Lifeboat Foundation

Circa 2017

Imagine living in a cocoon-like house without corners.

A team of researchers at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, working with one colleague from MIT and another from the University of Stuttgart, has developed a biomimetic elastomeric robot skin that has tactile sensing abilities. Their work has been published in the journal Science Robotics.

Roboticists continue to work on improving robot abilities and to make them more human-like. In this new effort, the researchers gave a robot arm the ability to detect such sensations as a pat, tickling, wind, or something stroking its surface. They accomplished this by partially imitating human skin.

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Elon Musk accused Twitter of “resisting and thwarting” his right to information about fake accounts on the platform, calling it in a letter to the company on Monday a “clear material breach” of the terms of their merger agreement.

“Mr. Musk reserves all rights resulting therefrom, including his right not to consummate the transaction and his right to terminate the merger agreement,” the letter, signed by Skadden Arps attorney Mike Ringler, says.

Twitter shares were down 5% on Monday morning.

Scientists at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have developed a stretchable and waterproof €˜fabric €™ that turns energy generated from body movements into electrical energy.

A crucial component in the fabric is a polymer that, when pressed or squeezed, converts mechanical stress into electrical energy. It is also made with stretchable spandex as a base layer and integrated with a rubber-like material to keep it strong, flexible, and waterproof.

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Nanosheets are finely structured two-dimensional materials and have great potential for innovation. They are fixed on top of each other in layered crystals, and must first be separated from each other so that they can be used, for example, to filter gas mixtures or for efficient gas barriers. A research team at the University of Bayreuth has now developed a gentle, environmentally-friendly process for this difficult process of delamination that can even be used on an industrial scale. This is the first time that a crystal from the technologically attractive group of zeolites has been made usable for a broad field of potential applications.

The delamination process developed in Bayreuth under the direction of Prof. Dr. Josef Breu is characterized by the fact that the structures of the nanosheets isolated from each other remain undamaged. It also has the advantage that it can be used at normal room temperature. The researchers present their results in detail in Science Advances.

The two-dimensional nanosheets, which lie on top of each other in layered crystals, are held together by electrostatic forces. In order for them to be used for technological applications, the electrostatic forces must be overcome, and the nanosheets detached from each other. A method particularly suitable for this is osmotic swelling, in which the nanosheets are forced apart by water and the molecules and ions dissolved in it. So far, however, it has only been possible to apply it to a few types of crystals, including some clay minerals, titanates, and niobates. For the group of zeolites, however, whose nanosheets are highly interesting for the production of functional membranes due to their silicate-containing fine structures, the mechanism of osmotic swelling has not yet been applicable.

MIT researchers can now control the physical and mechanical properties of lab-grown plant materials. This could enable an environmentally friendly process to produce wood-like structures with specific properties, like stiffness or density, tailored to certain applications.

Your Martian Dream Home, Made By Fungi ‘… it was the cheapest building material known.’ — Larry Niven, 1968.

3D Printed Glass Uses Stereolithography Techniques ‘All that with glass…’ — Frank Herbert, 1972.

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Circa 1978

Summary. The energetics of the gravitationally powered dynamo have been studied with the aid of a compressible-earth model which allows for the growth of the solid inner core. The basic premise of this study is that as the Earth gradually cooled over geological time the solid inner core continually accreted dense material which crystallized from an outer core composed of a molten binary alloy. This process requires a continual rearrangement of matter which generates the fluid motions needed to sustain the dynamo. These motions maintain the outer core in a well-mixed state, in apparent contradiction to Higgins & Kennedy’s hypothesis that the outer core is stably stratified. The vigour of these motions is dependent primarily upon the composition of the solid inner core, but is surprisingly independent of the density of the light constituent in the core. If the solid core is composed entirely of heavy metal, then as much as 3.7 × 10¹² W may be transferred from the core to the mantle as a result of cooling and gravitational settling. This is roughly equal to estimates of the amount of heat conducted down the adiabat in the core, but it is argued that there is no direct relation between the amount of heat conducted down the adiabat and the amount transferred to the mantle if the convection is driven non-thermally. The gravitational energy released per unit mass of the solid inner core is remarkably constant and may be as much as 2 × 10⁶J/kg, roughly five times the value of the latent heat of iron. These values are reduced if the solid inner core contains some light constituents. It was found that the efficiency of the gravitationally powered dynamo may exceed 50 per cent, a much higher figure than is possible for either the thermally or precessionally driven dynamo. Also, the amount of gravitational energy available to drive the dynamo in the future is many times that expended so far. The size of the magnetic field sustained by gravitational settling was related to the density jump at the inner—outer core boundary and the field strength was estimated to lie between 390 and 685 G, strongly suggesting that the dynamo is of the nearly-axisymmetric type developed by Braginsky.

A water wave incident on a grooved wall is shown to be analogous to electromagnetic waves called surface plasmon polaritons.

The ability of metamaterials to steer light has enabled amazing inventions from superresolution microscopes to “invisiblity” cloaks. But the physics underlying these structures also applies to other waves, such as acoustic, seismic, and water waves. Huanyang Chen and his colleagues at Xiamen University in China have demonstrated a structure that can change the propagation of surface water waves, making a localized wave that is analogous to an electromagnetic excitation called a surface plasmon polariton [1].

Surface plasmon polaritons occur at the interface between a dielectric and a negative-permittivity material such as a metal. Generating an equivalent excitation in surface water waves requires a similar sort of interface, such as that between water and a vertical barrier. In this case, the water’s parameter that is analogous to a metal’s permittivity is its depth. Of course, it’s impossible for water to have negative depth, but using metamaterials, Chen and his colleagues engineered the boundary conditions of the waves to achieve the same effect.