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Mar 20, 2022

Sunfarming builds new agri-PV systems in the Rhineland

Posted by in category: futurism

The project developer from Erkner near Berlin has built two new agriphotovoltaic plants near Jülich. They not only supply electricity, but also data for various research objectives.

Mar 20, 2022

Nanotechnology Repairs Engine Damage in Cars

Posted by in categories: materials, nanotechnology

NASA

That spot of oil on the garage floor dripping from your engine indicates a problem. It’s so small that you put off going to the mechanic, until you hear a new noise and the oil pressure warning light goes off. The bad news is that one of the bearings in the crankshaft is the source of the issue. Due to wear, the normally round part is now more elliptical in shape. Some of the metal has worn away, landing you with a costly repair.

This kind of wear on engine components is common because of friction, and it happens in all machinery with moving parts. Lubricants that reduce friction can only delay and minimize this inevitable damage. The idea of reversing that wear by fixing a worn part was the dream of Washington State University PhD candidate Pavlo “Pasha” Rudenko, who decided to research using smart nanoparticles to replace eroded material.

Mar 20, 2022

Live Fast, Die Young? Or Live Cold, Die Old?

Posted by in category: life extension

Summary: Body temperature exerts a greater effect on longevity and lifespan than metabolic rate, researchers report.

Source: Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Researchers from the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology (SIAT) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, along with collaborators from Wenzhou University and the University of Aberdeen, have found that body temperature exerts a greater effect on lifespan than metabolic rate.

Mar 20, 2022

Drones and AI recover a meteorite for the first time

Posted by in categories: drones, robotics/AI, space

Space rocks are very difficult for astronomers to find. Aerial drone footage was sent to an AI trained to track down these meteorites.

Mar 20, 2022

Physicists Startled To Discover a New Way To Shape a Material’s Atomic Structure With Light

Posted by in categories: materials, physics

X-ray laser experiments show that intense light distorts the structure of a thermoelectric material in a unique way, opening a new avenue for controlling the properties of materials.

Thermoelectric materials convert heat to electricity and vice versa, and their atomic structures are closely related to how well they perform.

Now researchers have discovered how to change the atomic structure of a highly efficient thermoelectric material, tin selenide, with intense pulses of laser light. This result opens a new way to improve thermoelectrics and a host of other materials by controlling their structure, creating materials with dramatic new properties that may not exist in nature.

Mar 20, 2022

Large-scale synthesis of graphene and other 2D materials towards industrialization

Posted by in categories: futurism, materials

The industrial application of two-dimensional (2D) materials strongly depends on the large-scale manufacturing of high-quality 2D films and powders. Here, the authors analyze three state-of-the art mass production techniques, discussing the recent progress and remaining challenges for future improvements.

Mar 20, 2022

Ask Ethan: What Is The ‘Zero-Point Energy’ Of Space?

Posted by in category: futurism

Even if you remove everything you can from the Universe, some energy will still remain. Here’s what that means.

Mar 20, 2022

A Surprise Finding About Mouse Vision Could Change Our View of Cognition

Posted by in category: neuroscience

Being able to tell the difference between a photo of something and the actual thing itself – picture-to-object equivalence, in science speak – is a useful test for better understanding the visual and cognitive function of other primates, birds, and even rats.

But how far does this ability to interpret a flat image extend in the animal kingdom?

A new study has found mice might also have the capacity, as they demonstrated the ability to link a 2D image of an object with the actual 3D object itself, using the hippocampus part of their brains in the same way that humans do.

Mar 20, 2022

Discovery of cells that prevent particularly important genes from mutating

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics

For many decades, evolutionary biologists assumed that the changes in DNA, known as mutations, occur irrespective of any consequences for the organism. A team led by Professor Detlef Weigel, Director at the Max Planck Institute …

Mar 20, 2022

Artificial Intelligence: Can AI Ever Become Conscious, And Other Burning Questions

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Use of AI techniques has shown significantly better performance in many natural language processing tasks, including machine translation and question-answering, as compared to hand-coded rules by linguistics or other computer science methods.