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Category: materials – Page 291

I don’t believe that we’re a decade away given the advancements around Quantum infrastructure work such the Quantum Internet and Platform. Too much progress is showing me within the next 7 to 8 years is a possibility especially with the race that we’re all in.

Bill Gates did an Ask Me Anything on Reddit Tuesday and said that there’s a chance within six to ten years that “cloud computing will offer super-computation by using quantum.”

“It could help users solve some very important science problems, including materials and catalyst design,” Gates wrote.

Quantum computing could help users analyze very large amounts of data quicker than they can do now with processor-based computers. While D-Wave offers quantum computing hardware, there is some debate over whether the products actually achieve quantum computing. Gates noted that Microsoft and others are working on quantum computing but steered clear of any debate about whether actual systems are on the market now.

Continue reading “Gates thinks quantum computing in the cloud may come in a decade” | >

Pretty cool.

Scientists report that amino acids, not sugar, supply most building blocks for cancerous tumor cells. Cancer cells are notorious for their ability to divide uncontrollably and generate hordes of new tumor cells. Most of the fuel consumed by these rapidly proliferating cells is glucose, a type of sugar.

Scientists had believed that most of the cell mass that makes up new cells, including cancer cells, comes from that glucose. However, MIT biologists have now found, to their surprise, that the largest source for new cell material is amino acids, which cells consume in much smaller quantities.

The findings offer a new way to look at cancer cell metabolism, a field of research that scientists hope will yield new drugs that cut off cancer cells’ ability to grow and divide.

Continue reading “How cancer cells fuel their growth” | >

New skin for keeping you under the radar.

Because the meta-skin is stretchable, it can be pulled tight to augment the range of radar frequencies trapped by the resonators.

The project set out to prove that that electromagnetic waves — “perhaps even the shorter wavelengths of visible light” — can be adequately suppressed with flexible, tunable liquid-metal technologies. The material is made up of rows of rings, with a radius of 0.1 inches (2.5mm) and gaps of 0.04 inches (1mm). They’re filled with galinstan, a metal alloy that remains liquid at room temperatures and is less toxic than metals who share this property, such as mercury. Each resonator acts like a small curved piece of liquid wire.

The rings create electric inductors and the gaps create electric capacitors.

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New material improving stealth mode vehicles and planes.

When Surrey NanoSystems introduced the original Vantablack, the company said the carbon nanotube material is capable of absorbing 99.96 percent of light that touches it. It’s so dark, it can fool your eyes into seeing a smooth surface even when the nanotubes were actually grown on crumpled foil (seriously — watch the video below the fold). Well, the new version of Vantablack is darker than that. In fact, Surrey can’t even give us the percentage of light that gets absorbed, because its spectrometers can’t measure it.

In this video below (and the GIF above), you can see the material engulf the laser pointer in darkness when it moves across:

Continue reading “The darkest material on Earth has become even darker” | >

The strangest life forms on Earth just got a lot stranger.

In 2003, Didier Raoult of Aix-Marseille University in France and his colleagues discovered a new kind of virus lurking inside single-celled protozoans.

Like other viruses, it couldn’t grow on its own, lacking the biochemical machinery to build proteins and genes. Instead, it had to infect host cells and use their material to produce new viruses.

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Tweaking the structure of graphene so that it matches patterns found in the eyes of moths could one day give us “smart wallpaper,” among a host of other useful technologies.

Using a novel technique called “nano texturing,” scientists at the University of Surrey in England have successfully modified ultra-thin graphene sheets to create the most efficient light-absorbent material to date, which is capable of generating electricity from both captured light and waste heat. They described their work in a new paper in Science Advances.

Graphene is often touted as a wonder material because of its many useful properties, most notably its excellent electrical conductivity and remarkable mechanical strength. This makes it promising for any number of practical applications (a big part of why it proved Nobel-worthy in 2010). Here, let the good folks at SciShow explain:

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And, this will only be the beginning because with the lightering weight materials that have been develop we will see some amazing VR suits coming.

Virtual reality could one day incorporate all the senses, creating a rich and immersive experience, but existing virtual reality headsets only simulate things you can see and hear. But now, a group of engineers wants to help people “touch” virtual environments in a more natural way, and they built a wearable suit to do just that.

Designed by Lucian Copeland, Morgan Sinko and Jordan Brooks while they were students at the University of Rochester, in New York, the suit looks something like a bulletproof vest or light armor. Each section of the suit has a small motor in it, not unlike the one that makes a mobile phone vibrate to signal incoming messages. In addition, there are small accelerometers embedded in the suit’s arms.

The vibrations provide a sense of touch when a virtual object hits that part of the body, and the accelerometers help orient the suit’s limbs in space, the researchers said. [Photos: Virtual Reality Puts Adults in a Child’s World].

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