Researchers Have Invented an Awesome And Scary Nuclear Battery Pack

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According to ScienceAlert

Is the world ready for it?

Batteries powered by radioactive materials have been around for more than a century, but what they promise in power they usually lose in bulk.

Not so with a new kind of power source, which combines a novel structure with a nickel isotope to pack ten times more power than an electrochemical cell of the same size. The only question is, are we ready to go nuclear?

A team of Russian researchers have put a new spin on technology that uses the beta decay of a radioactive element to create differences in voltage.

Your average electrochemical cell uses contrasts in the reactivity of various materials to build a difference in voltage potential.

This gives plenty of power for the volume of the battery, especially when using materials such as lithium.

But as we all know too well, batteries based on electrochemistry simply don’t last all that long. Sooner or later they need to be recharged or replaced.

The lifetime of a nuclear battery, on the other hand, is based not on its reactivity, but the half-life of its decay. Rather than being measured in hours or days, their potential lifetimes can be decades or even centuries.

So-called betavoltaic batteries were dreamed up way back in 1913. They aren’t at all like miniature nuclear reactors. Instead of producing heat, they get their charge from beta particles emitted by an isotope knocking electrons from another material.

Unfortunately this doesn’t exactly result in a torrential flood of power. To overcome this shortfall, the trickle of electrons could be fed into some sort of accumulator, such as a capacitor. It works, but it also adds to the overall bulk.

Given this sort of technology would be ideal for powering things you can’t (or don’t want to) access often – such as pacemakers or small satellites – added mass is something you’d want to avoid.

What’s more, the word ‘radioactive’ isn’t as charming as it was a century ago. Marketing a nuclear-powered pacemaker in today’s world would demand more than a catchy jingle; but this new approach might help tip the scales.

The devices is made of stacks of isotope of nickel-63 sandwiched between a pair of special semiconducting diodes called a Schottky barrier.

(V. Bormashov et al./Diamond and Related Materials)

This barrier keeps a current headed one way, a feature often used to turn alternating currents into direct ones.

Finding that the optimal thickness of each layer was just 2 micrometres, the researchers were able to maximise the voltage produced by every gram of isotope.

Nickel-63 has a half-life of just over 100 years, which in an optimised system like this adds up to 3,300 milliwatt-hours of energy per gram: ten times the specific energy of your typical electrochemical cell.

It’s a significant step up from previous nickel-63 betavoltaic devices, and while it isn’t quite enough to power your smart phone, it does bring it into a realm of being useful for a wide variety of tasks.

“The higher the power density of the device, the more applications it will have,” says the director of the Technological Institute for Superhard and Novel Carbon Materials, Vladimir Blank.

For example, current generations of pacemaker are around 10 cubic centimetres in size, and use around 10 microwatts of power provided by a subcutaneous electrochemical battery.

Wireless charging through the skin could one day be a possibility, but for now they need to be replaced through an invasive surgical operation.

Pacemakers would be a whole lot simpler and safer if they had a power source that outlasted the patient, and a betavoltaic cell like this could be ideal.

But after an initial love affair with all things radioactive, public appeal has since flipped. Half a century of dealing with the threat of atomic war and fear of fallout has led to confusion and mistrust of the power of the isotope.

Even communicating the risks of radioactivity using innocuous comparisons does little to ease concerns over the potential impact of any material described as radioactive.

But for some, tiny nuclear powered devices would be the technology to invest in.

This research was published in Diamond and Related Materials.

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This article and images were originally posted on [ScienceAlert] June 1, 2018 at 03:13AM. Credit to Author and ScienceAlert | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day

 

 

 

 

NASA Has Invented an Incredible New Space Navigation Technique

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According to ScienceAlert

Oh, the places we’ll go!

NASA has invented a new type of autonomous space navigation that could see human-made spacecraft heading into the far reaches of the Solar System, and even farther – by using pulsars as guide stars.

It’s called Station Explorer for X-ray Timing and Navigation Technology, or SEXTANT (named after an 18th century nautical navigation instrument), and it uses X-ray technology to see millisecond pulsars, using them much like a GPS uses satellites.

