Monday, October 31, 2022

Energy Everywhere


'Night-time solar' technology can now deliver power in the dark
May 2022, phys.org

A semiconductor device called a thermoradiative diode, composed of materials found in night-vision goggles, was used to generate power from the emission of infrared light.

via University of New South Wales School of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering: Michael P. Nielsen et al, Thermoradiative Power Conversion from HgCdtTe Photodiodes and Their Current–Voltage Characteristics, ACS Photonics (2022). DOI: 10.1021/acsphotonics.2c00223

The image shows a piece of Comet Leonard's tail breaking off and being carried away by the solar wind; said to be one of the best comet photographs in history by astronomer Dr Ed Bloomer, one of the competition judges.


A thermal management material that responds to heat or cold by folding or unfolding without need for a power source
Sep 2022, phys.org

Made with polymer subunits each designed to behave differently depending on ambient temperature: the material would lay flat under normal conditions until the ambient temperature reached a certain point. At that point, the top layer would roll itself up into a tube, exposing the dark substrate below. They suggest it could be a thermal management device that requires zero energy to run.

via Nankai University: Quan Zhang et al, Bioinspired zero-energy thermal-management device based on visible and infrared thermochromism for all-season energy saving, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2022). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2207353119


Inexpensive device that can harvest energy from a light breeze and store it as electricity
Oct 2022, phys.org
 
When exposed to winds with a velocity as low as 2 meters per second (about 5 mph), the device can produce a voltage of three volts and generate electricity power of up to 290 microwatts, which is sufficient to power a commercial sensor device and for it to also send the data to a mobile phone or a computer. The device can easily be mounted on the sides of buildings.

via Nanyang Technological University, Singapore: Chaoyang Zhao et al, A cantilever-type vibro-impact triboelectric energy harvester for wind energy harvesting, Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.ymssp.2022.109185


Dancers' moves help to power Glasgow music venue
Oct 2022, BBC News

Glasgow arts venue SWG3 has switched on a system that creates renewable energy from the body heat on its dancefloor.

Dancers' heat is piped via a carrier fluid to 200m (650ft) bore holes that can be charged like a thermal battery.

The energy then travels back to the heat pumps, is upgraded to a suitable temperature and emitted back into SWG3.

The owners say this will enable them to completely disconnect the venue's gas boilers, reducing its carbon emissions by about 70 tonnes of CO2 a year.

"When you start dancing, medium pace, to the Rolling Stones or something, you might be generating 250W.

"But if you've got a big DJ, absolutely slamming basslines and making everyone jump up and down, you could be generating 500-600W of thermal energy."


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Wednesday, October 26, 2022

Lexical Projections


Lattice distortion of perovskite quantum dots induces coherent quantum beating
Sep 2022, phys.org

Quantum beating - Using ensemble-level femtosecond polarized transient absorption, the researchers observed clear bright-exciton fine structure splitting in solution-processed CsPbI3 perovskite quantum dots, which is manifested as exciton quantum beats (periodic oscillations of kinetic traces).

via Chinese Academy of Sciences: Yaoyao Han et al, Lattice distortion inducing exciton splitting and coherent quantum beating in CsPbI3 perovskite quantum dots, Nature Materials (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41563-022-01349-4



TypoSwype: An image recognition tool to detect typosquatting attacks
Oct 2022, phys.org

Typosquatting - exploits the human tendency to misspell words when typing quickly or to misread words when they have small topographical errors, like google-goigle or facebook-fqcebook

via Ensign InfoSecurity in Singapore: Joon Sern Lee, Yam Gui Peng David, TypoSwype: An imaging approach to detect typo-squatting. arXiv:2209.00783v1 [cs.CR], arxiv.org/abs/2209.00783


The polypill could help with avoiding millions of premature deaths, heart attacks and strokes every year
Oct 2022, phys.org

Polypill - one pill that does a few different things all at once 

via McMaster University: Salim Yusuf et al, The polypill: from concept and evidence to implementation, The Lancet (2022). DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(22)01847-5


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Things Come To Life


Surely we won't see it until it's already infiltrating every kingdom and phylum -- what once was just a dumb robot, or a box of rocks, or a pile of dust, will soon be alive and trying to make its way in the world, commanding the same respect as the river in Ecuador that has rights, or the endangered animals in the Galapagos that have rights, or the dematerialized algorithms that exist as a dimensionally camouflaged meta-entity powered by economic incentive and psychological manipulation, which doesn't even need rights because it's the lifeline of global commerce. 

One day we'll all be held ethically liable for treating our stuff like inert, soul-less matter.



