Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers from the U.S., Russia, and China have bent the rules of classical chemistry and synthesized a “forbidden” compound of cerium and hydrogen—CeH₉—which exhibits superconductivity at a relatively low pressure of 1 million atmospheres. The paper came out in Nature Communications.

Superconductors are materials capable of conducting an electric current with no resistance whatsoever. They are behind the powerful electromagnets in particle accelerators, maglev trains, MRI scanners, and could theoretically enable power lines that deliver electricity from A to B without losing the precious kilowatts to thermal dissipation.

Unfortunately, the superconductors known today can only work at very low temperatures (below −138 degrees Celsius), and latest record (−13 degrees Celsius) requires extremely high pressures of nearly 2 million atmospheres. This limits the scope of their possible applications and makes the available superconducting technologies expensive, since maintaining their fairly extreme operating conditions is challenging.

Electrical engineers at Duke University have harnessed the power of machine learning to design dielectric (non-metal) metamaterials that absorb and emit specific frequencies of terahertz radiation. The design technique changed what could have been more than 2000 years of calculation into 23 hours, clearing the way for the design of new, sustainable types of thermal energy harvesters and lighting.

The study was published online on September 16 in the journal Optics Express.

Metamaterials are synthetic materials composed of many individual engineered features, which together produce properties not found in nature through their structure rather than their chemistry. In this case, the terahertz metamaterial is built up from a two-by-two grid of silicon cylinders resembling a short, square Lego.

Researchers in the lab of UC Santa Barbara professor Yasamin Mostofi have enabled, for the first time, determining whether the person behind a wall is the same individual who appears in given video footage, using only a pair of WiFi transceivers outside.

This novel video-WiFi cross-modal gait-based person identification system, which they refer to as XModal-ID (pronounced Cross-Modal-ID), could have a variety of applications, from surveillance and security to smart homes. For instance, consider a scenario in which law enforcement has a video footage of a robbery. They suspect that the robber is hiding inside a house. Can a pair of WiFi transceivers outside the house determine if the person inside the house is the same as the one in the robbery video? Questions such as this have motivated this new technology.

Continue reading “Researchers’ new method enables identifying a person through walls from candidate video footage, using only WiFi” »

It’s a long shot, but scientists are about to listen very closely for radio signals from our solar system’s first known interstellar visitor.

O.o I remember one time seeing an article I was not sure of basically talking about aliens coming out of the sun I thought it was crazy at the time but now I am not so sure o, o.

New research argues that ancient aliens could have turned space rocks orbiting near Earth into de-facto spy satellites.

Tesla has filed for a new patent on a design for a liquid-cooled charging connector, like the one used at its Supercharger stations.

With the advent of faster-charging electric vehicles, charging station manufacturers need to develop higher-powered DC fast charger and those machines generate more heat that needs to be dissipated.

Continue reading “Tesla patents new liquid-cooled charging connector” »

For years, Boston Dynamics’ only commercial product has been vaguely unsettling videos of robots moving in realistic ways. That changes today. No, the robots aren’t getting less creepy. Boston Dynamics has a real commercial product: Spot. This quadrupedal robot is shipping out to select companies, but it could expand to general sales eventually.

We’ve seen Spot (originally known as SpotMini) show up in various video demonstrations. You’ve seen it twerk, and now you might see it work. Boston Dynamics isn’t entirely certain what sort of work Spot will do, but that’s why it’s starting with a limited sales program. It wants to work closely with early adopters to evaluate Spot’s usefulness in the real world.

Continue reading “Boston Dynamics Begins Selling ‘Spot’ Robot” »

UK company Reaction Engines is developing its Synergetic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine (SABRE), which could fly in space at Mach 25 and cut UK-Australia flight times to ‘as little as four hours’.

A breast cancer drug has been used to double the survival of men with advanced prostate cancer, becoming the first successful precision medicine for the disease.

Doctors at the Royal Marsden Hospital who conducted the trial say the results amount to a “revolution” in prostate cancer care.

They conducted genetic testing on more than 4,400 patients to identify those with one or more of 15 types of DNA fault.