Space Based Power

Sci-Fi fans and futurists have long envisioned a mechanism that would capture solar power from space, focus it and transmit it to earth as a way of providing more efficient energy for humanity. 

There are many theoretical potential benefits of this if it can be made to work, including less pollution and no fear that the source of power will ever run out. 

With the right architecture, space based energy transmitted like this could also make access to energy available with little or no infrastructure. Just set up a device in your yard and there is your power.

How might this work? The video here from Dr. Ali Hajimiri, Caltech Bren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering and Co-Director of the Space-Based Solar Power Project, explains how:

Thanks to the vision and hard work and engineering of this Caltech team part of this vision has now been successfully demonstrated.  READ MORE...

Sex Robots Feeling Human-Like

Realism at request
One of the most requested features across all types of sex toys is realism. Consumers want their sex toys to feel (and sometimes look) as close as possible to a real human. Realism becomes even more important for sex dolls and sex robots not only because they come at a much higher price tag but also because of how they can be used by consumers. They are larger, feature more advanced technology, and are designed to represent full bodies/people, although robots and dolls can technically be defined as two separate things. Realistic materials are expected by consumers to provide the best alternative to human skin and stimulation that fulfills their fantasies.

Materials present: Standard silicone
The use of silicone and the more affordable thermoplastic elastomer (TPE) in creating the most realistic skin-like feel has been heavily debated by sex industry professionals. While the answer may vary between different types of sex toys, the current consensus is that although both silicone and TPE can emulate human skin, silicone simply does it better. So much so that it has become the standard for a variety of sex toys, including sex dolls and sex robots.

Materials of the future: Second skin
Three unique and innovative materials show promise to be used within the sex doll/robot industry; sensor skin, Aerohaptics, and printable artificial skin.

Sensor skin is a “form of artificial skin, packed with miniature sensors and actuators, that gives the wearer a remarkably realistic haptic illusion of being in physical contact with another person”. If this material were to be used with sex robots, it could potentially elevate tactile experiences by making every touch, feel, and cuddle feel much more real.

Aerohaptics is an even more futuristic material as it’s basically mechanically engineered skin…from a hologram. In 2021, a team at the University of Glasgow “configured their system so that users could virtually bounce a holographic basketball and feel it smack back into their hands”. While the team basketball experiment isn’t the sexiest example of Aerohaptics, if applied with sex robots in a virtual reality setting (which is already a popular feature), this technology could heighten the interactive component of sexual play as a sex robot could respond to the user’s movements – whether in-person or online.

While the two previously mentioned materials are already underway, a newer artificial skin developed at CalTech “can now give robots the ability to sense temperature, pressure, and even toxic chemicals through a simple touch.” This technology is part of a platform that uses artificial printable skin within a robotic arm as well as sensors that attach to human skin. According to CalTech, “the printable skin is a gelatinous hydrogel and makes robot fingertips a lot more like our own” the sensors embedded in the hydrogel give the robot skin the ability to detect the world around it. A sex robot that could sense temperature and pressure would completely transform the user experience!  READ MORE...

Nanotechnology

Physicist Richard Feynman, the father of nanotechnology.

Nanotechnology is science, engineering, and technology conducted at the nanoscale, which is about 1 to 100 nanometers.

Nanoscience and nanotechnology are the study and application of extremely small things and can be used across all the other science fields, such as chemistry, biology, physics, materials science, and engineering.

How It Started
The ideas and concepts behind nanoscience and nanotechnology started with a talk entitled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” by physicist Richard Feynman at an American Physical Society meeting at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) on December 29, 1959, long before the term nanotechnology was used. In his talk, Feynman described a process in which scientists would be able to manipulate and control individual atoms and molecules. Over a decade later, in his explorations of ultraprecision machining, Professor Norio Taniguchi coined the term nanotechnology. It wasn't until 1981, with the development of the scanning tunneling microscope that could "see" individual atoms, that modern nanotechnology began.


Fundamental Concepts in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology
It’s hard to imagine just how small nanotechnology is. One nanometer is a billionth of a meter, or 10-9 of a meter. Here are a few illustrative examples:There are 25,400,000 nanometers in an inch
A sheet of newspaper is about 100,000 nanometers thick
On a comparative scale, if a marble were a nanometer, then one meter would be the size of the Earth

Nanoscience and nanotechnology involve the ability to see and to control individual atoms and molecules. Everything on Earth is made up of atoms—the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the buildings and houses we live in, and our own bodies.

But something as small as an atom is impossible to see with the naked eye. In fact, it’s impossible to see with the microscopes typically used in a high school science classes. The microscopes needed to see things at the nanoscale were invented in the early 1980s.  READ MORE...

The Revolutionary World of Quantum Computers

The inside of an IBM System One quantum computer.  Bryan Walsh/Vox

A few weeks ago, I woke up unusually early in the morning in Brooklyn, got in my car, and headed up the Hudson River to the small Westchester County community of Yorktown Heights. There, amid the rolling hills and old farmhouses, sits the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, the Eero Saarinen-designed, 1960s Jet Age-era headquarters for IBM Research.