Starfish embryos swim in formation like a 'living crystal,' could inform the design of self assembling 
Jul 2022, phys.org

Fakhri says the team's observations of starfish crystals was a "serendipitous discovery." 

She and her colleagues fertilized thousands of starfish embryos, then watched as they swam to the surface of shallow dishes. "There are thousands of embryos in a dish, and they start forming this crystal structure that can grow very large," Fakhri says. "We call it a crystal because each embryo is surrounded by six neighboring embryos in a hexagon that is repeated across the entire structure, very similar to the crystal structure in graphene."

via MIT: Nikta Fakhri, Odd dynamics of living chiral crystals, Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04889-6.


A step toward the creation of materials controlled by artificial genes
Aug 2022, phys.org

"New types of soft material robots that are controlled by chemistry instead of electronics."

Say you're making artificial humans without saying you're making artificial humans.

"Engineering synthetic chemical systems that can emulate the complex behaviors of natural gene networks that operate inside diagnostic, self-healing materials rather than organisms."

via Johns Hopkins University: Samuel W. Schaffter et al, Standardized excitable elements for scalable engineering of far-from-equilibrium chemical networks, Nature Chemistry (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41557-022-01001-3


Synthetic mouse embryo develops beating heart
Aug 2022, BBC News

Scientists in Cambridge have created synthetic mouse embryos in a lab, without using eggs or sperm, which show evidence of a brain and beating heart.

At present, UK law permits human embryos to be studied in the laboratory only up to the fourteenth day of development, but there are no rules around synthetic embryos.

via University of Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology: Synthetic embryos complete gastrulation to neurulation and organogenesis. Gianluca Amadei et al. Nature. 2022. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05246-3


Robo-bug: A rechargeable, remote-controllable cyborg cockroach
Sep 2022, phys.org

Powered by a solar cell which is funny because roaches hang out in the dark mostly.

RIKEN: Yujiro Kakei et al, Integration of body-mounted ultrasoft organic solar cell on cyborg insects with intact mobility, npj Flexible Electronics (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41528-022-00207-2


Nanotubes illuminate the way to living photovoltaics
Sep 2022, phys.org

"We put nanotubes inside of bacteria" 

via Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne:  Ardemis Boghossian et al, Carbon nanotube uptake in cyanobacteria for near-infrared imaging and enhanced bioelectricity generation in living photovoltaics, Nature Nanotechnology (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41565-022-01198-x


Post Script:
GlyNAC supplementation reverses aging hallmarks in aging humans
Aug 2022, phys.org

A randomized, double blind human clinical trial conducted by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine reveals that supplementation with GlyNAC—a combination of glycine and N-acetylcysteine—improves many age-associated defects in older humans and powerfully promotes healthy aging. 

via Baylor College of Medicine:  Premranjan Kumar et al, Supplementing Glycine and N-Acetylcysteine (GlyNAC) in Older Adults Improves Glutathione Deficiency, Oxidative Stress, Mitochondrial Dysfunction, Inflammation, Physical Function, and Aging Hallmarks: A Randomized Clinical Trial, The Journals of Gerontology: Series A (2022). DOI: 10.1093/gerona/glac135


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Friday, October 21, 2022

Artificial Assistance

Drums, Stefan Lattner w Stable Diffusion, 2022

That was fast -- It's been two months since the open-source image-generating software Stable Diffusion was released to the public, and already it's being used by scientists to thumbnail their press releases. 

Here we have the first instance (that I've seen) of a scientist, Stefan Lattner, using Stable Diffusion to make his own image for publicizing his work. His article is about an AI drum machine, and when that article shows up in the science aggregator, it's paired with this image seen above, I'll just call it "Drums".

Sometimes it's a photograph from the lab, maybe a closeup of some fingers in rubber gloves holding a little but important new technological artifact. Sometimes it's just open content from Upsplash etc. 

But this time, the lead scientist said why not, and got a neural network not much different from the one he works on for drums and music, and asked it to make him a picture of drums. Not sure what his prompt was. No mention of it in the press release. 

SampleMatch: A model that automatically retrieves matching drum samples for musical tracks
Oct 2022, phys.org

via Sony Computer Science Laboratories in France: Stefan Lattner, SampleMatch: Drum sample retrieval by musical context. arXiv:2208.01141v1 [cs.SD], arxiv.org/abs/2208.01141

Post Script:
"Art is dead Dude" - the rise of the AI artists stirs debate
Sep 2022, BBC News

Policy makers need to get the rules right, "so nobody feels ripped off", and money isn't just siphoned off from artists and into the pockets of big corporations.

