Lifeboat Foundation

Conventional batteries are a lot like camels. They’re great for storage and transportation, but they’re not exactly speedy.

For technologies that require a fast discharge of energy, such as heart defibrillators, alternative materials are often used; foremost among them, antiferroelectrics.

There is only a handful of known antiferroelectric materials, and most of them contain lead, so they aren’t safe enough for everyday applications. Now, a Cornell-led collaboration has discovered a new approach for making a lead-free antiferroelectric that performs as well as its toxic relatives.

One year after winter storms crippled Texas’s electricity grid, contributing to more than 200 deaths, a Cornell University-led analysis recommends contracting improvements to reduce decentralized energy markets’ vulnerability to rare events.

Such “energy-only” markets rely on investors to anticipate demand for all conditions and build appropriate resiliency into the system. They allow prices to soar during extreme events to incentivize preparedness.

But in Texas, where Winter Storm Uri caused catastrophic blackouts over five consecutive days of frigid temperatures, the crisis revealed the market’s failure to manage risk as designed, says Jacob Mays, assistant professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell. Winterization investment fell short, he said, because the payoff proved too distant and uncertain.

And it doubles up as a backup energy unit and a camper.

Norwegian tech startup Fresco Motors just revealed its new Fresco XL, an electric vehicle (EV) that it claims will have a range of 620 miles (1,000 km). If the claim is true, it would make it the longest-range EV in the world.

Continue reading “It’s Official. Lucid Air Is the Longest-Range EV Ever” »

These missiles are too fast to detect. Hypersonic weapons technology is at the heart of a new arms race. Currently, the US, China, and Russia are all competing to develop the most effective long-range hypersonic missiles. A recent report revealed that North Korea has also successfully tested a hypersonic missile on January 5, 2022, the country’s second reported test of a hypersonic missile.

North Korea has also referred to verifying the “fuel ampoule system” during this deployment which means that the liquid fuel used by the missile was sealed at production. This allows for rapid deployment even after the missile has been stored for long periods of time, while also reducing its vulnerability to pre-emptive strikes.

We have now seen what North Korea can do in quite imaginative ways.

Continue reading “North Korea Claims Successfully Testing a New Hypersonic Gliding Warhead” »

New work suggests that the radiolytic splitting of water supports giant subsurface ecosystems of life on Earth — and could do it elsewhere, too.

From how food is grown to how we generate power, Vaclav Smil’s new book outlines the basic technologies that keep society going and commands us to know them better.

Quantum magnets can be studied using high-resolution spectroscopic studies to access magnetodynamic quantities including energy barriers, magnetic interactions, and lifetime of excited states. In a new report now published in Science Advances, Sascha Brinker and a team of scientists in advanced simulation and microstructure physics in Germany studied a previously unexplored flavor of low-energy spin excitation for quantum spins coupled to an electron bath. The team combined time-dependent and many-body perturbation theories and magnetic field-dependent tunneling spectra to identify magnetic states of the nanostructures and rationalized the results relative to ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic interactions. The atomically crafted nanomagnets are appealing to explore electrically pumped spin systems.

Anomalous magnetodynamics

Magnetodynamics at the atomic scale form the cornerstone of spin-based nanoscale devices with applications in future information technologies. Interactions of local spin states also play a crucial role with the local environment to determine their properties. Researchers have described the impact of orbital hybridization effects, charge transfer, and the presence of nearby impurities as strong influencers on the magnetic ground state, to determine a range of magnetodynamic qualities, including magnetic anisotropy, spin lifetime and spin-relaxation mechanisms. Experimental methods can be developed to directly capture these properties and analyze the magnetic phenomena of classical and semiclassical descriptions at sub-nanometer scales to reveal the emergence of exquisite quantum mechanical effects.

Blockchain may one day eliminate inefficiencies and lack of transparency in supply chains. While slow in coming, this revolution would benefit not only customers and brands, but the invisible” workers who power global trade.

#Blockchain #SystemShock #BloomberQuicktake.

Continue reading “This Huge Bet on Blockchain Could Change A $50 Trillion Industry” »