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Rén is a customizable lantern with an integrated OLED screen for users to project whatever moving images or videos they’d like.

Over the past few years, we’ve learned to prioritize what is most important to us. From going to the virtual family reunion to getting creative in the arts, we’re keeping the stuff that matters most to us extra close. Since the pandemic has transformed many of those experiences into digital ones, designers shave been getting creative in making them as large as real life, and sometimes even larger.

Designer: Merve Nur Sökme

When a bubble pops in a liquid, it can produce a flash of light, which we now know is thanks to quantum mechanics.

Sonoluminescence is a phenomenon in which small bubbles, produced and fixed in place by an ultrasound wave in a liquid, collapse and make particles of light, or photons. Physicists have known about this process for decades, but the mechanisms behind it weren’t fully known.

It is intended to be scalable and adaptable to a variety of settings, such as on the rooftops of inner-city buildings. The aim was to design and build a system that could be replicated in both rural areas and on roofs of urban building spaces.

The 130-square-foot structure is constructed from Aleppo Pine (Pinus halepensis) that was milled, dried, processed, and pressed into laminated wooden elements on-site at Valldaura. The glass roof, carefully arranged in a heliomorphic ‘diamond’ shape, allows for full solar capture both by the plants inside and the semi-transparent solar panels integrated within the glass to power the entire structure. The greenhouse only uses about 50% of the energy it produces, leaving the other half for the nearby Valldura Labs facility.

The solar-powered greenhouse also features a fully functional nutrient delivery system consisting of storage tanks, nutrient inflows, tubing to feed the plants directly, and a matrix of LED strip lights to facilitate longer growth cycles. The ground floor will be used for germinating the seedlings that will be planted in the gardens, while the upper level will generate a sizable harvest using advanced hydroponic techniques. All planting beds will use a sawdust substrate, a former waste product of the Green Fab Lab at Valldaura put to imaginative reuse.

It’s like “Venom” or “Flubber” come to life.

Scientists have created a bizarre magnetic slime that can be remotely controlled via a magnetic field, New Scientist reports. They’re hoping the odd entity could be used to navigate narrow passages inside the human body, likely to collect objects that were mistakenly swallowed.

Of course, that’s if you’re willing to swallow this thing and have it poking around inside of you — video footage of the thing certainly doesn’t make it look appetizing. In fact, people online are already cracking potty humor jokes about it.

5G+ (5G/Beyond 5G) is the fastest-growing segment and the only significant opportunity for investment growth in the wireless network infrastructure market, according to the latest forecast by Gartner, Inc. But currently 5G+ technologies rely on large antenna arrays that are typically bulky and come only in very limited sizes, making them difficult to transport and expensive to customize.

Researchers from Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering have developed a novel and flexible solution to address the problem. Their additively manufactured tile-based approach can construct on-demand, massively scalable arrays of 5G+ (5G/Beyond 5G)‐enabled smart skins with the potential to enable intelligence on nearly any surface or object. The study, recently published in Scientific Reports, describes the approach, which is not only much easier to scale and customize than current practices, but features no performance degradation whenever flexed or scaled to a very large number of tiles.

“Typically, there are a lot of smaller wireless network systems working together, but they are not scalable. With the current techniques, you can’t increase, decrease, or direct bandwidth, especially for very large areas,” said Tentzeris. “Being able to utilize and scale this novel tile-based approach makes this possible.”

How can you prove that we may not be from here? The complexity of our DNA doubles every 600M years (Moores Law) so if you take the timeline back to where it intersects when life must have begun, it would be about 9.5B years ago, but the Earth has only been around for about 4.5B years. What gives?

This video is a short 1 min 12 second clip from a great documentary by Caroline Cory, “ET Contact: They Are Here”, available on iTunes:

https://itunes.apple.com/ca/movie/e-t-contact-they-are-here/id1286966239

Trailer: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/movie/e-t-contact-they-are-here/id1286966239

Robot Maid: The child-sized robot can mop, pick up stuff off the floor, put dishes away, and even move furniture. It can even make and bring you coffee.


Remember the Jetsons? As kids, we hoped someday we’d have flying cars or those jetpacks Elroy used to zip around with. As we become older, the thing we really want most from the Jetsons is their lovable maid Rosie. Because let’s be honest, we all despise cleaning. Whether it’s vacuuming the living room, mopping up the kitchen or picking up our kid’s toys, nobody cleans with a smile on their face. Wouldn’t it be great if we had a robot maid like Rosie to clean up while we focused on other stuff?

Well having a “Rosie” might be closer than you think thanks to a company called Aeolus Robotics. They unveiled their as of yet unnamed “maid” robot earlier this year. The child-sized robot can mop, pick up stuff off the floor, put dishes away, and even move furniture.

The robot isn’t just about cleaning, it can even make and bring you coffee if you so shall desire. It can recognize both voice and text commands so you can simply say “Mop the floor then bring me my coffee” and walla! The robot integrates with Alexa, Google Home, and other smart devices. The robot’s owner can use an app to interact with and monitor it’s activities, even being able to see the world exactly as the robot does.

The information paradox may finally be resolved with the help of the holographic theory – but this time on a fractal scale.

Ever since Hawking predicted the thermal emission of black holes and their subsequent evaporation, the question arose as to where this information goes. In the context of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics – which states that the information about a system is entirely encoded in its wave function – information is always conserved. Thus, any loss in information, like that predicted by Hawking and his evaporating black holes, would violate quantum theory. This problem is known as the information paradox.

To resolve this paradox, physicists have been actively looking for a mechanism to explain how the information of the infalling particles re-emerges in the outgoing radiation. To begin, they need to determine the entropy of the Hawking radiation.