An international research group has engineered a new energy-generating device by combining piezoelectric composites with carbon fiber-reinforced polymer (CFRP), a commonly used material that is both light and strong. The new device transforms vibrations from the surrounding environment into electricity, providing an efficient and reliable means for self-powered sensors.
Details of the group’s research were published in the journal Nano Energy on June 13, 2023.
Energy harvesting involves converting energy from the environment into usable electrical energy and is something crucial for ensuring a sustainable future.
A collaborative team led by researchers from City University of Hong Kong (CityU) recently invented an innovative method for synthesizing high-quality, semiconducting nanomesh at a lower temperature and production cost than conventional methods. The findings will help enable the large-scale production of nanomesh for next-generation electronics.
Nanomesh is a nano-scale material formed from a network of nanowires. For several decades, one-dimensional materials like nanowires made of crystalline inorganic materials have been widely explored as the main driver for emerging electronics, as they have features like mechanical flexibility, energy efficiency and optical transparency. However, the scalability, integrability and cost-effectiveness of nanowire semiconductors are insufficient, limiting their potential for large-area electronic and optoelectronic applications.
To overcome these shortcomings, a research team led by CityU scientists made a breakthrough, inventing a low-temperature vapor-phase growth method, which can achieve large-scale synthesis of semiconducting tellurium (Te) nanomesh for use in devices.
According to a news release from the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), oxygen-ion batteries don’t have the same aging issue that lithium batteries face, which means they can maintain effectiveness for an incredibly long period.
They can also be manufactured using incombustible materials and don’t require the same rare elements as lithium batteries, which means they won’t have nearly as substantial of an environmental footprint and won’t spontaneously explode if mishandled.
“In many batteries, you have the problem that at some point the charge carriers can no longer move,” said Alexander Schmid of TU Wien’s Institute for Chemical Technologies. “Then they can no longer be used to generate electricity, the capacity of the battery decreases. After many charging cycles, that can become a serious problem.”
Large language models have been shown to ‘hallucinate’ entirely false information, but aren’t humans guilty of the same thing? So what’s the difference between both?
The idea of solar energy being transmitted from space is not a new one. In 1968, a NASA engineer named Peter Glaser produced the first concept design for a solar-powered satellite. But only now, 55 years later, does it appear scientists have actually carried out a successful experiment. A team of researchers from Caltech announced on Thursday that their space-borne prototype, called the Space Solar Power Demonstrator (SSPD-1), had collected sunlight, converted it into electricity and beamed it to microwave receivers installed on a rooftop on Caltech’s Pasadena campus. The experiment also proves that the setup, which launched on January 3, is capable of surviving the trip to space, along with the harsh environment of space itself.
“To the best of our knowledge, no one has ever demonstrated wireless energy transfer in space even with expensive rigid structures. We are doing it with flexible lightweight structures and with our own integrated circuits. This is a first,” said Ali Hajimiri, professor of electrical engineering and medical engineering and co-director of Caltech’s Space Solar Power Project (SSPP), in a press release published on Thursday.
The experiment — known in full as Microwave Array for Power-transfer Low-orbit Experiment (or MAPLE for short) — is one of three research projects being carried out aboard the SSPD-1. The effort involved two separate receiver arrays and lightweight microwave transmitters with custom chips, according to Caltech. In its press release, the team added that the transmission setup was designed to minimize the amount of fuel needed to send them to space, and that the design also needed to be flexible enough so that the transmitters could be folded up onto a rocket.
Three of these procedures have thus far been undertaken in Canada.
A neurosurgeon in Canada has become the first in the nation to perform robot-assisted deep brain stimulation surgery on a patient suffering from epilepsy with success.
This is according to a report by CTV News published on Wednesday.
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“It can also be my opponent. It can help me train.”
An assistant professor of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology has revealed a robotic tennis partner that may soon become your sparring partner and skilled opponent.
Dr. Matthew Gombolay envisions a future where human-scale robots play a crucial role in sports and athletic training. His latest creation, ESTHER (Experimental Sport Tennis Wheelchair Robot) is inspired by the limitations of traditional static ball machines used for tennis training.
Open-source AI can be defined as software engineers collaborating on various artificial intelligence projects that are open to the public to develop. The goal is to better integrate computing with humanity. In early March, the open source community got their hands on Meta’s LLaMA which was leaked to the public. In barely a month, there are very innovative OpenSource AI model variants with instruction tuning, quantization, quality improvements, human evals, multimodality, RLHF, etc.
Open-source models are faster, more customizable, more private, and capable. They are doing things with $100 and 13B params that even market leaders are struggling with. One open-source solution, Vicuna, is an… More.
This article explores AI in the context of open-sourced alternatives and highlights market dynamics in play.
Russia claims that its S-350 Vityaz air defence system shot down a Ukrainian aircraft while operating in “automatic mode”. The Russian Deputy PM said that its highly acclaimed S-350 Vityaz air defence system was operating in the NVO zone. It demonstrated capabilities of autonomously detecting, tracking, and destroying Ukrainian air targets without any operator’s intervention. Watch the video to find out how did the system work on AI?
