Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: engineering

Researchers from the University of Oklahoma have made significant advances in a promising technology for efficient energy conversion and chemical processing. Two recent studies involving protonic ceramic electrochemical cells, called PCECs, address significant challenges in electrochemical manufacturing and efficiency. These innovations are a crucial step toward reliable and affordable solutions for hydrogen production and clean energy storage.

The studies were led by Hanping Ding, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the School of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Oklahoma.

PCECs have traditionally struggled to maintain performance under the required for commercial use. In a study featured in Nature Synthesis, Ding and his colleagues reported a new approach that eliminates the need for cerium-based materials, which are prone to breakdown under high steam and heat.

Read more | >

By popular request we’ve begun adding playlists of the show as Podcasts on Youtube Music, I’ll try to add a new one every 2–3 days till we have most of our inventory up there, but given today’s Episode is *Cities of the Future*, a collection of all of those seemed a good idea https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIIOUpOge0LuyCbYUhy-79RQKkOXonmx4 These are the (tentatively named) upcoming playlists/podcasts list I’ll be adding, in no particular order: Megastructures & Extreme Engineering The Fermi Paradox & Alien Civilizations Space Colonization & Habitats Post-Scarcity & Future Civilizations Transhumanism & Human Evolution Propulsion & Interstellar Travel Terraforming & Planetary Engineering Mind, Machines & Alien Intelligence Future Warfare & Defense Strange Worlds & Alien Life.

Read more | >

Northwestern University Trustee Kimberly K. Querrey (’22, ’23 P) has made a $10 million gift to create and enhance the Querrey Simpson Institute for Regenerative Engineering at Northwestern University (QSI RENU), bringing her total giving to the institute to $35 million. The new institute will advance the development of medical tools that empower the human body to heal, focusing on the regeneration or reconstruction of various tissues and organs, such as the eyes, cartilage, spinal cord, heart, muscle, bone and skin.

The Querrey Simpson Institute for Regenerative Engineering at Northwestern University will advance research to regenerate and reconstruct tissues and organs.

Guillermo Ameer, director of the new Querrey Simpson Institute for Regenerative Engineering at Northwestern University, showcases his bioresorbable bandage, which delivers electrotherapy to wounds, accelerating diabetic ulcer healing and dissolving safely after use. QSI RENU combines engineering, biology, medicine and data science to develop technologies for tissue and organ function.

Read more | >

A research team has developed a high-performance supercapacitor that is expected to become the next generation of energy storage devices. With details published in the journal Composites Part B: Engineering, the technology developed by the researchers overcomes the limitations of existing supercapacitors by utilizing an innovative fiber structure composed of single-walled carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and the conductive polymer polyaniline (PANI).

Compared to conventional batteries, supercapacitors offer faster charging and higher power density, with less degradation over tens of thousands of charge and discharge cycles. However, their relatively low energy density limits their use over long periods of time, which has limited their use in practical applications such as and drones.

Researchers led by Dr. Bon-Cheol Ku and Dr. Seo Gyun Kim of the Carbon Composite Materials Research Center at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) and Professor Yuanzhe Piao of Seoul National University (SNU), uniformly chemically bonded single-walled carbon nanotubes (CNTs), which are highly conductive, with polyaniline (PANI), which is processable and inexpensive, at the nanoscale.

Read more | >

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) utilizes mid-infrared spectroscopy to precisely analyze molecular components such as water vapor and sulfur dioxide in exoplanet atmospheres. The key to this analysis, where each molecule exhibits a unique spectral “fingerprint,” lies in highly sensitive photodetector technology capable of measuring extremely weak light intensities.

Recently, KAIST researchers have developed an innovative capable of detecting a broad range of mid-infrared spectra, garnering significant attention. A research team led by Professor SangHyeon Kim from the School of Electrical Engineering has developed a mid-infrared photodetector that operates stably at room temperature, marking a major turning point for the commercialization of ultra-compact optical sensors.

The work is published in the journal Light: Science & Applications.

Read more | >

Arianna Gleason is an award-winning scientist at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory who studies matter in its most extreme forms—from roiling magma in the center of our planet to the conditions inside the heart of distant stars. During Fusion Energy Week, Gleason discussed the current state of fusion energy research and how SLAC is helping push the field forward.

Fusion is at the heart of every star. The tremendous pressure and temperature at the center of a star fuses atoms together, creating many of the elements you see on the periodic table and generating an immense amount of energy.

Fusion is exciting, because it could provide unlimited energy to our . We’re trying to replicate here on Earth, though it’s a tremendous challenge for science and engineering.

Read more | >

Imagine you are playing the guitar—each pluck of a string creates a sound wave that vibrates and interacts with other waves. Now shrink that idea down to a small single molecule, and instead of sound waves, picture vibrations that carry heat.

A team of engineers and at the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering at CU Boulder has recently discovered that these tiny thermal vibrations, otherwise known as phonons, can interfere with each other just like musical notes—either amplifying or canceling each other, depending on how a molecule is “strung” together.

The research is published in the journal Nature Materials.

Read more | >

A research team led by Professor Yong-Young Noh and Dr. Youjin Reo from the Department of Chemical Engineering at POSTECH (Pohang University of Science and Technology) has developed a technology poised to transform next-generation displays and electronic devices.

The project was a collaborative effort with Professors Ao Liu and Huihui Zhu from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC), and the findings were published in Nature Electronics.

Every time we stream videos or play games on our smartphones, thousands of transistors operate tirelessly behind the scenes. These microscopic components function like , regulating electric currents to display images and ensure smooth app operation.

Read more | >

The ideal material for interfacing electronics with living tissue is soft, stretchable, and just as water-loving as the tissue itself—in short, a hydrogel. Semiconductors, the key materials for bioelectronics such as pacemakers, biosensors, and drug delivery devices, on the other hand, are rigid, brittle, and water-hating, impossible to dissolve in the way hydrogels have traditionally been built.

A paper published today in Science from the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) has solved this challenge that has long stymied researchers, reimagining the process of creating hydrogels to build a powerful semiconductor in form. Led by Asst. Prof. Sihong Wang’s research group, the result is a bluish gel that flutters like a sea jelly in water but retains the immense semiconductive ability needed to transmit information between living tissue and machine.

The material demonstrated tissue-level moduli as soft as 81 kPa, stretchability of 150% strain, and charge-carrier mobility up to 1.4 cm2 V-1 s-1. This means their material—both semiconductor and hydrogel at the same time—ticks all the boxes for an ideal bioelectronic interface.

Read more | >