Lifeboat Foundation

The noise barriers built in Switzerland can supply up to 101 gigawatt hours of solar electricity every year. The prerequisite is that all noise barriers are covered with solar installations, as far as this is possible and economical. This would be possible with a solar capacity of 111 megawatts. This is the result of a study commissioned by the Swiss Federal Council at the instigation of Bruno Storni, a member of parliament from the Swiss Social Democratic Party.

This potential is far below what is technically feasible. However, the authors of the study subtracted the potential that would hardly be economically feasible according to the current state of the art. In addition, they had to take into account site conditions such as shading of the walls or safety aspects.

101 gigawatt hours sounds a lot. But this is only 0.15 per cent of the usable solar potential on roofs and facades used for comparison in Switzerland. For the federal road administration Astra and the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB), however, it is nevertheless a major step towards climate neutrality. After all, solar installations on noise barriers near road tunnels alone cover eleven per cent of the potential on Astra’s total surfaces.

AMD Unveils Zen 4 CPU Roadmap: 96-Core 5nm Genoa in 2,022 128-Core Begamo in 2023.

AMD shared its Zen 4 CPU roadmap, which includes the 96-core Genoa and 128-core Begamo CPUs.

China’s military has built a fake US Navy aircraft carrier and other warships for possible missile target practice, according to new satellite images published Sunday.

The images, captured by Colorado-based satellite imagery company Maxar Technologies, show a full-scale outline of a carrier and at least two Arleigh Burke-class destroyers at what appears to be a new target range complex in the Taklamakan Desert, part of China’s notorious Xinjiang province.

One of the mockups included the funnels and weapons systems featured on the destroyers, according to an analysis by the US Naval Institute.

A team of international scientists, including researchers from The Australian National University (ANU), have unveiled the largest number of gravitational waves ever detected.

The discoveries will help solve some of the most complex mysteries of the Universe, including the building blocks of matter and the workings of space and time.

Continue reading “Scientists detect a ‘tsunami’ of gravitational waves” »

In a new report now published in Science, primary authors Zhen Zhu, Michal Papaj, and an international research team in physics, materials science, and condensed matter at the Jiao Tong University, China, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, U.S., and the Chinese Academy of Sciences discovered the Fermi surface of supercurrent-induced quasiparticles in a superconducting system for the first time. This discovery comes 50 years after the initial theoretical prediction was made by physicist Peter Fulde and revealed the impact of the finite Cooper pair momentum on the quasiparticle spectrum. In condensed matter physics, Cooper pairs are a pair of electrons with opposite spins loosely bound due to electron-lattice interactions. Superconductivity is based on their condensation to Bosonic states at low temperatures. The interplay of superconductivity and magnetic fields leads to the phenomenon of a ‘segmented Fermi surface. A leading author of this work, MIT Professor of Physics Liang Fu, outlined the significance of this discovery.

Supercurrent flow in a superconductor

Physicists assume that a sufficiently large supercurrent can close the energy gap in a superconductor and create gapless quasiparticles via the Doppler shift of quasiparticle energy. This is facilitated by the finite momentum of Cooper pairs in the presence of supercurrent flow in a superconductor, where the shift in Cooper pair momentum can result in a Doppler shift. In this work, Zhu et al. used quasiparticle interference to image the field-controlled Fermi surface of bismuth telluride (Bi₂Te₃) thin films proximitized by the superconductor niobium diselenide (NbSe₂). A small applied in-plane magnetic field induced a screening supercurrent, which led to finite momentum pairing on the topological surface states of Bi₂Te₃. The scientists identified distinct interference patterns to indicate a gapless superconducting state with a segmented Fermi surface to reveal the strong impact of the finite Cooper pair momentum on the quasiparticle spectrum.

When a highly coherent light beam, such as that emitted by radars, is diffusely reflected on a surface with a rough structure (e.g., a piece of paper, white paint or a metallic surface), it produces a random granular effect known as the ‘speckle’ pattern. This effect results in strong fluctuations that can reduce the quality and interpretability of images collected by synthetic aperture radar (SAR) techniques.

SAR is an imaging method that can produce fine-resolution 2D or 3D images using a resolution-limited radar system. It is often employed to collect images of landscapes or object reconstructions, which can be used to create millimeter-to-centimeter scale models of the surface of Earth or other planets.

To improve the quality and reliability of SAR data, researchers worldwide have been trying to develop techniques based on deep neural networks that could reduce the speckle effect. While some of these techniques have achieved promising results, their performance is still not optimal.

Wireless sensing devices, tools that allow users to sense movements and remotely monitor activities or changes in specific environments, have many applications. For instance, they could be used for surveillance purposes as well as to track the sleep or physical activities of medical patients and athletes. Some videogame developers have also used wireless sensing systems to create more engaging sports or dance-related games.

Researchers at Florida State University, Trinity University and Rutgers University have recently developed Winect, a new wireless sensing system that can track the poses of humans in 3D as they perform a wide range of free-form physical activities. This system was introduced in a paper pre-published on arXiv and is set to be presented at the ACM Conference on Interactive, Mobile, Wearables and Ubiquitous Technologies (Ubi Comp) 2,021 one of the most renowned computer science events worldwide.

“Our research group has been conducting cutting-edge research in wireless sensing,” Jie Yang, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “In the past, we have proposed several systems to use Wi-Fi signals to sense various human activities and objects, ranging from large-scale human activities, to small-scale finger movements, sleep monitoring and daily objects For example, we proposed two systems dubbed E-eyes and WiFinger, which are among the first work to utilize Wi-Fi sensing to distinguish various types of daily activity and finger gestures.”

Just over a year after launching its flagship product, Landing AI secured a $57 million round of Series A funding to continue building tools that enable manufacturers to more easily and quickly build and deploy artificial intelligence systems.

The company, started by former Google and Baidu AI guru Andrew Ng, developed LandingLens, a visual inspection tool that applies AI and deep learning to find product defects faster and more accurately.

Ng says industries should adopt a data-centric approach to building AI, which provides a more efficient way for manufacturers to teach an AI model what to do, using no code/low code capabilities, which include just a few mouse clicks to build advanced AI models in less than a day.

Tesla works on software… SpaceX gets hit with another delay… Elon Musk will pay taxes.