Lifeboat Foundation

24M is reducing manufacturing costs by stripping out extraneous materials—and just got $22 million to begin building its first commercial factory.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=3Kc9xzuWP5Q

Keeping passengers in a vehicle from hearing the noise of a busy road is a problem that many auto manufacturers have attempted to solve over the years. Noise dampening materials can only do so much, but Ford is now working with noise cancelling technologies that aim to actively combat road sounds by cancelling them out.

The company recently applied its new noise-cancelling know-how to a project that has nothing to do with vehicles, but instead focuses on man’s best friend. Ford Europe built a new kind of doghouse that allows canines to rest without worry of loud noises, like fireworks, disturbing them.

Scientists have long known that synthetic materials—called metamaterials—can manipulate electromagnetic waves such as visible light to make them behave in ways that cannot be found in nature. That has led to breakthroughs such as super-high resolution imaging. Now, UMass Lowell is part of a research team that is taking the technology of manipulating light in a new direction.

This machine lets you recycle plastic at home 😲
Credit: http://bit.ly/2mzzFKz

Transistors, superconductors, and chip design have all seen efficiency breakthroughs this year. So much so, that we may see the cold-running computer before too long.

The curious tale of a ladies hairdresser who invented a potentially world-changing material. Part one of six. Reported by Lee Johnson, produced, filmed and directed by Adam Proctor.

But researchers have a new way to keep the materials and their associated circuitry, including electrodes, intact as they’re moved to curved or other smooth surfaces.

The results of their work appear in the journal ACS Nano.

The Ocean Cleanup, which is trying to remove plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, ran into problems in its first month of deployment.

Most of us think we have a pretty solid grasp on basic physics, and one of the assumptions we’ve come to form is that any material gets thinner as it’s stretched. It makes sense, since the same amount of material spread over a larger area would have to mean that there’s less of it in any one spot, right?

Not so fast. Researchers led by Dr. Devesh Mistry of the University of Leeds invented a new synthetic material that gets thicker as it’s being stretched. The material, which is described in detail in a new paper published in Nature Communications, is one of few that exhibit “auxetic” properties, which means they expand instead of contracting when tugged on from different directions.