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May 27, 2020

The bunker builders preparing for doomsday

Posted by in categories: electronics, existential risks

Most preppers are not in fact preparing for doomsday – they’re everyday people who anticipate and try to adapt for many conditions of calamity; conditions that they believe are inevitable and have been exponentially escalated through human hubris and excessive reliance on technology and global trade networks. While the disasters they anticipate might – at the more extreme end of the spectrum – include major “resets” like an all-out nuclear war or a massive electromagnetic pulse from the Sun that would fry our fragile electronics, most preppers stockpile for low to mid-level crises like the one the world is experiencing now.


For some, the current crisis is a dummy run for long-term lockdown. Across the world, luxury bunkers are being built for a lucky few to survive calamity and collapse.

May 27, 2020

🚀 Photo

Posted by in category: space travel

NASA and SpaceX officials have given the “go” for launch on a mission that will return human spaceflight to the International Space Station from U.S. soil on an American rocket and spacecraft as a part of our NASA Commercial Crew Program.

Tune in to https://nasa.gov/live starting at 6 p.m. EDT to hear updates from #LaunchAmerica mission experts.

May 26, 2020

Novel Device Harnesses Shadows to Generate Electricity

Posted by in categories: electronics, energy

Researchers have created a device called a ‘shadow-effect energy generator’ that makes use of the contrast in illumination between lit and shadowed areas to generate electricity. This novel concept opens up new approaches in harnessing indoor lighting conditions to power electronics.

Shadows are often associated with darkness and uncertainty. Now, researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) are giving shadows a positive spin by demonstrating a way to harness this common but often overlooked optical effect to generate electricity.

“Shadows are omnipresent, and we often take them for granted. In conventional photovoltaic or optoelectronic applications where a steady source of light is used to power devices, the presence of shadows is undesirable, since it degrades the performance of devices. In this work, we capitalised on the illumination contrast caused by shadows as an indirect source of power. The contrast in illumination induces a voltage difference between the shadowed and illuminated sections, resulting in an electric current. This novel concept of harvesting energy in the presence of shadows is unprecedented,” explained research team leader Assistant Professor Tan Swee Ching, who is from the NUS Department of Materials Science and Engineering.

May 26, 2020

A Bar Owner in The UK Has Built a Faraday Cage to Stop Customers Using Their Phones

Posted by in categories: mobile phones, physics

The owner of a cocktail bar in the UK has turned to physics in an attempt to force his customers to actually talk to other instead of just staring at social media all night.

Steve Tyler, who owns the Gin Tub in East Sussex, has built his very own Faraday cage around the establishment to block mobile phone signals from entering the building.

Continue reading “A Bar Owner in The UK Has Built a Faraday Cage to Stop Customers Using Their Phones” »

May 26, 2020

SpaceX wants to send people to Mars. Here’s what the trip might look like

Posted by in category: space travel

Here’s the latest on SpaceX’s dreams of building cities on Mars.

May 26, 2020

UN agency warns of fentanyl production threat in SE Asia

Posted by in category: futurism

BANGKOK (AP) — Narcotics police in Myanmar have seized a large amount of liquid fentanyl, providing the first evidence that the synthetic opioid is being produced in quantity in Southeast Asia’s infamous Golden Triangle region.

May 26, 2020

New 5G switches mean battery life improvements, higher bandwidth and speeds

Posted by in categories: computing, internet, mobile phones

The 5G revolution has begun, and the first lines of phones that can access the next generation of wireless speeds have already hit the shelves. Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and the University of Lille in France have built a new component that will more efficiently allow access to the highest 5G frequencies in a way that increases devices’ battery life and speeds up how quickly we can do things like stream high-definition media.

Smartphones are loaded with switches that perform a number of duties. One major task is jumping between networks and spectrum frequencies: 4G, Wi-Fi, LTE, Bluetooth, etc. The current radio-frequency (RF) switches that perform this task are always running, consuming precious processing power and battery life.

“The switch we have developed is more than 50 times more energy efficient compared to what is used today,” said Deji Akinwande, a professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering who led the research. “It can transmit an HDTV stream at a 100 gigahertz frequency, and that is unheard of in broadband switch technology.”

May 26, 2020

A model that estimates tactile properties of surfaces

Posted by in categories: materials, robotics/AI

The ability to estimate the physical properties of objects is of key importance for robots, as it allows them to interact more effectively with their surrounding environment. In recent years, many robotics researchers have been specifically trying to develop techniques that allow robots to estimate tactile properties of objects or surfaces, which could ultimately provide them with skills that resemble the human sense of touch.

Building on previous research, Matthew Purri, a Ph.D. student specializing in Computer Vision and AI at Rutgers University, recently developed a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based model that can estimate tactile properties of surfaces by analyzing images of them. Purri’s new paper, pre-published on arXiv, was supervised by Kristin Dana, a professor of Electrical Engineering at Rutgers.

“My previous research dealt with fine-grain material segmentation from ,” Purri told TechXplore. “Satellite image sequences provide a wealth of material about a scene in the form of varied viewing and illumination angles and multispectral information. We learned how valuable multi-view information is for identifying material from our previous work and believed that this information could act as a cue for the problem of physical surface property estimation.”

May 26, 2020

Exploring Satrun

Posted by in category: space travel

Exploring the Gold colour planet of our Solar system — Saturn.

#SaturnExploration #SpaceExploration

May 26, 2020

New material could be used to make a liquid metal robot

Posted by in categories: 3D printing, engineering, nuclear energy, robotics/AI

Eric Klien


A liquid metal lattice that can be crushed but returns to its original shape on heating has been developed by Pu Zhang and colleagues at Binghamton University in the US. The material is held together by a silicone shell and could find myriad uses including soft robotics, foldable antennas and aerospace engineering. Indeed, the research could even lead to the creation of a liquid metal robot evoking the T-1000 character in the film Terminator 2.

The team created the liquid metal lattice using a special mixture of bismuth, indium and tin known as Field’s alloy. This alloy has the relatively unusual property of melting at just 62 °C, which means it can be liquefied with just hot water. Field’s alloy already has several applications – including as a liquid-metal coolant for advanced nuclear reactors.

Continue reading “New material could be used to make a liquid metal robot” »