Lifeboat Foundation

The clang of metal, breathtaking speed and tons of adrenaline! Watch a futuristic video of battle robots in ultimate fighting in Moscow. The iron warriors are clashing without mercy for the right to face foreign competitors.

The Russian capital is holding an international competition ‘Bronebot-2016’ for battle robots, February 21–23. “Attention! The show contains scenes of total robot carnage,” the banner reads.

Now we can turn sugar into Nylon.

Genetically engineered yeast plus electro-catalyst yields bio-based nylon.

An etching process based on a three-layer stack achieves transfer into silicon of patterns with a depth of less than 5nm and a half-pitch of less than 20nm written by thermal scanning probe lithography.

A major goal in renewable energy research is to harvest the energy of the sun to convert water into hydrogen gas, a storable fuel. Now, with a nanoparticle-based system, researchers have set a record for one of the half-reactions in this process, reporting 100% efficiency for the reduction of water to hydrogen (Nano Lett. 2016, DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.5b04813).

To make such water-splitting systems, researchers must find the right materials to absorb light and catalyze the splitting of water into hydrogen and oxygen. The two half-reactions in this process—the reduction of water to hydrogen gas, and the oxidation of water to oxygen gas—must be isolated from each other so their products don’t react and explode. “Completing the cycle in an efficient, stable, safe fashion with earth-abundant elements is an ongoing challenge,” says chemist Nathan S. Lewis of Caltech, who was not involved in this study.

Until recently, the efficiency of the reduction step had maxed out at 60%. One challenge is that electrons and positive charges formed in the light absorption process can rapidly recombine, preventing the electrons from reducing water molecules to form hydrogen. To overcome this problem, several years ago, Lilac Amirav of Technion–Israel Institute of Technology and her colleagues designed a nanoparticle-based system (J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 2010, DOI: 10.1021/jz100075c) that would physically separate the charges formed during photocatalysis.

Continue reading “Nanoscale system reaches perfect efficiency for solar fuel production step” »

Russia isn’t messing around.

It’s for a good cause — but you have good reason to be scared.

Membrane wings show promise for highly efficient micro air vehicles.

Astronomers have found an extraordinary trail of gas greater than 300,000 light years across originating from a nearby galaxy called NGC 4569, according to a report in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The tail is comprised of hydrogen gas, the material new stars are born from, and is five times longer than the galaxy itself.

Brings a lot of possibilities.

Robotic reasoning.

Paper demonstrates autonomous underwater vehicles can be pre-programmed to make independent decisions.

Physicists have zoomed in on the transition that could explain why copper-oxides have such impressive superconducting powers.

Settling a 20-year debate in the field, they found that a mysterious quantum phase transition associated with the termination of a regime called the “pseudogap” causes a sharp drop in the number of conducting electrons available to pair up for superconductivity. The team hypothesizes that whatever is happening at this point is probably the reason that cuprates support superconductivity at much higher temperatures than other materials—about half way to room temperature.

“It’s very likely that the reason superconductivity grows in the first place, and the reason it grows so strongly, is because of that critical point,” CIFAR Senior Fellow Louis Taillefer (Université de Sherbrooke) says. The new findings are published in Nature.