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Category: engineering

Accelerating progress in neuroscience is helping us understand the big picture—how animals behave and which brain areas are involved in bringing about these behaviors—and also the small picture—how molecules, neurons, and synapses interact. But there is a huge gap of knowledge between these two scales, from the whole brain down to the neuron.

A team led by Christos Papadimitriou, the Donovan Family Professor of Computer Science at Columbia Engineering, proposes a new computational system to expand the understanding of the brain at an intermediate level, between and cognitive phenomena such as language. The group, which includes computer scientists from Georgia Institute of Technology and a neuroscientist from the Graz University of Technology, has developed a brain architecture that is based on neuronal assemblies, and they demonstrate its use in the syntactic processing in the production of language; their model, published online June 9 in PNAS, is consistent with recent experimental results.

“For me, understanding the brain has always been a computational problem,” says Papadimitriou, who became fascinated by the brain five years ago. “Because if it isn’t, I don’t know where to start.”

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Engineers at Duke University have demonstrated a versatile microfluidic lab-on-a-chip that uses sound waves to create tunnels in oil to touchlessly manipulate and transport droplets. The technology could form the basis of a small-scale, programmable, rewritable biomedical chip that is completely reusable to enable on-site diagnostics or laboratory research.

The results appear online on June 10 in the journal Science Advances.

“Our new system achieves rewritable routing, sorting and gating of droplets with minimal external control, which are essential functions for the digital logic control of droplets,” said Tony Jun Huang, the William Bevan Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Duke. “And we achieve it with less energy and a simpler setup that can control more droplets simultaneously than previous systems.”

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Laser-wakefield accelerators have led to the development of compact, ultrashort X-ray or gamma-ray sources to deliver peak brilliance, similar to conventional synchrotron sources. However, such sources are withheld by low efficiencies and limited to 107–8 photons per shot in the kiloelectron volt (KeV) to megaelectron volt (MeV) range. In a new report now published on Science Advances, Xing-Long Zhu and a research team in physics and astronomy in China and the U.K., presented a new approach to efficiently produce collimated, ultrabright gamma (γ)-ray beams. The resulting photon energies were tunable for up to gigaelectron volts by focussing a multi-petawatt laser pulse into a 2-stage wakefield accelerator. The high-intensity laser allowed them to efficiently generate a multi-gigaelectron volt electron beam with a high density and charge during the first stage of the experiment. The laser and electron beams entered a high-density plasma region in the second stage thereafter. Using numerical simulations, they demonstrated the production of more than 1012 gamma ray photons per shot with energy conversion efficiency above 10 percent for photons above 1 megaelectron volt (MeV) and achieved a peak brilliance above 1026 photons S-1 mm-2 mrad-2 per 0.1 percent bandwidth at 1 MeV. This research outcome will offer new avenues in both fundamental and applied physics and engineering.

Bright sources of high-energy gamma rays are versatile for broad areas of applications, including fundamental research in astrophysics, particle and nuclear physics, as well as high-resolution imaging. Researchers can improve such applications with compact gamma ray sources with low divergence, short pulse duration, high energy, and high peak brilliance. While widely used synchrotrons and X-ray free electron lasers (XFELS) can deliver X-ray pulses with peak brilliance, they are limited to low photon energies. The size and cost of such research structures can also limit their regular applications. Researchers have therefore rapidly developed compact laser-wakefield accelerators (LWFAs) in the past two decades to offer a radically different approach to drive the acceleration and radiation of high-energy particles on a much smaller scale. Continuous advancements in the field of ultrahigh-power laser technology will enable brilliant high-energy gamma sources.

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Flat solar panels still face big limitations when it comes to making the most of the available sunlight each day. A new spherical solar cell design aims to boost solar power harvesting potential from nearly every angle without requiring expensive moving parts to keep tracking the sun’s apparent movement across the sky.

The spherical solar cell prototype designed by Saudi researchers is a tiny blue sphere that a person can easily hold in one hand like a ping pong ball. Indoor experiments with a solar simulator lamp have already shown that it can achieve between 15 percent and 100 percent more power output compared with a flat solar cell with the same total surface area, depending on the background materials reflecting sunlight into the solar cells. The research group hopes its nature-inspired design can fare similarly well in future field tests in many different locations around the world.

