Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: sustainability – Page 662

Using Enzymes to Enhance LEDs

Robert Dunleavy had just started his sophomore year at Lehigh University when he decided he wanted to take part in a research project. He sent an email to Bryan Berger, an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, who invited Dunleavy to his lab.

Berger and his colleagues were conducting experiments on tiny semiconductor particles called quantum dots. The optical and electronic properties of QDs make them useful in lasers, light-emitting diodes (LEDs), medical imaging, solar cells, and other applications.

Dunleavy joined Berger’s group and began working with cadmium sulfide (CdS), one of the compounds from which QDs are fabricated. The group’s goal was to find a better way of producing CdS quantum dots, which are currently made with toxic chemicals in an expensive process that requires high pressure and temperature.

Startup creates renewable hydrogen energy out of sunlight and water

California startup HyperSolar and University of Iowa researchers have teamed up to make renewable energy in a way that draws inspiration from plants. Using water and sunlight, they are able to make renewable hydrogen energy. At the end of May, HyperSolar announced a “breakthrough” in efficiency, and the University of Iowa just renewed a year-long research agreement with the startup.

New Energy-Carrying Particles Help Advance Solar-Cell Development

Nice.

Scientists have designed new energy-carrying particles that improve the way electrons are transported and could be used to develop new types of solar cells and miniaturized optical circuitry.

The work of researchers at the University of California (UC) San Diego, MIT, and Harvard University has synthetically engineered particles called “topological plexcitons,” which can enhance a process known as exciton energy transfer, or EET.

It’s a problem scientists have been working on for years but it’s been tricky due to the short-ranged nature of EET, which is on the scale of only 10 nanometers, or 100 millionth of a meter, according to researchers. Moreover, the energy quickly dissipates as the excitons interact with different molecules.

Nick Bostrom: ‘We are like small children playing with a bomb’

Some truth to this if the engineering team and designers are not reflective of the broader world population. Good example, is the super race research of the Nazis and attempts to make it happen. Today, AI in the hands of a N. Korea for example could be bad for the world. However, the larger threat that I see with AI is still the hacking of AI, and stolen AI by criminals to use against society.

Sentient machines are a greater threat to human existence than climate change, according to the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom.

BAM launches robo printer

BAM has teamed up with Universe Architecture to launch a ‘robo printer’ that can create free-form buildings in stone and concrete.

The ‘building machine’ is described as the first to link free-form print technology to automotive industry robotics. It is designed to make free-form architecture possible, as well as enable the creation of complex ornamental exteriors.

In 2013, architect Janjaap Ruijssenaars of Universe Architecture had plans for the creation of a building without beginning or end, Landscape House, using a 3D printer. The 3D Builder machine entered service yesterday and is starting with the construction of a 1:4 scale version of Landscape House at FabCity, a temporary sustainability campus in Amsterdam.

Researchers: 3D Printing Offers Great Benefits for Water Treatment Industry, But Progress is Slow Thus Far

Interesting; however, I will be interested still how QC and 3D printing can converge and possibly address challenges such as this one, mass production of synthetic diamonds, cell circuitry, etc.

https://3dprint.com/137952/3d-printing-water-treatment-industry/

You might be surprised at how often 3D printing and water intermingle. After all though—as you’ll well remember if you try to go without it for a few hours—water is our life force. And as innovative 3D technology is used at the hands of researchers and innovators around the world to make positive transformations in nearly every industry, surely water should be included.

Whether we are discussing how to recycle water bottles in an attractive manner, adopt new methods for desalination to increase worldwide accessibility, or actually using 3D scanners to detect corrosion in older water pipes in the UK, the seeds have been planted for allowing 3D technology to play a substantial and versatile role in how we deal with water in the future, on many levels.

We are ‘almost definitely’ living in a Matrix-style simulation, claims Elon Musk

Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur and founder of Space X, Tesla and Paypal, has told an interviewer there is only a “one in billions” chance that we’re not living in a computer simulation.

Speaking at San Francisco’s Code Conference this week, Musk said that he has had “so many simulation discussions it’s crazy”, and that it got to the point where “every conversation [he had] was the AI/simulation conversation”.

He also claimed that, if we’re not living in a simulation, we could be approaching the end of the world.

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