Science Daily April 30, 2018 A team of researchers in the US (Stanford University, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory) has developed a rechargeable manganese–hydrogen battery, where the cathode is cycled between soluble Mn2+ and solid MnO2 with a two-electron reaction, and the anode is cycled between H2 gas and H2O through catalytic reactions of hydrogen evolution and oxidation. They are confident they can take this table-top technology up to an industrial-grade system that could charge and recharge up to 10,000 times, creating a grid-scale battery with a useful lifespan well over a decade… read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Top 10 Science and Technology Innovations for the Week of May 04, 2018
01. Improving mid-infrared imaging and sensing 02. A powerful laser breakthrough 03. Towards Quantum Communication from Global Navigation Satellite System 04. Image Inpainting for Irregular Holes Using Partial Convolutions 05. Scientists create nanomaterials that reconfigure in response to biochemical signals 06. ‘Valleytronics’ discovery could extend limits of Moore’s Law 07. Water-repellent surfaces can efficiently boil water, keep electronics cool 08. Scientists find a new way to make novel materials by ‘un-squeezing’ 09. Artificial intelligence helps soldiers learn many times faster in combat 10. China’s ‘Sky River’ Will Be The Biggest Artificial Rain Experiment Ever And others… Going beyond ‘human error’ […]
Artificial intelligence helps soldiers learn many times faster in combat
Eurekalert April 27, 2018 Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is widely used for Collaborative Filtering, a well-known machine learning technique for recommender systems. A team of researchers in the US (ARL, University of Southern California) has developed an FPGA-based accelerator, FASTCF, to accelerate the SGD-based CF algorithm consisting of parallel, pipelined processing units which concurrently process distinct user ratings by accessing a shared on-chip buffer. Compared with non-optimized baseline designs, the hierarchical partitioning approach they used results in up to 60x data dependency reduction, 4.2x bank conflict reduction, and 15.4x speedup… read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
China’s ‘Sky River’ Will Be The Biggest Artificial Rain Experiment Ever
Science Alert April 28, 2018 According to reports China is building thousands of fuel-burning chambers high up on the Tibetan mountains, that could increase rainfall in the region by up to 10 billion cubic metres a year. The chambers burn solid fuel to produce silver iodide, a cloud-seeding agent with a crystalline structure much like ice. The chambers stand on steep mountain ridges facing the moist monsoon from South Asia. As wind hits the mountain, it produces an upward draft and sweeps the particles into the clouds to induce rain and snow. Total area of about 1.6 million square kilometres […]
Going beyond ‘human error’
Phys.org April 30, 2018 Failures in highly technological environments, such as military aircraft, can be investigated using known tools like Human Factors Analysis and Classification System (HFACS). However, because of some limitations, HFACS does not always highlight the deeper causal factors that contribute to such failures. Researchers at the Naval Safety Center in Virginia applied the Bayes’ theorem probability formula to an HFACS dataset, to examine data from 95 severe incidents to pinpoint external influences behind human error. They found sensory misperception (spatial disorientation), mental awareness (cognition, attention), and the technological environment (e.g., design of cockpit displays and controls) to […]
Improving mid-infrared imaging and sensing
Eurekalert April 26, 2018 Making use of a mid-infrared femtosecond laser coupled with a parametric amplifier, an international team of researchers (MIT, UMass Lowell, China) developed a system that turns regions of molecules in the open air into glowing filaments of plasma. They proved that it did indeed work as expected. It opens the potential for detecting a very wide range of compounds in the air, from a distance. The system can detect various biohazards and pollutants by detecting the exact color of the filament and analyzing the absorption spectrum… read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Image Inpainting for Irregular Holes Using Partial Convolutions
Arxiv April 20, 2018 Existing deep learning-based image inpainting methods often lead to artifacts such as color discrepancy and blurriness. Researchers in the US (NVIDIA Corporation) propose the use of partial convolutions, where the convolution is masked and renormalized to be conditioned on only valid pixels. They include a mechanism to automatically generate an updated mask for the next layer as part of the forward pass. They have demonstrated that their model outperforms other methods for irregular masks. They have shown qualitative and quantitative comparisons with other methods to validate their approach… read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
New carbon-dioxide-adsorbing crystals could form the basis of future biomedical materials that rely on the shape-memory effect
Science Daily April 27, 2018 The shape-memory effect in crystalline porous materials is poorly understood. An international team of researchers (Ireland, Japan, University of Southern Florida) reports the porous coordination network that exhibits a sorbate-induced shape-memory effect in which multiple sorbates, N2, CO2 and CO promote the effect. It exhibits three distinct phases: the as-synthesized α phase; a denser-activated β phase; and a shape-memory γ phase. Analysis of the structural information of the three phases helped them to understand structure-function relationships and propose crystal engineering principles for the design of more examples of shape-memory porous materials… read more. Open Access […]
A powerful laser breakthrough
Science Daily April 27, 2018 A team of researchers in the US (Lehigh University, Sandia National Laboratory) demonstrated a new hybrid grating scheme that uses a superposition of second and fourth-order Bragg gratings that excite a symmetric mode with much greater radiative efficiency. The scheme is implemented for terahertz QCLs with metallic waveguides. Peak power output was 170 mW. The hybrid grating scheme is simpler to implement than distributed feedback (DFB) schemes and could be used to increase power output for surface-emitting DFB lasers at any wavelength… read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Proof of water wires motivated by a biological water channel
Science Daily April 26, 2018 Aquaporins are proteins that serve as water channels to regulate the flow of water across biological cell membranes; they remove excess salt and impurities in the body. An international team of researchers (France, USA- Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Cornell University) synthesized and studied the dynamics of a ring structure of the imidazole, a nitrogen-based organic compound, embedded in a supported lipid bilayer. They have shown that water exists in the imidazole water channel and the imidazole ring construct induces the water molecules to self-assemble into a highly oriented linear chain structure — dubbed “water wires.” The […]