Lifeboat Foundation

New method to make purify water and eliminate clean water shortages in the future by purifying waste water via artificial leafing.

For years, scientists have been pursuing ways to imitate a leaf’s photosynthetic power to make hydrogen fuel from water and sunlight. In a new twist, a team has come up with another kind of device that mimics two of a leaf’s processes — photosynthesis and transpiration — to harness solar energy to purify water. Their development, reported in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, could help address issues of water scarcity.

More than 1 billion people around the world live in areas where clean water is hard to come by, and that number will likely rise as the population grows.

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Scientists were able to study brain growth using a 3D gel model in order to see how the human brain gets its folds.

New research shows that our brains are likely folded because, as they grow, a large amount of volume has to fit in a small space (AKA, our skulls). This compression is actually beneficial, the folds reduce the length of neuronal wiring, improving cognitive function.

Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences teamed up with scientists in Finland and France to find out more about the folding process.

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HoloLens is about to change the way we watch sports. http://voc.tv/14JQHoo

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Building building diamond lattices through DNA.

Using bundled strands of DNA to build Tinkertoy-like tetrahedral cages, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory have devised a way to trap and arrange nanoparticles in a way that mimics the crystalline structure of diamond. The achievement of this complex yet elegant arrangement, as described in a paper published February 5, 2016, in Science, may open a path to new materials that take advantage of the optical and mechanical properties of this crystalline structure for applications such as optical transistors, color-changing materials, and lightweight yet tough materials.

“We solved a 25-year challenge in building diamond lattices in a rational way via self-assembly,” said Oleg Gang, a physicist who led this research at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) at Brookhaven Lab in collaboration with scientists from Stony Brook University, Wesleyan University, and Nagoya University in Japan.

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Non-hackable RFIDs

You might not realize it, but radio frequency identification (RFID) tech is everywhere these days. From the cards in your wallet, to inventory control in warehouses, it’s the technology that works behind the scenes to power the world around you. RFID has brought efficiency to complicated industries and makes our tiny devices and everyday carry items speak to each other. But RFID technology has also been very vulnerable to security attacks and information hackers – until now. A team of researchers from MIT and Texas Instruments have developed a new kind of RFID chip that they believe is impossible to hack.

The new RFID chip is made of ferroelectric crystals, which are material made up of molecules arranged in a lattice pattern across three dimensions. Thanks to this unique structure, when you apply electricity to the lattice, each cell can be polarized as either positive or negative, representing the values of a bit of information. Because the cells retain their polarization when the electric field is removed, the chips can store data even when they’re powered off. Texas Instruments developed a series of 3.3-volt capacitors for the chip’s energy source, and 1.5-volt cells for data storage.

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AI Chip for the phone — the new MIT chip has 168 processing engines with each engine having it’s own dedicated memory bank.

A chip designed to run powerful neural networks for image analysis uses one-tenth the energy a mobile GPU would.

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US Hacker Tools treated like weapons in US arms deals with other countries — why not; the true war is really in Cyber.

The government is rewriting a proposal under arms control rules from 20 years ago to make it simpler to export tools related to surveillance and hacking software, since they are used for network security.

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Cyber is still a challenge for soldiers on the battlefield.

Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to include comment from an industry official.

WASHINGTON — Cyber vulnerabilities continue to plague the Army’s battlefield communications, according to the Pentagon’s top weapons tester, while the service works to harden its network against cyber attacks.

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