Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists have made it possible to listen to the light echoes of a black hole by turning astronomical data into souns.

“Thermal issues are currently one of the biggest bottlenecks that are plaguing any kind of microelectronics,” says team lead Srabanti Chowdhury, professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University. “We asked ourselves, ‘Can we perform device cooling at the very material level without paying a penalty in electrical performance?’”

Indeed, they could. The engineers grew a heat-wicking diamond layer right on top of individual transistors—their hottest points—as well as on their sides. Heat flowed through the diamond to a heat sink on the back of the device. With this technique, the researchers achieved temperatures 100 degrees Celsius lower without any degradation of the device’s electrical properties. They will report their findings in San Francisco at the IEEE International Electron Device Meeting in December.

They demonstrated their technique on gallium nitride (GaN) high-electron-mobility transistors, or HEMTs. GaN is the go-to alternative to silicon for high-frequency applications, as it can sustain higher electric fields and responds more quickly to electric field changes. GaN also breaks down at a higher temperature than silicon. But not high enough: “If you go by the physics of the material, you see what its potential is, and we’re nowhere close to that today,” says Chowdhury. Keeping GaN HEMTs cool as devices shrink and frequencies grow will allow them to live up to their physics-promised potential.

When charged particles are shot through ultra-thin layers of material, sometimes spectacular micro-explosions occur, and sometimes the material remains almost intact. The reasons for this have now been explained by researchers at the TU Wien.

It sounds a bit like a magic trick: Some materials can be shot through with fast, electrically charged ions without exhibiting holes afterwards. What would be impossible at the macroscopic level is allowed at the level of individual particles. However, not all materials behave the same in such situations—in recent years, different research groups have conducted experiments with very different results.

At the TU Wien (Vienna, Austria), it has now been possible to find a detailed explanation of why some materials are perforated and others are not. This is interesting, for example, for the processing of thin membranes, which are supposed to have tailor-made nano-pores in order to trap, hold or let through very specific atoms or molecules there.

3D structures of cells and connections reveal new role for an understudied brain cell.

A new study equates a green view and the proximity of green space with better mental health in urban settings.

You heard that right, it’s time to cool down the solar farms a bit.

It’s a common belief that a solar panel produces more energy on receiving more sunlight but that’s not always true. In fact, a report from the World Economic Forum state that photovoltaic cells on a solar panel (that trap sunlight and convert it into electricity) may start producing less energy if they get overheated.

A new study conducted by a team of researchers from the University of Utah (UU), National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), and Portland State University (PSU), sheds more light on this rarely discussed aspect of solar panels. It mentions that the efficiency of a solar plant goes down by 0.5 percent.

Continue reading “Cooling solar farms can make them more powerful” »

The future we’ve been waiting for is a little closer.

Recent information from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has revealed that the Pentagon has indeed continued to pursue military-equipped jetpacks.

And now, they seem closer than ever to achieving their goal as they have already awarded contracts to companies to build test prototypes.

Controlling light “has been a recurring research theme since antiquity.”

An international group of researchers, led by a team at MIT, spent more than four years developing technologies for high-speed optical beam forming.

The researchers also developed a pioneering fabrication process that will ensure the quality of the device if and when it is manufactured at scale.

Continue reading “New light-controlling device could allow LIDAR to image scenes a million times faster” »

Researchers advance efforts to create groups of robots that could construct almost anything.

When it comes to the manufacturing of commercial aircraft, different parts are manufactured at various locations. Before finally bringing them all together in a central plant and putting the finished aeroplane together, the tail components, the fuselage, and the wings are made at different plants.

Many other large structures, besides aircraft, are also built in sections.

Continue reading “MIT engineers design self-replicating robots capable of assembling giant structures” »