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Dramatic advances in the field of quantum dot light emitting diodes (QD-LEDs) could come from recent work by the Nanotechnology and Advanced Spectroscopy team at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Quantum dots are nano-sized semiconductor particles whose emission color can be tuned by simply changing their dimensions. They feature near-unity emission quantum yields and narrow emission bands, which result in excellent color purity. The new research aims to improve QD-LEDs by using a new generation of engineered quantum dots tailored specifically to have reduced wasteful charge-carrier interactions that compete with the production of light.
"QD-LEDs can potentially provide many advantages over standard lighting technologies, such as incandescent bulbs, especially in the areas of efficiency, operating lifetime and the color quality of the emitted light," said Victor Klimov of Los Alamos.
Incandescent bulbs, known for converting only 10 percent of electrical energy into light and losing 90 percent of it to heat, are rapidly being replaced worldwide by less wasteful fluorescent light sources. However, the most efficient approach to lighting is direct conversion of electricity into light using electroluminescent devices such as LEDs.
MIT?s DarkLight project prepares to finally create dark matter in the lab | ExtremeTechAt MIT, members of the DarkLight project are preparing to create tiny amounts of dark matter using a particle accelerator, to finally prove once and for all just how dark matter operates.
As it stands, the generally accepted theory is that almost 27% of the universe is fashioned out of dark matter, compared to just 5% for ordinary matter. We say “theory” because no one has ever observed dark matter (nor dark energy, which makes up the remaining 68% of the universe), but given our current understanding of the universe, it’s the explanation that makes the most sense.
A Vancouver coffee shop will see the first of five ATMs expected in major Canadian cities.
Bitcoin fans, prepare your passports. If you want to be among the first to use a Bitcoin ATM, head to Canada.
What's being billed as the world's first Bitcoin ATM is set to enter service next week in Vancouver, according to local operator and broker Bitcoiniacs and Nevada-based manufacturer Robocoin.
The $18,500 ATM will debut in downtown coffee shop Waves as the first of five Bitcoin machines that will be deployed across the country.
They'll trade the increasingly popular digital currency for Canadian dollars and vice versa, with a CAD $3,000 daily limit ($2,870) for each user.
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The ATMs will use palm scans to identify users and enforce the limit, which is also designed to prevent problems with anti-money-laundering laws.
Scientists have fingerprinted a distinctive atmospheric wave pattern high above the Northern Hemisphere that can foreshadow the emergence of summertime heat waves in the United States more than two weeks in advance. The new research, led by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), could potentially enable forecasts of the likelihood of U.S. heat waves 15-20 days out, giving society more time to prepare for these often-deadly events.
The research team discerned the pattern by analyzing a 12,000-year simulation of the atmosphere over the Northern Hemisphere. During those times when a distinctive "wavenumber-5" pattern emerged, a major summertime heat wave became more likely to subsequently build over the United States.
"It may be useful to monitor the atmosphere, looking for this pattern, if we find that it precedes heat waves in a predictable way," says NCAR scientist Haiyan Teng, the lead author. "This gives us a potential source to predict heat waves beyond the typical range of weather forecasts."
The study is being published next week in Nature Geoscience. It was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, NASA, and the National Science Foundation (NSF), which is NCAR's sponsor. NASA scientists helped guide the project and are involved in broader research in this area.
Predicting a lethal event
Heat waves are among the most deadly weather phenomena on Earth. A 2006 heat wave across much of the United States and Canada was blamed for more than 600 deaths in California alone, and a prolonged heat wave in Europe in 2003 may have killed more than 50,000 people.
To see if heat waves can be triggered by certain large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns, the scientists looked at data from relatively modern records dating back to 1948. They focused on summertime events in the United States in which daily temperatures reached the top 2.5 percent of weather readings for that date across roughly 10 percent or more of the contiguous United States. However, since such extremes are rare by definition, the researchers could identify only 17 events that met such criteria -- not enough to tease out a reliable signal amid the noise of other atmospheric behavior.
The group then turned to an idealized simulation of the atmosphere spanning 12,000 years. The simulation had been created a couple of years before with a version of the NCAR-based Community Earth System Model, which is funded by NSF and the Department of Energy.
