Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 7,556

“I mean, I suspect we could have an army of 120,000, of which 30,000 might be robots, who knows?” Carter said, although he stressed he was not setting any particular target in terms of future numbers.

Investment in robot warfare was to be at the heart of the planned integrated five-year defence review, whose future was thrown into doubt after the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, postponed the cross-government spending review to which it had been linked last month.

Carter said negotiations with Downing Street and the Treasury about salvaging the multi-year defence funding settlement were “going on in a very constructive way” – as he lobbied in public for a long-term financial deal.

Read more | >

It will allow for near-instantaneous virtual interactions, allowing people to send a hug to a loved one or shake hands with a colleague online. Its increased capacity and speed will revolutionise virtual reality and allow for wholesale ‘teleportation of senses’, researchers claim.

Potential applications include doctors monitoring patients remotely, embracing and holding hands with a loved one who may be thousands of miles away, and having virtual meetings with no lag…

Scientists say 6G technology will be about adding a fourth dimension, ‘teleporting´ our senses to more advanced virtual worlds.

Read more | >

New device puts music in your head — no headphones required…

LONDON (AP) — Imagine a world where you move around in your own personal sound bubble. You listen to your favorite tunes, play loud computer games, watch a movie or get navigation directions in your car — all without disturbing those around you.

That’s the possibility presented by “sound beaming,” a new futuristic audio technology from Noveto Systems, an Israeli company. On Friday it will debut a desktop device that beams sound directly to a listener without the need for headphones.

The company provided The Associated Press with an exclusive demo of the desktop prototype of its SoundBeamer 1.0 before its launch Friday.

Read more | >

Researchers discover an unexpected new class of superconducting material.

Superconducting materials are traditionally classed into two types: s-wave and d-wave. A third type, p-wave, has long been predicted. Now, however, researchers in the US, Germany and Japan say they may have discovered a fourth, unexpected type of superconductor: g-wave. The result, obtained thanks to high-precision resonant ultrasound spectroscopy measurements on strontium ruthenate, could shed fresh light on the Cooper pairing mechanisms in so-called unconventional superconductors.

Read more | >

Forget glue, screws, heat or other traditional bonding methods. A Cornell University-led collaboration has developed a 3D printing technique that creates cellular metallic materials by smashing together powder particles at supersonic speed.

This form of technology, known as “cold spray,” results in mechanically robust, that are 40% stronger than similar materials made with conventional manufacturing processes. The structures’ small size and porosity make them particularly well-suited for building biomedical components, like replacement joints.

The team’s paper, “Solid-State Additive Manufacturing of Porous Ti-6Al-4V by Supersonic Impact,” published Nov. 9 in Applied Materials Today.

Read more | >

A team of physicists from the University of Konstanz and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in Germany have achieved attosecond time resolution in a transmission electron microscope by combining it with a continuous-wave laser—offering new insights into light-matter interactions.

Electron microscopes provide deep insight into the smallest details of matter and can reveal, for example, the atomic configuration of materials, the structure of proteins or the shape of virus particles. However, most materials in nature are not static and rather interact, move and reshape all the time. One of the most common phenomena is the interaction between and matter, which is ubiquitous in plants as well as in , solar cells, displays or lasers. These interactions—which are defined by electrons being moved around by the field cycles of a light wave—happen at ultrafast time scales of femtoseconds (10-15 seconds) or even attoseconds (10-18 seconds, a billionth of a billionth of a second). While ultrafast electron microscopy can provide some insight into femtosecond processes, it has not been possible, until now, to visualize the reaction dynamics of light and matter occurring at attosecond speeds.

Now, a team of physicists from the University of Konstanz and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München have succeeded in combining a with a continuous-wave laser to create a prototypical attosecond electron (A-TEM). The results are reported in the latest issue of Science Advances.

Read more | >

Most materials used for optical lighting applications need to produce a uniform illumination and require high mechanical and hydrophobic properties. However, they are rarely eco-friendly. Herein, a bio-based, polymer matrix-free, luminescent, and hydrophobic film with excellent mechanical properties for optical lighting purposes is demonstrated. A template is prepared by turning a wood veneer into porous scaffold from which most of the lignin and half of the hemicelluloses are removed. The infiltration of quantum dots (CdSe/ZnS) into the porous template prior to densification resulted in almost uniform luminescence (isotropic light scattering) and could be extended to various quantum dot particles, generating different light colors. In a subsequent step, the luminescent wood film is coated with hexadecyltrimethoxysilane (HDTMS) via chemical vapor deposition. The presence of the quantum dots coupled with the HDTMS coating renders the film hydrophobic (water contact angle ≈ 140°). This top-down process strongly eliminates lumen cavities and preserves the orientation of the original cellulose fibrils to create luminescent and polymer matrix-free films with high modulus and strength in the direction of fibers. The proposed optical lighting material could be attractive for interior designs (e.g., lamps and laminated cover panels), photonics, and laser devices.

Read more | >