Lifeboat Foundation

Ultracapacitors are awesome. But could they viably replace batteries in future electric vehicles?

Ultracapacitors have significant advantages over batteries, after all, they are much lighter, faster to charge, safer, and non-toxic. However, there are some areas where batteries wipe the floor with them, at least for now.

With recent acquisitions of ultracapacitor manufacturers by the likes of Tesla, ultracapacitors could be on the verge of ousting batteries as the go-to power source for electric cars.

In a move that echoes a sci-fi series, researchers have developed a super-small material that was able to not only stimulate nerves in rodents, but reconnect them as well. The finding could lead to injectable particles that take the place of larger implants.

In creating the particles, researchers at Rice University started with two layers of a metallic glass alloy called Metglas and wedged a piezoelectric layer of lead zirconium titanate in between them. Piezoelectric materials generate electricity when they have mechanical forces applied to them. Metglas is a magnetostrictive material, which means it changes its shape when it has a magnetic field applied to it. In this case, the change in shape of the Metglas in the presence of magnetic pulses caused the piezoelectric material inside to generate an electrical signal. Materials that do this are known as magnetoelectric.

“We asked, ‘Can we create a material that can be like dust or is so small that by placing just a sprinkle of it inside the body you’d be able to stimulate the brain or nervous system?’” said lead author Joshua Chen, a Rice doctoral alumnus. “With that question in mind, we thought that magnetoelectric materials were ideal candidates for use in neurostimulation. They respond to magnetic fields, which easily penetrate into the body, and convert them into electric fields – a language our nervous system already uses to relay information.”

The Higgs field is famous for its role bestowing mass on other particles. But it isn’t a one-way relationship: The Higgs field’s interactions also influence its own particle, the Higgs boson. Due to this give-and-take, some physicists think the Higgs boson should be approximately as heavy as the biggest mass scale with which it interacts, the Planck scale.

But this isn’t the case. The Planck scale sits at the enormous energies at which it is thought that gravity becomes as strong as the other three fundamental forces, around 10¹⁹ gigaelectronvolts. This is many orders of magnitude bigger than the actual Higgs mass of 125 GeV.

How can the gap between expectation and reality be so huge? Is something protecting the Higgs from Planck-scale physics? The large, unexpected difference in these two scales is known as the hierarchy problem.

Personal Perspective: Can we prevent bad actors from using it for bad things?

The DOD is looking for tech that will protect against “cognitive attacks” that could disable soldiers wearing virtual reality devices.

Each October, the Nobel Prizes celebrate a handful of groundbreaking scientific achievements. And while many of the awarded discoveries revolutionize the field of science, some originate in unconventional places. For George de Hevesy, the 1943 Nobel Laureate in chemistry who discovered radioactive tracers, that place was a boarding house cafeteria in Manchester, U.K., in 1911.

De Hevesey had the sneaking suspicion that the staff of the boarding house cafeteria where he ate at every day was reusing leftovers from the dinner plates – each day’s soup seemed to contain all of the prior day’s ingredients. So he came up with a plan to test his theory.

In a suite of 21 papers published in the journals Science (12), Science Advances , and Science Translational Medicine , a large consortium of researchers shares new knowledge about the cells that make up our brains and the brains of other primates. It’s a huge leap from previously published work, with studies and data that reveal new insights about our nervous systems’ cellular makeup across many regions of the brain and what is distinctive about the human brain.

The research consortium is a concerted effort to understand the human brain and its modular, functional nature. It was brought together by the National Institutes of Health’s Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative.

Hundreds of scientists from around the world worked together to complete a range of studies exploring the cellular makeup of the human brain and those of other primates, and to demonstrate how a transformative new suite of scalable techniques can be used to study the detailed organization of the human brain at unprecedented resolution.

Date October 11, 2023

Eventually, maybe by the early 2040s, would like to see every large body in solar system, from the Sun out to Pluto to have a probe like the Cassini probe in a permanent orbit around it. So we have 24/7 live feed / study of all of them. And, ASI could run all of it by that point.

You know, the planet?