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UAE will be a major player in technology innovation of the future as they like Israel, Africa, Eastern Europe, and various parts of Asia such as the current ones of China and India as well as Australia and Vietnam will be the new emerging leaders in tech innovation. We’re entering a period of radical change and a complete overhaul of science (including medical) and technology thanks to the realities and opportunities of Quantum. The following announcement shows US UAE’s own commitment to being a leader and I promise you there is much more to come from these amazing hotspots of innovation and invention.


Vice President and Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, issued directives to Mohammad Bin Rashid Space Centre, MBRSC, to lead the Mars 2117 project and prepare a 100-year plan for its implementation.

As per his directives, the centre’s plan will focus on preparing specialised national cadres and developing their capabilities in the fields of space science, research, artificial intelligence, robotics and advanced space technologies.

The centre will also put in place a detailed plan for the next five years that will deal with all technological, logistical and technical aspects of the project. This five-year plan will be carried out alongside a media plan that will keep pace with the project’s implementation programme. The media plan will ensure coverage at local, regional and international levels, taking into consideration how well the project was received when it was announced during the World Government Summit 2017.

Is there nothing sacred for goodness sakes anymore! The robots are replacing the University Research Teams. Personally, I will be shocked if it will indeed (on a massive scale) take over all experimental innovation activities in research.


At this past weekend’s annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, scientists also heard broader warnings about the threats to American workers posed by computerized automation.

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As I shared yesterday with others, the world of tech is about to be flipped on its’ head & even spun around several times. So what is the impact? It means that the companies “big tech” & Silicon Valley will need to change & evolve faster than ever or they could see countries with no old tech products & old tech brand will be given an easier playing field to adapt, quick-to-market due to no legacy noise, & refreshing as the new image brand v. an older stigma-brand tied to the good old days of Moore’s Law. So, I see many new versions of SVs outside the US emerging.


Shanghai’s Pudong will build a Tsung-Dao Lee Research Center in the Zhangjiang area, along with a batch of new world-class scientific institutes in a bid to develop the area into a “national science center.”

The research center is named after the Shanghai-born scientist who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1957 and will focus on particle physics and astrophysics as well as quantum science and technology, the Shanghai Science and Technology Commission said.

“The new center aims to enhance China’s influence on the fields of fundamental physics,” a commission official told reporters yesterday.

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Nice development — demonstrating that light can control product selectivity in complex chemical reactions can be performed reliably.


Atmospheric CO2 can be transformed into valuable hydrocarbons by reaction with H2, but CO is the favoured kinetic product. Here, Liu and co-workers show that plasmonic rhodium nanoparticles not only reduce the activation energy for CO2hydrogenation, but also photo-selectively produce methane.

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Nice find on nanoparticles and energy transfer — important in scalable devices, energy conservation, etc.


The development, design and the performance evaluation of rare-earth doped host materials is important for further optical investigation and industrial applications. Herein, we successfully fabricate KLu2F7 upconversion nanoparticles (UCNPs) through hydrothermal synthesis by controlling the fluorine-to-lanthanide-ion molar ratio. The structural and morphological results show that the samples are orthorhombic-phase hexagonal-prisms UCNPs, with average side length of 80 nm and average thickness of 110 nm. The reaction time dependent crystal growth experiment suggests that the phase transformation is a thermo-dynamical process and the increasing F/Ln3+ ratio favors the formation of the thermo-dynamical stable phase — orthorhombic KLu2F7 structure. The upconversion luminescence (UCL) spectra display that the orthorhombic KLu2F7:Yb/Er UCNPs present stronger UCL as much as 280-fold than their cubic counterparts. The UCNPS also display better UCL performance compared with the popular hexagonal-phase NaREF4 (RE = Y, Gd). Our mechanistic investigation, including Judd-Ofelt analysis and time decay behaviors, suggests that the lanthanide tetrad clusters structure at sublattice level accounts for the saturated luminescence and highly efficient UCL in KLu2F7:Yb/Er UCNPs. Our research demonstrates that the orthorhombic KLu2F7 is a promising host material for UCL and can find potential applications in lasing, photovoltaics and biolabeling techniques.

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I told a few CEOs and Boards a few years ago that Syn-diamonds would be critical to Quantum Computing (processing, storage, networking & communications), energy, etc. Well, more proof in imaging and sensors found in these one time worthless imitations.


With a sensor made from diamond, the new microscope can study biochemical processes in unprecedented detail.

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