Today at the California NanoSystems Institute/ UCLA in Los Angeles, California, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) co-sponsored a look at humanity’s space future.
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“Online abuse can be cruel – but for some tech companies it is an existential threat. Can giants such as Facebook use behavioural psychology and persuasive design to tame the trolls?”
Graphene is too delicate to be produced commercially, but it seem that scientists have now stumbled upon the correct method of tuning it.
Graphene has many extraordinary properties. It is carbon, but it comes in the form of a two-dimensional, atomic thick, honeycomb lattice.
Remarkably, it is 100 times stronger than the strongest steel known to man, and is a very efficient conductor of heat and electricity. The possible applications for graphene-based electronics are myriad: they include better solar cells, OLEDs, batteries and supercapacitors, and they can also be used to make faster microchips that run on very little power.
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GOLDEN, Colo. — Researchers are mapping out how to build a human outpost in cislunar space — the region around Earth’s moon.
The ongoing work is expected to help plot out other deep-space trips, such as the journey to a near-Earth asteroid and the larger leap to distant Mars.
Under NASA’s Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP) Projects, scientists and engineers are examining how best to utilize NASA’s Orion deep-space crew capsule and future human habitats to set up a cislunar outpost. [Visions of Deep-Space Stations (Gallery)].
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More from Mobile World Congress 2016: http://bit.ly/24mukpB
Forgoing the use of a phone as its display, LG’s VR headset features two independent screens and connects to your handset with a USB Type-C connection.
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Our next step is to develop a photo-catalyst better matched to the solar spectrum,” MacDonnell said. “Then we could more effectively use the entire spectrum of incident light to work towards the overall goal of a sustainable solar liquid fuel.
A team of University of Texas at Arlington chemists and engineers have proven that concentrated light, heat and high pressures can drive the one-step conversion of carbon dioxide and water directly into useable liquid hydrocarbon fuels.
This simple and inexpensive new sustainable fuels technology could potentially help limit global warming by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to make fuel. The process also reverts oxygen back into the system as a byproduct of the reaction, with a clear positive environmental impact, researchers said.
“Our process also has an important advantage over battery or gaseous-hydrogen powered vehicle technologies as many of the hydrocarbon products from our reaction are exactly what we use in cars, trucks and planes, so there would be no need to change the current fuel distribution system,” said Frederick MacDonnell, UTA interim chair of chemistry and biochemistry and co-principal investigator of the project.
Sometimes, it seems like the tech world is inexorably bending towards a future full of curved devices. At MWC in Barcelona, we saw yet another prototype display, this time from English firm FlexEnable. Now, this isn’t a working device of any kind — it’s essentially just a screen running a demo — and neither is FlexEnable a consumer electronics company. But the firm says its technology is ready to go, and it’s apparently in talks with unnamed hardware partners who want to make this sort of device a reality. How long until we see fully-fledged wristbands like this on the market? Eighteen months is the optimistic guess from FlexEnable’s Paul Cain.
The prototype uses plastic transistors to achieve its flexibility, creating what the company calls OLCD (organic liquid crystal display) screens. FlexEnable says these can achieve the same resolutions as regular LCD using the same amount of power, but, of course, they have that added flexibility. These transistors can be wrapped around pretty much anything, and also have uses outside of display technology. FlexEnable was also showing off thin flexible fingerprint sensors, suggesting they could be wrapped around a door handle to add security without it being inconvenient to the user.
The prototype we saw at MWC was encased in a stiff metal frame, like a lot of flexible displays, and although OLCD can flex a little, it’s not the sort of material you can endlessly bend and crease. That, says, Cain, will have to wait for flexible OLED displays, a technology that is going to need more development. Still, we are seeing truly flexible OLED prototypes popping up here and there, such as this device from Queen’s University, which lets you flex a screen to flick through the pages of a digital book. The future bends ever closer.
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