Lifeboat Foundation

To meet soaring demand for lightning-quick mobile technology, each year tech giants create faster, more powerful devices with longer-lasting battery power than previous models.

A major reason companies like Apple and Samsung can miraculously pull this off year after year is because engineers and researchers around the world are designing increasingly power-efficient microchips that still deliver high speeds.

To that end, researchers led by a team at Brigham Young University have just built the world’s most power-efficient high-speed analog-to–digital converter (ADC) microchip. An ADC is a tiny piece of technology present in almost every electronic piece of equipment that converts analog signals (like a radio wave) to a digital signal.

When one of the largest modern earthquakes struck Japan on March 11, 2011, the nuclear reactors at Fukushima-Daiichi automatically shut down, as designed. The emergency systems, which would have helped maintain the necessary cooling of the core, were destroyed by the subsequent tsunami. Because the reactor could no longer cool itself, the core overheated, resulting in a severe nuclear meltdown, the likes of which haven’t been seen since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.

Since then, reactors have improved exponentially in terms of safety, sustainability and efficiency. Unlike the light-water reactors at Fukushima, which had liquid coolant and uranium fuel, the current generation of reactors has a variety of coolant options, including molten-salt mixtures, supercritical water and even gases like helium.

Dr. Jean Ragusa and Dr. Mauricio Eduardo Tano Retamales from the Department of Nuclear Engineering at Texas A&M University have been studying a new fourth-generation reactor, pebble-bed reactors. Pebble-bed reactors use spherical fuel elements (known as pebbles) and a fluid coolant (usually a gas).

The continuing miniaturization of electronics is opening up some exciting possibilities when it comes to what we might place in our bodies to monitor and improve our health. Engineers at Columbia University have demonstrated an extreme version of this technology, developing the smallest single-chip system ever created, which could be implanted with a hypodermic needle to measure temperature inside the body, and possibly much more.

From ladybug-sized implants that track oxygen levels in deep body tissues to tiny “neural dust” sensors that monitor nerve signals in real time, scientists are making big steps when it comes to the functionality of tiny electronic devices. The implant developed by the Columbia Engineers breaks new ground as the world’s smallest single-chip system, which is a completely functional electronic circuit with a total volume of less than 0.1 mm³.

That makes it as small as a dust mite, and only visible under a microscope. The tiny chip required some outside-the-box thinking to make, particularly when it comes to the way it communicates and is powered.

HELSINKI — China’s Zhurong rover descended onto the surface of Mars late May 21, a week after the vehicle’s historic landing in Utopia Planitia.

The China National Space Administration (CNSA) announced Saturday that the six-wheeled Zhurong had reached the surface at 10:20 p.m. Eastern Friday.

The rover will now begin science and exploration tasks in Utopia Planitia with six science payloads, including optical and multispectral cameras and ground-penetrating radar.

STARFORGE, an initiative dedicated to modeling early star formation, has released stunning supercomputer simulations of young protostars.

DNA was personified in Jurassic Park, where the animated double helix that called himself Mr. DNA took you and a group of skeptical scientists through the oversimplified (and obviously fictional) steps to creating dino DNA — but there is some reality in this.

For all you dinosaur enthusiasts out there, synthesizing DNA can’t bring T.Rex and Brachiosaurus back from extinction. Though creating genes in a lab sounds like the original eureka moment of Jurassic Park, synthesizing human DNA has done everything from genetic sequencing and editing to detecting diseases like the current plague we are living through. There is just one step that has always been problematic.

As the Covid-19 vaccine rollout continues in the United States, with people ages 12 and older receiving their shots, vaccine makers are now preparing for a next possible phase: booster doses.

Researchers at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics published a paper last week that just might explain a mysterious gap in planet sizes beyond our solar system. Planets between 1.5 and 2 times Earth’s radius are strikingly rare. This new research suggests that the reason might be because planets slightly larger than this, called mini-Neptunes, lose their atmospheres over time, shrinking to become ‘super-Earths’ only slightly larger than our home planet. These changing planets only briefly have a radius the right size to fill the gap, quickly shrinking beyond it. The implication for planetary science is exciting, as it affirms that planets are not static objects, but evolving and dynamic worlds.

Exoplanet research is a very young field. As recently as 1992, no one had ever seen a planet beyond our solar system. Today, we’ve discovered more than 4700 of them, and that number is growing rapidly due to the efforts of dedicated planet-hunting space telescopes like Kepler (now defunct) and its successor, TESS. We’ve suddenly gained an enormous new sample size of planets to study, beyond the eight planets (sorry Pluto) that orbit around our sun.

Kepler, TESS, and other planet hunters have discovered brand new types of planets, like so-called ‘hot-Jupiters,’ large gas giants that orbit very close to their star. These were among the first exoplanets observed because their large size made them easy to find, and their small, fast orbital periods meant we could see them pass in front of their star more than once in a short period of time (some hot-Jupiters have a year that lasts only a few Earth days).

Exoplanet hunting is difficult, and we are limited by our technology. But Peter Vickers believes we’re also limited by our biases.