Lifeboat Foundation

Nice and Kudos to ORNL.

A team led by Jonathan Poplawsky of the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences used advanced microscopy techniques to discover efficiency differences of crystalline structures of various mixtures of cadmium, tellurium and selenium. In fact, selenium is an integral part of the formulation that resulted in a world record for solar cell efficiency. The team’s paper is published in Nature Communications.

While some of today’s solar cells use a blend of cadmium and tellurium to convert light into electricity, adding the optimum amount of selenium in the right places could help increase efficiency from the current mark of about 22 percent to levels approaching the theoretical limit of 30–33 percent. The trick is to determine the best ratio of selenium.

Continue reading “ORNL optimizes formula for cadmium-tellurium solar cells” »

Amazing and can serve many areas.

(DOE/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) In work that aims to protect soldiers from biological and chemical threats, a team of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists has created a material that is highly breathable yet protective from biological agents.

This material is the first key component of futuristic smart uniforms that also will respond to and protect from environmental chemical hazards. The research appears in the July 27 edition of the journal, Advanced Materials.

Continue reading “‘Second skin’ protects soldiers from biological and chemical agents” »

Hmmmm; ok.

Finally, lasers will figure out what the deal with wind is.

Anyone want to visit Roslyakovo in Russia’s artic region?

For generations, Roslyakovo was a secret city with restricted access, even for Russians. The shipbuilding center was a place to work on military technology, and also a perfect place to hide things.

A Russian web hosting service is providing an avenue for cybercriminals to set up sites for selling stolen passwords, credit cards, and other pilfered personal information, a cybersecurity firm said.

The web hosting company Deer.io has become popular among online thieves because it’s easy to use and asks few questions from users, said Rick Holland, vice president of strategy at the cybersecurity firm Digital Shadows, on Tuesday at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas.

Continue reading “Russian web hosting service a favorite among cybercriminals” »

https://youtube.com/watch?v=iD3MuG3zBIA

Half quad-copter and 1/2 missile.

The design of small UAVs usually falls into one of two categories: the cruciform quadcopter (with extra arms added as necessary) and the fixed-wing glider (such as early iterations of Google’s delivery drones). However, there’s still room for innovation in this market, as demonstrated by the QuadRKT: a quadcopter drone with a rocket-shaped fuselage that can hovers vertically, but also switch to a horizontal orientation when it needs to go really fast.

Continue reading “The QuadRKT is half-quadcopter, half-missile, and built for speed” »

When not all men and women are created equal.

If futurist, inventor, and Google executive Ray Kurzweil is right about the future, we’ll all be augmenting our brains with extra capacity in the cloud at some point in the future.

Which sounds exciting, even if a little frightening.

Continue reading “A.D. 2035: Rich people will be thousands of times smarter than poor people” »

Quantum computers promise speedy solutions to some difficult problems, but building large-scale, general-purpose quantum devices is a problem fraught with technical challenges.

To date, many research groups have created small but functional quantum computers. By combining a handful of atoms, electrons or superconducting junctions, researchers now regularly demonstrate quantum effects and run simple quantum algorithms —small programs dedicated to solving particular problems.

But these laboratory devices are often hard-wired to run one program or limited to fixed patterns of interactions between the quantum constituents. Making a quantum computer that can run arbitrary algorithms requires the right kind of physical system and a suite of programming tools. Atomic ions, confined by fields from nearby electrodes, are among the most promising platforms for meeting these needs.

Continue reading “Programmable ions set the stage for general-purpose quantum computers” »

Additional insights on the latest reprogrammable QC.

Researchers implement a key piece of Shor’s algorithm in a programmable quantum computer.