Lifeboat Foundation

Seeing the environmental crises rising particularly because of the construction sector, more conscious choices regarding building materials need to be considered. Since the beginning of our craft, architects and constructors have been trying to utilize natural materials in buildings—either used in their raw form, like bamboo, or processed and incorporated into different materials. Hempcrete is one type of concrete incorporating natural materials; it is energy-saving and durable.

Standing hundreds of feet above ground, wind turbines — like tall trees, buildings, and telephone poles — are easy targets for lightning. Just by virtue of their height, they will get struck.

Lightning protection systems exist for conventional wind turbine blades. But protection was needed for blades made from a new type of material—thermoplastic resin composites — and manufactured using an innovative thermal (heat-based) welding process developed by scientists at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

Thermoplastic materials, like plastic bottles, can be more easily recycled than the thermoset materials commonly used to make wind turbine blades today. While thermoset materials need to be heated to cure, thermoplastics cure at room temperature, which reduces both blade manufacturing times and costs.

A new article in Science magazine gives an overview of almost three decades of research into colloidal quantum dots, assesses the technological progress for these nanometer-sized specs of semiconductor matter, and weighs the remaining challenges on the path to widespread commercialization for this promising technology with applications in everything from TVs to highly efficient sunlight collectors.

“Thirty years ago, these structures were just a subject of scientific curiosity studied by a small group of enthusiasts. Over the years, quantum dots have become industrial-grade materials exploited in a range of traditional and emerging technologies, some of which have already found their way into commercial markets,” said Victor I. Klimov, a coauthor of the paper and leader of the team conducting quantum dot research at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Many advances described in the Science article originated at Los Alamos, including the first demonstration of colloidal quantum dot lasing, the discovery of carrier multiplication, pioneering research into quantum dot light emitting diodes (LEDs) and luminescent solar concentrators, and recent studies of single-dot quantum emitters.

The vision of a concrete building that can store energy like a giant battery could someday be a reality.

New thermoelectric could usher in inexpensive power source.

O,.o circa 2017.

We present a detection scheme to search for QCD axion dark matter, that is based on a direct interaction between axions and electrons explicitly predicted by DFSZ axion models. The local axion dark matter field shall drive transitions between Zeeman-split atomic levels separated by the axion rest mass energy m a.

C.
2. Axion-related excitations are then detected with an upconversion scheme involving a pump laser that converts the absorbed axion energy (~hundreds of μeV) to visible or infrared photons, where single photon detection is an established technique. The proposed scheme involves rare-earth ions doped into solid-state crystalline materials, and the optical transitions take place between energy levels of 4f.

Continue reading “Axion dark matter detection” »

Amazing.

Zaha Hadid Architects and ETH Zurich have built a 3D-printed concrete footbridge named Striatus in Venice that is freestanding and assembled without mortar.

Named Striatus, the 16-metre-long bridge was built by the computation and design team at Zaha Hadid Architects, known as ZHACODE, in collaboration with the Block Research Group (BRG) at Swiss university ETH Zurich, incremental3D and Holcim. It was constructed from 53 hollow blocks each printed from 500 layers of printed concrete.

Continue reading “Zaha Hadid Architects creates unreinforced 3D-printed concrete bridge at Venice” »

Prior to 1970, bulletproof vests were pretty iffy, with a history extending as far as the 1500s when there were attempts to make metal armor that was bulletproof. By the 20th century there was ballistic nylon, but it took kevlar to produce garments with real protection against projectile impact. Now a 3D printed nanomaterial might replace kevlar.

A group of scientists have published a paper that interconnected tetrakaidecahedrons made up of carbon struts that are arranged via two-photon lithography.

We know that tetrakaidecahedrons sound like a modern invention, but, in fact, they were proposed by Lord Kelvin in the 19th century as a shape that would allow things to be packed together with minimum surface area. Sometimes known as a Kelvin cell, the shape is used to model foam, among other things.

Scientists have found two huge, red objects in the asteroid belt that they believe are not supposed to be there – both of which have “complex organic matter” on their surfaces.

These two asteroids, called 203 Pompeja and 269 Justitia, were discovered by Jaxa, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. Pompeja is approximately 110 kilometres wide, while the smaller Justitia has a diameter of only 55 kilometres.

Found in the cluster of rocks between Mars and Jupiter, these two objects are distinctly different from their neighbours. Both Pompeja and Justitia reflect more red light than other surrounding asteroids due to the increased presence of complex organic material on their surface – such as carbon or methane.