By analyzing more than 5,900 U.S. heat waves simulated in the computer model, they determined that the heat waves tended to be preceded by a wavenumber-5 pattern. This pattern is not caused by particular oceanic conditions or heating of Earth's surface, but instead arises from naturally varying conditions of the atmosphere. It was associated with an atmospheric phenomenon known as a Rossby wave train that encircles the Northern Hemisphere along the jet stream.
During the 20 days leading up to a heat wave in the model results, the five ridges and five troughs that make up a wavenumber-5 pattern tended to propagate very slowly westward around the globe, moving against the flow of the jet stream itself. Eventually, a high-pressure ridge moved from the North Atlantic into the United States, shutting down rainfall and setting the stage for a heat wave to emerge.
When wavenumber-5 patterns in the model were more amplified, U.S. heat waves became more likely to form 15 days later. In some cases, the probability of a heat wave was more than quadruple what would be expected by chance.
In follow-up work, the research team turned again to actual U.S. heat waves since 1948. They recognized that some historical heat wave events are indeed characterized by a large-scale circulation pattern that indicated a wavenumber-5 event.
Researchers at Oregon State University and the University of Oregon today announced a scientific advance that has eluded researchers for more than 100 years – a platform to fully study and understand the aqueous chemistry of aluminum, one of the world's most important metals.
The findings, reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, should open the door to significant advances in electronics and many other fields, ranging from manufacturing to construction, agriculture and drinking water treatment.
Aluminum, in solution with water, affects the biosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere and anthrosphere, the scientists said in their report. It may be second only to iron in its importance to human civilization. But for a century or more, and despite the multitude of products based on it, there has been no effective way to explore the enormous variety and complexity of compounds that aluminum forms in water.
Now there is.
"This integrated platform to study aqueous aluminum is a major scientific advance," said Douglas Keszler, a distinguished professor of chemistry in the OSU College of Science, and director of the Center for Sustainable Materials Chemistry.
"Research that can be done with the new platform should have important technological implications," Keszler said. "Now we can understand aqueous aluminum clusters, see what's there, how the atomic structure is arranged."
Chong Fang, an assistant professor of chemistry in the OSU College of Science, called the platform "a powerful new toolset." It's a way to synthesize aqueous aluminum clusters in a controlled way; analyze them with new laser techniques; and use computational chemistry to interpret the results. It's simple and easy to use, and may be expanded to do research on other metal atoms.
FiberFix aims to make duct tape look patheticPeople may make jokes about how duct tape can be used to fix just about anything, but a new product is claimed to be 100 times stronger than our matte-silver friend. It's called FiberFix, and it's a tape impregnated with a resin that reportedly "hardens like steel."
To use FiberFix, you just immerse a length of it in water, wrap that wet tape around the broken item in question, and allow it to set. Although it takes 24 hours to cure completely, it should begin to harden within just a few minutes, and will set to its hard consistency within about 10 – so you need to work with it quickly. Once set, it can be sanded or painted, and will be completely waterproof.
While it's apparently non-toxic, its makers warn against getting the resin on skin, clothes, tools or other places where you don't want it, as it will be very difficult to remove once it's set ... they also advise against using it to make an arm cast, in case you were wondering.
If you regularly watch any police forensics TV shows, then the word "Luminol" is probably already part of your vocabulary. Now, however, you might also want to add the word "Lumicyano." That's the name of a new product that is said to reveal latent fingerprints faster, cheaper and better than other methods.
Along with good ol' fingerprint powder dusting, one process commonly used by crime scene investigators involves exposing touched objects to the fumes given off by a cyanoacrylate compound – known to you and I as super-glue. These fumes react with chemicals in the fingerprint oil (which is mainly sweat residue), polymerizing into a white deposit that causes the print to visually stand out from the surface of the object ... ideally, that is.
We could see a small-scale Hyperloop in about a year | DVICEThere's a new corporation out there, folks. It's called Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, and contrary to what you might believe, Elon Musk had nothing to do with it being formed. Instead, the new corporation is the logical progression of JumpStartFund, the crowdsourcing group announced last month by ex-SpaceX director Marco Villa and past ASCA president Patricia Galloway.
