Lifeboat Foundation

Some researchers are driven by the quest to improve a specific product, like a battery or a semiconductor. Others are motivated by tackling questions faced by a given industry. Rob Macfarlane, MIT’s Paul M. Cook Associate Professor in Materials Science and Engineering, is driven by a more fundamental desire.

“I like to make things,” Macfarlane says. “I want to make materials that can be functional and useful, and I want to do so by figuring out the basic principles that go into making new structures at many different size ranges.” (Image: Adam Glanzman)

Advances in display technologies prompt the development of electronic products with foldable and flexible panels. Flexible displays have thin-film transistors (TFTs) built in that act as an on/off light switch for the display. At the same time, important considerations for the advancement of next generation displays include electrical charge transmission velocity, operation stability, and production cost reduction.

Recently, a research team at POSTECH has proposed a highly efficient crosslinking strategy for a dense and defect-free thin-film organic-inorganic hybrid dielectric layer. The findings from the study were published in Nature Communications.

The global evolution of IoT has raised interest in metal-oxide semiconductor-based circuits with low standby power consumption. Attention has been particularly keen on TFT materials capable of low-cost solution processing. Among several solution-processable semiconductors, metal oxides are regarded as the most successful material platforms for TFTs mainly because of their high charge carrier mobility and operational stability.

Google developed the language model known as Google Bard AI (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) to produce high-quality text by anticipating the next word in a given phrase based on context. It is trained on a sizable corpus of text and may be tailored using smaller datasets to produce material in a particular style or domain.

The third version of OpenAI’s language model, GPT-3 (Generative Pretrained Transformer 3), was trained on enormous volumes of text data and is capable of producing text, summarising text, translating text, responding to inquiries, and carrying out a range of other natural language tasks.

Let’s take a look at the top 5 differences between ChatGPT and Google Bard AI.

For centuries, the town of Carrara’s prosperity has depended on artists. Its famed Tuscan marble quarries supplied artists like Michelangelo, Canova and Bernini with the finest material for their sculptures. Today, robots are being used to create modern-day works. Chris Livesay has more.

#news #marble #technology.

Continue reading “Robots used to carve out marble sculptures” »

Two types of nanotechnology, metalenses and metamaterials, could soon make Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak a reality.

Adapting a method for making graphene, researchers have created a 2D honeycomb material that is predicted to have desirable mechanical, thermal, and optical properties.

The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.

A new type of material can learn and improve its ability to deal with unexpected forces thanks to a unique lattice structure with connections of variable stiffness, as described in a new paper by my colleagues and me.

The new material is a type of architected material, which gets its properties mainly from the geometry and specific traits of its design rather than what it is made out of. Take hook-and-loop fabric closures like Velcro, for example. It doesn’t matter whether it is made from cotton, plastic or any other substance. As long as one side is a fabric with stiff hooks and the other side has fluffy loops, the material will have the sticky properties of Velcro.

A newly discovered structure located deep in the heart of a thick cloud of gas and dust more than 450 light-years away is the signature of a pair of baby stars in the throes of formation.

A team of astronomers have identified a previously unseen bubble at the center of a stellar nursery called Barnard 18 in the Taurus molecular cloud complex, likely carved from the surrounding gas as two emerging stars therein formed and grew.

It’s only the second time astronomers have identified such a bubble with the ejection of material or ‘outflow’ associated with a growing star. The newly discovered structure could help scientists learn more about how stars affect their environment as they grow.

Continue reading “Astronomers Detect a Strange New ‘Molecular Bubble’ Structure in Space” »

During a break from looking at planets around other stars, the European Space Agency’s CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite (Cheops) mission has observed a dwarf planet in our own Solar System and made a decisive contribution to the discovery of a dense ring of material around it.

The dwarf planet is known as Quaoar. The presence of a ring at a distance of almost seven and a half times the radius of Quaoar, opens up a mystery for astronomers to solve: why has this material not coalesced into a small moon?