Lifeboat Foundation

In a breakthrough that could help revolutionize wireless communication, researchers unveiled a novel method for manipulating terahertz waves, allowing them to curve around obstacles instead of being blocked by them.

While cellular networks and Wi-Fi systems are more advanced than ever, they are also quickly reaching their bandwidth limits. Scientists know that in the near future they’ll need to transition to much higher communication frequencies than what current systems rely on, but before that can happen there are a number of — quite literal — obstacles standing in the way.

Researchers from Brown University and Rice University say they’ve advanced one step closer to getting around these solid obstacles, like walls, furniture, and even people — and they do it by curving light.

COLORADO SPRINGS — Commercial space station developer Vast will use SpaceX’s Starlink constellation to provide broadband connectivity for its Haven-1 station launching next year.

Vast announced April 9 that it will install laser intersatellite link terminals on its Haven-1 station to enable communications with Starlink satellites. The agreement between Vast and SpaceX extends to future space stations Vast plans to develop.

Max Haot, chief executive of Vast, said in an interview during the 39^th Space Symposium that his company will use terminals supplied by SpaceX. Gwynne Shotwell, president of SpaceX, announced at the Satellite 2024 conference March 19 that SpaceX would sell laser terminals it developed for Starlink to other customers, a product offering she dubbed “Plug ’n’ Plaser.”

Can you wirelessly power wireless devices, thus improving and advancing the technology known an “Internet of Things” (IoT)? This is what a recent study published in Energy & Environmental Science hopes to address as a team of researchers from the University of Utah investigated how pyroelectrochemical cell (PECs) could be used to self-charge IoT devices through changes in immediate surrounding temperature, also known as ambient temperature. This study holds the potential to help a myriad of industries, including agriculture and machinery, by allowing IoT devices to charge without the need for electrical outlets.

“We’re talking very low levels of energy harvesting, but the ability to have sensors that can be distributed and not need to be recharged in the field is the main advantage,” said Dr. Roseanne Warren, who is an associate professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Utah and a co-author on the study. “We explored the basic physics of it and found that it could generate a charge with an increase in temperature or a decrease in temperature.”

² Department of Neurobiology, Duke University, Durham, NC, United States.

³Center for Bioelectric Interfaces of the Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia.

⁴Department of Information and Internet Technologies of Digital Health Institute, I.M. Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University, Moscow, Russia.

When I was a kid, I went to a science camp, and one of the instructors showed us a few inches of fiber optic cable. I remember thinking it was so neat that you could light it up at one end, and no matter how you twisted the cable, you could see the light come out on the other end. At the time, I thought how useful it might be to send Morse code through it—I was very young. Things have changed a bit since then. Today, UK Aston University researchers sent data at a 301 terabits per second (Tbps) clip over existing fiber networks.

How fast is that? It’s about 1.2 million times faster than the US’ medium fixed broadband speed of 242.48 megabits per second (Mbps). Or, it’s fast enough to deliver 1,800 4K movies to your home in a second. And I thought my recent home internet fiber upgrade to 2 Gigabits per second (Gbps) was impressive!Of course, no one will get 301 Tbps speeds in their home office. In the real world, I know a handful of people with 10 Gbps connections to their houses and many data centers with 40 Gbps local area networks.

Team presents new path to long-term data storage based on atomic-scale defects.

With the development of the internet, social media, and cloud computing, the amount of data created worldwide on a daily basis is skyrocketing. This calls for new technologies that could provide higher storage densities combined with secure long-term data archiving far beyond the capabilities of traditional data storage devices. An international research team led by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) now proposes a new concept of long-term data storage based on atomic-scale defects in silicon carbide, a semiconducting material. These defects are created by a focused ion beam, providing high spatial resolution, fast writing speed, and low energy for storing a single bit, as the team reports in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.

Latest estimates assume around 330 million terabytes of new data created each day, with 90 percent of the world’s data generated in the last two years alone. If the sheer numbers already suggest the need of advanced data storage technologies, it is by no means the only problem associated to this development. “The limited storage time of current storage media requires data migration within several years to avoid any data loss. Besides of being trapped in perpetual data migration procedures, this substantially increases the energy consumption, because a significant amount of energy is consumed in the process,” says Dr. Georgy Astakhov from the Institute of Ion Beam Physics and Materials Research at HZDR.

The SpaceX Falcon 9 launch of 21 Starlink satellites from Vandenberg Space Force Base climbs into the atmosphere over Southern California at dusk, April 6, 2024.

Credit: SpaceXWatch live as a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches a batch of 21 Starlink internet satellites from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space…

The settlement terms include Google deleting ‘billions of data records’ that are from the private browsing activities of users involved in the suit. Going forward, Google will also update its disclosure to make users aware of what data it retains from the private browsing sessions.

As per the settlement, Google will also let people using the Incognito mode block third-party cookies for the next five years. The company will also not track the user’s choice of privately browsing the internet.