Lifeboat Foundation

face_with_colon_three circa 2020.

Scientists in Australia have developed a new type of electronic material that is touch-responsive and just a fraction of the thickness of current smartphone screens. This could see it one day find use in next-generation mobile devices, and because of its incredible thinness and flexibility, could be manufactured at large scale using roll-to-roll (R2R) processing like a printed newspaper.

The breakthrough comes from researchers at RMIT University, who began with a material commonly used in today’s mobile touchscreens called indium-tin oxide. This transparent material is highly conductive but does have its shortcomings, chiefly that it is very brittle, so the team sought to give it better pliability by greatly reducing its thickness.

Continue reading “Ultra-thin smartphone touchscreens could be printed like a newspaper” »

Perhaps Arthur C. Clarke was being uncharacteristically unambitious. He once pointed out that any sufficiently advanced technology is going to be indistinguishable from magic. If you dropped in on a bunch of Paleolithic farmers with your iPhone and a pair of sneakers, you’d undoubtedly seem pretty magical. But the contrast is only middling: The farmers would still recognize you as basically like them, and before long they’d be taking selfies. But what if life has moved so far on that it doesn’t just appear magical, but appears like physics?

After all, if the cosmos holds other life, and if some of that life has evolved beyond our own waypoints of complexity and technology, we should be considering some very extreme possibilities. Today’s futurists and believers in a machine “singularity” predict that life and its technological baggage might end up so beyond our ken that we wouldn’t even realize we were staring at it. That’s quite a claim, yet it would neatly explain why we have yet to see advanced intelligence in the cosmos around us, despite the sheer number of planets it could have arisen on—the so-called Fermi Paradox.

For example, if machines continue to grow exponentially in speed and sophistication, they will one day be able to decode the staggering complexity of the living world, from its atoms and molecules all the way up to entire planetary biomes. Presumably life doesn’t have to be made of atoms and molecules, but could be assembled from any set of building blocks with the requisite complexity. If so, a civilization could then transcribe itself and its entire physical realm into new forms. Indeed, perhaps our universe is one of the new forms into which some other civilization transcribed its world.

Omiefe Africa’s first humanoid robot has been built by a Nigerian company, Uniccon.

As the world takes a U-turn in inventions ranging from smartphones, and drones, and now with the latest inventions of humanoid (robots).

The humanoid robot was unveiled at the world’s biggest technology event, Gitex, which took place at Dubai World Trade Centre, from October 10th to 14th.

South Australian artificial intelligence (AI) company GoMicro is rolling out its new grain assessment technology in Australia, paving the way towards more consistent quality controls and stable grain and pulse prices.

Based at Flinders University’s high-tech New Venture Institute (NVI) at Tonsley Innovation District in Clovelly Park, Adelaide, GoMicro CEO Dr. Sivam Krish says the multi-grain assessor gives growers and domestic and export markets a quick and better way to grade crops, accurately testing more than 1,200 grains in one sample—compared to the existing scanner-based method which assesses about 200 well-separated grains at a time.

“GoMicro relies on the excellent quality of phone cameras and Amazon web services to deliver low-cost, high-precision quality grain and other produce assessments to farmers worldwide,” says Dr. Krish.

Google has removed two new malicious dropper apps that have been detected on the Play Store for Android, one of which posed as a lifestyle app and was caught distributing the Xenomorph banking malware.

“Xenomorph is a trojan that steals credentials from banking applications on users’ devices,” Zscaler ThreatLabz researchers Himanshu Sharma and Viral Gandhi said in an analysis published Thursday.

“It is also capable of intercepting users’ SMS messages and notifications, enabling it to steal one-time passwords and multi-factor authentication requests.”

Researchers from LP3 Laboratory in France developed a light-based technique for local material processing anywhere in the three-dimensional space of semiconductor chips. The direct laser writing of new functionalities opens the possibility to exploit the sub-surface space for higher integration densities and extra functions.

Semiconductors remain the backbone material of the electronics integrated with modern devices such as cellphones, cars, robots and many other intelligent devices. Driven by the continuous need for miniaturized and powerful chips, the current semiconductor manufacturing technologies are facing increasing pressure.

The dominating manufacturing technology, lithography, has strong limitations when addressing these challenges, given its surface processing nature. For this reason, a solution to fabricating structures under the wafer surfaces would be highly desirable so that the full space inside the materials could be exploited.

A new quantum random-access memory device reads and writes information using a chirped electromagnetic pulse and a superconducting resonator, making it significantly more hardware-efficient than previous devices.

Random-access memory (or RAM) is an integral part of a computer, acting as a short-term memory bank from which information can be quickly recalled. Applications on your phone or computer use RAM so that you can switch between tasks in the blink of an eye. Researchers working on building future quantum computers hope that such systems might one day operate with analogous quantum RAM elements, which they envision could speed up the execution of a quantum algorithm [1, 2] or increase the density of information storable in a quantum processor. Now James O’Sullivan of the London Centre for Nanotechnology and colleagues have taken an important step toward making quantum RAM a reality, demonstrating a hardware-efficient approach that uses chirped microwave pulses to store and retrieve quantum information in atomic spins [3].

Just like quantum computers, experimental demonstrations of quantum memory devices are in their early days. One leading chip-based platform for quantum computation uses circuits made from superconducting metals. In this system, the central processing is done with superconducting qubits, which send and receive information via microwave photons. At present, however, there exists no quantum memory device that can reliably store these photons for long times. Luckily, scientists have a few ideas.

Knowing that current methods to detect viruses and other biological markers of disease are effective, yet large and expensive (such as fluorescence microscopes), a team of researchers at the University of Tokyo (Tokyo, Japan) has developed and tested a miniaturized virus-scanning system that makes use of low-cost components and a smartphone. The researchers hope the system could aid those who tackle the spread of diseases faster, as current tools—while highly accurate at counting viruses—are too cumbersome for many situations, especially when rapid diagnosis is required.

The newly developed device, which scans biological samples for real viruses, is portable, low-cost, and battery-powered. Yoshihiro Minagawa from the University of Tokyo, who led the development, tested the device with viruses, but says it could also detect other biological markers.

“I wanted to produce a useful tool for inaccessible or less-affluent communities that can help in the fight against diseases such as influenza,” says Minagawa. “Diagnosis is a critical factor of disease prevention. Our device paves the way for better access to essential diagnostic tools.”

A 3D-printed device in a tank of water braids nanowires and moves microparticles.

New antennae to access higher and higher frequency ranges will be needed for the next generation of phones and wireless devices. One way to make antennae that work at tens of gigahertz — the frequencies needed for 5G and higher devices — is to braid filaments about 1 micrometer in diameter. However, today’s industrial fabrication techniques won’t work on fibers that small.

Continue reading “Simple 3D-Printed Device May Pave the Way for Far More Powerful Cell Phones and WIFI” »