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Making Kazakhstan Green Again — Mr. Arman Kashkinbekov, Honorary CEO and Board Member, Association of Renewable Energy of Kazakhstan — Director, International Snow Leopard Foundation.

Mr. Arman Kashkinbekov, is the honorary CEO and board member, Association of Renewable Energy of Kazakhstan and Deputy Chairman of the Board, International Centre for Green Technologies and Investment Projects (Kazakhstan).

With a bachelor’s degree from Karaganda University, in International Economic Relations, and a master’s degree in economics from Vanderbilt University, Mr. Kashkinbekov also studied at the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate and the Kazakhstan-Japan Development Center.

Continue reading “Arman Kashkinbekov — Honorary CEO, Renewable Energy of Kazakhstan — Making Kazakhstan Green Again” | >

Place one clock at the top of a mountain. Place another on the beach. Eventually, you’ll see that each clock tells a different time. Why?

In his book “The Order of Time,” Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli suggests that our perception of time — our sense that time is forever flowing forward — could be a highly subjective projection. After all, when you look at reality on the smallest scale (using equations of quantum gravity, at least), time vanishes.

“If I observe the microscopic state of things,” writes Rovelli, “then the difference between past and future vanishes … in the elementary grammar of things, there is no distinction between ‘cause’ and ‘effect.’”

So, why do we perceive time as flowing forward? Rovelli notes that, although time disappears on extremely small scales, we still obviously perceive events occur sequentially in reality. In other words, we observe entropy: Order changing into disorder; an egg cracking and getting scrambled.

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Imagine Apple, Bose or other consumer electronics companies making hearing aids more stylish and relatively affordable — with people having confidence that the devices had been vetted by the F.D.A. Bose told me that it’s working on over-the-counter hearing aid technology.

This article is part of the On Tech newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it weekdays.

On Tech is back from a spring break, and the magnolia trees are blooming outside On Tech headquarters (a.k.a., my New York apartment).

Today, let’s talk about relatively simple technology and a change in government policy that could unleash more innovation for Americans who have difficulty hearing.

Continue reading “Hearing AIDS for the Masses” | >

This spring, the biotechnology company Oxitec plans to release genetically modified (GM) mosquitoes in the Florida Keys. Oxitec says its technology will combat dengue fever, a potentially life-threatening disease, and other mosquito-borne viruses — such as Zika — mainly transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito.

While there have been more than 7300 dengue cases reported in the United States between 2010 and 2020, a majority are contracted in Asia and the Caribbean, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In Florida, however, there were 41 travel-related cases in 2020, compared with 71 cases that were transmitted locally.

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In high-end 21st century communications, information travels in the form of a stream of light pulses typically traveling through fiber optic cables. Each pulse can be as faint as a single photon, the smallest possible unit (quantum) of light. The speed at which such systems can operate depends critically on how fast and how accurately detectors on the receiving end can discriminate and process those photons.

Now scientists at the National institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have devised a method that can detect individual photons at a rate 10 times faster than the best existing technology, with lower error rates, higher detection efficiency, and less noise.

“While classical communication and detection can operate at blazing speeds, , which need that ultimate sensitivity for those faintest of pulses, are limited to much lower speeds,” said group leader Alan Migdall. “Combining that ultimate sensitivity with the ability to achieve the counting of photons at has been a long-standing challenge. Here we are pushing both performance limits all in the same device.”

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Researchers at Utrecht University and at TU Wien (Vienna) create special light waves that can penetrate even opaque materials as if the material was not even there.

Why is sugar not transparent? Because light that penetrates a piece of sugar is scattered, altered and deflected in a highly complicated way. However, as a research team from TU Wien (Vienna) and Utrecht University (Netherlands) has now been able to show, there is a class of very special light waves for which this does not apply: for any specific disordered medium – such as the sugar cube you may just have put in your coffee – tailor-made light beams can be constructed that are practically not changed by this medium, but only attenuated. The light beam penetrates the medium, and a light pattern arrives on the other side that has the same shape as if the medium were not there at all.

This idea of “scattering-invariant modes of light” can also be used to specifically examine the interior of objects. The results have now been published in the journal Nature Photonics.

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FLIR Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: FLIR) announced it has won a contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to rapidly develop novel fabrics with embedded catalysts and chemistries that can fight and reduce chemical and biological threats upon contact.

The revolutionary fabrics will be incorporated into protective suits and other equipment such as boots, gloves, and eye protection that can be worn by troops on the battlefield, medical experts, healthcare workers, and more. FLIR received $11.2 million in initial funding for the potential five-year effort worth up to $20.5 million, including options.

The goal of DARPA’s Personalized Protective Biosystems (PPB) program is to reduce the substantial weight and physiological burden of current Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) so soldiers and other specialists can better perform their tasks. PPB will combine novel, lightweight protective materials with new prophylactic medical technologies that mitigate chemical and biological threats at vulnerable tissue barriers, notably the eyes, skin and lungs.

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