Lifeboat Foundation

Fans of perovskite solar cell technology have been promising the moon, and stakeholders are increasingly confident that it will deliver. Among them is Toyota, which has just tapped its Woven Capital branch to put down a 5.5 billion yen stake in the perovskite solar startup EneCoat Technologies. If you’re thinking the solar-powered electric car of the future is coming, that’s a good guess, because EneCoat lists mobility applications among its areas of focus.

New Solar Cells For The Solar Car Of The Future

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The trunk of an elephant is among the versatile appendages in the animal kingdom. Now a research team has shown that most of its dexterity can be reproduced with a model using just three “muscles.” And they built a physical model to do just that. The findings are published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

The National Institute for Materials Science has successfully synthesized a new SmFe-based magnetic compound, SmFe8.8N1.1, which possesses superior intrinsic magnetic properties when compared to those of NdFeB compound used in neodymium magnets. The study is published in the journal Acta Materialia.

Researchers at the Ye Lab at JILA (the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado Boulder) and University of Delaware recently created a highly precise optical lattice clock based on trapped strontium atoms. Their clock, presented in a Physical Review Letters paper, exhibits a total systematic uncertainty of 8.1 × 10–19, which is the lowest uncertainty reported to date.

According to a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a research team led by Professor Xu Ning from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) has found that active matter and shear flows share similar thinning behaviors in self-propulsion and shear forces.

If you make a material thinner and thinner, at a certain point it undergoes a seemingly miraculous transformation: A two-dimensional material that consists of only one or two layers of molecules sometimes has completely different properties than the same material when it is thicker.

Wings aren’t the only things that make birds so successful. If it weren’t for their feet, how would pelicans skimming the tips of waves be able to suddenly land on a pier piling, or owls grab a mouse at 64 kilometers per hour without missing a beat? Robot birds must be able to do the same—something that has been a challenge, until now.

In a new study, researchers analyzed the anatomy and behavior of a tiny American parrot called a parrotlet and peregrine falcons, two species known for their expert footwork. They then designed “SNAG” (Stereotyped Nature-Inspired Aerial Grasper) — a pair of jointed legs attached to feet with jointed talons that automatically close around any object they encounter, be it a dowel, branch, or tennis ball.

A search for “air fryer recipe” on most social media platforms likely returns a flood of food videos touting quick and easy meal ideas. The market touts these devices as a convenient, clean, quick way to heat and crispen food, that offers a typically healthier option to using conventional deep fryers.

Researchers developed adjustable arrays of waveguides that introduce synthetic modal dimensions, enhancing the management of light within photonic systems. This innovation has potential applications ranging from mode lasing to quantum optics and data transmission.

In the realm of physics, synthetic dimensions (SDs) have emerged as a cutting-edge research frontier, providing a means to investigate phenomena in higher-dimensional spaces beyond our conventional 3D geometry. This concept has gained substantial attention, particularly in topological photonics, due to its potential to reveal complex physics that cannot be accessed within traditional dimensions.

Researchers have proposed various theoretical frameworks to study and implement SDs, aiming at harnessing phenomena like synthetic gauge fields, quantum Hall physics, discrete solitons, and topological phase transitions in four dimensions or higher. Those proposals could lead to new fundamental understandings in physics.