In Changsha, China, a 30-story hotel project went from blueprint and prefab parts to finished building in fifteen days. Some are questioning how the construction project could possibly be safe, but the builder defends it.
via Boing Boing
… Read More → "30-story prefab skyscraper built in two weeks. Of course it’s safe!"
Anyone who’s ever floored the accelerator in an EV knows the meaning of torque. It’s all right here, right now, allowing even an utterly pedestrian ride like the Nissan Leaf to provide an entertaining kick from a stop.
Having all your torque available at 1 rpm largely negates the need for multiple gear ratios, which is how even an electric sports car like the Tesla Roadster makes do … Read More → "Morgan’s new-old EV has a 5-speed"
IBM researchers have built a prototype optical chip that can transfer a terabit of data per second, using an innovative design requiring 48 tiny holes drilled into a standard CMOS chip, facilitating the movement of light. Much faster and more power-efficient than today’s optics, the so-called “Holey Optochip” technology could enhance the power of supercomputers.
Optical chips, which move data with light instead of electrons, are commonly … Read More → "Holey chip! IBM drills holes into optical chip for terabit-per-second speed"
You get home from work on a Tuesday evening. Sensing your arrival, your home turns on the lights in the living room and kitchen. You stop by the bathroom and step on your Internet-connected scale—it absorbs your day’s activity levels from a clip-on fitness monitoring device, then logs them on a website along with your sleeping activity and health history.
After making … Read More → "The five technologies that will transform homes of the future"
A new technique inspired by elegant pop-up books and origami will soon allow clones of robotic insects to be mass-produced by the sheet.
Devised by engineers at Harvard, the ingenious layering and folding process enables the rapid fabrication of not just microrobots, but a broad range of electromechanical devices.
In prototypes, 18 layers of carbon fiber, Kapton (a plastic film), titanium, … Read More → "In new mass-production technique, robotic insects spring to life"
In a remarkable feat of micro-engineering, UNSW physicists have created a working transistor consisting of a single atom placed precisely in a silicon crystal.
The tiny electronic device, described today in a paper published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, uses as its active component an individual phosphorus atom patterned between atomic-scale electrodes and electrostatic control gates.
This unprecedented atomic accuracy may yield the elementary building block for a future quantum computer with unparalleled computational efficiency.
Until now, single-atom transistors have been realised only by chance, where researchers … Read More → "Single-atom transistor is “perfect”"
To improve the next generation of insect-size flying machines, Johns Hopkins engineers have been aiming high-speed video cameras at some of the prettiest bugs on the planet. By figuring out how butterflies flutter among flowers with amazing grace and agility, the researchers hope to help small airborne robots mimic these maneuvers.
U.S. defense agencies, which have funded this research, … Read More → "Unraveling a butterfly’s aerial antics could help builders of bug-size flying robots"
Scientists said they have gotten even closer to proving the existence of the elusive Higgs boson, the so-called “God particle” that supplies mass to matter and would complete Albert Einstein’s theory of the universe.
Analyzing data from some 500 trillion sub-atomic particle collisions designed to emulate conditions right after the Big Bang when the universe was formed, scientists at Fermilab outside Chicago produced some 1,000 Higgs particles over a decade of work.
“Unfortunately, this hint is not significant enough to … Read More → "Scientists at U.S. lab detect hints of elusive Higgs boson particle"
< … Read More → "230% efficient LEDs seem to violate first law of thermodynamics"Physicists hellbent on destroying the universe have come up with a tiny LED that produces 69 picowatts of light while using just 30 picowatts of power. That’s an efficiency of above 100%, which should be impossible, but isn’t. And in other breaking news, up is down, black is white, and zebras look the same.
via DVICE
On Sunday, a group of amateur astronomers in San Antonio fired a one-watt blue laser up at the ISS and scored a direct hit, a first in ISS history. And instead of getting hunted down and arrested (which is what usually happens when you shoot lasers at flying things owned by the Feds), they got a congratulatory email from an astronaut.
Don Pettit, one of the lucky few up on the ISS, … Read More → "Texas blasts the ISS with a ground-based laser"
