MIT Technology Review April 25, 2019 According to the MIT Technology Review widespread dangers of a cyber attack have become a guarantee for organizations in all sectors and regions. They describe how cyber attackers are most likely to penetrate a company’s defenses, including through cloud storage, cloud services and even hardware. They discuss some of the most striking trends in cyber security strategies, including the “death of the perimeter” —how the type of robust firewalls and strong anti-virus programs that were keeping companies safe, no longer work. They show how business leaders can focus on effective cyber hygiene and cyber […]
Can AI and autonomous systems detect hostile intent?
Defense Systems April 24, 2019 The Urban Reconnaissance through Supervised Autonomy (URSA) project aims to use autonomous systems to help the military detect hostile forces in cities and positively identify combatants before any U.S. troops come in contact with them. DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office is hosting a Proposers Day to provide information to potential applicants on the structure and objectives of the new Urban Reconnaissance through Supervised Autonomy (URSA) program. URSA aims to develop technology to enable autonomous systems operated and supervised by U.S. ground forces to detect hostile forces and establish positive identification of combatants before U.S. troops encounter […]
Battery research: New breakthroughs in research on super-batteries
Science Daily April 25, 2019 Previously researchers in Austria uncovered that cell ageing in living organisms and in batteries are caused by highly reactive singlet oxygen. Redox mediators play a vital role in the flow of electrons between the exterior circuit and the charge storage material in oxygen batteries and have a considerable impact on their performance. Singlet oxygen also triggers parasitic reactions, which compromise battery life and rechargeability. The researchers identified DABCOnium — which is a salt of the organic nitrogen compound DABCO — as an electrolyte additive which is much more resistant to oxidation and compatible with a […]
Top 10 Science and Technology Inventions for the Week of April 26, 2019
01. Catalyst renders nerve agents harmless 02. Cornell Engineers Create a Robotic Material That Displays 3 of The Key Traits For Life 03. Breakthrough research to revolutionise internet communication 04. Study opens a new route to achieving invisibility without using metamaterials 05. Tiny, fast, accurate technology on the radar 06. New way to improve cybersecurity 07. Bioengineers program cells as digital signal processors 08. Creating a cloak for grid data in the cloud 09. Printing self-powered sensor systems on plastic 10. Biosensor ‘bandage’ collects and analyzes sweat And others… Earth’s North Magnetic Pole Is Moving Fast, And We Might Finally […]
Tiny, fast, accurate technology on the radar
Phys.org April 8, 2019 An international team of researchers (Italy, Saudi Arabia) has developed a low-power, portable frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar with an operating frequency of 24 Gigahertz. It has one transmitting and two receiving antennae, meaning it can better estimate the angular location of a target. The device fits into a 10-centimeter box, weighs less than 150 grams and is powered by a 5V battery. Initial trials suggest the device is capable of target detection, speed estimation and tracking at ranges of up to 12 meters. Possible applications include object detection for visually impaired people or unmanned moving […]
Study opens a new route to achieving invisibility without using metamaterials
Phys.org April 23, 2019 Researchers in Japan report a way of making a cylinder invisible without a cloak for monochromatic illumination at optical frequency including those visible to the human eye. Based on Mie scattering they looked for a region indicating very low scattering efficiency, which they knew would correspond to the cylinder’s invisibility and determined that in this region invisibility would occur when the refractive index of the cylinder ranges from 2.7 to 3.8. Natural materials such as silicon, aluminum arsenide and germanium arsenide, which are commonly used in semiconductor technology fall in this category. They found that the […]
Printing self-powered sensor systems on plastic
Nanowerk April 22, 2019 An international team of researchers (China, USA – MIT) has developed a proof-of-concept wearable wristband which consists of inkjet-printed electrical interconnects, silicon solar cells for energy harvesting/conversion, printable MnO2-based planar supercapacitors for energy storage, and fully printable SnO2 gas sensor for ethanol/acetone detection. With the supercapacitors serving as photovoltaic energy storage units and providing power for the functional devices during intermittent light illumination, simultaneous functionality without external charging modules can be realized, which is highly desirable for wearable and portable electronics. They synthesized and prepared different functional nanoparticles into printable inks for the fabrication of supercapacitors […]
New way to improve cybersecurity
Science Daily April 17, 2109 Use of distributed network intrusion detection requires data to be transmitted from sensors requiring large bandwidth, hence most systems only send alerts or summaries of activities back to the security analyst. To overcome this, a team of researchers in the US (ARL, Towson University) developed a tool that would stop transmitting traffic after a given number of messages had been transmitted based on the theory that malicious network activity would manifest its maliciousness early in the transmission process. In tests they found their theory to be correct. They are working to reduce the amount of […]
Lasers make magnets behave like fluids
Science Daily April 18, 2019 When a magnet is hit with a short enough laser pulse the spins within a magnet will no longer point just up or down, but in all different directions canceling out the metal’s magnetic properties. Using mathematical modeling, numerical simulations and experiments an international team of researchers (USA – University of Colorado, NIST, SLAC, Temple University, UK, Sweden, U, Italy, Germany, China, Japan, Belgium) has shown that the spins behaved like a superfluid 3 picoseconds after a laser pulse hits and then form small clusters with the same orientation like “droplets” in which the spins […]
A “Laser for Sound” from a Levitated Nanoparticle
Optics and Photonics News April 19, 2019 A team of researchers in the US (University of Rochester, Los Alamos National Laboratory) used feedback loops to optomechanically manipulate the oscillations of a silica nanosphere levitated in an optical trap. In so doing, they were able to create laser-like amplification and coherence of phonons—quanta of vibrational or acoustic energy, analogous to photons in the optical domain. The team believes that the setup opens a general technique for creating frequency-tunable sound lasers in a system-size range that hasn’t previously been explored. The result, according to the researchers, could provide a useful tool both […]