The rules of immunity.
Welcome to the age of wireless electricity.
Nikola Tesla once envisioned a world where electricity could be transmitted wirelessly, eliminating the need for wires and revolutionizing energy distribution.
Over a century later, that dream is on the brink of becoming reality.
Companies worldwide, from America’s Wave Inc. to Japan’s Space Power Technologies and New Zealand’s Emrod, are pioneering wireless power transmission technologies. These innovations range from microwave and laser-based energy transfer to solar satellites that beam electricity from space. New Zealand is already testing Emrod’s wireless energy infrastructure, which could provide clean, sustainable power across difficult terrains. Meanwhile, advancements like wireless EV charging roads and underground charging systems are making the technology more practical than ever.
As promising as wireless electricity sounds, challenges remain—chief among them, public skepticism and efficiency concerns.
Despite this, major institutions like Caltech and Purdue University are pushing forward, with projects aimed at developing large-scale wireless power solutions. Whether through inductive charging for electric vehicles, space-based solar power, or rectenna-driven energy grids, the world is inching closer to Tesla’s vision. If successful, wireless electricity could revolutionize industries, eliminate the limitations of traditional power grids, and usher in a new era of energy sustainability.
The future of power might just be as simple as turning on a switch—without plugging in.
Spider webs aid arachnids in hearing, a principle that could enhance microphone technology.
A study reveals how spiders use their webs to detect sound velocity, leading to the development of a microphone with enhanced sensitivity.
As the world searches for energy alternatives to fossil fuels, the answer may have been in front of us the whole time.
PsiQuantum has detailed the photonic quantum chips and cooling system it plans to use for a quantum computer with a million qubits.
The Omega quantum photonic chipset is purpose-built for utility-scale quantum computing and produced by Global Foundries in New York on 300mm wafer. The technology was detailed in a paper in Nature submitted last June and published this week.
This paper shows high-fidelity qubit operations, and a simple, long-range chip-to-chip qubit interconnect – a key enabler to scale that has remained challenging for other technologies.
Microsoft’s Majorana 1 quantum chip introduces a breakthrough Topological Core, enabling stable and scalable qubits.
By leveraging topoconductors, this innovation paves the way for million-qubit machines capable of solving complex scientific and industrial challenges. With DARPA
Formed in 1958 (as ARPA), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is an agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. DARPA formulates and executes research and development projects to expand the frontiers of technology and science, often beyond immediate U.S. military requirements, by collaborating with academic, industry, and government partners.
My short story has been published by White Cat Publications! It features the idea of deliberately kicking off life on other planets by seeding them with engineered microorganisms, potentially leading to new civilizations in the distant future! #sciencefiction
By Logan Thrasher Collins.
“Wait up Jimmy!” Katrina called after her brother as he clambered up the snowy hill towards the launch facility. He turned back to her, cheeks pink and eyes bright. It was a cold clear night. Snowflakes drifted on the breeze, glowing against the light from the facility’s bulbs.
“Sorry Kat. Just excited.” Jimmy held up the capsule containing the bacteria that he and Katrina had engineered using old lab equipment in their parents’ garage after school. They had not yet started high school, so they had taught themselves the rudiments of the biological sciences through books and the internet. After finding the old rocket in the facility and hatching their plan, they had spent many late nights deciphering passages from journal articles and laboratory protocols. At last, they were ready to send their engineered bacteria into outer space.
I have always considered myself generally attuned to the nuances of sound and technology, but nothing in my training or experience as an audio engineer had prepared me for the experience that would challenge my understanding of mind-machine interaction, if not reality itself. During my five years of industry experience (in documentary postproduction) working with digital audio workstations, mixing consoles, and media servers, I occasionally noticed fleeting moments of uncanny synchrony between my thoughts and the technology around me — an inexplicable, almost telepathic rapport with the equipment.
One event stood apart from all others: a sudden, unshakable certainty that the entire production company’s server infrastructure was on the verge of catastrophic failure. There were no perceptible signs of this — no sluggishness in the UI or signal output, no glitches registering perceptually or in the manipulations of the hardware — it was just a gut feeling. Trusting this intuition, I meticulously backed up every project I was working on at the time. A couple days later, the crash hit — crippling the workflow of every suite in the company except mine. To a skeptic, this might be dismissed as coincidence or subconscious pattern recognition. But to me, it was phenomenologically undeniable: something beyond conventional cognition had occurred, something that demanded deeper inquiry.
The history of science is punctuated by phenomena that defy our prevailing paradigms. The phenomenon described here — a premonition of an impending media server collapse, acted upon with near-perfect timing — suggests an intimate, perhaps even psychic, relationship between the human mind and the technological milieu. While a materialist skeptic may argue that this experience is the product of unconscious pattern recognition or mere coincidence, such objections introduce unnecessary complexities, violating the principle of Occam’s Razor.
Researchers have developed a battery capable of converting nuclear energy into electricity through light emission, according to a new study.
Nuclear power plants generate about 20% of the electricity in the United States and produce minimal greenhouse gas emissions. However, they also generate radioactive waste, which poses risks to human health and the environment, making safe disposal a significant challenge.
To address this, a team led by researchers from The Ohio State University designed a system that harnesses ambient gamma radiation to generate electricity. By combining scintillator crystals—high-density materials that emit light when exposed to radiation—with solar cells, they successfully converted nuclear energy into an electric output powerful enough to run microelectronics, such as microchips.
Researchers have developed small robots that can work together as a collective that changes shape and even shifts between solid and “fluid-like” states — a concept that should be familiar to anyone still haunted by nightmares of the T-1000 robotic assassin from “Terminator 2.”
A team led by Matthew Devlin of UC Santa Barbara described this work in a paper recently published in Science, writing that the vision of “cohesive collectives of robotic units that can arrange into virtually any form with any physical properties … has long intrigued both science and fiction.”
Otger Campàs, a professor at Max Planck Institute of Molecular Biology and Genetics, told Ars Technica that the team was inspired by tissues in embryos to try and design robots with similar capabilities. These robots have motorized gears that allow them to move around within the collective, magnets so they can stay attached, and photodetectors that allow them to receive instructions from a flashlight with a polarization filter.