Lifeboat Foundation

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) engineers have developed a battery-free, wireless underwater camera that’s powered by sound waves.

Scientists estimate that more than 95 percent of Earth’s oceans have never been observed, which means we have seen less of our planet’s ocean than we have the far side of the moon or the surface of Mars.

The high cost of powering an underwater camera for a long time, by tethering it to a research vessel or sending a ship to recharge its batteries, is a steep challenge preventing widespread undersea exploration.

Continue reading “MIT engineers build a battery-free, wireless underwater camera” »

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, discovered a key material needed for fast-charging lithium-ion batteries. The commercially relevant approach opens a potential pathway to improve charging speeds for electric vehicles.

Lithium-ion batteries, or LIBs, play an essential role in the nation’s portfolio of clean energy technologies. Most hybrid electric and all–electric vehicles use LIBs. These rechargeable batteries offer advantages in reliability and efficiency because they can store more energy, charge faster and last longer than traditional lead-acid batteries. However, the technology is still developing, and fundamental advances are needed to meet priorities to improve the cost, range and charge time of electric-vehicle batteries.

“Overcoming these challenges will require advances in materials that are more efficient and synthesis methods that are scalable to industry,” said ORNL Corporate Fellow and corresponding author Sheng Dai.

Researchers in Italy claim to have built Europe’s first house powered by hydrogen fuel cells.

This solution was developed by scientists at the University of Sannio in southern Italy in collaboration with private companies, Euronews reported on Thursday.

“Lately, we have focussed on the issue of CO₂ emissions in the environment and worked on the idea of using hydrogen to make this house a completely self-sufficient system,” Gerardo Canfora, the dean of the University of Sannio, told Euronews.

Scientists from the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Washington in the U.S. have discovered links to Japan’s next “great earthquake” after drilling deep into the underseas.

The researchers found that the tectonic stress in Japan’s Nankai subduction zone is less than expected after studying an earthquake fault, Phys.org reported on Thursday.

“This is the heart of the subduction zone, right above where the fault is locked, where the expectation was that the system should be storing energy between earthquakes,” said Demian Saffer, director of the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG).

Molecules of the rare metallic element niobium can be used as molecular building blocks to design electrochemical energy storage materials. Mark Rambaran, Department of Chemistry at Umeå University, presents in his thesis a method for producing solid materials from aqueous solutions containing nano-sized niobium molecules, called polyoxoniobates.

“These polyoxoniobates are water-soluble and can be synthesized in large volumes. They act as molecular building blocks, in the same way as when a child stacks Lego bricks,” Mark Rambaran says. “They can be used to make a wide range of materials, including supercapacitors that facilitate lithium-ion storage.”

Synthesis of polyoxoniobates can be done with microwave irradiation, because it is a rapid and efficient alternative to conventional hydrothermal methods, Mark Rambaran shows in his thesis.

After failing to reproduce last year’s record-breaking fusion-energy shot, scientists at the US National Ignition Facility have gone back to the drawing board. Edwin Cartlidge discusses their next steps.

In nature, wood, shells, and other structural materials are lightweight, strong, and tough. Significantly, these materials are made at the ambient temperature in the local environment – not at the high temperatures at which human-made structural materials are generally processed. Similar materials are difficult to make synthetically. In a review article in Nature Materials, a team of scientists assessed the common design motifs of a range of natural structural materials and determined what it would take to design and fabricate structures that mimic nature. They considered the remaining challenges to include the need for comprehensive characterization of strength and toughness to identify underlying multiscale mechanisms.

This comprehensive assessment provides new inspiration and understanding of design principles that may lead to more efficient synthetic approaches for advanced, lightweight structural materials for transportation, buildings, batteries, and energy conversion.

In the natural world, many of the structural materials (wood, shells, bones, etc.) are hybrid materials made up of simple constituents that are assembled at ambient temperatures and often have remarkable properties. Even though the constituent materials generally have poor intrinsic properties, the superior extrinsic properties of the hybrid materials are the result of the arrangement of hard and soft phases in complex hierarchical architectures, with dimensions spanning from the nanoscale to the macroscale. The resulting materials are lightweight and usually show interesting combinations of strength and toughness, even though these two key structural properties tend to be mutually exclusive. It is relatively easy to make materials that are strong or tough, but difficult to make materials that are both.

Summary: The pioneering “soleus pushup” effectively elevates muscle metabolism for hours, even when sitting.

Source: University of Houston.

From the same mind whose research propelled the notion that “sitting too much is not the same as exercising too little,” comes a groundbreaking discovery set to turn a sedentary lifestyle on its ear: The soleus muscle in the calf, though only 1% of your body weight, can do big things to improve the metabolic health in the rest of your body if activated correctly.

An information engine uses information to convert heat into useful energy. Such an engine can be made, for example, from a heavy bead in an optical trap. A bead engine operates using thermal noise. When noise fluctuations raise the bead vertically, the trap is also lifted. This change increases the average height of the bead, and the engine produces energy. No work is done to cause this change; rather, the potential energy is extracted from information. However, measurement noise—whose origin is intrinsic to the system probing the bead’s position—can degrade the engine’s efficiency, as it can add uncertainty to the measurement, which can lead to incorrect feedback decisions by the algorithm that operates the engine. Now Tushar Saha and colleagues at Simon Fraser University in Canada have developed an algorithm that doesn’t suffer from these errors, allowing for efficient operation of an information engine even when there is high measurement noise [1].

To date, most information engines have operated using feedback algorithms that consider only the most recent bead-position observation. In such a system, when the engine’s signal-to-noise ratio falls below a certain value, the engine stops working.

To overcome this problem, Saha and colleagues instead use a “filtering” algorithm that replaces the most recent bead measurement with a so-called Bayesian estimate. This estimate accounts for both measurement noise and delay in the device’s feedback.