Lifeboat Foundation

A lot of heat gets lost during the conversion of energy. Estimates even put it at more than 70%. However, in thermoelectric materials, such as those being studied at the Institute of Solid State Physics at TU Wien, heat can be converted directly into electrical energy. This effect (the Seebeck effect) can be used in numerous applications in industry but also in everyday life.

Recently, Ernst Bauer’s research team made an exciting discovery in a thermoelectric material consisting of iron, vanadium and aluminum (Fe₂VAl). The researchers recently published their results in Nature Communications.

China is emerging as a pioneer in artificial intelligence as it makes strides in filing AI patents and experimenting with the latest AI technology to power industrial applications, industry experts said.

Their comments came after a Stanford University report that shows China filed more than half of all the world’s AI patent applications last year and Chinese researchers produced about one-third of AI journal papers and AI citations in 2021.

Wu Hequan, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said China has been working to build a solid foundation to support its AI economy and is making significant contributions to AI globally.

Interpreting magnetic resonance images in the context of network control theory, researchers seek to explain the brain’s dynamics in terms of its structure, information content, and energetics.

Zero-Day vulnerability in Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi browsers allow taking control of your laptop or mobile — Vulnerabilities — Information Security Newspaper | Hacking News.

In many cases, security vulnerabilities appear that affect the programs that we use on a day-to-day basis. A clear example is the browser. It may have vulnerabilities and that can allow a hacker to break in and steal passwords or personal information. That is what is happening now with Google Chrome and you should update it as soon as possible to fix a zero-day bug.

Google has released security updates to address a Zero-Day in its Chrome web browser that it said is being exploited in the wild.

Continue reading “Zero-Day vulnerability in Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi browsers allow taking control of your laptop or mobile” »

The US Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has selected the first-ever group of encryption tools that could potentially withstand the attack of a quantum computer.

The four selected encryption algorithms will now reportedly become part of NIST’s post-quantum cryptographic (PQC) standard, which should be finalized in about two years.

More specifically, for general encryption (used for access to secure websites), NIST has selected the CRYSTALS-Kyber algorithm.

Researchers, led by experts at Imperial College London, have developed a new method that allows gene expression to be precisely altered by supplying and removing electrons. Scientists engineer new tools to electronically control gene expression.

New microelectronics device can program and reprogram computer hardware on demand through electrical pulses.

Lithium Ion-based batteries are among the most effective and widely used battery technologies. However, the batteries’ electrolytes mainly contain organic carbonated solvents, which are considered highly flammable with a narrow temperature window. To ensure that they don’t catch fire while operating at extreme temperatures, engineers must design safer electrolytes that are not only non-flammable, but also able to operate at a wide temperature range.

Researchers in the University of California San Diego’s Shirley Meng group and at the Army Research Laboratory have recently developed new liquefied gas electrolytes that could be used to produce lithium-metal batteries that can operate safely from-60 to 55 ^o C. These electrolytes have a unique structure, outlined in a paper published in Nature Energy, which make them capable of extinguishing fire.

“The liquefied gas electrolyte (LGE) was firstly conceptualized by our research group in a paper published in Science in 2017 and has been developed over five years,” Yijie Yin, one of the researchers who are working in this field from Prof. Meng’s lab, told TechXplore. “It consists of a variety of fluorocarbon gases, that when put under pressure, liquefies to form a chemically stable, low-freezing point, low-cost electrolyte.”

A cutting-edge AI development that could boost smartphone battery life by 30 percent and shave countless kilowatts from energy bills will be unveiled to technology giants. The ground-breaking University of Essex-developed work has been rolled into an app called EOptomizer—which will be demonstrated to expert researchers and designers as well as major manufacturing companies like Nokia and Huawei.

It is hoped the EOptomizer app will be adapted across the industry and help drive down carbon emissions, by making consumers’ goods last longer.

It will do this by using software to dramatically increasing efficiency and reliability in phones, tablets, cars, smart fridges and computers’ batteries—delaying when consumers need to buy carbon-footprint-producing replacements. The event—which takes place in Robinson College, in Cambridge, on 11July—will showcase the impact EOptomizer could have across the globe.

Powerful radio pulses originating deep in the cosmos can be used to study hidden pools of gas cocooning nearby galaxies, according to a new study appearing in the journal Nature Astronomy.

So-called fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are pulses of radio waves that typically originate millions to billions of light-years away (radio waves are electromagnetic radiation like the light we see with our eyes but have longer wavelengths and frequencies). The first FRB was discovered in 2007, and since then, hundreds more have been found. In 2020, Caltech’s STARE2 instrument (Survey for Transient Astronomical Radio Emission 2) and Canada’s CHIME (Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment) detected a massive FRB that went off in our own Milky Way galaxy. Those earlier results helped confirm the theory that the energetic events most likely originate from dead, magnetized stars called magnetars.

As more and more FRBs roll in, researchers are now asking how they can be used to study the gas that lies between us and the bursts. In particular, they would like to use the FRBs to probe halos of diffuse gas that surround galaxies. As the radio pulses travel toward Earth, the gas enveloping the galaxies is expected to slow the waves down and disperse the radio frequencies. In the new study, the researchers looked at a sample of 474 distant FRBs detected by CHIME, which has discovered the most FRBs to date, and showed that the subset of two dozen FRBs that passed through galactic halos were indeed slowed down more than non-intersecting FRBs.