Lifeboat Foundation

Nearsightedness, or myopia, is an increasing problem around the world. There are now twice as many people in the US and Europe with this condition as there were 50 years ago. In East Asia, 70 to 90 percent of teenagers and young adults are nearsighted. By some estimates, about 2.5 billion of people across the globe may be affected by myopia by 2020.

Eye glasses and contact lenses are simple solutions; a more permanent one is corneal refractive surgery. But, while vision correction surgery has a relatively high success rate, it is an invasive procedure, subject to post-surgical complications, and in rare cases permanent vision loss. In addition, laser-assisted vision correction surgeries such as laser in situ keratomileusis (LASIK) and photorefractive keratectomy (PRK) still use ablative technology, which can thin and in some cases weaken the cornea.

Columbia Engineering researcher Sinisa Vukelic has developed a new non-invasive approach to permanently correct vision that shows great promise in preclinical models. His method uses a femtosecond oscillator, an ultrafast laser that delivers pulses of very low energy at high repetition rate, for selective and localized alteration of the biochemical and biomechanical properties of corneal tissue. The technique, which changes the tissue’s macroscopic geometry, is non-surgical and has fewer side effects and limitations than those seen in refractive surgeries. For instance, patients with thin corneas, dry eyes, and other abnormalities cannot undergo refractive surgery. The study, which could lead to treatment for myopia, hyperopia, astigmatism, and irregular astigmatism, was published May 14 in Nature Photonics.

Generating power from the sun isn’t the problem. The technology has been there for decades. Storing that power efficiently, however, has been a challenge.

That’s why the Department of Energy has awarded $3 million to engineering researchers at The University of Texas at Austin to overcome the Achilles’ heel of the solar power story since Day One: how to store its energy.

To date, most major solar energy systems are bulky and expensive, with inefficient storage capacity. Energy coming from existing solar power systems must be housed in storage systems outside of the generators that create the power. In other words, two separate systems are required to ensure successful operation.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=e2N1i7_13QM

Engineering.com lists some of the most exciting companies that are using 3D printing to take humans into space.

A membrane made up of block polymers has the customizable and uniform pore sizes needed for filtering or recovering particular substances from wastewater, researchers say in a review published in npj Clean Water.

Some parts of the world have an increasing need to generate drinkable water from wastewater due to excessive chemical discharge into typical water sources or lack of rainfall. Researchers from Purdue University and the University of Notre Dame believe that a block polymer membrane could not only improve desalination and filtration of wastewater, but could also be used in forthcoming hybrid water treatment processes that simultaneously recover substances for other purposes.

“Current nanofiltration membranes used for desalination tend to separate things based on size and electrostatic interactions, but not chemical identity,” said Bryan Boudouris, Purdue’s Robert and Sally Weist Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering. “If we tailor the right membrane to the right application to begin with, then less energy is used.”

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This is a talk by Marc Raibert for course 6.S099: Artificial General Intelligence. He is the CEO of Boston Dynamics. This class is free and open to everyone. Our goal is to take an engineering approach to exploring possible paths toward building human-level intelligence for a better world.

Note: Due to technical difficulties, we don’t have a screencast of the slides, and the video of the slides is low resolution. Despite this, I chose to include several parts of the talk that show slides, especially with videos. It’s not optimal, but I hope you learn and enjoy anyway. Thanks for understanding. We’re always learning and improving.

Continue reading “Boston Dynamics (Marc Raibert, CEO)” »

Scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and the University of Southern California (USC) have demonstrated the successful implementation of a prosthetic system that uses a person’s own memory patterns to facilitate the brain’s ability to encode and recall memory.

In the pilot study, published in today’s Journal of Neural Engineering, participants’ short-term memory performance showed a 35 to 37 percent improvement over baseline measurements. The research was funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

A new microchip technology capable of optically transferring data could solve a severe bottleneck in current devices by speeding data transfer and reducing energy consumption by orders of magnitude, according to an article published in the April 19, 2018 issue of Nature.

Researchers from Boston University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California Berkeley and University of Colorado Boulder have developed a method to fabricate silicon chips that can communicate with light and are no more expensive than current chip technology. The result is the culmination of a several-year-long project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency that was a close collaboration between teams led by Associate Professor Vladimir Stojanovic of UC Berkeley, Professor Rajeev Ram of MIT, and Assistant Professor Milos Popovic from Boston University and previously CU Boulder. They collaborated with a semiconductor manufacturing research team at the Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE) of the State University of New York at Albany.

The electrical signaling bottleneck between current microelectronic chips has left light communication as one of the only options left for further technological progress. The traditional method of data transfer-electrical wires-has a limit on how fast and how far it can transfer data. It also uses a lot of power and generates heat. With the relentless demand for higher performance and lower power in electronics, these limits have been reached. But with this new development, that bottleneck can be solved.

Continue reading “Researchers illuminate the path to a new era of microelectronics” »

This could be used for hydrogen storage.

Of the four states of matter, gases are the hardest to pin down. Gas molecules move quickly and wildly and don’t like to be confined. When confined, heat and pressure build in the container, and it doesn’t take long before the gas blows the lid off the place, literally. Luckily, gases are superficial. Provide them with an attractive internal surface area, and they’ll pin themselves down in no time. No, it’s not love at first sight, it’s adsorption.

“Adsorption is the processes of gas pinning to the surface of another material—the inside walls of a container, for example,” says Chris Wilmer, assistant professor in Pitt’s Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering. “When adsorption occurs, the gas molecules stop bumping into each other, reducing pressure. So, by increasing a container’s internal surface area, we can store more gas in less space.”

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MIT engineers have developed a continuous manufacturing process that produces long strips of high-quality graphene.

The team’s results are the first demonstration of an industrial, scalable method for manufacturing high-quality graphene that is tailored for use in membranes that filter a variety of molecules, including salts, larger ions, proteins, or nanoparticles. Such membranes should be useful for desalination, biological separation, and other applications.

Continue reading “Scalable manufacturing process spools out strips of graphene for use in ultrathin membranes” »