Lifeboat Foundation

New applications in energy, defense and telecommunications could receive a boost after a team from The University of Texas at Austin created a new type of “nanocrystal gel”—a gel composed of tiny nanocrystals each 10,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair that are linked together into an organized network.

The crux of the team’s discovery is that this new material is easily tunable. That is, it can be switched between two different states by changing the temperature. This means the material can work as an optical filter, absorbing different frequencies of light depending on whether it’s in a gelled state or not. So, it could be used, for example, on the outside of buildings to control heating or cooling dynamically. This type of optical filter also has applications for defense, particularly for thermal camouflage.

The gels can be customized for these wide-ranging applications because both the nanocrystals and the molecular linkers that connect them into networks are designer components. Nanocrystals can be chemically tuned to be useful for routing communications through fiber optic networks or keep the temperature of space craft steady on remote planetary bodies. Linkers can be designed to cause gels to switch based on ambient temperature or detection of environmental toxins.

NFIs could be the next step in the evolution of NFTs and Altered State Machine’s Artificial Intelligence Football Association could be P2E gaming’s next breakout project in 2022.

Cornell chemists have discovered a class of nonprecious metal derivatives that can catalyze fuel cell reactions about as well as platinum, at a fraction of the cost.

This finding brings closer a future where hydrogen fuel cells efficiently power cars, generators and even spacecraft with minimal greenhouse gas emissions.

“These less expensive metals will enable wider deployment of hydrogen fuel cells,” said Héctor D. Abruña, the Émile M. Chamot Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology in the College of Arts and Sciences. “They will push us away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy sources.”

Neuralink! Also known as, Elon Musk’s other (other) project.

You’ve probably heard of Elon Musk’s plan to insert brain chips into the human brain, finally bridging the gap between human and machine. Academically, this is known as a brain-machine interface and it’s actually not that novel an idea!

Continue reading “Neuralink: Bridging The Gap Between Human & Machine” »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4fYXQ7HSMc

Circa 2021

Entrepreneurs are devising innovative ways to reuse spent electric vehicle batteries. One promising idea is storing power from solar and wind farms.

It was always going to come to something like this. But now, everyone at work may be even more concerned about what they write and say.

Quite a bit of my consulting work lately has focused on helping clients counter false information spreading online. This sort of engagement can very quickly lead to rough and murky waters, especially if an organization does not arm itself with proper ongoing situational awareness tools in order to differentiate between the bad actors who are steering the narrative and the people unknowingly posting false information.

Much of the discourse on ‘fake news’ these days conflates three notions: misinformation, disinformation and mal-information. It’s important to distinguish messages that are true from those that are false, and messages that are created, produced or distributed by “agents” who intend to do harm from those that are not. I recommend that you ensure your online comms and digital engagement folks are well versed in key definitions from the Council of Europe’s Information Disorder Report:

A study shows that Canadians have concerns about how extreme temps will affect EVs.