Deep inside that building, through endless corridors and security gates guarded by iris scanners, is where the company’s scientists are hard at work developing what IBM director of research Dario Gil told me is “the next branch of computing”: quantum computers.

I was at the Watson Center to preview IBM’s updated technical roadmap for achieving large-scale, practical quantum computing. This involved a great deal of talk about “qubit count,” “quantum coherence,” “error mitigation,” “software orchestration” and other topics you’d need to be an electrical engineer with a background in computer science and a familiarity with quantum mechanics to fully follow.

I am not any of those things, but I have watched the quantum computing space long enough to know that the work being done here by IBM researchers — along with their competitors at companies like Google and Microsoft, along with countless startups around the world — stands to drive the next great leap in computing. Which, given that computing is a “horizontal technology that touches everything,” as Gil told me, will have major implications for progress in everything from cybersecurity to artificial intelligence to designing better batteries.

Provided, of course, they can actually make these things work.

Entering the quantum realm
The best way to understand a quantum computer — short of setting aside several years for grad school at MIT or Caltech — is to compare it to the kind of machine I’m typing this piece on: a classical computer.

My MacBook Air runs on an M1 chip, which is packed with 16 billion transistors. Each of those transistors can represent either the “1” or “0” of binary information at a single time — a bit. The sheer number of transistors is what gives the machine its computing power.

Sixteen billion transistors packed onto a 120.5 sq. mm chip is a lot — TRADIC, the first transistorized computer, had fewer than 800. The semiconductor industry’s ability to engineer ever more transistors onto a chip, a trend forecast by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in the law that bears his name, is what has made possible the exponential growth of computing power, which in turn has made possible pretty much everything else.  READ MORE...

A Pixelated Space...

The search for signatures of quantum gravity forges ahead.
Sand dunes seen from afar seem smooth and unwrinkled, like silk sheets spread across the desert. But a closer inspection reveals much more. As you approach the dunes, you may notice ripples in the sand. Touch the surface and you would find individual grains. The same is true for digital images: zoom far enough into an apparently perfect portrait and you will discover the distinct pixels that make the picture.

The universe itself may be similarly pixelated. Scientists such as Rana Adhikari, professor of physics at Caltech, think the space we live in may not be perfectly smooth but rather made of incredibly small discrete units. “A spacetime pixel is so small that if you were to enlarge things so that it becomes the size of a grain of sand, then atoms would be as large as galaxies,” he says.

Adhikari and scientists around the world are on the hunt for this pixelation because it is a prediction of quantum gravity, one of the deepest physics mysteries of our time. Quantum gravity refers to a set of theories, including string theory, that seeks to unify the macroscopic world of gravity, governed by general relativity, with the microscopic world of quantum physics. At the core of the mystery is the question of whether gravity, and the spacetime it inhabits, can be “quantized,” or broken down into individual components, a hallmark of the quantum world.

“Sometimes there is a misinterpretation in science communication that implies quantum mechanics and gravity are irreconcilable,” says Cliff Cheung, Caltech professor of theoretical physics. “But we know from experiments that we can do quantum mechanics on this planet, which has gravity, so clearly they are consistent. The problems come up when you ask subtle questions about black holes or try to merge the theories at very short distance scales.”

Because of the incredibly small scales in question, some scientists have deemed finding evidence of quantum gravity in the foreseeable future to be an impossible task. Although researchers have come up with ideas for how they might find clues to its existence—around black holes; in the early universe; or even using LIGO, the National Science Foundation-funded observatories that detect gravitational waves—no one has yet turned up any hints of quantum gravity in nature.  READ MORE...

Star Eats Black Hole

 It’s the first firm evidence of a rare cosmic phenomenon

Jets of energy explode from a star that has cannibalized its dead companion
in this artist’s illustration.

For the first time, astronomers have captured solid evidence of a rare double cosmic cannibalism — a star swallowing a compact object such as a black hole or neutron star. 

In turn, that object gobbled the star’s core, causing it to explode and leave behind only a black hole.

The first hints of the gruesome event, described in the Sept. 3 Science, came from the Very Large Array (VLA), a radio telescope consisting of 27 enormous dishes in the New Mexican desert near Socorro. 

During the observatory’s scans of the night sky in 2017, a burst of radio energy as bright as the brightest exploding star — or supernova — as seen from Earth appeared in a dwarf star–forming galaxy approximately 500 million light-years away.

“We thought, ‘Whoa, this is interesting,’” says Dillon Dong, an astronomer at Caltech.

He and his colleagues made follow-up observations of the galaxy using the VLA and one of the telescopes at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, which sees in the same optical light as our eyes. 

The Keck telescope caught a luminous outflow of material spewing in all directions at 3.2 million kilometers per hour from a central location, suggesting that an energetic explosion had occurred there in the past.  READ MORE