Phys.org July 8, 2019 ESA has launched two tiny supercomputing parallel supercomputing scalable satellites nanosatellites (size of a shoebox) built by an international team of researchers (UK, Canada). It can be programmed to both receive and process data while in orbit. The small satellites can collect over a terabyte of data per day which has to be analyzed in orbit so that true insights can be delivered to customers directly and in a timely fashion…read more.
UK budgets £130M for laser and RF weapons development
Optics.org July 10, 2019 The UK’s Ministry of Defence plans to spend up to £130 million developing three new directed-energy weapons – including both laser and radio-frequency systems. The plan is to trial the technologies at sea and on-board army vehicles in 2023. Similar programs to the UK’s are already under way elsewhere and appear to be at a significantly more advanced stage in the US. Following earlier tests of a 30-kilowatt system on the USS Ponce, the USS Preble is now set to become the first US Navy destroyer to be equipped with a high-energy laser, with installation expected […]
Unlocking magnetic properties for future faster, low energy spintronics
Nanowerk July 8, 2019 While studying Fe3GeTe2 (FGT) which has promising ferromagnetic properties for spintronic devices, an international team of researchers (Australia, China, South Korea, Russia) discovered magnetoresistance in devices with ferromagnetic van-der-Waals (vdW) materials. They attributed this property to a spin momentum locking induced spin-polarized current at the graphite/FGT interface. The research reveals that ferromagnetic heterostructures assembled from vdW materials can exhibit substantially different properties to those exhibited by similar heterostructures grown in vacuum. Hence, it highlights the potential for new physics and new spintronic applications to be discovered using vdW heterostructures…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Will your future computer be made using bacteria?
EurekAlert July 10, 2019 A major hurdle in adopting graphene for everyday applications is producing it at a large scale, while still retaining its amazing properties. An international team of researchers (The Netherlands, USA – University of Rochester) has developed a method to produce graphene by mixing oxidized graphite with bacteria. They exfoliated the graphite to produce graphene oxide (GO), which they then mixed with the bacteria Shewanella. After the beaker of bacteria and precursor materials sit overnight, the bacteria reduced the GO to a graphene material. The graphene is thinner, more stable, and can be stored for longer periods […]
Top 10 Science and Technology Inventions for the Week of July 5, 2019
01. Drone transmits uncompressed 4K video in real time using millimeter wave tech 02. Perfect quantum portal emerges at exotic interface 03. The Pentagon has a laser that can identify people from a distance—by their heartbeat 04. Scientists combine light and matter to make particles with new behaviors 05. ‘Tsunami’ on a silicon chip: A world first for light waves 06. What Happens When a CBRN Agent is Released in an Urban Area? Ask HASP. 07. Found: A sweet way to make everyday things almost indestructible 08. The RoboBee flies solo 09. With little training, machine-learning algorithms can uncover hidden […]
Climate impact of aircraft contrails could treble by mid-century
Physics World July 1, 2019 Researchers in Germany used ECHAM5-CCMod, an atmospheric climate model, to investigate the climate impact of contrail cirrus for the year 2050. Contrails have the potential to linger and become artificial cirrus clouds which reflect infrared radiation coming up from the Earth’s surface far more than they reflect incoming solar radiation back into space. As a result, such clouds tend to trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere and have an overall warming effect on climate. According to the researchers instead of rerouting flights to mitigate the effects of contrails, a better course of action may be […]
Computer scientists predict lightning and thunder with the help of artificial intelligence
Science Daily June 26, 2019 Current satellite-based approaches to predict thunderstorms are usually based on the analysis of the observed brightness temperatures in different spectral channels and emit a warning if a critical threshold is reached. Researchers in Germany have developed a method using the error of two-dimensional optical flow algorithms applied to images of meteorological satellites as a feature for machine learning models. They trained different tree classifier models as well as a neural network to predict lightning. The results show a high accuracy of 96% for predictions over the next 15 minutes which slightly decreases with increasing forecast […]
Drone transmits uncompressed 4K video in real time using millimeter wave tech
Phys.org July 1, 2019 Millimeter wave wireless communication is expected to be used in 5G because of the high-speed communication, but the problem is that communication distance is limited due to large attenuation of radio waves. An international team of researchers (Japan, USA – industry) has developed a video transmission system with a millimeter wave wireless communication device that uses a small, lightweight lens antenna that can be mounted on a drone. In tests, the team was able to use a drone to take video in 4K and transmit the video in real time from over 100 m in the […]
Found: A sweet way to make everyday things almost indestructible
Science Daily June 27, 2019 An international team of researchers (USA – University of Virginia, University of Washington, Brookhaven National Laboratory, industry, University of Minnesota, USAID, UT Austin, Colorado State University, the Netherlands, France, UK, Tanzania, Switzerland, Italy) found that organisms that live in harsh environments have a pili on the surface. Pili, which are protein filaments, normally would be very sensitive to heat, acid and enzymes, but coating it in sugars make it almost indestructible. The sugars were arranged in such a stable fashion that even acid can’t dissolve them. According to the team coating materials with the special […]
Molecular thumb drives: Researchers store digital images in metabolite molecules
Science Daily July 3, 2019 Researchers at Brown University have demonstrated that the metabolome (arrays of liquid mixtures containing sugars, amino acids and other types of small molecules) is an information-rich molecular system with diverse chemical dimensions which could be harnessed for information storage and processing. As a proof of principle, they demonstrated a workflow for representing abstract data in synthetic mixtures of metabolites. They wrote more than 100,000 bits of digital image data into metabolomes and stored that could be decoded with accuracy exceeding 99% using multi-mass logistic regression. These early demonstrations provide insight into some of the benefits […]