Lifeboat Foundation

Straight from the depths of AI hell hails Crungus — or somewhere like that, because until a few days ago, nobody knew this thing existed.

Yet another startup says it’s nearing tests for a system that could once and for all prove the technology can actually generate more energy than it consumes, The New York Times reports.

Seattle-based startup Zap Energy says its approach to fusion energy — potentially an entirely green source of renewable energy — is far simpler and cheaper than other attempts.

But critics are crying foul, arguing that we’re merely stuck in yet another round of “fusion energy fever,” according to the report.

A team of researchers at ETH Zurich in Switzerland have created an intriguing new exosuit that’s designed to give its wearer an extra layer of muscles.

The suit is intended to give those with limited mobility back their strength — and early trials are already showing plenty of potential, the scientists say.

The soft “wearable exomuscle,” dubbed the Myoshirt, automatically detects its wearer’s movement intentions and use actuators to literally take some of the load off.

A 30-year-old Kenyan engineer named Nzambi Matee has come up with a promising way to upcycle plastic trash that would’ve otherwise landed in landfills — by pressing it, with the addition of sand, into sturdy bricks and paving stones.

Her Nairobi-based company, Gjenge Makers, produces a variety of different paving stones, which are already being put to use to line sidewalks, driveways, and roads.

Continue reading “Kenyan Engineer Invents Method to Turn Waste Plastic Into Sturdy Construction Bricks” »

Most folks probably don’t think of satellites as capable of sinking, but according to the European Space Agency they can and do.

Space news site Space. com reported Thursday that ESA scientists had to raise the Swarm constellation satellites, which measure Earth’s magnetic field, because they were sinking in chaotic space weather.

“In the last five, six years, the satellites were sinking about two and a half kilometers [1.5 miles] a year,” Swarm mission managerAnja Stromme, ESA’s told Space.com. “But since December last year, they have been virtually diving. The sink rate between December and April has been 20 kilometers [12 miles] per year.”

Technique probes dopamine concentrations at the subcellular level.

Special relativity famously dictates that no known object can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum – making it unlikely that humans will ever send spacecraft to explore beyond our local area of the Milky Way. However, new research by Erik Lentz at the University of Göttingen suggests there could be a way beyond this limit. The only catch is that his scheme requires vast amounts of energy and so may never actually be able to propel a spacecraft (Class. Quant. Grav. 38 075015).

Lentz proposes that conventional energy sources could arrange the structure of space–time in the form of a soliton – a robust singular wave. This soliton would act like a “warp bubble’”, contracting space in front of it and expanding space behind. Unlike objects within it, space–time itself can bend, expand or warp at any speed. A spacecraft contained in a hyperfast bubble could therefore arrive at its destination faster than light would in normal space without breaking any physical laws.

It had been thought that the only way to produce a warp drive was by generating vast amounts of negative energy – perhaps by using some sort of undiscovered exotic matter or by manipulating dark energy. To get around this problem, Lentz constructed an unexplored geometric structure of space–time to derive a new family of solutions to Einstein’s general relativity equations called positive-energy solitons. Though Lentz’s solitons appear to conform to Einstein’s general theory of relativity and remove the need to create negative energy, space agencies will not be building warp drives any time soon, if ever. Part of the reason is that Lentz’s positive-energy warp drive requires a huge amount of energy. According to Lentz, a 100 m radius spacecraft would require the energy equivalent to “hundreds of times the mass of Jupiter”.

Nanotechnologist and co-founder of the Black in Nanotech initiative, Olivia Geneus. (Courtesy: Alexander Harold) Welcome to this Physics World Nanotechnology Briefing, which showcases the breadth of applications of modern nanotechnology.

Olivia Geneus is one of the growing number of scientists who are developing nanotechnologies for medicine. In an interview, the PhD student at the State University of New York at Buffalo explains how she is developing nanoparticles designed to cross the blood–brain barrier in order to image and destroy brain cancer cells. Geneus also talks about Black in Nanotech Week, which she co-founded, and the need to encourage Black children to consider careers in science.

Ed Lester of the UK’s University of Nottingham knows that there are myriad uses for nanoparticles. In 2007 he founded the company Promethean Particles when he realized industrial users were not able to source nanoparticles in the quantities and quality that they required. In an interview, Lester talks about some of the company’s development projects including nanoparticles for aviation, healthcare and energy.

Researchers in Switzerland and Italy have developed a new method for generating currents of spin-polarized electrons without the need for large external magnetic fields. This could enable the development of devices that are compatible with superconducting electronic components, paving the way for the next generation of highly efficient electronics.

Emerging in the 1980s, “spintronics” is dedicated to creating practical devices that exploit electron spin. Semiconductor-based spintronics systems have garnered particular interest because semiconductors can be integrated within modern-day electronics with the aim of improving the efficiency and storage capacity of devices. But to make useful spintronics devices, researchers must control and detect the spin state of electrons with a high level of accuracy.

One way of controlling electron spin current is a “spin valve”, which usually consists of a non-magnetic material sandwiched between ferromagnetic materials. Electrons in one spin state (say up) can propagate through the device, while spin-down electrons are reflected or scattered away. The result is a “spin polarized current” in which all electrons are either spin-up or all spin-down) – at least in principle.