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Jan 4, 2024

Southern Company

Posted by in categories: innovation, robotics/AI

Southern Company has a historic commitment to energy innovation. Since the 1960s, the company has invested well over $2 billion in research and development (R&D), and currently, their employees are on the forefront of delivering new ideas to build the future of energy.

Enter Spot—an agile robot. Chethan Acharya, a principal research engineer within Southern Company R&D, first discovered Spot on social media.

At the time, Acharya’s job was to find and test new sensors, analytics tools, and other solutions to help Southern Company improve operations and maintenance (O&M) activities while also lowering costs.

Jan 4, 2024

Researchers develop high-performance stretchable solar cells

Posted by in categories: chemistry, engineering, solar power, sustainability, wearables

With the market for wearable electric devices growing rapidly, stretchable solar cells that can function under strain have received considerable attention as an energy source. To build such solar cells, it is necessary that their photoactive layer, which converts light into electricity, shows high electrical performance while possessing mechanical elasticity. However, satisfying both of these two requirements is challenging, making stretchable solar cells difficult to develop.

A KAIST research team from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (CBE) led by Professor Bumjoon Kim announced the development of a new conductive polymer material that achieved both high electrical performance and elasticity while introducing the world’s highest-performing stretchable organic solar cell.

Figure 1. Chemical structure of the newly developed conductive polymer and performance of stretchable organic solar cells using the material. (Image: KAIST)

Jan 4, 2024

Commercial Space Companies Receive Latest Batch of Awards from NASA

Posted by in categories: business, robotics/AI, space

The commercial space industry recently received a boost after NASA awarded 10 small businesses up to $150,000 each as part of NASA’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Ignite program, granting each company six months to demonstrate the viability and additional standards of their mission proposals. This funding comes as part of the second round of Phase I awards and holds the potential to continue the development of the commercial space industry for the short-and long-term.

“The investments we’re able to offer through SBIR Ignite give us the ability to de-risk technologies that have a strong commercial pull, helping make them more attractive to outside investors, customers, and partners,” said Jason L. Kessler, who is the Program Executive for the NASA SBIR & Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Program. “We also hope it advances the sometimes-overlooked goal of all SBIR programs to increase private-sector commercialization of the innovations derived from federal research and development funding.”

The 10 companies selected for this latest round of funding include (in alphabetical order): Astral Forge LLC, Astrobotic Technology Inc., Benchmark Space Systems, Brayton Energy LLC, Channel-Logistics LLC dba Space-Eyes, GeoVisual Analytics, Lunar Resources Inc., Space Lab Technologies LLC, Space Tango, and VerdeGo Aero.

Jan 4, 2024

DARPA and Aurora Flight Sciences Building Full Scale X-65 Plane With No Moving Control

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, military, space travel

Reminds me of how the space shuttle moved in orbit. Great idea though hopefully they’ll pass it on to us civilians too. That could be very useful. Though the military sometimes passes their tech to us like the CIA is responsible for some medical science amazingly. Yes I was surprised.


DARPA has selected Aurora Flight Sciences to build a full-scale X-plane to demonstrate the viability of using active flow control (AFC) actuators for primary flight control. The award is Phase 3 of the Control of Revolutionary Aircraft with Novel Effectors (CRANE) program.

The X-65 flight is controlled by using jets of air from a pressurized source to shape the flow of air over the aircraft surface, with AFC effectors on several surfaces to control the plane’s roll, pitch, and yaw. Eliminating external moving parts is expected to reduce weight and complexity and to improve performance.

Continue reading “DARPA and Aurora Flight Sciences Building Full Scale X-65 Plane With No Moving Control” »

Jan 4, 2024

Q2B23 SV | Crossing the Quantum Chasm: From NISQ to Fault Tolerance | John Preskill

Posted by in category: quantum physics

John Preskill, Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics and Director, Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, California Institute of Technology | Crossing the Quantum Chasm: From NISQ to Fault Tolerance.

Jan 4, 2024

Skin-on-a-chip: Modeling an innervated epidermal-like layer on a microfluidic chip

Posted by in categories: bioengineering, biotech/medical, computing, neuroscience

Year 2023 face_with_colon_three


Bioengineers and tissue engineers intend to reconstruct skin equivalents with physiologically relevant cellular and matrix architectures for basic research and industrial applications. Skin pathophysiology depends on skin-nerve crosstalk and researchers must therefore develop reliable models of skin in the lab to assess selective communications between epidermal keratinocytes and sensory neurons.

In a new report now published in Nature Communications, Jinchul Ahn and a research team in , bio-convergence engineering, and therapeutics and biotechnology in South Korea presented a three-dimensional, innervated epidermal keratinocyte layer on a to create a sensory neuron-epidermal keratinocyte co-culture model. The maintained well-organized basal-suprabasal stratification and enhanced barrier function for physiologically relevant anatomical representation to show the feasibility of imaging in the lab, alongside functional analyses to improve the existing co-culture models. The platform is well-suited for biomedical and pharmaceutical research.

Continue reading “Skin-on-a-chip: Modeling an innervated epidermal-like layer on a microfluidic chip” »

Jan 4, 2024

This startup is bringing a ‘voice frequency absorber’ to CES 2024

Posted by in categories: business, transportation

CES has always been the place for weird, out-there gadgets to make their debuts, and this year’s show is no exception.

Skyted, a Toulouse, France-based startup founded by former Airbus VP Stéphane Hersen and acoustical engineer Frank Simon, is bringing what look like a pair of human muzzles to CES 2024. Called the “Mobility Privacy Mask” and “Hybrid Silent Mask,” the face-worn accoutrements are designed to “absorb voice frequencies” in noisy environments like plains, trains and rideshares, Hersen says.

Continue reading “This startup is bringing a ‘voice frequency absorber’ to CES 2024” »

Jan 4, 2024

American Kennel Club announces the newest recognized dog breed

Posted by in category: futurism

Say hello to this tiny pup that is known for its smile.

Jan 4, 2024

Astronomers Use Hubble Data and Computational Modeling to Study Exoplanet Weather

Posted by in categories: chemistry, computing, space

Meteorologists on Earth struggle to predict the weather, but what about scientists trying to predict the weather on exoplanets that are light-years from Earth? This is what a recently accepted study to The Astrophysical Journal Supplement hopes to unveil as an international team of researchers used data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to conduct a three-year investigation into weather patterns on WASP-121 b, which is a “hot Jupiter” that orbits its star in just over one day and located approximately 880 light-years from Earth. This study holds the potential to not only advance our understanding of exoplanets and their atmospheres, but also how we study them, as well.

Artist impression of WASP-121 b orbiting its host star. (Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STSci))

“The assembled dataset represents a significant amount of observing time for a single planet and is currently the only consistent set of such repeated observations,” said Dr. Quentin Changeat, who is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Astronomy at University College London and lead author of the study. “The information that we extracted from those observations was used to infer the chemistry, temperature, and clouds of the atmosphere of WASP-121 b at different times. This provided us with an exquisite picture of the planet changing over time.”

Jan 4, 2024

How crowded are the oceans? New maps show what flew under the radar until now

Posted by in categories: mapping, robotics/AI, satellites

Advances in AI and satellite imagery allowed researchers to create the clearest picture yet of human activity at sea, revealing clandestine fishing activity and a boom in offshore energy development.


New maps show how much more crowded the sea is than previously known.

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