Phys.com November 11, 2019 As proof of concept, an international team of researchers (USA – Duke University, UK, China) proposed and developed a smart digital-coding metasurface with self-adaptive capacity for reprogrammable functionality. A sensor on the metasurface detected specific features surrounding the construct in the environment and delivered them to a microcontroller unit (MCU) which independently determined reactions to these variations and then instructed the FPGA via coding patterns, to change the metasurface configuration in real time. The smart metasurfaces achieved self-adaptive reprogrammable functionality automatically based on the surface-installed sensing-feedback system and calculation software. The team envisions the preliminary work […]
Sound-redirecting prototype could fool eavesdroppers
Phys.org November 12, 2019 Though the idea of engineering materials or surfaces to strategically refract sound waves is well-established, most existing designs are static. An international team of researchers (China, University of Nebraska) has designed a tunable metasurface with Helmholtz resonance. Moving sliders in the design allow full phase shift with a high transmission ratio in a broad frequency bandwidth. The design can be used for tunable wave front redirection, focusing with varying wavelengths and sound source illusion, as shown in numerical and experimental examples. The technique may be used in applications that range from magnifying signals to disorienting adversaries…read […]
Stretchable, degradable semiconductors
Science Daily November 13, 2019 Researchers at Stanford University decoupled the design of stretchability and transience by harmonizing polymer physics principles and molecular design to develop a material that simultaneously possesses three disparate attributes: semiconductivity, intrinsic stretchability, and full degradability. They have shown that the semiconducting nanofibers concurrently enable controlled transience and strain-independent transistor mobilities. They anticipate that these materials could be used to build fully biodegradable diagnostic or therapeutic devices, environmental monitors, and advance developing multifunctional materials for skin-inspired electronic devices…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ATRICLE IMAGE https://pubs.acs.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/achs/journals/content/acscii/0/acscii.ahead-of-print/acscentsci.9b00850/20191031/images/medium/oc9b00850_0005.gif CAPTION Abstract. Credit: ACS Central Science, November 13, 2019 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acscentsci.9b00850
Using mountains for long-term energy storage
Science Daily November 11, 2019 To close the gap between existing short- and long-term storage technologies an international team of researchers (Austria, Denmark, Italy) proposes Mountain Gravity Energy Storage (MGES) and hydropower which moves sand or gravel from a lower storage site to an upper elevation. The higher the height difference the greater the amount of stored energy as this technology is constrained to the topography of the location. MGES cost varies from 50 to 100 $/MWh of stored energy and 1–2 M$/MW of installed capacity. It could be a feasible option for micro-grids, for example, small islands and isolated areas, […]
Welcome to robot university (only robots need apply)
MIT Technology Review November 7, 2019 Researchers at UC Berkeley are creating RoboNet, a database similar to the ImageNet created by Princeton University, consisting of annotated video data of robots in action. The trick is to have countless hours of video to learn from. They start by recording the way a robot interacts with, say, a brush to move it across a surface. Then they take countless hours of video to learn from many more videos of its motion and use the data to train a neural network on how best to perform the action. Once a robot has mastered […]
WPI researchers discover vulnerabilities affecting billions of computer chips
Eurekalert November 12, 2019 Researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute discovered two vulnerabilities located in trusted platform modules, which are specialized, tamper-resistant chips that computer manufacturers have been deploying in nearly all laptops, smart phones, and tablets for the past 10 years. One of them was found in Intel’s TPM firmware, and another in STMicroelectronics’ TPM. The vulnerabilities have been addressed. They would have allowed hackers to employ timing side-channel attacks to steal cryptographic keys that are supposed to remain safely inside the chips. The recovered keys could be used to compromise a computer’s operating system, forge digital signatures on documents, […]
Top 10 Science and Technology Inventions for the Week of November 8, 2019
01. Nanotechnology breakthrough enables conversion of infrared light to energy 02. Structured light promises path to faster, more secure communications 03. AI learns to design 04. Light-based ‘tractor beam’ assembles materials at the nanoscale 05. Microbes harvest electrons: Novel process discovered 06. An artificial sunflower that bends toward the sun 07. The Bioacoustic Signatures of Our Bodies Can Reveal Our Identities 08. Flexible yet sturdy robot is designed to “grow” like a plant 09. The scientists who are creating a bio-internet of things 10. Suspended layers make a special superconductor And others… Commemorating 30 years of optical vortices: A comprehensive […]
AI learns to design
Science Daily November 6, 2019 A team of researchers in the US (Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania State University) has implemented a two-step framework that learns to imitate human design strategies from observation to generate designs without any explicit information about objective and performance metrics. It is trained to imitate a set of human designers by observing their design state sequences without inducing problem-specific modeling bias or extra information about the problem. It is designed to interact with the problem through a visual interface as humans did when solving the problem. The designs generated by a computational team of these agents […]
An artificial sunflower that bends toward the sun
Phys.org November 5, 2019 A team of researchers in the US (UCLA, Arizona State University, industry) has created, sunflower-like biomimetic omnidirectional tracker (SunBOT), an artificial phototropic system based on nanostructured stimuli-responsive polymers that can aim and align to the incident light direction in the three-dimensions over a broad temperature range. Such adaptive reconfiguration is realized through a built-in feedback loop rooted in the photothermal and mechanical properties of the material. They have shown that an array of SunBOTs can, in principle, be used in solar vapour generation devices, as it achieves up to a 400% solar energy-harvesting enhancement over non-tropistic […]
The Bioacoustic Signatures of Our Bodies Can Reveal Our Identities
IEEE Spectrum November 4, 2019 A team of researchers in South Korea is exploring whether the unique bioacoustic signatures created as sound waves pass through humans can be used to identify individuals. They developed a bioacoustic frequency spectroscopy system and applied it to the fingers to obtain information on the anatomy, biomechanics, and biomaterial properties of the tissues. The modulated microvibrations propagated through our body could capture a unique spectral trait of a person and the biomechanical transfer characteristics persisted for two months and resulted in 97.16% accuracy of identity authentication in 41 subjects. In the current version it does […]