Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 9617

Circa 2005

Until 1993 LEDs could only produce red, green and yellow light. But then Nichia Chemical of Japan figured out how to produce blue LEDs. By combining blue LEDs with red and green LEDs – or adding a yellow phosphor to blue LEDs – manufacturers were able create white light, which opened up a number of new applications. However, these LEDs tend to produce white light with a cool, bluish tinge.

The white-light quantum dots, by contrast, produce a smoother distribution of wavelengths in the visible spectrum with a slightly warmer, slightly more yellow tint, reports Michael Bowers, the graduate student who made the quantum dots and discovered their unusual property. As a result, the light produced by the quantum dots looks more nearly like the “full spectrum” reading lights now on the market which produce a light spectrum closer to that of sunlight than normal fluorescent tubes or light bulbs. Of course, quantum dots, like white LEDs, have the advantage of not giving off large amounts of invisible infrared radiation unlike the light bulb. This invisible radiation produces large amounts of heat and largely accounts for the light bulb’s low energy efficiency.

Image left: The crude hybrid white-light LED that Bowers made by mixing magic-sized quantum dots with Minwax and using the mixture to coat a blue LED. Photo by Daniel Dubois.

Continue reading “Quantum dots that produce white light could be the light bulb’s successor” | >

Circa 2018

Researchers have demonstrated nanomaterial-based white-light-emitting diodes (LEDs) that exhibit a record luminous efficiency of 105 lumens per watt. Luminous efficiency is a measure of how well a light source uses power to generate light. With further development, the new LEDs could reach efficiencies over 200 lumens per watt, making them a promising energy-efficient lighting source for homes, offices and televisions.

“Efficient LEDs have strong potential for saving energy and protecting the environment,” said research leader Sedat Nizamoglu, Koç University, Turkey. “Replacing conventional lighting sources with LEDs with an of 200 lumens per watt would decrease the global electricity consumed for lighting by more than half. That reduction is equal to the electricity created by 230 typical 500-megawatt coal plants and would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 200 million tons.”

The researchers describe how they created the high-efficiency white LEDs in Optica, The Optica l Society’s journal for high impact research. The new LEDs use commercially available blue LEDs combined with flexible lenses filled with a solution of nano-sized semiconductor particles called . Light from the blue LED causes the dots to emit green and red, which combines with the blue emission to create .

Continue reading “Quantum dot white LEDs achieve record efficiency” | >

A biomedical tool that tricks aggressive brain tumors such as glioblastoma into migrating into an external container rather than throughout the brain has been designated a “Breakthrough Device” by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Dubbed the Tumor Monorail, the mimics the physical properties of the brain’s to entice to migrate toward the exterior of the brain, where the migrating cells can be collected and removed. The purpose of the device is not to destroy the tumor, but to halt its lethal spread, making the disease more of a condition to manage than a death sentence.

Breakthrough designations from the FDA aim to expedite the development and review of drugs, diagnostics and devices aimed at life-threatening or irreversibly debilitating conditions. While the designation does not mean that the device has been approved for clinical use, it does provide a partnership with the FDA that can speed development, assessment and review.

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Slowly but surely, home delivery is getting cleaner.

Logistics company DHL has already branched out into selling its own StreetScooter zero emission delivery vehicles, but that doesn’t mean it’s not in the market for adding to its fleet from other manufacturers either.

In fact, the company is announcing the addition of 63 NGEN-1000 electric delivery cargo vans, built by equipment manufacturer Workhorse Group. It goes without saying, of course, that 63 vehicles is next to nothing for a company DHL’s size—but it looks like yet another sign that the company is serious about its long-term goal of zero emissions by 2050. More encouragingly, the company has an interim goal of making 70% of first and last mile deliveries and pick ups using “clean transport modes” by 2025. (Truthfully, I was a little suspicious of a vague term like ‘clean transport modes’, but the Mission 2050 website suggests these are electric vehicles or bikes.)

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In a paper to be published in the forthcoming issue in NANO, researchers from the National Institute of Technology, India, have synthesized blue-green-orange photoemissive sulfur and nitrogen co-doped graphene quantum dots (SNGQDs) using hydrothermal method. These GQDs showed strong UV-visible photoabsorption and excitation dependent photoemission which have low-cost, eco-friendly solar cell application.

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A team of researchers including Neil Johnson, a professor of physics at the George Washington University, has discovered that decentralized systems work better when the individual parts are less capable.

Dr. Johnson was interested in understanding how systems with many moving parts can reach a desired target or goal without centralized control. This explores a common theory that decentralized systems, those without a central brain, would be more resilient against damage or errors.

This research has the potential to inform everything from how to effectively structure a company, build a better autonomous vehicle, optimize next-generation artificial intelligence algorithms—and could even transform our understanding of evolution. The key lies in understanding how the “” between decentralized and centralized systems varies with how clever the pieces are, Dr. Johnson said.

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Faced with the rising threat of drug resistant pathogens, researchers are all but giving up hope that new treatments can be easily cooked up in the lab.

One recent discovery gives us hope that novel antibiotics are easier to find than we think, perhaps in plain sight right under our very feet. And it’s possible their curative properties could have already been recognised centuries in the past.

An international team of researchers based at Swansea University Medical School in South West Wales recently identified a new strain of bacterium in ‘healing soil’ taken from a site associated with ancient druidic rituals in Northern Ireland.

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