{"id":206525,"date":"2025-02-15T06:18:03","date_gmt":"2025-02-15T12:18:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/02\/engineers-enable-a-drone-to-determine-its-position-in-the-dark-and-indoors"},"modified":"2025-02-15T06:18:03","modified_gmt":"2025-02-15T12:18:03","slug":"engineers-enable-a-drone-to-determine-its-position-in-the-dark-and-indoors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/02\/engineers-enable-a-drone-to-determine-its-position-in-the-dark-and-indoors","title":{"rendered":"Engineers enable a drone to determine its position in the dark and indoors"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<p><iframe style=\"display: block; margin: 0 auto; width: 100%; aspect-ratio: 4\/3; object-fit: contain;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/TyySRwsUpbY?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope;\n   picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Transparent aluminum oxide (TAlOx), a real material despite its sci-fi name, is incredibly hard and resistant to scratches, making it perfect for protective coatings on electronics, optical sensors, and solar panels. On the sci-fi show Star Trek, it is even used for starship windows and spacefaring aquariums.<\/p>\n<p>Current methods of making TAlOx are expensive and complicated, requiring high-powered lasers, vacuum chambers, or large vats of dangerous acids. That may change thanks to research co-authored by Filipino scientists from the Ateneo de Manila University.<\/p>\n<p>Instead of immersing entire sheets of metal into acidic solutions, the researchers applied microdroplets of acidic solution onto small aluminum surfaces and applied an <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/electric+current\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">electric current<\/a>. Just two volts of electricity\u2014barely more than what\u2019s found in a single AA household flashlight battery\u2014was all that was needed to transform the metal into glass-like TAlOx.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Transparent aluminum oxide (TAlOx), a real material despite its sci-fi name, is incredibly hard and resistant to scratches, making it perfect for protective coatings on electronics, optical sensors, and solar panels. On the sci-fi show Star Trek, it is even used for starship windows and spacefaring aquariums. Current methods of making TAlOx are expensive and [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":367,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1488,1633,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-206525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-drones","category-solar-power","category-sustainability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206525","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/367"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206525"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206525\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}