Lifeboat Foundation

The transport sector is transforming towards climate-friendly powertrains with significantly reduced CO₂ emissions. The electrification of powertrains remains a major challenge not only for trucks, buses, trains, and ships but also for aircraft. These applications cannot be realized in the future with batteries because of the energy requirements. The fuel cell is an extremely promising energy supplier for these applications, which supplies electrical energy from stored hydrogen and ambient air.

Fraunhofer Institutes LBF, IFAM, IISB, and SCAI joined their forces to develop advanced and highly efficient components for fuel cells. The project HABICHT aims to design and develop a high-speed motor for a fuel cell compressor to enable innovation in the utility vehicle and aviation domain. The electric machine should at least achieve apower density of 30 kW/kgby using innovative materials for direct cooling of the stator and maximizing the rotor’shigh-speed capability (150.000 rpm). The rotor design will use a new manufacturing process to glue and pot the magnets to be suitable for high circumferential speeds.

Prototype of a high-speed motor for a fuel cell compressor. (Image: Project HABICHT)

We all learn from early on that computers work with zeros and ones, also known as binary information. This approach has been so successful that computers now power everything from coffee machines to self-driving cars and it is hard to imagine a life without them.

Building on this success, today’s quantum computers are also designed with binary information processing in mind. “The building blocks of quantum computers, however, are more than just zeros and ones,” explains Martin Ringbauer, an experimental physicist from Innsbruck, Austria. “Restricting them to binary systems prevents these devices from living up to their true potential.”

The team led by Thomas Monz at the Department of Experimental Physics at the University of Innsbruck, now succeeded in developing a quantum computer that can perform arbitrary calculations with so-called quantum digits (qudits), thereby unlocking more computational power with fewer quantum particles. Their study is published in Nature Physics.

Carbon labelling gives consumers a weapon to fight climate change at the cash register.

What’s Involved with Carbon Labelling

Today, nutritional and content labelling can be found on packaged foods. The Government recently announced plans to enhance those labels. Why, because of concerns that Canadians need to learn more about what they eat so that they can make healthier choices.

Continue reading “The Time for Carbon Labelling is Now” »

By new gene therapy, doctor said.

“Since her death in 1979, the woman who discovered what the universe is made of has not so much as received a memorial plaque. Her newspaper obituaries do not mention her greatest discovery. […] Every high school student knows that Isaac Newton discovered gravity, that Charles Darwin discovered evolution, and that Albert Einstein discovered the relativity of time. But when it comes to the composition of our universe, the textbooks simply say that the most abundant atom in the universe is hydrogen. And no one ever wonders how we know.“
–
Jeremy Knowles, discussing the complete lack of recognition Cecilia Payne gets, even today, for her revolutionary discovery. (via alliterate)

OH WAIT LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT CECILIA PAYNE.

Cecilia Payne’s mother refused to spend money on her college education, so she won a scholarship to Cambridge.

Continue reading “I did not know that!” »

Sub-Saharan Africa could soon account for half the world’s cases of cancer in children unless the disease is prioritized through robust national plans, a study published in Lancet Oncology suggests.

Lead author, Wil Ngwa, from the Johns Hopkins Medicine, said that the high rate of people in Africa surviving infectious diseases could be a reason for surging cases of infection-related cancers such as Kaposi sarcoma, Burkitt lymphoma, Hodgkin lymphoma and hepatocellular carcinoma, and also embryonal cancers like retinoblastoma and nephroblastoma.

Another study, published in the journal Cancers, found close to 1.7 million children under 15 years of age with Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) worldwide, a risk factor for cancer in children, 91% of them in sub-Saharan Africa. The researchers found that Kaposi sarcoma and lymphoma are the most common.

George Karniadakis, a professor of applied math and engineering, was one of nine faculty scientists and engineers from across the U.S. to receive a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship.

Wind farm developers have found unexploded munitions at two sites set to be some of the first commercial offshore wind farms in the US. After decades of military dumping, weapons on the seabed aren’t uncommon, but the developers will have to work around them.