Lifeboat Foundation

The rapid development of flexible and wearable electronics is giving rise to an exciting range of applications, from smart watches and flexible displays—such as smart phones, tablets, and TV—to smart fabrics, smart glass, transdermal patches, sensors, and more. With this rise, demand has increased for high-performance flexible batteries. Up to now, however, researchers have had difficulty obtaining both good flexibility and high energy density concurrently in lithium-ion batteries.

A team led by Yuan Yang, assistant professor of materials science and engineering in the department of applied physics and mathematics at Columbia Engineering, has developed a prototype that addresses this challenge: a Li-on battery shaped like the human spine that allows remarkable flexibility, high energy density, and stable voltage no matter how it is flexed or twisted. The study is published today in Advanced Materials.

“The energy density of our prototype is one of the highest reported so far,” says Yang. “We’ve developed a simple and scalable approach to fabricate a flexible spine-like lithium ion battery that has excellent electrochemical and mechanical properties. Our design is a very promising candidate as the first-generation, flexible, commercial lithium-ion battery. We are now optimizing the design and improving its performance.”

Continue reading “Engineers develop flexible lithium battery for wearable electronics” »

“Virtually every industry will be impacted by 5G ”.

There’s no excuse for phones with large bezels anymore.

Can’t get enough Google? You’re in luck.

The company, a division of Alphabet Inc., has announced that it will expand its Cloud services to five new regions, and build three new submarine cables to service its capacity needs.

SEE ALSO: Google wants your phone screen to double as a speaker.

Continue reading “Google will construct three new undersea cables in 2019” »

Today, at least 45 start-ups are working on chips that can power tasks like speech and self-driving cars, and at least five of them have raised more than $100 million from investors. Venture capitalists invested more than $1.5 billion in chip start-ups last year, nearly doubling the investments made two years ago, according to the research firm CB Insights.

SAN FRANCISCO — For years, tech industry financiers showed little interest in start-up companies that made computer chips.

How on earth could a start-up compete with a goliath like Intel, which made the chips that ran more than 80 percent of the world’s personal computers? Even in the areas where Intel didn’t dominate, like smartphones and gaming devices, there were companies like Qualcomm and Nvidia that could squash an upstart.

Continue reading “Big Bets on A.I. Open a New Frontier for Chip Start-Ups, Too” »

Hawaii ‘ballistic missile threat’ alert to phones was false alarm, officials say.

“Hawaiians were thrown into a panic Saturday morning after an emergency alert was mistakenly sent, warning them to ”seek immediate shelter” from a ballistic missile threat, and it took emergency officials 38 minutes to send a new alert to mobile phones that the threat was a false alarm.

”Hawaii Emergency Management Agency Administrator Vern Miyagi said at a press conference with the governor Saturday afternoon that a single individual sent out the alert by mistake. The individual went so far as to click through a second message, intended as a safeguard, that asked whether the alert should go out.

Continue reading “‘Ballistic missile threat’ warning in Hawaii a false alarm” »

Over the past year, Google has demonstrated its desire to step up its hardware game. The company bought HTC’s Pixel team for $1.1 billion, designed its own imaging chip for the Pixel 2 and also hired a key Apple chip designer. Bloomberg reports that in its bid to gain an edge on the competition, Google has quietly snapped up UK startup Redux, a small team focused on delivering sound and touch feedback via mobile displays.

According to filings, Google took control of the startup back in August and then subsequently shut down the company’s website. Previous demonstrations show Redux playing back music via a tablet device, which possesses tiny actuators that vibrate the screen and effectively turn it into a loudspeaker. By eliminating the need for smartphone speakers, Google may be able free up more space for batteries and other important components inside future smartphones.

Imagine you and a group of friends are at the peak of a mountain after a long hike. It’s sunset and the sky is alight; you want to take a photo. You pull out your smartphone, but instead of flipping it around to take a long-armed selfie, you unclip a tiny drone from the back of your phone, make it hover at the perfect height and snap a series of photos, no extendo-arms required.

Prosthetics have improved my leaps and bounds over the past century and we’ve reached a point where someone with an artificial limb is often just as capable (and in some cases even more capable) than a person with their natural arms and legs. Still, prosthetics have long fell short in one very important aspect, which is the sense of touch afforded by human skin. That could all be changing thanks to an incredible breakthrough that has provided a woman with a bionic hand that can actually feel.

Almerina Mascarello lost her left hand and part of her forearm in an accident more than two decades ago, and was chosen as one of the test subjects for a new type of prosthetic that relays the feeling of touch to the wearer. Remarkably, it seems to work brilliantly.

Don’t Miss : Apple brand battery cases for the iPhone 6/6s and iPhone 7 are discounted on Amazon.