Since its inception, the crowdsourcing endeavor has been wrangling an impressive list of partners, all of whom are hell-bent on seeing the Hyperloop come into being. One such partner, computer modeling and simulation firm Ansys, has already begun Hyperloop feasibility studies. It is their belief that, thanks to the unique nature of crowdsourcing, we could see a working scale model of the Hyperloop by the beginning of 2015.
What that means for Elon Musk's vision of an eventual Hyperloop carrying commuters between San Francisco and Los Angeles is up for debate. There's already a high speed rail project underway in California, making the Hyperloop potentially redundant (even if it is a much better idea). There's also been a lot of chatter about other cities wanting a piece of the Hyperloop's action. Wherever it ends up, it looks like Musk's Hyperloop concept might actually turn into something real far sooner than anyone expected.
The story: about 7 years ago, I just thought that it is cool to turn on/off the light or door switch without touching the contact especially at the public area such as restroom... I started to experiment with the touchless switch. I chose the infrared technology because it is widely available and least expensive.
What is the V-Switch?
The V-Switch is based on the infrared technology. It has one infrared emitter and one infrared receiver. The Receiver receives the infrared ray which is reflected from your hand or some other thing will toggle the switch. This is a simple concept; however, to make the switch reliable, I have to figure out how to avoid the problems arrives from heat, light, temperature, sound noise, Voltage surge...etc. And more important, it must fit into one gang box.
I have been working for more than seven years try to perfect the V-Switch. I know that there is no such thing as perfect but I have tried to make the switch to work as much as possible what it supposed to do. As of today, I have exhausted of things to make the V-Switch false triggers. Under direct sun light or too close to an infrared source, the user have to use hand to block the sun or light to turn on/off but there is no false trigger. Nobody knows the future, but I am confident that the V-Switch will work very well under indoor conditions.
----Published on Oct 31, 2013
The Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) is the primary sensor on the new generation GOES satellites, GOES-R. ABI will have 16 spectral bands, which will contribute to a greater number of products and better data quality. ABI will track and monitor cloud formation, atmospheric motion, convection monitoring, land surface temperature, ocean dynamics, flow of water, fire, smoke, volcanic ash plume, aerosols and air quality, as well as vegetation health. With 5 times faster coverage rate and 4 times better spatial resolution ABI is poised to become a true success story, benefitting the public by providing critical data.
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SkyRunner car goes off-road and off-groundBack in 2008, we heard about a parasail-equipped dune buggy, known as the Parajet Skycar. It could scramble over rough ground like a true off-roader, but then take to the skies when needed. One epic 6,000-km (3,728-mile) drive/flight from London to Tombouctou later, its creators got some ideas about how the design could be improved. The result is the lighter, better-flying and less-polluting SkyRunner – and you can order one now
Toyota Motor Corporation announces that it has developed a next-generation advanced driving support system, Automated Highway Driving Assist (AHDA), which uses automated driving technologies to support safer highway driving.
AHDA links two automated driving technologies to support safer driving and reduce driver workload: Cooperative-adaptive Cruise Control, which wirelessly communicates with preceding vehicles to maintain a safe distance; and Lane Trace Control, which aids steering to keep the vehicle on an optimal driving line within the lane.
Toyota recognizes the importance of the driver being in ultimate control of a vehicle and is therefore aiming to introduce AHDA and other advanced driving support systems where the driver maintains control and the fun-to-drive aspect of controlling a vehicle is not compromised. Toyota plans to market the newly developed AHDA in the mid-2010s and other driving support systems as soon as possible to provide safe and secure means of transportation.
A research team at Columbia University has figured out a way to bridge the gap between our three-dimensional world and the two-dimensional world of graphene, an alluring but notoriously fickle “miracle material” only one atom thick. The finding brings us one step closer to a new generation of smaller, lighter, faster, cheaper, more flexible and more energy efficient computers, solar cells, and other electronic devices.
Columbia’s new graphene research, “One dimensional electrical contact to a two-dimensional material,” is published in the November 1 edition of Science.
