Heads Up, Hoverboarders: Here Comes Quantum Levitation | Motherboard - StumbleUpon. Few motifs of science fiction cinema have been more appealing to us than the subtle defiance of gravity offered by futuristic hovercraft. So every once in a while we check in to see how humanity is progressing on that front, and whether the promise of hoverboards will be delivered by 2015 as evidenced in Back to the Future Part 2.
We’re not quite there yet, but we’re definitely getting off the ground, so to speak. Get ready to hover your brain around the art of quantum levitation. That’s right, quantum. Because of its chemical properties, a superconductor (when brought to low enough temperatures using, say, liquid nitrogen) exhibits this effect, causing the energy from the magnet below to warp around the superconductive object in a way which “locks” it in space.
Even more impressive and ripe for practical transportation use: When the superconducting object is placed along a magnetic rail, it exhibits frictionless momentum. Connections:
A bottle of wastewater could be powering your house by next year. By mimicking the essential process that allows plants to produce energy, an MIT researcher has managed to create electricity out of water more efficiently than conventional solar cells, to the point where one and a half bottles of wastewater could power an entire house for a day. Plants, being extremely clever, somehow manage to use sunlight to crack water into oxygen and hydrogen. They combine the hydrogen with carbon dioxide to make sugar (which is what I would do, 'cause sugar is good stuff), but we humans have been trying to figure out for about a century how to skip the sugar step and just recombine that oxygen and hydrogen back into water to generate electricity. Daniel Nocera, a chemistry and engineering researcher at MIT, has come up with an artificial "leaf" that uses cobalt and phosphate to split water molecules using nothing but sunlight.
Nocera has just teamed up with Tata Group to work towards commercializing this technology. Live Mint, via Fast Company. New efficiency record advances spray-on solar cells. Advancing solar technology is a trade-off between the efficiency of the cells themselves and the cost of producing and installing them. Quantum dot solar cells, which use nanoscale semiconductors to produce electricity, promise low-cost production and, because they can be sprayed or painted on, big benefits in terms of installation.
In the efficiency stakes quantum cells don't score as well as silicon-based or CIGS solar cells, but a new efficiency record for colloidal quantum dot solar cells represents a big step towards narrowing the gap. This breakthrough isn't about the quantum dots though, it's about the wrapping. Colloidal quantum dot solar cells To make quantum dot solar cells that can be sprayed or painted on, the tiny nanoscale semiconductors need to be dispersed evenly within another substance - this is known as a colloid. "We wrapped a single layer of atoms around each particle," explains Dr.
New efficiency record. Entire Computer Built Into USB Thumb Drive. Is that a USB key in your pocket or a dual-core computer? Norwegian company FXI Technologies showed off an amazing USB stick-sized portable computer prototype on Friday, Nov. 18. Code-named Cotton Candy because its 21 gram weight is the same as a bag of the confection, the tiny PC enables what its inventor calls "any-screen computing": the ability to turn any TV, laptop, phone, tablet, or set-top box into a dumb terminal for its Android-powered operating system. Packed in its tiny body is a dual-core 1.2-GHz Samsung Exynos ARM CPU (the same processor as in the Galaxy S II), 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, HDMI-out and even a microSD card slot for memory.
The Cotton Candy has a USB 2.0 connector on one end and an HDMI jack on the other. The device can output up to 1080p so even a full HD screen can display the Candy's preloaded Android 2.3 operating system at its native resolution. When you plug the Cotton Candy into a Mac or PC, the Windows or OS X operating system recognizes it as a USB drive. Worlds-lightest-material-9999-percent-air from popsci.com. A collaboration of researchers from HRL, CalTech, and UC Irvine have created the new world's lightest material--some 100 times lighter than styrofoam. It's even lighter than aerogel, one of our favorite ultralight materials. The material is a micro-lattice in structure, with the 0.01 percent of the material that's solid consisting of hollow tubes that are only 100 nanometers thick. It's rated at a density of 0.9 mg/cc, lighter than even the lightest aerogels, which have only achieved 1.1 mg/cc. It's also extraordinarily strong and shock-absorbent, thanks to all that air: it can compress by 50 percent and completely recover its shape, highly unusual for a material that is essentially metallic.
It was actually inspired by architectural structures rather than other ultralight materials--the team looked to the Golden Gate Bridge and the Eiffel Tower to see how those structures are so light and yet so strong. Old Red Goes Green: Recycled Wall Brick Built to Save Water | Designs &... It might look like your typical old red clay house-building brick on one side, but turn it over and there is a shift that hints at a deeper design change – one that is eco-friendly but also expressive in a way that most walls or brick are not.
Designed by Jin-young Yoon to be made from recycled plastic and decomposed leaves, this brick is green from the ground up (so to speak). More than just its composite materials, however, built-in grooves are designed to funnel water for gardening or even long-term underground storage. In a world where water is becoming the next hot-button resource destined to become scarce, it seems like a good time to start thinking about our most basic building materials and structures (such as bricks and walls) and see how they might shift to accommodate an ever-growing need for homes to have access to nature’s most vital resource. World-resources-map-r2.gif from mint.com.