 
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Wednesday, October 19, 2022

Scraping the Bottom of the Barrel

Getty is the Equifax of images. They own everything. And if they don't own it, they will buy it, and then own it. Try searching for something, anything. Grass-stained wiffle ball lying on the ground? Beads of rainwater on an umbrella? Two red foxes sniffing each other in the woods in autumn. Guaranteed among the first five images, one will belong to Getty, and it will be the best one. 

This has been written about before on Network Address. Right about the time that Google bought Pinterest (2018ish) and then rearranged their image search algorithm to show nothing but images hosted on Pinterest, the site that requires you to sign-up and log-in to see the images. So now even if I wanted to, I can't source the image I just right-clicked, saved, and posted to my weblog, no matter who it belongs to or who made it.

Then enter Getty -- they forced Google to change their image search engine to force you to go to the website where the image came from in order to see beyond the thumbnail. This way, Getty can get money from advertisers on the websites where their images are found: Anger at Google image search peace deal, Feb 2018, BBC.

Sorry if you forgot, but the "com" in .com stands for commerce.

But things have changed a bit. When Stable Diffusion was released to the public as an open source program that can run an image generating neural net using only the GPU's already in your own computer, it pretty much destroyed the business prospects of any company like Getty. That's why we're looking at the screenshot of their stock price circa August 15 2022, when Stable Diffusion was released. 

Why Getty Images gambled on a SPAC to go public after a 14-year absence from public markets
Sep 2022, Fortune Magazine

I asked Leyden if A.I. image generation could be a potential threat to Getty Images’ business. “We’re watching that space, like everyone else is, pretty closely,” she told me. “We don’t think about it as competition. We think of it as further evidence that the demand for visual content is just growing.”

Post Script:
It's hard to keep track, but "In 2021, Getty Images acquired Unsplash, which offers “widely accessed,” free creative photography; its website is ad-supported with over 17,000 users of its API. “That’s a big focus for us and really monetizing that creator economy that Unsplash taps into,” Leyden says.

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Wednesday, October 5, 2022

Wood 2.0


Toward customizable timber, grown in a lab
May 2022, phys.org

Tunable technique to generate wood-like plant material in a lab, which could enable someone to "grow" a wooden product like a table without needing to cut down trees, process lumber, etc.

"The idea is that you can grow these plant materials in exactly the shape that you need, so you don't need to do any subtractive manufacturing."

Researchers first isolate cells from the leaves of young Zinnia elegans plants, culture them in liquid medium for two days, then transfer them to a gel-based medium of nutrients and hormones. Adjusting the hormones enables researchers to tune the physical and mechanical properties of the plant cells that grow in that nutrient-rich broth. Then a 3D printer extrudes the gel into a structure in a petri dish, it incubates for three months (two orders of magnitude faster than it takes to grow a mature tree).

"In the human body, you have hormones that determine how your cells develop and how certain traits emerge. In the same way, by changing the hormone concentrations in the nutrient broth, the plant cells respond differently. Just by manipulating these tiny chemical quantities, we can elicit pretty dramatic changes in terms of the physical outcomes," Beckwith says.

via MIT: Ashley L. Beckwith et al, Physical, mechanical, and microstructural characterization of novel, 3D-printed, tunable, lab-grown plant materials generated from Zinnia elegans cell cultures, Materials Today (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.mattod.2022.02.012

Image credit: AI Art - Wooden Futures: a complex building, large wood joinery, dowels and pegs, people walking, architectural photography. https://lexica.art/prompt/a0440fb8-21cb-4fd8-87e9-59a727ab7511


New artificial enzyme breaks down tough, woody lignin: Study shows promise for developing a new renewable energy source
Jun 2022, phys.org

"This is the first nature-mimetic enzyme which we know can efficiently digest lignin to produce compounds that can be used as biofuels and for chemical production," added Chun-Long Chen.

(Why not "biomimetic" though?)

via Pacific Northwest National Laboratory: Highly stable and tunable peptoid/hemin enzymatic mimetics with natural peroxidase-like activities, Nature Communications (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-30285-9


Researchers envision wood-derived, self-powered biosensors for wireless devices
Jun 2022, phys.org

Lignocellulosic nanofibrils derived from tree bark are used in a self-powered device for sending  wireless signals to a smartphone via bluetooth. Leaving about 30 percent lignin in the nanofibrils improved their performance as tribonegative materials. The principle behind the innovation is the trioboelectric effect, a form of static electricity. 

