Lifeboat Foundation

There’s a new way to harness the power of the sun and it may just revolutionize how we approach solar energy. The development is called quantum dots and it consists of tiny semiconductor particles only a few nanometers in size.

This is according to a report by Fagen Wasanni published on Saturday.

“Quantum dots have unique properties that make them ideal for use in solar cells. Their small size allows them to absorb light from a wide range of wavelengths, including those that traditional solar cells cannot capture. This means that quantum dot-based solar cells can potentially convert more sunlight into electricity, significantly increasing their efficiency,” states the report.

Scientists have created an innovative model membrane electrode with hollow giant carbon nanotubes and a wide range of nanopore dimensions. The invention aids in understanding electrochemical behaviors and could significantly advance our knowledge of porous carbon materials in electrochemical systems.

Researchers at Tohoku University and Tsinghua University have introduced a next-generation model membrane electrode that promises to revolutionize fundamental electrochemical research. This innovative electrode, fabricated through a meticulous process, showcases an ordered array of hollow giant carbon nanotubes (gCNTs) within a nanoporous membrane, unlocking new possibilities for energy storage and electrochemical studies.

The key breakthrough lies in the construction of this novel electrode. The researchers developed a uniform carbon coating technique on anodic aluminum oxide (AAO) formed on an aluminum substrate, with the barrier layer eliminated. The resulting conformally carbon-coated layer exhibits vertically aligned gCNTs with nanopores ranging from 10 to 200 nm in diameter and 2 μm to 90 μm in length, covering small electrolyte molecules to bio-related large matters such as enzymes and exosomes. Unlike traditional composite electrodes, this self-standing model electrode eliminates inter-particle contact, ensuring minimal contact resistance — something essential for interpreting the corresponding electrochemical behaviors.

Silicon anode batteries have the potential to revolutionize energy storage capabilities, which is key to meeting climate goals and unlocking the full potential of electric vehicles.

However, the irreversible depletion of lithium ions in silicon anodes puts a major constraint on the development of next-generation lithium-ion batteries.

Scientists at Rice University’s George R. Brown School of Engineering have developed a readily scalable method to optimize prelithiation, a process that helps mitigate lithium loss and improves battery life cycles by coating silicon anodes with stabilized lithium metal particles (SLMPs).

This is according to a press release by the institution published last week.

“We wanted to reduce the effect of the membrane as much as possible, since it’s heavy. But what can be as light as air? The air itself,” explained Stanislav Sergeev, a postdoc at EPFL’s Acoustic Group and first author.

“We first ionize the thin layer of air between the electrodes that we call a plasmacoustic metalayer. The same air particles, now electrically charged, can instantaneously respond to external electrical field commands and effectively interact with sound vibrations in the air around the device to cancel them out.”

Woven across our universe is a weblike structure of galaxies called the cosmic web. Galaxies are strung along filaments in this vast web, which also contains enormous voids. Now, astronomers using Webb have discovered an early strand of this structure, a long, narrow filament of 10 galaxies that existed just 830 million years after the big bang. The 3 million light-year.

A light year is the distance that a particle of light (photon) will travel in a year—about 10 trillion kilometers (6 trillion miles). It is a useful unit for measuring distances between stars.

When you turn on a lamp to brighten a room, you are experiencing light energy transmitted as photons, which are small, discrete quantum packets of energy.

These photons must obey the sometimes strange laws of quantum mechanics, which, for instance, dictate that photons are indivisible, but at the same time, allow a photon to be in two places at once.

Continue reading “A New Kind of Quantum Computer Could Be Built on The Strange Physics of Sound Waves” »

New research by the University of Liverpool could signal a step change in the quest to design the new materials that are needed to meet the challenge of net zero and a sustainable future.

Published in the journal Nature, Liverpool researchers have shown that a mathematical algorithm can guarantee to predict the structure of any material just based on knowledge of the atoms that make it up.

Developed by an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the University of Liverpool’s Departments of Chemistry and Computer Science, the algorithm systematically evaluates entire sets of possible structures at once, rather than considering them one at a time, to accelerate identification of the correct solution.

A new navigation system that tracks subatomic particles constantly bombarding Earth could help us get around indoors, underground, and underwater — all the places GPS fails.

The challenge: GPS (the Global Positioning System) is a group of 31 satellites, constantly transmitting radio signals from about 12,500 miles above Earth’s surface. Receivers in phones, cars, planes, and ships then use data from multiple satellites’ signals to calculate their own locations on Earth.

While GPS has revolutionized surface transportation, satellite signals can reflect off solid surfaces, making the navigation system incapable of accurately pinpointing the locations of receivers indoors, underground, and underwater.

A bullet piercing the protective armor of a first responder, a jellyfish stinging a swimmer, micrometeorites striking a satellite: High-speed projectiles that puncture materials show up in many forms. Researchers constantly aim to identify new materials that can better resist these high-speed puncture events, but it has been hard to connect the microscopic details of a promising new material to its actual behavior in real-world situations.

To address this issue, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have designed a method that uses a high-intensity laser to blast microscale projectiles into a small sample at velocities that approach the speed of sound. The system analyzes the energy exchange between the particle and the sample of interest at the micro level then uses scaling methods to predict the puncture resistance of the material against larger energetic projectiles, such as bullets encountered in real-world situations. This new method, described in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, reduces the need to perform a lengthy series of lab experiments with larger projectiles and bigger samples.

“When you’re investigating a new material for its protective applications, you don’t want to waste time, money and energy in scaling up your tests if the material doesn’t pan out. With our new method we can see earlier if it’s worth looking into a material for its protective properties,” said NIST chemist Katherine Evans.