Lifeboat Foundation

Smart bricks capable of recycling wastewater and generating electricity from sunlight are being developed by a team of scientists from the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol). The bricks will be able to fit together and create ‘bioreactor walls’ which could then be incorporated in housing, public building and office spaces.

The UWE Bristol team is working on the smart technologies that will be integrated into the bricks in this pan European ‘Living Architecture’ (LIAR) project led by Newcastle University. The LIAR project brings together living architecture, computing and engineering to find a new way to tackle global sustainability issues.

The smart living bricks will be made from bio-reactors filled with microbial cells and algae. Designed to self-adapt to changing environmental conditions the smart bricks will monitor and modify air in the building and recognise occupants.

Want to have that circuit board as a necklace, bracelet, or ring; well now you can.

The complex little patterns of old circuit boards are highlighted in this lovely handmade collection of jewelry for men and women.

With a new programming language, almost anyone create a DNA-encoded circuit.

(Phys.org)—By carefully arranging many nanoblocks to form pixels on a metasurface, researchers have demonstrated that they can manipulate incoming visible light in just the right way to create a color “meta-hologram.” The new method of creating holograms has an order of magnitude higher reconstruction efficiency than similar color meta-holograms, and has applications for various types of 3D color holographic displays and achromatic planar lenses.

The researchers, Bo Wang et al., from Peking University and the National Center for Nanoscience and Technology, both in China, have published a paper on the new type of hologram in a recent issue of Nano Letters.

The pixels on the new metasurface consist of three types of silicon nanoblocks whose precise dimensions correspond to the wavelengths of three different colors: red, green, and blue. To enhance the efficiency for the blue light, two identical nanoblocks corresponding to the blue light are arranged in each pixel, along with one nanoblock for red light and one for green light.

Continue reading “High-efficiency color holograms created using a metasurface made of nanoblocks” »

Should all new technologies be used?

At the head of all this you will hear about the latest technology from the biotech world, such as CRISPR, that allows scientists to edit the very genome of a plant or animal, but not all technologies that can be used should be used.

While learning to grow massive quantities of organic food in urban landscapes without pesticides is great news, taking away human oversight from farming isn’t necessarily going to make our food better.

Continue reading “New Automation Technologies are Revolutionizing Farming” »

There are 110 million active landmines in the world. This drone is detonating them, one by one: http://kck.st/29RtcCo

This is how Facebook plans to blanket the entire earth in internet.

Technology developments will continue to transform every field of aerospace, just as they have the over the last 100 years.

AWESOME.

New UCLA research suggests that a gene-based immunotherapy that has shown promising results against cancer could also be used against HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

In a study to be published in an August issue of the bi-monthly peer-reviewed Journal of Virology, researchers with the UCLA AIDS Institute and Center for AIDS Research found that recently discovered potent antibodies can be used to generate chimeric antigen receptors, or CARs, that can be used to kill cells infected with HIV-1.

Continue reading “Promising Cancer-Fighting Gene Immunotherapy Could Be Used Against HIV, UCLA Research Suggests” »