Designed for places that don’t have indoor plumbing, the change: WATER toilet sucks the water out of waste so it’s more compact, more sanitary, and easier to dispose of.
[Image: change: WATER].
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Small tweaks in component ratios generate electronically different layers from the same material to create transparent transistors.
Worldwide demand is growing for transparent conducting oxides for use in solar cells, flat panel displays, smart windows and semiconductor-based consumer electronics. KAUST researchers have engineered a zinc-oxide-based transparent material that displays tunable electronic properties depending on the tweaking of a new type of dopant.
Transparent electronics rely on indium tin oxide, a transparent and electrically conductive material that has an exorbitant cost due to the scarcity of indium. Zinc-oxide-based materials, such as hafnium-doped zinc-oxide materials, are expected to offer affordable, green and abundant alternatives to indium tin oxide. However, hafnium-doped zinc-oxide materials typically require high deposition temperatures and display inadequate performance for real-life device applications.
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This Fungus Eats Polyurethane
Posted in food
Very soon we might be able to say good riddance to the overheating laptops, phones and tablets that we deal with every day. Electrons carry information around circuits but lose energy as heat during transmission. Electrons are the best thing we have right now for computing, but in the near future we could wave goodbye to electronics and welcome photon, or light, communication that will be both faster and cooler. There are still few hurdles before we can get this technology in every home and every pocket, but one of its limitations was just solved by the development of a new metamaterial.
A metamaterial is a substance that has properties not observed in nature. In this case, the special property is its refractive index, a value that describes how light propagates through a medium. Take water or glass, for example, which cause light rays to bend as they travel through them. This is why pools always look shallower than they actually are.
The new metamaterial has a refractive index of zero, which means that the light phase in the material can travel infinitely fast. This doesn’t mean that relativity is violated by this material, though. Light has a “group velocity,” the velocity at which the wave propagates into space, and a “phase velocity,” the velocity at which the peaks of the waves move with respect to the wave.
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NASA has started production of a plane that will fly faster than the speed of sound, but will be almost inaudible from the ground below.
The US space agency plans to bring supersonic speeds back to commercial air travel with the X-Plane. But unlike its predecessor Concorde, its sonic booms will be too soft to be noticed from the ground.
If all goes to plan, the piloted aircraft will be built and delivered to NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Centre by the end of 2021, and will be approved for commercial use by 2025.
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