“The placement and shape of the housefly’s eyes increase their angular field of view so they can see roughly 270 degrees around them in the horizontal field,” says Nazek El-Atab, a postdoctoral researcher in microsystems engineering at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). “Similarly, the spherical architecture increases the ‘angular field of view’ of the solar cell, which means it can harvest sunlight from more directions.”

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WASHINGTON — SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft is performing well enough on orbit to give NASA confidence that the mission can last until August, an agency official said June 9.

Ken Bowersox, the acting associate administrator for human exploration and operations at NASA, told an online meeting of two National Academies committees that NASA had been monitoring the health of the Crew Dragon spacecraft since its launch May 30 on the Demo-2 mission, carrying NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station.

NASA, he noted, had not set a length for the mission, saying they wanted to see how the Dragon performed in space. “The Dragon is doing very well, so we think it’s reasonable for the crew to stay up there a month or two,” he told members of the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board and Space Studies Board.

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Sometimes, breaking rules is not a bad thing. Especially when the rules are apparent laws of nature that apply in bulk material, but other forces appear in the nanoscale.

“Nature knows how to go from the small, to larger scales,” said Melik Demirel, professor of engineering science and mechanics and holder of the Lloyd and Dorothy Foehr Huck Chair in Biomimetic Materials. “Engineers have used mixing rules to enhance properties, but have been limited to a single scale. We’ve never gone down to the next level of hierarchical engineering. The key challenge is that there are apparent forces at different scales from molecules to bulk.”

Composites, by definition, are composed of more than one component. Mixture rules say that, while the ratios of one component to another can vary, there is a limit on the physical properties of the composite. According to Demirel, his team has broken that limit, at least on the nanoscale.

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Achieving near-zero friction in commercial and industrial applications will be game-changing from tiny microelectromechanical systems that will never wear out, to oil-free bearings in industrial equipment, to much more efficient engines and giant wind turbines scavenging energy even in low wind conditions. Superlubricity offers promising solutions to overcome lubrication challenges in various areas of nanotechnology including micro/nano-electromechanical systems (MEMS/NEMS), water transport control, biomedical engineering, atomic force microscopy (AFM), aerospace and wind energy applications, as well as other electronic devices. It is one of the most promising properties of functional nanomaterials for energy saving applications.

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Skateboarding legend Rodney Mullen teams up with Physics Girl to explain the unusual physics behind skateboard tricks. Filmed with a phantom high speed camera at 1000fps, see Mullen’s tricks like never before.

If you liked this video check out these:
How SMOOTHNESS of a SOCCER BALL affects curve!

Crazy tic tac bounce!?

Created by: dianna cowern editing: jabril ashe animations: kyle norby props: kyle kitzmiller science advisor: dan walsh

Check out Beyond Slow Motion:
https://www.youtube.com/beyondslowmotion
and Kuma Films:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC497r18hyShx1ffsYcgK_kg

A million thanks to Rodney Mullen!
https://www.instagram.com/rodneymullen/?hl=en

Thanks to Kyle Kitzmiller
twitter.com/kylekengineering

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Government agencies and universities around the world—not to mention tech giants like IBM and Google—are vying to be the first to answer a trillion-dollar quantum question : How can quantum computers reach their vast potential when they are still unable to consistently produce results that are reliable and free of errors?

Every aspect of these exotic machines—including their fragility and engineering complexity; their preposterously sterile, low-temperature operating environment; complicated mathematics; and their notoriously shy quantum bits (qubits) that flip if an operator so much as winks at them—are all potential sources of errors. It says much for the ingenuity of scientists and engineers that they have found ways to detect and correct these errors and have quantum computers working to the extent that they do: at least long enough to produce limited results before errors accumulate and quantum decoherence of the qubits kicks in.

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Washington State University (WSU) and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) researchers have created a sodium-ion battery that holds as much energy and works as well as some commercial lithium-ion battery chemistries, making for a potentially viable battery technology out of abundant and cheap materials.

The team reports one of the best results to date for a sodium-ion . It is able to deliver a capacity similar to some and to recharge successfully, keeping more than 80 percent of its charge after 1,000 cycles. The research, led by Yuehe Lin, professor in WSU’s School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, and Xiaolin Li, a senior research scientist at PNNL is published in the journal, ACS Energy Letters.

“This is a major development for ,” said Dr. Imre Gyuk, director of Energy Storage for the Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity who supported this work at PNNL. “There is great interest around the potential for replacing Li-ion batteries with Na-ion in many applications.”

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