Lifeboat Foundation

The device opens the door to invisible displays on walls and windows – displays that would be bright when turned on but see-through when turned off — or in futuristic applications such as light-emitting tattoos, according to the researchers.

“The materials are so thin and flexible that the device can be made transparent and can conform to curved surfaces,” said Der-Hsien Lien, a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley and a co-first author along with Matin Amani and Sujay Desai, both doctoral students in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at Berkeley.

Their study was published March 26 in the journal Nature Communications. The work was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy.

Continue reading “Atomically thin light emitting device opens the possibility for ‘invisible’ displays” »

LEDs are already pretty tiny, but they just got a whole lot smaller. Researchers at the University of Washington have built what they say are the “thinnest-possible LEDs” — tiny lights that measure just three atoms thick. “Such thin and foldable LEDs are critical for future portable and integrated electronic devices,” Xiaodong Xu, co-author of a paper on the research that was published over the weekend in Nature Nanotechnology, says in a statement. At three atoms thick, the researchers’ LEDs are said to be 10 to 20 times thinner than conventional LEDs, opening up a number of potential new uses for them.

The technology purifies the air through the photosynthesis of plants, removing greenhouse gases from the environment whilst generating breathable oxygen.

Ummmm… o„o.

A massive, underground “blob” of dripping continental crust might be triggering hundreds of mysterious earthquakes in the Hindu Kush mountains.

A new finding puts the half-life of xenon 124 close to 18 sextillion years.

That’s 18,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Existing theory predicts the isotope’s radioactive decay has a half-life that surpasses the age of the universe “by many orders of magnitude,” but no evidence of the process has appeared until now.

Continue reading “Half-life of xenon 124 is about 18 sextillion years” »

A googolplex is 10^{10^100}, where the exponents are solved from the right. The exponentiation symbol (^) means the number just to the left multiplied by the left number’s self the number just to the right number of times. If the left number is 10, that means 1 followed by the right number of zeros. That is 10^googol=10^{10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000}. So the answer to your question is a-googolplex-and-1=(10^{10^100})+1.

In the popular movie franchise “Back to the Future”, an eccentric scientist creates a time machine that runs on a flux capacitor.

Now a group of actual physicists from Australia and Switzerland have proposed a device which uses the quantum tunneling of magnetic flux around a capacitor, breaking time-reversal symmetry.

The research, published this week in Physical Review Letters, proposes a new generation of electronic circulators, which are devices that control the direction in which microwave signals move.

Continue reading “Physicists invent flux capacitor, break time-reversal symmetry” »

Read more

But there are still plenty of humans involved in preparing orders.