Lifeboat Foundation

Envisioning armies of electronically controllable insects is probably nightmare fuel for most people. But scientists think they could help rescue workers scour challenging and hazardous terrain. An automated cyborg cockroach factory could help bring the idea to life.

The merger of living creatures with machines is a staple of science fiction, but it’s also a serious line of research for academics. Several groups have implanted electronics into moths, beetles, and cockroaches that allow simple control of the insects.

However, building these cyborgs is tricky as it takes considerable dexterity and patience to surgically implant electrodes in their delicate bodies. This means that creating enough for most practical applications is simply too time-consuming.

Sandia Labs reveals top drill bits for optimized geothermal drilling.

Learn how Sandia Labs identifies superior drill bits to revolutionize geothermal energy extraction and lower operational costs.

A chance discovery by researchers could drastically lower the energy needed for next-generation memory technologies.

Scientists in China have claimed a breakthrough that might completely change how we store energy by turning waste oil into a formidable substance for energy storage.

As the world grapples with increasing power demand, supercapacitors are becoming more popular because of their quick charging and discharging times, which makes them perfect for high-performance applications.

The researcher’s novel method provides a sustainable way to make these supercapacitors while addressing waste management and energy storage challenges, according to a press release by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

Nagoya University researchers have pioneered a surfactant-based method to create amorphous nanosheets, enabling production from previously inaccessible materials like aluminum and rhodium oxides.

Researchers at Nagoya University in Japan have addressed a significant challenge in nanosheet technology. Their innovative approach employs surfactants to produce amorphous nanosheets from various materials, including difficult-to-synthesize ultra-thin amorphous metal oxides such as aluminum and rhodium. This breakthrough, published in Nature Communications, sets the stage for future advances in the application of these nanosheets such as those used within fuel cells.

The upcoming generation of nanotechnology requires components that are just a few nanometers thick (one billionth of a meter). These ultrathin layers, which are essential for improving functionality, are known as nanosheets.

A research team at the Institute of Materials Chemistry at TU Wien, led by Professor Dominik Eder, has developed a new synthetic approach to create durable, conductive and catalytically active hybrid framework materials for (photo)electrocatalytic water splitting. The study is published in Nature Communications.

The development of technologies for sustainable energy carriers, such as hydrogen, is essential. A promising way to produce hydrogen (H₂) is from splitting water into H₂ and oxygen (O₂), either electrochemically or using light, or both—a path that the team follows. However, this process requires a catalyst that accelerates the reaction without being consumed. Key criteria for a catalyst include a large surface area for the adsorption and splitting of water molecules, and durability for long-term use.

Zeolitic imidazolate frameworks (ZIFs), a class of hybrid organic/inorganic materials with molecular interfaces and numerous pores, offer record surface areas and ample adsorption sites for water as catalysts. They consist of single metal ions, such as cobalt ions, which are connected by specific organic molecules, called ligands, through what is called coordination bonds. Conventional ZIFs only contain a single type of organic ligand.

Since it was first demonstrated in the 1960s, spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) has been at the center of many quantum optics experiments that test the fundamental laws of physics in quantum mechanics, and in applications like quantum simulation, quantum cryptography, and quantum metrology.

SPDC is the spontaneous splitting of a photon into two photons after it passes through a nonlinear object like certain crystals. The process is nonlinear and instantaneous, and the two output photons (called the signal photon and idler photon) satisfy conservation of energy and momentum compared to the input photon (the pump photon). SPDC is often used with a specially designed crystal to create pairs of entangled photons.

A research team from Canada has discovered that there is a delay between the detection of the two output photons, one that depends on the intensity of the incoming light that impacts the crystal. They call this a “gain-induced group delay.”

China-based Farasis Energy has created a 1,000,000-mile lifespan battery that operates well at various temperatures.

Ocean currents spin off huge gyres, whose kinetic energy is transferred to ever-smaller turbulent structures until viscosity has erased velocity gradients and water molecules jiggle with thermal randomness. A similar cascade plays out in space when the solar wind slams into the magnetopause, the outer boundary of Earth’s magnetic field. The encounter launches large-scale magnetic, or Alfvén, waves whose energy ends up heating the plasma inside the magnetosphere. Here, however, the plasma is too thin for viscosity to mediate the cascade. Since 1971 researchers have progressively developed their understanding of how Alfvén waves in space plasmas generate heat. These studies later culminated in a specific hypothesis: Alfvén waves accelerate ion beams, which create small-scale acoustic waves, which generate heat. Now Xin An of UCLA and his collaborators have found direct evidence of that proposed mechanism [1]. What’s more, the mechanism is likely at work in the solar wind and other space plasmas.

Laboratory-scale experiments struggle to capture the dynamics of rotating plasmas, and real-world observations are even more scarce. The observations that An and his collaborators analyzed were made in 2015 by the four-spacecraft Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission. Launched that year, the MMS was designed to study magnetic reconnection, a process in which the topology of magnetic-field lines is violently transformed. The field rearrangements wrought by reconnection can be large, on the scale of the huge loops that sprout from the Sun’s photosphere. But the events that initiate reconnection take place in a much smaller region where neighboring field lines meet, the X-line. The four spacecraft of MMS can fly in a configuration in which all of them witness the large-scale topological transformation while one of them could happen to fly through the X-line—a place where no spacecraft had deliberately been sent before.

On September 8, 2015, the orbits of the MMS spacecraft took them through the magnetopause on the dusk side of Earth. They were far enough apart that together they could detect the passage of a large-scale Alfvén wave, while each of them could individually detect the motion of ions in the surrounding plasma. An and his collaborators later realized that these observations could be used to test the theory that ion beams and the acoustic waves that they generate mediate the conversion of Alfvén-wave energy to heat.