Lifeboat Foundation

Apple is developing custom batteries with significantly improved performance that it aims to bring to its devices starting in 2025, ETNews reports.

Apple’s custom battery technology has reportedly been in the works since 2018, with the company actively seeking patents and hiring new personnel related to the project. The company is reportedly seeking to create an “all-new” kind of battery with significantly improved performance by becoming directly involved in its use of materials.

Previous attempts at trapping them in 2D had failed.

Successful electron trapping in 3D

The MIT team looked for materials that could be used to work out 3D lattices in kagome patterns and came across pyrochlore — a mineral with highly symmetric atomic arrangements. In 3D, pyrochlore’s atoms formed a repeating pattern consisting of cubes in a kagome-like lattice.

Continue reading “In a first, MIT researchers successfully trap electrons in 3D crystal” »

Agi, if you can see or hear this. WE Eagerly Await and Welcome Your Arrival!!!

Update from November 9, 2023:

During a Q&A session at OpenAI’s developer conference, Altman reiterated that GPT-5 is not yet concrete. OpenAI still has “a lot” of things to figure out before it can train a model it calls GPT-5, Altman said.

Continue reading “OpenAI’s Altman says today’s AI will be ‘quaint’ by next year, talks GPT-5” »

A team of researchers at Kyoto University has been hard at work on a satellite made of wood — and they say it’s now scheduled to launch into space next summer in a joint mission between Japan’s JAXS space agency and NASA.

While it may sound like an odd choice of materials, they say wood is a surprisingly suitable material for space.

“When you use wood on Earth, you have the problems of burning, rotting, and deformation, but in space, you don’t have those problems: there is no oxygen in space, so it doesn’t burn, and no living creatures live in them, so they don’t rot,” Koji Murata, a Kyoto University researcher who’s been working on the project, told CNN.

“We are interested in studying shear deformation on icy moons because that type of faulting can facilitate the exchange of surface and subsurface materials through shear heating processes, potentially creating environments conducive for the emergence of life,” said Dr. Liliane Burkhard.

Two recent studies published in Icarus examine tectonic processes known as shear stresses which are also referred to as strike-slip faults on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, and Saturn’s largest moon, Ganymede. While such processes are common on Earth, specifically with the San Andreas Fault in northern California, and have been observed on several icy moons throughout the solar system, these two studies hope to shed new light on the inner workings that cause these processes to occur on Titan and Ganymede, the latter of which is the largest moon in the solar system.

True color image of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, passing in front of the ringed planet taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute)

Continue reading “Titan and Ganymede Revealed: Understanding Shear Deformation on Icy Moons” »

The new material mimics human tissue under X-rays, allowing for more accurate and safer imaging of tumors, bones, and organs.

Researchers at the University of Surrey have developed a new type of flexible X-ray detector.

Credit: Dr Prabodhi Nanayakkara.

Continue reading “New flexible X-Ray detectors could revolutionise cancer treatment” »

A large space mirror heats up an asteroid, slowly melting it. Water, which was injected into the center of the body expands, blows up the melted material, creating the shape of a balloon. After cooling down, rotation is induced into the hollow body creating artificial gravity. An artificial fusion Sun brings daylight to the dark interior. A team of bio-life-support system experts, urban planners, and ecologists starts to create an artificial world inside the balloon, preparing it for the first settlers. The small world is then provided with a propulsion system and launched to one of the next stars or used as a space colony.

Illuminating a high-resolution lens with waves whose intensity diminishes over time can improve the image quality.

Images formed using a conventional lens have a strict resolution limit—features smaller than about one half of a wavelength of light are lost. “Superlenses” made from structures called metamaterials could potentially beat this restriction if not for unavoidable losses in the transmission of the light carrying the finest details. Now researchers have used sound waves to demonstrate a new way around this problem that should also apply to light waves: they varied the amplitude of the “illuminating” waves over time [1]. The new approach, they believe, will enable the development of more precise acoustic and photonic lenses for use in areas such as microscopy and ultrasound imaging.

Not all of the light that reflects off of an object escapes to distances far away. The so-called evanescent waves decay rapidly in amplitude as they travel away from an object, but these waves contain the subwavelength information required to beat the usual resolution limit. A technique called near-field scanning optical microscopy can detect these waves by using a probe to scan across the object at close range, but real-time images are not possible because the scanning process is time consuming. Other “superresolution” imaging techniques also face trade-offs between complexity, speed, and efficiency.

A new study reveals that supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies, known as quasars, can sometimes be obscured by dense clouds of gas and dust in their host galaxies.

This challenges the prevailing idea that quasars are only obscured by donut-shaped rings of dust in the close vicinity of the black hole.

Quasars are extremely bright objects powered by black holes gorging on surrounding material. Their powerful radiation can be blocked if thick clouds come between us and the quasar.