Simply by tapping the device on an acrylic plate during testing, the prototype was able to generate enough power to send out a radio-frequency ping every three minutes that was picked up by a nearby smartphone.

In theory, such a device could be inserted into the sole of a shoe to power a biosensor that sends data wirelessly.

And PFAS Free FYI:
Most current designs incorporate synthetic materials such as polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), also known under the brand name Teflon. However, this material persists for long periods of time in the environment and concerns have been raised about its potential health effects.

Yan and her team wanted to see if it was possible to create a natural, biodegradable substitute.

This device was able to generate 160 percent more voltage and 140 percent more current when compared with a similar device that used PTFE as the tribonegative layer.

via University of Toronto: Nicolas R. Tanguy et al, Natural lignocellulosic nanofibrils as tribonegative materials for self-powered wireless electronics, Nano Energy (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.nanoen.2022.107337



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Terraforming the Anthroposphere


Engineered crystals could help computers run on less power
Apr 2022, phys.org

Crystals are cool and all, but did you know that the total amount of energy the U.S. uses on computers has risen dramatically over the last decade and is quickly approaching that of other major sectors, like transportation.

This is a big deal, and despite the well-deserved environmental crypto-hate, we hear almost nothing about this. In the United States, roughly 30% of our energy is used in buildings (lighting, heating and cooling) another 30% for transportation, and the last 30% for industrial processes (gross estimation, see the US Energy Information Administration for real stats). Switching to CFL's alone, since about 2012, has already made a huge dent in our national energy expenditure (go figure, that was easy, and yet you almost never hear about this). Any other attempts to lower that expenditure are aimed at buildings and transportation, think tighter buildings with better insulation and cars with better fuel efficiency. We are absolutely not talking about how to wrestle with the computing sector, and it will be very interesting to see how this takes shape in the coming years. 

via University of California - Berkeley: Suraj S. Cheema et al, Ultrathin ferroic HfO2–ZrO2 superlattice gate stack for advanced transistors, Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04425-6

Note: According to the Energy Information Administration's statistics, the per-capita energy consumption in the U.S. has been somewhat consistent from the 1970s to the present time. The average was about 334 million British thermal units [BTU] (352 GJ) per person from 1980 to 2010. One explanation suggested that the energy required to increase the nation's consumption of manufactured equipment, cars, and other goods has been shifted to other countries producing and transporting those goods to the U.S. 

Another Note: Lawrence Livermore Labs have devised a connection between energy and information that allows for the creation of a cryptocurrency token that is directly backed by and convertible into one kilowatt-hour of electricity. 

Image credit: Artwork by Anatoly Fomenko, Russian mathematician and artist from the 1960's and beyond.


These simple changes can make AI research much more energy efficient
Jul 2022, MIT Technology Review

They found that emissions can be significantly reduced if researchers use servers in specific geographic locations and at certain times of day. Emissions from training small machine-learning models can be reduced up to 80% if the training starts at times when more renewable electricity is available on the grid, while emissions from large models can be reduced over 20% if the training work is paused when renewable electricity is scarce and restarted when it’s more plentiful. 

This has me thinking about the crypto-nomads who followed the rainy season across China to use the cheaper hydropower. Once we synchronize our entire energy system to the sun and the seasons, we'll be able to feed the army of computers being trained to replace us. 

via Allen Institute for AI, Microsoft, Hugging Face, University of Washington: Measuring the Carbon Intensity of AI in Cloud Instances, Jesse Dodge et al, FAccT ’22, June 21–24, 2022, Seoul, Republic of Korea. https://doi.org/10.1145/3531146.3533234


Post Script:
Climate change: 'Sand battery' could solve green energy's big problem
Jul 2022, BBC News

Around 100 tonnes of builder's sand, piled high inside a dull grey silo.

Using low-grade sand, the device is charged up with heat made from cheap electricity from solar or wind. The sand stores the heat at around 500C, which can then warm homes in winter when energy is more expensive.

via Finnish researchers Markku Ylönen and Tommi Eronen, who came up with the sand battery idea.


Post Post Script:
The cryptopocalypse is nigh! NIST rolls out new encryption standards to prepare
Jul 2022, Ars Technica
 
Decision will be binding on many companies and change the way they protect your data.

In the not-too-distant future—as little as a decade, perhaps, nobody knows exactly how long—the cryptography protecting your bank transactions, chat messages, and medical records from prying eyes is going to break spectacularly with the advent of quantum computing. On Tuesday, a US government agency named four replacement encryption schemes to head off this cryptopocalypse. CRYSTALS-Kyber, CRYSTALS-Dilithium, FALCON, and SPHINCS+.


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