Lifeboat Foundation

Prof. Zhang Tao’s group at the Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering (NIMTE) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), in collaboration with Prof. Hou Yang from Zhejiang University and Prof. Xiao Jianping from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics of CAS, proposed a novel two-dimensional (2D) nanoconfinement strategy to strongly enhance the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) activity of low-conductivity metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). Results were published in Nature Communications.

The development of high-efficiency electrocatalysts for the electrochemical conversion of water to generate environmentally friendly and sustainable hydrogen energy has drawn tremendous attention for decades.

Despite the crucial role the OER plays in water splitting, OER at the anode requires a relatively high thermodynamic potential to accelerate water splitting kinetics. Thanks to the large surface area, tunable porosity, diverse compositions and metal centers, MOFs have emerged as promising candidates for efficient OER electrocatalysts. However, the intrinsically poor conductivity of the most MOFs seriously impede their catalytic activity.

The world’s richest man closed his blockbuster purchase of the social media service, thrusting Twitter into a new era.

Researchers at Tokyo Metropolitan University have created a robotic system that could automate the cleaning of restrooms in convenience stores and other public spaces. This system, introduced in a paper published in Advanced Robotics, will be competing in the Future Convenience Store Challenge (FCSC) at the World Robot Summit (WRS), a competition for state-of-the-art technologies to automate convenience stores.

“Many convenience stores provide restrooms for customers, and restroom cleaning is an essential part of the business,” Kazuyoshi Wada, one of the researchers who developed the system, told TechXplore. “While restroom cleaning is necessary for sanitary purposes, it involves mental and physical hard work. Clerks are often inappropriate for cleaning toilets in convenience stores; and maintaining consistent cleanliness levels is difficult because of the different perceptions of cleanliness among clerks.”

Continue reading “An automated system to clean restrooms in convenience stores” »

Concern is rising over the ongoing Ebola outbreak in Uganda that is now swiftly spreading in the densely populated capital city of Kampala. The outbreak is caused by a lesser-seen species of Ebolavirus, the Sudan virus, for which there is no proven vaccine or treatment.

Uganda’s Ministry of Health declared an outbreak on September 20, a day after a 24-year-old man from a rural area in central Uganda died of the disease. Since then, the virus has spread to seven districts in the country, with the ministry reporting a total of 109 confirmed cases and 30 deaths. Health workers accounted for 15 of the confirmed cases and six of the confirmed deaths. There are also unofficial reports of probable cases and deaths.

Health experts are particularly concerned about the spread into Kampala, which government officials reported only Sunday. As of Wednesday, the city of more than 1.6 million has seen at least 15 confirmed cases. Of the 15 cases, six are school-age children from the same family.

Mars may not be the geologically dead world we thought it was, as hints of magma have been discovered underground.

The Red Planet is thought to have been volcanically active in the past, but not for many millions of years. Now, by studying a cluster of more than 20 seismic events on Mars using data from NASA’s InSight lander mission, Simon Stähler at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and his colleagues have uncovered a likely magma deposit near Cerberus Fossae, a region of fissures created by fault lines.

InSight landed on Mars in 2018 with the objective of studying seismic waves that travel across the planet’s surface and from deep within its interior. By investigating the speed and frequency of these waves, we can better understand Mars’s geological structure.

Associate Professor of the Department of Information Technologies and Computer Sciences at MISIS University, Ph.D., mathematician and doctor Alexandra Bernadotte has developed algorithms that significantly increase the accuracy of recognition of mental commands by robotic devices. The result is achieved by optimizing the selection of a dictionary. Algorithms implemented in robotic devices can be used to transmit information through noisy communication channels. The results have been published in the peer-reviewed international scientific journal Mathematics.

The task of improving the object (audio, video or electromagnetic signals) classification accuracy, when compiling so-called “dictionaries” of devices is faced by developers of different systems aimed to improve the quality of human life.

The simplest example is a voice assistant. Audio or video transmission devices for remote control of an object in the line-of-sight zone use a limited set of commands. At the same time, it is important that the commands classifier based on the neural network accurately understands and does not confuse the commands included in the device dictionary. It also means that the recognition accuracy should not fall below a certain value in the presence of extraneous noise.

A tentacle robot can gently grasp fragile objects by entangling and ensnaring them – just as a jellyfish would.

Drawing inspiration from nature or, more specifically, from a jellyfish collecting stunned prey, a Harvard team of engineers developed a robotic gripper equipped with thin, soft tentacles to handle irregularly shaped or fragile objects.

Continue reading “Scientists build a robot gripper with spaghetti-like tentacles” »

The race to create a solid-state battery that could compete with today’s lithium-ion cells is heating up. In the past few years, there’s been a lot of R&D around solid electrolytes that promise to be safer and more powerful. In this video, we visit Sakuú, a company that doesn’t just want to make solid-state batteries, they also want to 3D-print them.

0:00 Intro.
0:29 Battery basics feat. a potato.
1:29 Lithium-ion batteries 101
2:18 What is a solid-state battery?
3:28 Intro to Sakuú
4:00 Why 3D-printing?
5:35 3D-printing prototype.
6:25 Customized battery shapes.
7:34 Challenges of total reinvention.
8:09 Looking forward.

Continue reading “Is the future of solid-state batteries 3D-printed?” »

An artificial intelligence system from Google’s sibling company DeepMind stumbled on a new way to solve a foundational math problem at the heart of modern computing, a new study finds. A modification of the company’s game engine AlphaZero (famously used to defeat chess grandmasters and legends in the game of Go) outperformed an algorithm that had not been improved on for more than 50 years, researchers say.

The new research focused on multiplying grids of numbers known as matrices. Matrix multiplication is an operation key to many computational tasks, such as processing images, recognizing speech commands, training neural networks, running simulations to predict the weather, and compressing data for sharing on the Internet.