Lifeboat Foundation

China has a found a novel way to tackle its massive air pollution problem: Putting up a giant air purifier the size of an industrial smokestack in the middle of a smog-plagued city.

Instead of pumping out billows of black smoke like the chimneys rising from factories in the northern province of Shaanxi, the 60-meter (197-foot) tall structure on the outskirts of the regional capital Xian blasts clean air.

Standing between high-rises, the device is capable of cleaning between five million and 18 million cubic meters of air each day, depending on the weather, season, and level of pollution, according to a report by the Chinese website Thecover.cn.

A KAIST research team recently developed sodium ion batteries using copper sulfide anode. This finding will contribute to advancing the commercialization of sodium ion batteries (SIBs) and reducing the production cost of any electronic products with batteries.

Professor Jong Min Yuk and Emeritus Professor Jeong Yong Lee from Department of Materials Science and Engineering developed a new anode material suitable for use in an SIB. Compared to the existing anode materials, the copper sulfide anode was measured to exhibit 1.5 times better cyclability with projected 40 percent reduction in cost.

Lithium-ion batteries (Li-ion batteries or LIBs) are widely used in mobile phones and other personal electronics. However, large-scale energy storage systems require less expensive, more abundant materials. Hence, a SIBs have attracted enormous attention for their advantage over lithium-based batteries.

A team of researchers from the National Institute of Informatics (NII) in Tokyo and NTT Basic Research Laboratories (BRL, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation) in Japan have published an explanation of how quantum systems may be able to heat up by cooling down. Their paper appeared recently in Physical Review Letters.

“Heating by cooling sounds rather counterintuitive, but if the system has symmetries, decay could mean many things,” says Kae Nemoto, a professor in the Principles of Informatics Research Division at NII which is part of the Inter-University Research Institute Corporation Research Organization of Information and Systems (ROIS).

Nemoto and her team examined a double sub–domain system coupled to a single constant temperature reservoir. Each sub-domain contained multiple spins—a form of angular momentum carried by elementary particles such as electrons and nuclei. The researchers considered the situation in which the spins within each sub-domain are aligned with respect to each other, but the sub-domains themselves are oppositely aligned (for instance all up in one and all down in the second). This creates a certain symmetry in the system.

Continue reading “Scientists make counterintuitive observations in hybrid quantum systems” »

What is Holochain? #notblockchain

Holochain has been in the works since before the Bitcoin whitepaper and now it is being released on the world. There is no mining, no cryptocurrency and it claims to be more efficient than Blockchain. Could Holochain be the future or decentralization?

Continue reading “Is Holochain Better than Blockchain?” »

Wei Lin built a scalable computing cluster comprised of $7 chips.

KILAUEA VOLCANO, BIG ISLAND (HawaiiNewsNow) — Scientists with the U.S.G.S. issued a Volcano Activity Notice on Tuesday, warning that the magma system beneath Kilauea’s East Rift Zone had become increasingly pressurized and that a new vent could form ‘at any time’ if conditions persist.

Based on data observed over the past month, the new vent could form on either the existing Pu’u O’o cone or on an adjacent area along the East Rift Zone, scientists say.

Magma is currently accumulating ‘at shallow depths’ beneath the existing Pu’u O’o eruption. The last time a major vent opened in the area was June 27, 2014 – the appropriately-named June 27th Flow sent lava flowing more than 12 miles into the town of Pahoa, causing minor damage to roads and structures.

Continue reading “: New Kilauea lava vent could form ‘at any time,’ scientists say” »

A man in Paris has become the world’s first to successfully receive two facial transplants.

Jérôme Hamon, 43, underwent his first face transplantation procedure in 2010 to treat neurofibromatosis, a genetic disorder characterized by the growth of tumors along nerves in the skin, brain and other parts of the body. Yet Hamon’s body rejected the original transplant.

In January, a team of surgeons and paramedics at Georges Pompidou European Hospital AP-HP, led by surgeon Dr. Laurent Lantieri, performed Hamon’s second transplant.

Continue reading “Man’s second face transplant is a world first” »

If it’s started to feel like all summer blockbuster movies are being written by robots [INSERT FORMER PRO WRESTLER, INSERT GIANT CGI ANIMAL], you’ll be disquieted to learn that that future may not be too far off.

The meditation app Calm teamed up with the tech team at Botnik to write a new Brothers Grimm-style fairy tale entirely through artificial intelligence. By inputting the data from existing Brothers Grimm stories and using predictive text technology (and with a few human writers stitching things together), the group at Botnik crafted “The Princess and the Fox,” a story about “a talking fox [who] helps the lowly miller’s son to rescue the beautiful princess from the fate of having to marry a dreadful prince who she does not love.”

“We’re doing for the Brothers Grimm what Jurassic Park did for dinosaurs,” says Michael Acton Smith, co-founder of Calm, in a press press release. “We’re bringing them back from the dead, with modern science.” (It perhaps bears remembering here that Jurassic Park famously did not end well.)

Continue reading “Artificial intelligence is writing fairy tales now, and humanity is doomed” »

But the mice didn’t seem any smarter than usual.