“This demonstration is a breakthrough for future deep space exploration,” said SEXTANT project manager Jason Mitchell of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

“As the first to demonstrate X-ray navigation fully autonomously and in real-time in space, we are now leading the way.”

Pulsars are highly magnetised, rapidly rotating neutron stars – the result of a massive star’s core collapsing and subsequently exploding.

As they spin, they emit electromagnetic radiation. If an observer is in the right position, they can appear as sweeping beams, like a cosmic lighthouse.

They’re also extraordinarily regular – in the case of some millisecond pulsars, which can spin hundreds of times a second, their regularity can rival that of atomic clocks.

This is what led to the idea behind SEXTANT. Because these pulsars are so regular, and because they’re fixed in position in the cosmos, they can be used in the same way that a global positioning system uses atomic clocks.

SEXTANT works like a GPS receiver getting signals from at least three GPS satellites, all of which are equipped with atomic clocks. The receiver measures the time delay from each satellite and converts this into spatial coordinates.

The electromagnetic radiation beaming from pulsars is most visible in the X-ray spectrum, which is why NASA’s engineers chose to employ X-ray detection in SEXTANT.

To do so, they used a washing machine-sized observatory attached to the International Space Station. Called Neutron-star Interior Composition Explorer, or NICER, it contains 52 X-ray telescopes and silicon-drift detectors for studying neutron stars, including pulsars.

An illustration of NICER attached to the ISS. (NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center)

They directed NICER to latch onto four pulsars, J0218+4232, B1821-24, J0030+0451, and J0437-4715 – pulsars so precise that their pulses can be accurately predicted for years into the future.

Over two days, NICER took 78 measurements of these pulsars, which were fed into SEXTANT. SEXTANT then used these measurements to calculate the position of NICER in its orbit around Earth on the International Space Station.

This information was compared to GPS data, with the goal being to locate NICER within a 10-mile (16 km) radius. Within eight hours, the system had calculated NICER’s position, and it remained below the 10-mile threshold for the remainder of the experiment.

“This was much faster than the two weeks we allotted for the experiment,” said SEXTANT system Architect Luke Winternitz. “We had indications that our system would work, but the weekend experiment finally demonstrated the system’s ability to work autonomously.”

It could take a few years for the technology to be developed into a navigation system suitable for deep-space vessels, but the concept has been proven.

Now the team is rolling up their sleeves to refine it. They will be updating and fine-tuning its software in preparation for another experiment in the second half of 2018. They also hope to reduce the size, weight, and power requirements of the hardware.

Eventually, SEXTANT could be used to calculate the location of planetary satellites far from the range of Earth’s GPS satellites, and assist on human spaceflight missions, such as the space agency’s planned Mars mission.

“This successful demonstration firmly establishes the viability of X-ray pulsar navigation as a new autonomous navigation capability,” Mitchell said.

“We have shown that a mature version of this technology could enhance deep-space exploration anywhere within the solar system and beyond.”

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This article and images were originally posted on [ScienceAlert] January 12, 2018 at 01:04AM. Credit to Author and ScienceAlert | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day

 

 

 

Breaking: An Entirely New Type of Quantum Computing Has Been Invented

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Australian researchers have designed a new type of qubit – the building block of quantum computers – that they say will finally make it possible to manufacture a true, large-scale quantum computer.

Broadly speaking, there are currently a number of ways to make a quantum computer. Some take up less space, but tend to be incredibly complex. Others are simpler, but if you want it to scale up you’re going to need to knock down a few walls.

Some tried and true ways to capture a qubit are to use standard atom-taming technology such as ion traps and optical tweezers that can hold onto particles long enough for their quantum states to be analysed.

Others use circuits made of superconducting materials to detect quantum superpositions within the insanely slippery electrical currents.

The advantage of these kinds of systems is their basis in existing techniques and equipment, making them relatively affordable and easy to put together.