Making Clean Contact With Graphene
Graphene is a two-dimensional sheet of carbon atoms arranged in a characteristic chicken wire pattern. Despite its slim nature, it is 200 times stronger than steel.
Over at the Skunk Works, aircraft designers are hard at work cooking up a hypersonic scion to the legendary SR-71, the superspeedy recon jet of the Cold War.
The SR-71 Blackbird flew faster than any other production plane ever. Its successor, the SR-72, will go twice as fast.
That's the big, jawdropping takeaway from Aviation Week's exclusive look at Lockheed Martin's work on the next-generation aircraft. A demonstrator version of the SR-72 could be ready as early as 2018.
Lockheed told Aviation Week that the goal is for the new aircraft to be seriously hypersonic, blazing across the sky at around Mach 6. The intent, too, is to broaden the mission: The SR-72 would pick up where the Blackbird left off in performing high-altitude intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions, but unlike its weaponless predecessor also would -- hypothetically -- be capable of carrying out strikes on targets.
(Phys.org) —It doesn't take a Watson to realize that even the world's best supercomputers are staggeringly inefficient and energy-intensive machines.
Our brains have upwards of 86 billion neurons, connected by synapses that not only complete myriad logic circuits; they continuously adapt to stimuli, strengthening some connections while weakening others. We call that process learning, and it enables the kind of rapid, highly efficient computational processes that put Siri and Blue Gene to shame.
Materials scientists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have now created a new type of transistor that mimics the behavior of a synapse. The novel device simultaneously modulates the flow of information in a circuit and physically adapts to changing signals.
Gadgets, airplanes, and you: What's up with the FAA rules | Cutting Edge - CNET NewsThe FAA now says that it's fine and dandy for airline passengers to use their electronic devices in all phases of flight, including takeoff and landing. Here's how the rule change could affect your future flights.
Flying will soon be a little more tech-friendly. Gone are the days of flight attendants politely, or not so politely, reminding airline passengers to turn off all electronic devices for takeoff and landing. Imagine using Wi-Fi on your device during the entire flight.
On Thursday, the Federal Aviation Administration issued a long-awaited -- and much hoped for -- ruling that airlines can "safely expand passenger use of Portable Electronic Devices (PEDs) during all phases of flight," including during takeoff and landing.
(Phys.org) —Scientists working at SLAC, Stanford, Oxford, Berkeley Lab and in Tokyo have discovered a new type of quantum material whose lopsided behavior may lend itself to creating novel electronics.
The material is called bismuth tellurochloride, or BiTeCl. It belongs to a class of materials called topological insulators that conduct electrical current with perfect efficiency on their surfaces, but not through their middles. Researchers hope to exploit their unusual properties to create "spintronic" devices that use the electron's spin, rather than just its charge, to carry energy and information with 100 percent efficiency and at room temperature.
Recently, researchers have been developing a new type of laser that combines photons and plasmons (electron density oscillations) into a single radiation-emitting device with unique properties. In particular, nanoscale photon-plasmon lasers can emit light that is more tightly confined than the light emitted by lasers that use only photons.
.The BladeGlider concept to be shown by Nissan at the Tokyo Motor Show this month will no doubt cause a stir among the general populace for its radical shape, but it just might represent a significant moment in the history of the automobile. When Ben Bowlby conceived the vehicle’s revolutionary architecture in December 2008, he envisioned a far more efficient automobile than current form factors allow
The BladeGlider concept to be shown by Nissan at the Tokyo Motor Show this month will no doubt cause a stir among the general populace for its radical shape, but it just might represent a significant moment in the history of the automobile. When Ben Bowlby conceived the vehicle’s revolutionary architecture in December 2008, he envisioned a far more efficient automobile than current form factors allow.
Just five years later, the same trapezoid form factor will be the marquee unveiling at one of the most important car shows in the world. The reason it is so important, and yes, revolutionary, is that the Bladeglider (nee ZEOD RC, nee Deltawing) has such a low aerodynamic drag coefficient, that it uses considerably less energy to achieve the same performance as a conventional car using the same powerplant – maybe as little as half the energy.
