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Stunning, truly.

NASA has presented us with yet another stunning, backlit view of Pluto, taken by the New Horizons spacecraft during its flyby in July. The photo adds to the growing repertoire of Pluto images that are slowly being downloaded from the probe and released by the space agency. This one shows Pluto’s crescent in full, spectacular detail, completing the partial crescent image that NASA released in mid-September.

The image was taken by New Horizons’ Multi-spectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC), just 15 minutes after making its closest approach of Pluto on July 14th. It was taken from 11,000 miles away, when New Horizons looked back at Pluto toward the Sun. The photo shows the hazy layers of the dwarf planet’s atmosphere, as well as the mountains on Pluto’s surface that surround the icy plains of Sputnik Planum.

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Can black phosphorous rival #graphene?

A new experimental revelation about black phosphorus nanoribbons should facilitate the future application of this highly promising material to electronic, optoelectronic and thermoelectric devices. A team of researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has experimentally confirmed strong in-plane anisotropy in thermal conductivity, up to a factor of two, along the zigzag and armchair directions of single-crystal black phosphorous nanoribbons.

“Imagine the lattice of black phosphorous as a two-dimensional network of balls connected with springs, in which the network is softer along one direction of the plane than another,” says Junqiao Wu, a physicist who holds joint appointments with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and the University of California (UC) Berkeley’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering. “Our study shows that in a similar manner heat flow in the black phosphorous nanoribbons can be very different along different directions in the plane. This thermal conductivity has been predicted recently for 2D black phosphorous crystals by theorists but never before observed.”

Wu is the corresponding author of a paper describing this research in Nature Communications titled “Anisotropic in-plane thermal conductivity of black phosphorus nanoribbons at temperatures higher than 100K.” The lead authors are Sangwook Lee and Fan Yang. (See below for a complete list of authors)

Continue reading “Is black phosphorous the next big thing in materials?” | >

Nissan says its autonomous car will be ready for sale to consumers by 2020.

Nissan Motor Co. is aggressively pushing forward with plans for a mostly autonomous car that will be ready for sale to consumers by 2020, putting it well ahead of its global competitors.

Chief Executive Carlos Ghosn said the technology would be ready by the Japanese auto maker’s self-imposed deadline—though he wasn’t sure if it would be legal on any nation’s roads.

“We are very excited about it and we want to come as soon as…

Continue reading “Nissan Speeds Ahead of Rivals With Plans for Driverless Car” | >

Who needs a peep hole when a wifi network will do? Researchers from MIT have developed technology that uses wireless signals to see your silhouette through a wall—and it can even tell you apart from other people, too.

The team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab are no strangers to using wireless signals to see what’s happening on the other side of a wall. In 2013, they showed off software that could use variations in wifi signal to detect the presence of human motion from the other side of a wall. But in the last two years they’ve been busy developing the technique, and now they’ve unveiled the obvious — if slightly alarming — natural progression: they can use the wireless reflections bouncing off a human body to see the silhouette of a person standing behind a wall.

Not only that, the team’s technique, known is RF-Capture, is accurate enough to track the hand of a human and, with some repeated measurements, the system can even be trained to recognise different people based just on their wifi silhouette. The research, which is to be presented at SIGGRAPH Asia next month, was published this morning on the research group’s website.

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