Lifeboat Foundation

Recently, a research team from Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, proposed a bionic quadruped soft thin-film microrobot actuated by magnetic fields with a mass of only 41 mg, which promises to be applied to stomach examination and treatment. Researchers realized the multimodal locomotion control of the soft microrobot in magnetic fields and the grasping and transportation of micro-objects by the soft microrobot.

The new paper, published in Cyborg and Bionic Systems, details the process of making the microrobot and the magnetization process, presents the mechanism of microrobot’s locomotion and cargo transportation, and demonstrates the microrobot transporting multiple microbeads from different locations to the target position.

Untethered microrobots have received much attention for their potential in biomedical applications and small-scale micromanipulation. “Due to the fact that magnetic fields are harmless to biological cells and tissues, magnetic fields are widely used to actuate microrobots for biomedical applications,” explained study author Tiantian Xu, a professor at the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Artificial intelligence can create images based on text prompts, but scientists unveiled a gallery of pictures the technology produces by reading brain activity. The new AI-powered algorithm reconstructed around 1,000 images, including a teddy bear and an airplane, from these brain scans with 80 percent accuracy.

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As part of a one of a kind project, the first flying taxis will be utilized during the 2024 Olympic Games in France and will be used to drive passengers around. This project is supervised by the Paris Transportation Network and the general manager of France for Commercial Air.

Few months prior to the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, a series of test will commence and will examine the service. If the tests prove successful, this will allow airlines to develop a similar service during 2028–2030, according to a report by Maariv news.

The robots contain miniaturized sensors which are deployed as they traverse a cave or other subsurface environment.

Life on Mars is closer than you think. And researchers at the University of Arizona College of Engineering are already scouting real estate and house hunting. Their helpers? A flock of robots that can explore the subsurface environments on other worlds.

“Lava tubes and caves would make perfect habitats for astronauts because you don’t have to build a structure; you are shielded from harmful cosmic radiation, so all you need to do is make it pretty and cozy,” said Wolfgang Fink, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at UArizona.

Continue reading “Engineers develop robots to house-hunt and scout real estate in space” »

Recycling spent lithium-ion batteries plays a significant role in alleviating the shorting of raw materials and environmental problems. However, recycled materials are deemed inferior to commercial materials, preventing the industry from adopting recycled materials in new batteries.

Now, researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Massachusetts have demonstrated that the recycled materials from used lithium-ion batteries can outperform new commercial materials, making the recycled materials a potentially green and profitable resource for battery producers. Led by Yan Wang, professor in the Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, the team of researchers used physical tests, imaging, and computer simulations to compare new cathode materials recovered from old electric vehicle batteries through a recycling process, which is being commercialized by Battery Resourcers Inc. of Worcester.

The technology involved shredding batteries and removing the steel cases, aluminum and copper wires, plastics, and pouch materials for recycling. Researchers then dissolved the metals from those battery bits in an acidic solution. They by tweaking the solution’s pH, the team removed impurities such as iron and copper and recovered over 90% of three key metals – nickel, manganese, and cobalt. The recovered metals formed the basis for the team’s cathode material.

Hydrogen power!

The first flight of a hydrogen-powered airplane was a success this week, showing zero-emissions air travel could be on the horizon.

Tesla held Investor Day 2023 this week and announced the construction of a new plant in the Mexican state of Nuevo Leon. The new facility will be Tesla’s largest production facility.

Here’s What We Know

Elon Musk’s company will invest $5 billion to build the Mexican plant and create 5,000–6,000 jobs. Over time, however, the amount of investment and the number of jobs will double.

And yet the scientific consensus is that 1.5℃ is the real upper limit we can risk. Beyond that, dangerous tipping points could spell even more frequent disasters.

Luckily, the IMO will revise its strategy this July. I and many others expect far more ambition—because zero shipping emissions by 2050 is a necessity to keep the 1.5℃ limit credible. That gives us less than three decades to clean up an industry whose ships have an average life of 25 years. The 2050 timeline conceals that our carbon budget will likely run out far more quickly—requiring urgent action for all sectors, including shipping.

Continue reading “Wind-Powered Cargo Ships Are the Future: Debunking 4 Myths That Stand in the Way of Cutting Emissions” »

“If we could see the air we fly in, we wouldn’t,” is a common saying among glider pilots. The invisible turbulent pockets that accompany soaring thermals present hazards to small aircraft, but today’s observational tools struggle to measure such wind features at high spatial resolutions over large distances. Now Yunpeng Zhang of the University of Science and Technology of China and his colleagues demonstrate how adapting a remote-sensing technology called pulsed coherent Doppler lidar (PCDL) enables long-range wind detection with submeter resolution [1].

PCDL senses wind speeds by detecting the frequency shift when a laser pulse scatters off dust particles in the air. By measuring the time taken for this scattered light to return to the detector, the technique allows wide-region profiling of wind speeds. This large-scale sampling comes at the cost of measurement precision, however. Measuring the laser’s travel time requires short-duration pulses, but short pulses transmit little total energy for a given laser power, and this energy is necessarily dispersed over a wide frequency range.

To avoid this trade-off, Zhang and his colleagues imprinted a phase-modulation pattern within each transmitted pulse using an electro-optic modulator. This pattern broke the link between pulse duration and spatial resolution, allowing a more flexible pulse duration. As a result, their setup achieved a spatial resolution of 0.9 m at a distance of 700 m (compared to a 3-m resolution at 300 m for a conventional instrument) and was able to detect the wind from an electric fan on a rooftop 329 m away.