“I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.” — Winston Churchill
Death still enjoys a steady paycheck, but being the Grim Reaper isn’t the cushy job that it used to be.
A new rechargeable aluminium battery has been produced by researchers in the US, and according to them the prototype can charge a smartphone in 60 seconds and it’s more environmentally friendly, heavy-duty, and inexpensive than anything presently on the market. And it won’t suddenly burst into flames like certain generally used lithium-ion batteries are capable of… This new technology has done something researchers around the world have been pursuing for decades — it puts aluminium to better use in the high-demand battery market. The benefits of aluminium are many, counting its cheapness, accessibility, low-flammability, and high-charge storage capability. But the challenge in producing a sustainable aluminium battery has been in finding a material for the cathode — the device through which the entire electrical current passes — that can yield enough voltage to withstand it across a whole lot of charges.
The scientists who last year revealed the world’s first solar battery that essentially combines a battery and solar cell, are now reporting its first significant performance milestone. Tested against traditional lithium-iodine batteries, the researchers are claiming energy savings of 20 percent.
Call it an abundance of caution. A Microsoft research project has upgraded the encryption protocol that secures the Web to resist attacks from quantum computers—machines that are expected to have stupendous power but have never been built.
Governments and computing giants like IBM, Microsoft, and Google are working on quantum computers because tapping subtle effects of quantum physics should let them solve in seconds some problems that a conventional machine couldn’t solve in billions of years (see “Microsoft’s Quantum Mechanics”). That might allow breakthroughs in areas such as medicine or energy. But such machines would also be able to easily break the encryption used to secure information online.
As everyone is pointing out, 2015 is a crucial year for sustainable development, with three critical international meetings in the calendar starting this month. But what role do science, technology and innovation play in these processes?
August 3, 2015 The question of why we age is one of the most fascinating questions for humankind, but nothing close to a satisfactory answer has been found to date. Scientists at the Leibniz-Institut für Molekulare Pharmakologie in Berlin have now shown, for the first time, that the ER loses its oxidative power in advanced age, which shifts the reducing/oxidising equilibrium — redox for short — in this compartment. This leads to a decline in the capacity to form the disulphide bridges that are so important for correct protein folding. As a consequence, many proteins can no longer mature properly and become unstable.
WISH COME TRUE: 8-year-old Zion receives the world’s first pediatric double hand transplant at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. http://nbcnews.to/1SLmf5m.
Serendipity has as much a place in science as in love. That’s what Northeastern physicists Swastik Kar and Srinivas Sridhar found during their four-year project to modify graphene, a stronger-than-steel infinitesimally thin lattice of tightly packed carbon atoms. Primarily funded by the Army Research Laboratory and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, the researchers were charged with imbuing the decade-old material with thermal sensitivity for use in infrared imaging devices such as night-vision goggles for the military.
What they unearthed, published Friday in the journal Science Advances, was so much more: an entirely new material spun out of boron, nitrogen, carbon, and oxygen that shows evidence of magnetic, optical, and electrical properties as well as DARPA’s sought-after thermal ones. Its potential applications run the gamut: from 20-megapixel arrays for cellphone cameras to photo detectors to atomically thin transistors that when multiplied by the billions could fuel computers.
It’s getting harder and harder to get away from the cameras these days, and now a new type of facial recognition system goes further than most: it uses infrared scanning technology to match the thermal heat signature of a person’s with a standard photograph of it. In other words, you can now be seen in the dark.
