Lifeboat Foundation

Freshwater is scarce in many parts of the world. While currently there is enough fresh water on earth to support consumption, it is not available in a way where supply meets demand. To solve this issue, engineers at ETH Zurich have developed a new device that can harvest drinking water 24 hours around the clock, with no energy input, even under the blazing sun.

It consists of a specially coated glass pane, which both reflects solar radiation and also radiates away its own heat through the atmosphere to outer space. The resulting device thus cools itself down to as much as 15 degrees Celsius below the ambient temperature. At the bottom of the pane, the moisture in the air condenses into the water which is collected.

The glass pane is coated with layers of a specially designed polymer and silver, which allows it to firstly reflect sunlight away to prevent it from heating up. The coating causes the pane to emit infrared radiation at a specific wavelength window to the outer space, with no absorption by the atmosphere nor reflection back onto the pane.

Commercial storage: Many customers want as many functions and high performance as possible, but want to pay as little as possible. Franz-Josef Feilmeier, CEO of Fenecon, explains how this fits together.

Elon Musk said “orbit is not easy” after congratulating the California-based company Astra Space for reaching orbit after several failed attempts.

Scientists have been experimenting with the creation of nuclear energy for decades and have used nuclear fission — the process of breaking atoms apart — to power everything from devasting atomic bombs to clean nuclear energy.

However, this kind of nuclear energy is different from cosmic inspired nuclear fusion in one significant way: it’s not self-sustaining. Creating enough energy on Earth to power this kind of reaction has been just out of reach for decades.

Continue reading “What a fusion breakthrough means for the future of clean energy” »

Ruonan Han seeks to push the limits of electronic circuits.

Ruonan Han’s research is driving up the speeds of microelectronic circuits to enable new applications in communications, sensing, and security.

Han, an associate professor who recently earned tenured in MIT

Continue reading “Developing Next-Generation Electronic Devices” »

Magnetene could have useful applications as a lubricant in implantable devices or other micro-electro-mechanical systems.

A team of researchers from University of Toronto Engineering and Rice University have reported the first measurements of the ultra-low-friction behaviour of a material known as magnetene. The results point the way toward strategies for designing similar low-friction materials for use in a variety of fields, including tiny, implantable devices.

Magnetene is a 2D material, meaning it is composed of a single layer of atoms. In this respect, it is similar to graphene 0, a material that has been studied intensively for its unusual properties — including ultra-low friction — since its discovery in 2004.

Palo Alto Networks on Tuesday unveiled a new cloud security offering, its next-generation Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), which taps machine learning to bolster the protection of software-as-a-service (SaaS) and collaboration apps.

The company’s next-generation CASB platform will use ML and AI to provide capabilities such as the automatic discovery of applications and improved data loss prevention for sensitive data, the company announced.

The next-generation CASB is the latest product from the Santa Clara, California-based cyber firm to get a significant injection of ML-and AI-powered functionality, said Lee Klarich, chief product officer at Palo Alto Networks, in a briefing with reporters.

When it comes to carbon capture and storage, researchers have been getting creative by turning carbon dioxide into everything from carbon monoxide (CO) for the use in industrial processes to oxalic acid for processing rare earth elements. Now, it seems they are going back to its source, turning it into solid coal.

In a world-first breakthrough, a research team led by RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia developed a technique that can convert CO₂ back into particles of carbon, decreasing pollution by removing greenhouse gases from our environment.

Continue reading “In World First, Scientists Turn Carbon Dioxide Back Into Coal” »

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) on Saturday released its second batch of extended goals for promoting the usage of China’s 5G network and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).

IIoT refers to the interconnection between sensors, instruments and other devices to enhance manufacturing efficiency and industrial processes. With a strong focus on machine-to-machine communication, big data and machine learning, the IIoT has been applied across many industrial sectors and applications.

The MIIT announced that the 5G IIoT will be applied in the petrochemical industry, building materials, ports, textiles and home appliances as the 2021 China 5G + Industrial Internet Conference kicked off Saturday in Wuhan, central China’s Hubei Province.