Lifeboat Foundation

PARC is a Xerox company that has received funds from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) through its Inbound, Controlled, Air-Releasable, Unrecoverable Systems (ICARUS) program.

The ICARUS program aims at creating a prototype air vehicle that has the potential to deliver small payloads in an autonomous manner to targeted locations and then disappears after the task it completed. PARC in cooperation with AeroVironment Inc. plans to produce particular materials and the air delivery system that can be made to disappear through a project within ICARUS that is referred to as On-Target Delivery and Disintegration Upon Stress-release Trigger (ONLY-DUST).

The project focuses on producing complex structures that are majorly firm during flight and storage, and at the same time permits reliable on-demand transience. It is possible to potentially scale up the DoD applications of the demonstration system because of its association with AeroVironment Inc., a leading company in unmanned, small aerial vehicles.

Great work by my friends at ORNL.

In a review paper published in ACS Nano, Olga Ovchinnikova and colleagues provide an overview of existing paths to 3D materials, but the ultimate goal is to create and customize material at the atomic scale. Material would be assembled atom by atom, much like children can use Legos to build a car or castle brick by brick. This concept, known as directed matter, could lead to virtually perfect materials and products because many limitations of conventional manufacturing techniques would be eliminated.

“Being able to assemble matter atom by atom in 3D will enable us to design materials that are stronger and lighter, more robust in extreme environments and provide economical solutions for energy, chemistry and informatics,” Ovchinnikova said.

Continue reading “Additive manufacturing techniques featuring atomic precision could one day create materials with Legos flexibility and Terminator toughness” »

Yale researchers have devised a method that brings marketable Li-O₂ batteries closer to reality, improving both the batteries’ performance and the ability to study them.

In recent years, lithium-oxygen batteries have intrigued researchers with their potential. They can store at least two to three times the energy as lithium-ion batteries can, which are the current standard for consumer electronics, so laptops could theoretically run longer on a single charge and electric cars would drive farther.

But they’re not quite there yet. For now, Li-O₂ batteries operate sluggishly and have short lives. Compounding matters, it’s hard to get a sense of how to fix that because figuring out the exact nature of their chemistry has proved tricky.

Continue reading “A New Design Strategy for Better Lithium Oxygen Batteries” »

There are three buckets.

There are three buckets of jobs right now, and each one will be affected by artificial intelligence. So says Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Social and a director with Starbucks, during a conversation on Tuesday at Fortune Brainstorm Tech in Colorado.

The first bucket, Shih says, are the jobs that almost certainly will disappear as AI and machine learning technologies continue to evolve and become more prevalent. This includes things like drivers (thanks to autonomous vehicles), lower-skilled manufacturing jobs (humans out, robots in), and certain research functions (paralegals, etc.).

The program will be managed by a specially formed company to be owned equally by the Chinese and Russian state manufacturers.

Interesting and plausible perspective about the future of air travel.

The Boeing Co. is turning 100 on July 15. Throughout the year, The Daily Herald is covering the people, airplanes and moments that define The Boeing Century. More about this series.

Glad that I hadn’t plan to buy one of these cars.

A Chinese company is hoping to bring the solar-powered car to market, showing off four new “zero-charge” EVs that get all their range from the sun.

In just a few years, we could see an electric car on the market that doesn’t need a charging station to ‘fuel up.’

The biggest apparent stumbling blocks for electric vehicles (EVs) seems to be their range — the distance that can be driven between charging — and the time it takes for an EV battery to be charged. When competing against gas cars, which can be filled up in just a few minutes, and can cover a range of several hundred miles per tank, the idea of having a limited range and a longer ‘fueling’ time with an EV isn’t one that most of us are comfortable with. And when considering the easy availability of fuel from the vast number of gas stations (as opposed to the EV charging stations that are few and far between in most areas), switching from gas to electric mobility is a bit of a stretch for many people (not even taking into account the higher cost for EVs).

However, as costs go down, and as EV ranges increase (along with the growing numbers of dedicated EV charging stations), electric transport options will start to become more and more desirable (especially in times of rising gas prices), but will still most likely need to be tethered to charging points, unless the next generation of electric cars follows in the footsteps of one Chinese company.

Continue reading “Hanergy’s solar-powered electric cars can charge themselves while driving” »