle, and it can charge any USB device, or up to four phones (though not at the same time). The turbine is shaped a bit like a mini Zeppelin. It features three gently curved blades that fold out like flower petals and a collapsible tripod that is stored inside. The product launched on Kickstarter last year and on Indigogo last week. It has raised over $270,000 so far and will be shipping in a matter of months–just in time for camping season.

Humans have been harnessing the wind for centuries, but it has always required massive infrastructure, be it windmills or wind turbines. In recent years, engineers and designers alike have taken it upon themselves to reinvent the technology by playing with scale and form (think wind turbines integrated into walls or giant grids made of tiny turbines). But Aurea’s founders had a different goal in mind: Make wind power portable.

Shine can be used during a blackout at home, and serve anyone who needs access to energy while not attached to the grid. But its most likely users are going to be campers, RVers, and nomads, making weight a crucial factor. “People said, ‘We won’t carry it if it weighs more than three pounds,’” says Cat Adaley, a mechanical engineer who founded Aurea in 2017 and developed Shine with entrepreneur Rachel Carr. “Every design feature was weighed.” (The battery makes up a third of the weight, and the turbine is made of polycarbonate reinforced plastic with a glass composite; the tripod is aluminum.) All of this helped the founders create a portable turbine that has the highest power to weight ratio of any renewable energy at this scale, Adaley says.

Apple, Google and Microsoft team up on passwordless logins

On the “World Password Day”, which was on May 5, Google, Microsoft and Apple joined hands to “kill” the password.

The three technology giants have vowed to create a future where your phone will be the primary source of online authentication. The new standard is being referred to as “muti-device FIDO credential”.

In a rare show of alliance, Apple, Google and Microsoft have joined forces to expand support for passwordless logins across mobile, desktop and browsers.

Passwords are notoriously insecure, with weak and easily guessable credentials accounting for more than 80% of all data breaches, per Verizon’s annual data breach report. While password managers and multi-factor technologies offer incremental improvements, Apple, Google and Microsoft are working together to create sign-in technology that is more convenient and more secure.

Through the new system, users will be able to sign-in to their accounts “through the same action that they take multiple times each day to unlock their devices, such as a simple verification of their fingerprint or face, or a device PIN.”

The new approach would protect people against phishing and the logins would be more secure compared to passwords and legacy multi-factor technologies such as one-time passcodes sent over SMS\.

Continue reading “Apple, Google and Microsoft team up on passwordless logins” | >

Making Electricity Cheaper: A Cellphone-Sized Device Automatically Adjusts a Home’s Power Use to Save Money

A cellphone-sized device automatically adjusts a home’s power use up or down to save the consumer money and increase the resiliency of the electric grid.

The effects of climate change are pushing electrical grids around the world to their limits. Last year, unprecedented cold weather caused people in Texas to turn up their thermostats, which overwhelmed the power grid and caused days-long power outages. And in California, the power is turned off before there is a high possibility of a fire.

To combat the electric grid’s vulnerabilities and cut down on the use of non-renewable sources of energy, researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have developed technology that automatically adjusts a home’s power use up or down in response to fluctuating prices that are established by real-time market demand.

New Eye Drops Improve Aging Vision Without Glasses. Here’s How They Work

When people get into their 40s and beyond, their close-up vision starts to worsen. For many people, cranking up the font size on a phone or maxing out the brightness on a computer is the only way to be able to read some text.

This condition is known as presbyopia, and it affects around 128 million people in the US and more than a billion people worldwide.

In late 2021, the US Food and Drug Administration approved a new eye drop medication to treat presbyopia. As an optometrist, I was initially skeptical.

Scientist’s INSANE NEW Light Speed CPU Changes Everything!

Do you want your gadgets to be faster? What if your phone can cut the time it takes to.
complete tasks? Or your computer can compute way faster? Most of us do, but with the.
state of current technology, the truth is, they aren’t likely to get much faster than they.
are! For the past decade and a half, the clock rate of single processor cores has stalled.
at a few Gigahertz, and it is getting harder to push the boundaries of the famous.
Moore’s law! However, a new invention by IBM may change all of that! What are optical.
circuits, how do they work, and how will they make your devices faster? Join us as we.
dive into the new optical circuit that surpasses every CPU known to humans!

Disclaimer.
• Our channel is not associated with Elon Musk in ANY way and is purely made for entertainment purposes, based on facts, rumors and fiction. Enjoy Watching.

A clock beats inside the heart of every atom

In the pre-industrial age, people only needed to measure years and months to a fair amount of accuracy. The position of the sun in the sky was good enough to break up the day. Timing at the level of fractions of a second was simply not needed.

Eventually, modern industry arose. Fast-moving machines came to dominate human activity, and clocks required hands that could measure seconds. In the current era of digital technology, the timing of electronic circuitry means that millionths or billionths of a second actually matter. None of the high-tech stuff we need, from our phones to our cars, can be controlled or manipulated if we cannot keep close track of it. To make technology work, we need clocks that are faster than the timing of the machines we need to control. For today’s technology, that means we must be able to measure seconds, milliseconds, or even nanoseconds with astonishing accuracy.

Every timekeeping device works via a version of a pendulum. Something must swing back and forth to beat out a basic unit of time. Mechanical clocks used gears and springs. But metal changes shape as it heats or cools, and friction wears down mechanical parts. All of this limits the accuracy of these timekeeping machines. As the speed of human culture climbed higher, it demanded a kind of hyper-fast pendulum that would never wear down.