A project to teach threatened marsupials to avoid feral cats is among a host of “assisted evolution” efforts to help animals in the face of climate change.
Technology paves way for intelligent solar cells, other highly efficient devices programmed at the macro and nano scale.
Researchers at Tufts University School of Engineering have created light-activated composite devices able to execute precise, visible movements and form complex three-dimensional shapes without the need for wires or other actuating materials or energy sources. The design combines programmable photonic crystals with an elastomeric composite that can be engineered at the macro and nano scale to respond to illumination.
AI And Robots For Law And Order — Irakli Beridze — Head, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, UNICRI – United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute.
Irakli Beridze is the Head of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at The United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI).
Researchers at Tufts University School of Engineering have created light-activated composite devices able to execute precise, visible movements and form complex three-dimensional shapes without the need for wires or other actuating materials or energy sources. The design combines programmable photonic crystals with an elastomeric composite that can be engineered at the macro and nano scale to respond to illumination.
The research provides new avenues for the development of smart light-driven systems such as high-efficiency, self-aligning solar cells that automatically follow the sun’s direction and angle of light, light-actuated microfluidic valves or soft robots that move with light on demand. A “photonic sunflower,” whose petals curl towards and away from illumination and which tracks the path and angle of the light, demonstrates the technology in a paper that appears March 12th, 2021 in Nature Communications.
Color results from the absorption and reflection of light. Behind every flash of an iridescent butterfly wing or opal gemstone lie complex interactions in which natural photonic crystals embedded in the wing or stone absorb light of specific frequencies and reflect others. The angle at which the light meets the crystalline surface can affect which wavelengths are absorbed and the heat that is generated from that absorbed energy.
Two types of materials are better than one when it comes to solar cells, as revealed by an international team that has tested a new combination of materials and architecture to improve solar-cell efficiency.
Silicon has long dominated as the premier material for solar cells, helped by its abundance as a raw material. However, perovskites, a class of hybrid organic-inorganic material, are a viable alternative due to their low-cost and large-scale manufacture and potentially higher performance. While still too unstable for full commercialization, they might become available to the market by 2022.
KAUST’s Michele De Bastiani and Stefaan De Wolf, working with colleagues in Canada, Germany and Italy, now show that a combination of the two is the best approach. By optimizing the material composition and the architecture of a “tandem” device, the team has achieved efficiencies beyond commercial silicon solar panels.
MIT scientists demonstrate a hair-like plastic polymer cable that can transmit data 10 times as fast as USB.
How fast does data flow? The answer: not fast enough.
The search for more efficient data-transfer solutions to meet the ever-increasing demand for computation never ends. Even today, most data transmission happens via traditional copper cables, which are power-hungry, leading to a compromise between data exchange and energy consumed. Fiber-optic cables are an alternative, but they don’t work well with the silicon chips in our computing systems. Overcoming these limitations, while theoretically possible, can turn out to be prohibitively expensive, especially for electronics-rich applications like data centers, spacecraft, electric vehicles and so on.
Continue reading “Plastic Polymer Cables That Rival Fiber Optics” »
The aviation industry is a terrible emitter of greenhouse gases. In 2019, it emitted 918 million tons of carbon dioxide into the environment. To solve this problem, aircraft must go green. One solution is battery-powered airplanes. Battery-powered airplanes have existed for decades and with improvements in battery technology, could become widespread in the near future. However, for long-distance intercontinental flights, we will need hydrogen airplanes. Hydrogen airplanes are also very feasible and could be used with turbofan technology, producing only water as emissions.
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Scientists have taken a major step forward in harnessing machine learning to accelerate the design for better batteries: Instead of using it just to speed up scientific analysis by looking for patterns in data, as researchers generally do, they combined it with knowledge gained from experiments and equations guided by physics to discover and explain a process that shortens the lifetimes of fast-charging lithium-ion batteries.
It was the first time this approach, known as “scientific machine learning,” has been applied to battery cycling, said Will Chueh, an associate professor at Stanford University and investigator with the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory who led the study. He said the results overturn long-held assumptions about how lithium-ion batteries charge and discharge and give researchers a new set of rules for engineering longer-lasting batteries.
The research, reported today in Nature Materials, is the latest result from a collaboration between Stanford, SLAC, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Toyota Research Institute (TRI). The goal is to bring together foundational research and industry know-how to develop a long-lived electric vehicle battery that can be charged in 10 minutes.
From flat battery to full charge in just five minutes—an Israeli start-up has developed technology it says could eliminate the “range anxiety” associated with electric cars.
Ultra-fast recharge specialists StoreDot have developed a first-generation lithium-ion battery that can rival the filling time of a standard car at the pump.
“We are changing the entire experience of the driver, the problem of ‘range anxiety’… that you might get stuck on the highway without energy,” StoreDot founder Doron Myersdorf said.
Researchers from the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV) have come up with and patented a new system for manufacturing beams that aims to revolutionize the architecture, construction and civil engineering sectors. They are manufactured with 3D-printed plastic pieces that can be assembled as if they were pieces of Lego adding a high-performance layer of concrete in the most compressed area.
Its advantages, according to its creators, are several: they weigh up to 80% less than concrete or metallic beams, which means that no heavy cranes or lorries are needed to carry and install them; they save time and money on labor and materials; and they can be printed and assembled in situ, which facilitates their installation anywhere, regardless of how difficult it is to reach. In addition to all of this, it uses recycled plastics as the raw material, giving a new life to this product and thus helping move towards more sustainable construction.
The development of these innovative beams is the result of almost three years of research. “Our goal was to propose an alternative to the current reinforced concrete beams. These are made using profiles built for the length of the piece, which requires expensive installation and are hard to transport,” says José Ramón Albiol, lecturer at the Higher Technical School of Construction Engineering (ETSIE) of the Polytechnic University of Valencia. Following numerous hours of tests and trials, the combination of 3D printing, plastics and concrete provided optimum results. And last October they patented the system.
