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An SMU-led research team has developed a more cost-effective, energy-efficient material called high-entropy oxide (HEO) nanoribbons that can resist heat, corrosion and other harsh conditions better than current materials.

These HEO nanoribbons— featured in the journal Science —can be especially useful in fields like aerospace, energy, and electronics, where materials need to perform well in extreme conditions.

And unlike high entropy materials that have been created in the past, the nanoribbons that SMU’s Amin Salehi-Khojin and his team developed can be 3D-printed or spray-coated at room temperature for manufacturing components or coating surfaces. This makes them more energy-efficient and cost-effective than traditional high-entropy materials, which typically exist as bulk structures and require high-temperature casting.

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Lightweight, powerful lithium-ion batteries are crucial for the transition to electric vehicles, and global demand for lithium is set to grow rapidly over the next 25 years. A new analysis from the University of California, Davis, published May 29 in Nature Sustainability, looks at how new mining operations and battery recycling could meet that demand. Recycling could play a big role in easing supply constraints, the researchers found.

“Batteries are an enormous new source of demand for ,” said Alissa Kendall, the Ray B. Krone endowed professor of Environmental Engineering at UC Davis and senior author on the paper.

Lithium is a relatively common mineral and up to about 10 years ago demand was relatively small and steady, with a small number of mines providing the world’s supply, Kendall said. Global demand for lithium has risen dramatically—by 30% between 2022 and 2023 alone—as adoption of continues.

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Batteries are nearing their limits in terms of how much power they can store for a given weight. That’s a serious obstacle for energy innovation and the search for new ways to power airplanes, trains, and ships. Now, researchers at MIT and elsewhere have come up with a solution that could help electrify these transportation systems.

Instead of a battery, the new concept is a kind of fuel cell which is similar to a battery but can be quickly refueled rather than recharged. In this case, the fuel is liquid sodium metal, an inexpensive and widely available commodity.

The other side of the cell is just ordinary air, which serves as a source of oxygen atoms. In between, a layer of solid ceramic material serves as the electrolyte, allowing sodium ions to pass freely through, and a porous air-facing electrode helps the sodium to chemically react with oxygen and produce electricity.

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While there are many potential uses for soft-bodied robots, the things are still typically only built in small experimental batches. Scottish scientists are out to change that, with a mass-production-capable soft bot that is 3D-printed in a single piece which then walks off of the print bed.

Before we go any further, this isn’t the first time we’ve heard about a soft robot that was printed in one piece.

It was just this March that we told you about a hexapod bot created at UC San Diego, which was 3D-printed in one continuous 58-hour step. That robot was powered not by a motor but by compressed air, which sequentially moves its legs forward.

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American scientists plan to implement a project to test quantum communication in free space. Using lasers, they want to launch qubits over the Long Island Sound.

It is noted, that three laser beams from the telescope on top of the Kline Tower on the Yale University campus will be directed across the Long Island Sound at a distance of nearly 43.5 km and captured on the opposite side by a similar telescope on the roof of the University Hospital Stony Brook.

The goal of the Quantum Laser Across the Sound project is to expand the ability to send and receive quantum information and demonstrating the potential for possible future quantum computing infrastructures. The telescope on top of the Kline Tower will send entangled photons 43.4 km across the Long Island Sound.

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Why is there something rather than nothing? Robert Lawrence Kuhn, creator of Closer To Truth, joins John Michael Godier to explore one of the most profound questions in science and philosophy. The discussion moves through materialism, idealism, panpsychism, and quantum perspectives, asking whether consciousness is merely a byproduct of evolution or a fundamental aspect of reality, and what that could mean for the universe, artificial intelligence, and the nature of mind. Kuhn discusses his recent paper, A Landscape of Consciousness: Toward a Taxonomy of Explanations and Implications, which maps the full range of consciousness theories and explores their broader significance.

Links:
Closer to Truth.
https://www.youtube.com/c/CloserToTruthTV

Homepage

A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications by Robert Lawrence Kuhn https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079610723001128?via%3Dihub.

Seeing the consciousness forest for the trees by Àlex Gómez-Marín.
https://iai.tv/articles/seeing-the-consciousness-forest-for-the-trees-auid-2901

00:00:00 Introduction to Robert Lawrence Kuhn and consciousness.

Continue reading “Is Consciousness a Field? | Robert Lawrence Kuhn” | >

Strontium titanate was once used as a diamond substitute in jewelry before less fragile alternatives emerged in the 1970s. Now, researchers have explored some of its more unusual properties, which might someday be useful in quantum materials and microelectronics applications.

Writing in the journal Nature Communications, the team explains how they built an extremely thin, flexible strontium titanate membrane and stretched it, in the process turning on what’s known as a ferroelectric state. In that state, the material generates its own , somewhat similar to how a generates its own magnetic field.

“We applied strain to tune the membrane to a ferroelectric or non-ferroelectric state reversibly and repeatedly,” said Wei-Sheng Lee, a lead scientist at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and a principal investigator at the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES), a joint SLAC-Stanford institute. “This allowed quantitative characterizations of this transition in strontium titanate with unprecedented details.”

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