Lifeboat Foundation

In recent years, it has become possible to use laser beams and electron beams to “print” engineering objects with complex shapes that could not be achieved by conventional manufacturing. The additive manufacturing (AM) process, or 3D printing, for metallic materials involves melting and fusing fine-scale powder particles—each about 10 times finer than a grain of beach sand—in sub-millimeter-scale “pools” created by focusing a laser or electron beam on the material.

“The highly focused beams provide exquisite control, enabling ‘tuning’ of properties in critical locations of the printed object,” said Tresa Pollock, a professor of materials and associate dean of the College of Engineering at UC Santa Barbara. “Unfortunately, many advanced metallic alloys used in extreme heat-intensive and chemically corrosive environments encountered in energy, space and nuclear applications are not compatible with the AM process.”

The challenge of discovering new AM-compatible materials was irresistible for Pollock, a world-renowned scientist who conducts research on advanced metallic materials and coatings. “This was interesting,” she said, “because a suite of highly compatible alloys could transform the production of metallic materials having high economic value—i.e. materials that are expensive because their constituents are relatively rare within the earth’s crust—by enabling the manufacture of geometrically complex designs with minimal material waste.

Goodyear’s Wrangler All-Terrain Adventure SUV tires are a great choice for drivers who spend most of their time on the pavement but sometimes venture off-road.

As soon as Thursday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is predicting that a solar outburst could generate northern lights or aurora as far south as Oregon to Pennsylvania.

A vulnerability in VMWare has prompted a warning that companies—and government agencies—need to patch as soon as possible.

Norway’s domestic security agency has said that Russian hackers linked to the country’s military intelligence service were “likely” behind a cyber attack against the Norwegian parliament this year.

The network operation behind the attack was part of “a broader national and international campaign that lasts at least since 2019” the Norwegian Police Security Service (PST) said in a statement.

The Russians stole hacking tools that FireEye uses to detect weaknesses in its customers’ networks, according to a person familiar with the matter.

For the longest time, Google’s new Fuchsia operating system remained a bit of a mystery — with little information in terms of the company’s plans for it, even as the team behind it brought the code to GitHub under a standard open-source license. These days, we know that it’s Google’s first attempt at developing a completely new kernel and general purpose operating system that promises to be more than just an experiment (or a retention project to keep senior engineers from jumping ship). For the most part, though, Google has remained pretty mum about the subject.

It seems like Google is ready to start talking about Fuchsia a bit more now. The company today announced that it is expanding the Fuchsia open-source community and opening it up to contributions from the public. Typically, companies start opening up their open-source projects to outside contributors once they feel they have achieved a stable foundation that others can build on.

“Starting today, we are expanding Fuchsia ‘s open source model to make it easier for the public to engage with the project,” the team writes. “We have created new public mailing lists for project discussions, added a governance model to clarify how strategic decisions are made, and opened up the issue tracker for public contributors to see what’s being worked on. As an open source effort, we welcome high-quality, well-tested contributions from all. There is now a process to become a member to submit patches, or a committer with full write access.”

Future EDF research topics will be specified in annual calls run by the European Commission, the EU executive branch, and approved by a committee of national delegates. AI will be a big topic, Ripoche says. He says EDF funding will also go to new materials, such as discreet metamaterial antennas that can be engineered into the surfaces of vehicles and weapons. Muravska says she expects “a healthy take-up” in the EDF by European academic researchers, “provided they are aware of it.”

With no military of its own, European Union funds work on camouflage, drones, and laser weapons.

WASHINGTON: Scientists are a step closer to restoring vision for the blind, after building an implant that bypasses the eyes and allows monkeys to perceive artificially induced patterns in their brains.

The technology, developed by a team at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience (NIN), was described in the journal Science on Thursday.

It builds on an idea first conceived decades ago: electrically stimulating the brain so it “sees” lit dots known as phosphenes, akin to pixels on a computer screen.