IEEE Spectrum October 28, 2020 The key players in this field were universities and startups until the recent entrance of bigger players. Now multinationals have interest in the sector. The floating platform built by a German company uses a combination of wave, wind, and solar energy to harness renewable energy on the open seas. To cope with the maritime environment, the company developed a product family consisting of electric machines, power electronics, and storage solutions. Their wind, wave, and photovoltaic platform is scalable in capacity and can be designed to generate 80 kilowatts to power small houses by the coast […]
Top 10 Science and Technology Inventions for the Week of October 23, 2020
01. ‘Classified knots’: Researchers create optical framed knots to encode information 02. The chips of the future will include programmable photonic circuits 03. Integrated circuit of pure magnons 04. Optical wiring for large quantum computers 05. Researchers discover a uniquely quantum effect in erasing information 06. A trillion turns of light nets terahertz polarized bytes 07. Asymmetric optical camouflage: Tunable reflective color accompanied by optical Janus effect 08. A controllable membrane to pull carbon dioxide out of exhaust streams 09. A flexible color-changing film inspired by chameleon skin (w/video) 10. Good vibrations for new energy And others… Artificial intelligence reveals […]
Targeting the shell of the Ebola virus
Science Daily October 20, 2020 As the world grapples with COVID-19, the Ebola virus is again raging. Researchers at the University of Delaware are using supercomputers to simulate the inner workings of Ebola, observing the way molecules move, atom by atom, to carry out their functions. In the team’s latest work, they reveal structural features of the virus’s coiled protein shell that may be promising therapeutic targets, more easily destabilized, and knocked out by an antiviral treatment. They found that single-stranded viral RNA (ssRNA) is essential for maintaining structural integrity of the nucleocapsid. Other molecular determinants observed to stabilize the nucleocapsid […]
Artificial intelligence reveals hundreds of millions of trees in the Sahara
EurekAlert October 20, 2020 A large proportion of dryland trees and shrubs grow in isolation, without canopy closure. These non-forest trees have a crucial role in biodiversity, and provide ecosystem services such as carbon storage, food resources and shelter for humans and animals. An international team of researchers (Denmark, USA – NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Germany, France, Senegal, Belgium) mapped the crown size of each tree more than 3 m in size over a land area that spans 1.3 million km in the West African Sahara, Sahel and sub-humid zone. They detected over 1.8 billion individual trees. Although the […]
Asymmetric optical camouflage: Tunable reflective color accompanied by optical Janus effect
Phys.org October 20, 2020 Going beyond an improved colour gamut, an asymmetric colour contrast, which depends on the viewing direction, and its ability to readily deliver information could create opportunities for a wide range of applications, such as next-generation optical switches, colour displays, and security features in anti-counterfeiting devices. Researchers in South Korea propose a simple Fabry–Perot etalon architecture capable of generating viewing-direction-sensitive colour contrasts and encrypting pre-inscribed information upon immersion in particular solvents. Based on the experimental verification of the theoretical modelling, they have discovered a completely new and exotic optical phenomenon involving a tunable colour switch for viewing-direction-dependent […]
The chips of the future will include programmable photonic circuits
Nanowerk October 19, 2020 The increase in complexity of circuits has introduced a generation of photonic circuits that can be programmed using software for a wide variety of functions through a mesh of on-chip waveguides, tunable beam couplers and optical phase shifters. An international team of researchers (Belgium, Spain, USA – Stanford University, MIT, Germany, Canada, Italy) discusses the state of this emerging technology, including recent developments in photonic building blocks and circuit architectures, as well as electronic control and programming strategies. They cover possible applications in linear matrix operations, quantum information processing and microwave photonics, and examine how these […]
‘Classified knots’: Researchers create optical framed knots to encode information
Phys.org October 17, 2020 Modern beam shaping techniques have enabled the generation of optical fields displaying a wealth of structural features. Due to their robustness against external perturbations, topological invariants in physical systems are increasingly being considered to encode information. Hence, structured light with topological properties could potentially be used for such purposes. An international team of researchers (Canada, USA – MIT, Israel) has experimentally demonstrated structures known as framed knots within optical polarization fields. They developed a protocol in which the topological properties of framed knots are used in conjunction with prime factorization to encode information…read more. Open Access […]
A controllable membrane to pull carbon dioxide out of exhaust streams
MIT News October 16, 2020 Researchers at MIT have developed a gas gating mechanism driven by reversible electrochemical metal deposition/dissolution on a conductive membrane, which can continuously modulate the interfacial gas permeability over two orders of magnitude with high efficiency and short response time. The gating mechanism involves neither moving parts nor dead volume and can therefore enable various engineering processes. An electrochemically mediated carbon dioxide concentrator demonstrates proof of concept by integrating the gating membranes with redox-active sorbents, where gating effectively prevented the crosstalk between feed and product gas streams for high-efficiency, directional carbon dioxide pumping. The system could […]
Eight Lincoln Laboratory technologies named 2020 R&D 100 Award winners
MIT News October 20, 2020 Eight technologies developed by MIT Lincoln Laboratory researchers, either wholly or in collaboration with researchers from other organizations, were among the winners of the 2020 R&D 100 Awards. Six of the laboratory’s winning technologies are software systems, several of them take advantage of artificial intelligence techniques. The software technologies are solutions to difficulties inherent in analyzing large volumes of data and to problems in maintaining cybersecurity. Another technology is a process designed to assure secure fabrication of integrated circuits, and the eighth winner is an optical communications technology that may enable future space missions to […]
A flexible color-changing film inspired by chameleon skin (w/video)
Nanowerk October 21, 2020 By tensing or relaxing their skin, chameleons can change the way light reflects from guanine crystals under the surface, producing structural coloration. The structural colors are different from the pigments that give many other creatures their hues. Currently available materials for mimicking chameleon skin is difficult to produce. Researchers in China introduced a flexible network structure in cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs), exerting a bridge effect for the rigid nanomaterials. These films display high flexibility with a fracture strain of up to 39%. Notably, stretching-induced structural color changes visible to the naked eye are realized, for the first […]