Lifeboat Foundation

Flat solar panels still face big limitations when it comes to making the most of the available sunlight each day. A new spherical solar cell design aims to boost solar power harvesting potential from nearly every angle without requiring expensive moving parts to keep tracking the sun’s apparent movement across the sky.

The spherical solar cell prototype designed by Saudi researchers is a tiny blue sphere that a person can easily hold in one hand like a ping pong ball. Indoor experiments with a solar simulator lamp have already shown that it can achieve between 15 percent and 100 percent more power output compared with a flat solar cell with the same total surface area, depending on the background materials reflecting sunlight into the solar cells. The research group hopes its nature-inspired design can fare similarly well in future field tests in many different locations around the world.

“The placement and shape of the housefly’s eyes increase their angular field of view so they can see roughly 270 degrees around them in the horizontal field,” says Nazek El-Atab, a postdoctoral researcher in microsystems engineering at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). “Similarly, the spherical architecture increases the ‘angular field of view’ of the solar cell, which means it can harvest sunlight from more directions.”

WASHINGTON — SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft is performing well enough on orbit to give NASA confidence that the mission can last until August, an agency official said June 9.

Ken Bowersox, the acting associate administrator for human exploration and operations at NASA, told an online meeting of two National Academies committees that NASA had been monitoring the health of the Crew Dragon spacecraft since its launch May 30 on the Demo-2 mission, carrying NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station.

NASA, he noted, had not set a length for the mission, saying they wanted to see how the Dragon performed in space. “The Dragon is doing very well, so we think it’s reasonable for the crew to stay up there a month or two,” he told members of the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board and Space Studies Board.

Sometimes, breaking rules is not a bad thing. Especially when the rules are apparent laws of nature that apply in bulk material, but other forces appear in the nanoscale.

“Nature knows how to go from the small, atomic scale to larger scales,” said Melik Demirel, professor of engineering science and mechanics and holder of the Lloyd and Dorothy Foehr Huck Chair in Biomimetic Materials. “Engineers have used mixing rules to enhance properties, but have been limited to a single scale. We’ve never gone down to the next level of hierarchical engineering. The key challenge is that there are apparent forces at different scales from molecules to bulk.”

Composites, by definition, are composed of more than one component. Mixture rules say that, while the ratios of one component to another can vary, there is a limit on the physical properties of the composite. According to Demirel, his team has broken that limit, at least on the nanoscale.

Achieving near-zero friction in commercial and industrial applications will be game-changing from tiny microelectromechanical systems that will never wear out, to oil-free bearings in industrial equipment, to much more efficient engines and giant wind turbines scavenging energy even in low wind conditions. Superlubricity offers promising solutions to overcome lubrication challenges in various areas of nanotechnology including micro/nano-electromechanical systems (MEMS/NEMS), water transport control, biomedical engineering, atomic force microscopy (AFM), aerospace and wind energy applications, as well as other electronic devices. It is one of the most promising properties of functional nanomaterials for energy saving applications.

Skateboarding legend Rodney Mullen teams up with Physics Girl to explain the unusual physics behind skateboard tricks. Filmed with a phantom high speed camera at 1000fps, see Mullen’s tricks like never before.

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Government agencies and universities around the world—not to mention tech giants like IBM and Google—are vying to be the first to answer a trillion-dollar quantum question : How can quantum computers reach their vast potential when they are still unable to consistently produce results that are reliable and free of errors?

Every aspect of these exotic machines—including their fragility and engineering complexity; their preposterously sterile, low-temperature operating environment; complicated mathematics; and their notoriously shy quantum bits (qubits) that flip if an operator so much as winks at them—are all potential sources of errors. It says much for the ingenuity of scientists and engineers that they have found ways to detect and correct these errors and have quantum computers working to the extent that they do: at least long enough to produce limited results before errors accumulate and quantum decoherence of the qubits kicks in.

Washington State University (WSU) and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) researchers have created a sodium-ion battery that holds as much energy and works as well as some commercial lithium-ion battery chemistries, making for a potentially viable battery technology out of abundant and cheap materials.

The team reports one of the best results to date for a sodium-ion battery. It is able to deliver a capacity similar to some lithium-ion batteries and to recharge successfully, keeping more than 80 percent of its charge after 1,000 cycles. The research, led by Yuehe Lin, professor in WSU’s School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, and Xiaolin Li, a senior research scientist at PNNL is published in the journal, ACS Energy Letters.

“This is a major development for sodium-ion batteries,” said Dr. Imre Gyuk, director of Energy Storage for the Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity who supported this work at PNNL. “There is great interest around the potential for replacing Li-ion batteries with Na-ion in many applications.”

In an incredible feat of remote engineering, NASA has fixed one of the most intrepid explorers in human history.

Thanks to some (very) remote engineering work by NASA, the intrepid explorer’s science mission is back on.

Predictive biology is the next great chapter in synthetic and systems biology, particularly for microorganisms. Tasks that once seemed infeasible are increasingly being realized such as designing and implementing intricate synthetic gene circuits that perform complex sensing and actuation functions, and assembling multi-species bacterial communities with specific, predefined compositions. These achievements have been made possible by the integration of diverse expertise across biology, physics and engineering, resulting in an emerging, quantitative understanding of biological design. As ever-expanding multi-omic data sets become available, their potential utility in transforming theory into practice remains firmly rooted in the underlying quantitative principles that govern biological systems. In this Review, we discuss key areas of predictive biology that are of growing interest to microbiology, the challenges associated with the innate complexity of microorganisms and the value of quantitative methods in making microbiology more predictable.