L amborghini has created the world’s first self-healing sports car. The Terzo Millennio, which translates as third millennium in Italian, has the ability to detect and repair cracks in its body work.
Using sensors the car can conduct its own health check to detect any damages and self-repair itself by filling the crack with nanotubes to prevent it spreading.
The super car was created in collaboration with researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston.
A two-in-one solar bio-battery and solar panel has been created by researchers who printed living cyanobacteria and circuitry onto paper.
Cyanobacteria are photosynthetic micro-organisms that have been on Earth for billions of years. They are thought to be the primary reason why the Earth’s atmosphere is oxygen rich.
Now, a team has demonstrated that cyanobacteria could be used as an ink and printed from an inkjet printer in precise patterns onto electrically conductive carbon nanotubes, which were also inkjet-printed onto the piece of paper. The team showed that the cyanobacteria survived the printing process and were able to perform photosynthesis so that small amounts of electrical energy could be harvested over a period of 100 hours.
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Boeing announced its investment in Gamma Alloys, which specializes in aluminum alloys focused on developing advanced metal-matrix composites for use in aerospace, automotive and other industries.
This investment by Boeing HorizonX Ventures, which was established earlier this year, is its first in advanced materials and machining development and applications.
As luck would have it, we may be on the verge of another revolution in miniaturization, this time through nanoelectronics.
Creating electronics at the nanoscale is difficult and has faced limitations but those limitations may be a thing of the past. Researchers from the National University of Singapore have developed a “converter” for nanoelectronic devices that could allow them to use plasmons for data processing.
To understand why that’s so important though, it’s best we start by explaining how nanoelectronic devices work.
Quantum physicists in Oriol Romero-Isart’s research group in Innsbruck show in two current publications that, despite Earnshaw’s theorem, nanomagnets can be stably levitated in an external static magnetic field owing to quantum mechanical principles. The quantum angular momentum of electrons, which also causes magnetism, is accountable for this mechanism.
Already in 1842, British mathematician Samuel Earnshaw proved that there is no stable configuration of levitating permanent magnets. If one magnet is levitated above another, the smallest disturbance will cause the system to crash. The magnetic top, a popular toy, circumvents the Earnshaw theorem: When it is disturbed, the gyrating motion of the top causes a system correction and stability is maintained. In collaboration with researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, Munich, physicists in Oriol Romero-Isart’s research group at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, Innsbruck University, and the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information, Austrian Academy of Sciences, have now shown that: In the quantum world, tiny non-gyrating nanoparticles can stably levitate in a magnetic field.
Ray Kurzweil is director of engineering at Google but he is better known for writing best-selling books outlining the future of artificial intelligence.
He has made 147 predictions on the future of technology including the ubiquity of wearable devices and the move from desktops and laptops to smartphones and tablets. In fact, his prediction rate has been rated 86 per cent accurate.
With this in mind, fans were excited to see Kurzweil answer their questions in a live streaming interview session last week where he elaborated on his predictions.
Two researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem claim to have developed food 3D printing technology capable of printing entire meals from nano-cellulose, a naturally occurring fiber that contains no calories.
3D printed food. Do you need it? No. Do you want it? Not especially. Are companies going to continue exploiting the highly novel concept in order to make money? Of course they are. And since it’s going to happen anyway, why not just get on board? From 3D printed pizza to 3D printed candy, these complex treats are here to stay. Yum!
Just like how letters are strung together to form words, our DNA is also strung together by letters to encode proteins. The genetic alphabet contains only 4 natural letters — A, C, G and T, which hold the blueprint for the production of proteins that make our bodies work. Now, researchers from the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN) of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) have created a DNA technology with two new genetic letters that could better detect infectious diseases, such as dengue and Zika.
Genetic alphabet expansion technology is the introduction of artificial base pairs into DNA. The existing four genetic letters are naturally bound together in base pairs of A-T and G-C. These specific base pair formations are essential in DNA replication, which occurs in all living organisms. It is the process by which a DNA molecule is duplicated to produce two identical molecules.
“The expansion of the genetic alphabet is a significant scientific achievement. It sheds insights into DNA’s natural replication mechanism, which will help us to design unique DNA molecules and technologies. For example, our technology can be used to create novel diagnostics and therapeutic agents with superior efficacy,” said IBN Executive Director Professor Jackie Ying.
One of the secrets to making tiny laser devices such as opthalmic surgery scalpels work even more efficiently is the use of tiny semiconductor particles, called quantum dots. In new research at Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Nanotech Team, the ~nanometer-sized dots are being doctored, or “doped,” with additional electrons, a treatment that nudges the dots ever closer to producing the desired laser light with less stimulation and energy loss.
“When we properly tailor the compositional profile within the particles during their fabrication, and then inject two or more electrons in each dot, they become more able to emit laser light. Importantly, they require considerably less power to initiate the lasing action,” said Victor Klimov, leader of the Nanotech team.
In order to force a material to emit laser light one has to work toward a “population inversion,” that is, making the number of electrons in a higher-energy electronic state exceed the number that are in a lower-energy state. To achieve this condition normally, one applies an external stimulus (optical or electrical) of a certain power, which should exceed a critical value termed the “optical-gain threshold.” In a recent paradigm-changing advance, Los Alamos researchers demonstrated that by adding extra electrons into their specially designed quantum dots, they can reduce this threshold to virtually zero.
AI machines injected into our bodies could give us superhuman strength and let us control gadgets using the power of THOUGHT within 20 years…
Humans could be ‘melded’ to machines, giving us huge advancements in brain power, experts told peers at the House of Lords Artificial Intelligence Committee (pictured, stock)
Growing the Artificial Intelligence Industry in the UK, an independent review of artificial intelligence recommended information about people’s health and lifestyles should be opened up to allow major advances to be made in developing artificial intelligence (AI).
It calls for the Alan Turing Institute, named in honour of the wartime codebreaker, to become a national centre for AI and said the Government should expand its support for businesses in the field.