The cost is space – the technology might do for a relatively small number of qubits, but when you’re looking at hundreds or thousands of them linked into a computer, the scale quickly becomes unfeasible.

Thanks to coding information in both the nucleus and electron of an atom, the new silicon qubit, which is being called a ‘flip-flop qubit’, can be controlled by electric signals, instead of magnetic ones. That means it can maintain quantum entanglement across a larger distance than ever before, making it cheaper and easier to build into a scalable computer.

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This article and images were originally posted on [ScienceAlert] September 6, 2017 at 05:20AM

Credit to Author and ScienceAlert

 

 

 

 

Google’s AI Invents Sounds Humans Have Never Heard Before

Jesse Engel is playing an instrument that’s somewhere between a clavichord and a Hammond organ—18th-century classical crossed with 20th-century rhythm and blues. Then he drags a marker across his laptop screen. Suddenly, the instrument is somewhere else between a clavichord and a Hammond. Before, it was, say, 15 percent clavichord. Now it’s closer to 75 percent. Then he drags the marker back and forth as quickly as he can, careening though all the sounds between these two very different instruments.“This is not like playing the two at the same time,” says one of Engel’s colleagues, Cinjon Resnick, from across the room. And that’s worth saying. The machine and its software aren’t layering the sounds of a clavichord atop those of a Hammond. They’re producing entirely new sounds using the mathematical characteristics of the notes that emerge from the two. And they can do this with about a thousand different instruments—from violins to balafons—creating countless new sounds from those we already have, thanks to artificial intelligence.

https://soundcloud.com/wired/nsynth-bass-flute

 

Engel and Resnick are part of Google Magenta—a small team of AI researchers inside the internet giant building computer systems that can make their own art—and this is their latest project. It’s called NSynth, and the team will publicly demonstrate the technology later this week at Moogfest, the annual art, music, and technology festival, held this year in Durham, North Carolina.

The idea is that NSynth, which Google first discussed in a blog post last month, will provide musicians with an entirely new range of tools for making music. Critic Marc Weidenbaum points out that the approach isn’t very far removed from what orchestral conductors have done for ages—“the blending of instruments is nothing new,” he says—but he also believes that Google’s technology could push this age-old practice into new places. “Artistically, it could yield some cool stuff, and because it’s Google, people will follow their lead,” he says.

The Boundaries of Sound

Magenta is part of Google Brain, the company’s central AI lab, where a small army of researchers are exploring the limits of neural networks and other forms of machine learning. Neural networks are complex mathematical systems that can learn tasks by analyzing large amounts of data, and in recent years they’ve proven to be an enormously effective way of recognizing objects and faces in photos, identifying commands spoken into smartphones, and translating from one language to another, among other tasks. Now the Magenta team is turning this idea on its head, using neural networks as a way of teaching machines to make new kinds of music and other art.

NSynth begins with a massive database of sounds. Engel and team collected a wide range of notes from about a thousand different instruments and then fed them into a neural network. By analyzing the notes, the neural net—several layers of calculus run across a network of computer chips—learned the audible characteristics of each instrument. Then it created a mathematical “vector” for each one. Using these vectors, a machine can mimic the sound of each instrument—a Hammond organ or a clavichord, say—but it can also combine the sounds of the two.

In addition to the NSynth “slider” that Engel recently demonstrated at Google headquarters, the team has also built a two-dimensional interface that lets you explore the audible space between four different instruments at once. And the team is intent on taking the idea further still, exploring the boundaries of artistic creation. A second neural network, for instance, could learn new ways of mimicking and combining the sounds from all those instruments. AI could work in tandem with AI.

The team has also created a new playground for AI researchers and other computer scientists. They’ve released a research paper describing the NSynth algorithms, and anyone can download and use their database of sounds. For Douglas Eck, who oversees the Magenta team, the hope is that researchers can generate a much wider array of tools for any artist, not just musicians. But not too wide. Art without constraints ceases to be art. The trick will lie in finding the balance between here and the infinite.

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This article and images was originally posted on [WIRED] May 15, 2017 at 12:57AM

By CADE METZ BUSINESS