The device consists of a layer of superconducter, complemented by several layers of metamaterial. And the authors are afraid of potential abuse of this cloak to smuggle forbidden objets on airplanes etc. Hillarious! Another example how good research makes itself completely ridiculous by means of absurd claims about their potential usage.
Honda Research Institute USA plans to publish results of new research on Friday that shows that the company has improved the success rate of growing carbon nanotubes with metallic properties, a key to using them in future power devices.
Researchers have discovered that an array of radio transceivers--devices that send and receive signals--can track people's movements behind walls. Possible uses include detecting people trapped in burning buildings, controlling lighting or heating and cooling systems as people enter or exit rooms, and spotting burglars or enemy soldiers.
The nanometer-sized gizmo could provide a key tool for researchers trying to develop a new type of microchip technology called "plasmonics" that mixes electronics and optics.
The channel in Zhang's device measures as little as 40 nanometers wide by 5 nanometers high, far smaller than the roughly 250-nanometer diameter of a conventional laser of a similar wavelength.
Some physicists and engineers are hoping to build nanocircuits that manipulate plasmonics to marry high-speed electronics and high-speed optics.
I stop complaining about "useless" research such as infeasible invisibility devices... At least I start to understand why Italy is a country with one of the highest publication rates per researcher.
"In an effort to help solve the black hole information paradox that has immersed theoretical physics in an ocean of soul searching for the past two years, two researchers have thrown their hats into the ring with a novel solution: Lasers. Technically, we're not talking about the little flashy devices you use to keep your cat entertained, we're talking about the underlying physics that produces laser light and applying it to information that falls into a black hole. According to the researchers, who published a paper earlier this month to the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity (abstract), the secret to sidestepping the black hole information paradox (and, by extension, the 'firewall' hypothesis that was recently argued against by Stephen Hawking) lies in stimulated emission of radiation (the underlying physics that generates laser light) at the event horizon that is distinct from Hawking radiation, but preserves information as matter falls into a black hole."
interestingly it looks like a subject could wear it all day while doing normal stuff
http://www.choosemuse.com/
"I got my hands on an early version of Interaxon's brainwave reading headband, the Muse, and I think this could be the most important wearable of the year. And that's saying a lot, considering I've seen 2014′s entire lineup for health tech at the Consumer Electronic Show as well as a few undisclosed athletic devices slated for later this year."
..."alerts the users with sights and sounds when they are producing brain waves associated with calm and focus."
ALERT! ALERT! ALERT! YOU ARE CALM AND FOCUSSED!
:-D
A personal interest of mine that I want to explore a bit more in the future. I just bought a ZigBee electricity monitor and I am wondering whether from the signal of the mains one could detect (reliably) the oven turning on, lights, etc. Probably requires Neural Network training. The idea would be to make a simple device which basically saves you money by telling you how much electricity you are wasting.
Then again, its probably already done by Google...
Some 1,896 experts responded to the following question:
The economic impact of robotic advances and AI—Self-driving cars, intelligent digital agents that can act for you, and robots are advancing rapidly. Will networked, automated, artificial intelligence (AI) applications and robotic devices have displaced more jobs than they have created by 2025?
Hasta la vista, baby. A real-life T-1000, the shape-shifting liquid-metal robot from Terminator 2, is a step closer, thanks to a self-powered liquid metal motor. The device is surprisingly simple: just a drop of metal alloy made mostly of gallium - which is liquid at just under 30 °C - with some indium and tin mixed in.
A system of nine quantum bits (qubits) that is robust to errors that would normally destroy a quantum computation has been created by researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and Google. The device relies on a quantum error-correction protocol, which the team says could be deployed in practical quantum computers of the future.
The first complete theory of how plasmons produce "hot carriers" has been developed by researchers in the US. The new model could help make this process of producing carriers more efficient, which would be good news for enhancing solar-energy conversion in photovoltaic devices.
I did not read the paper but what is further down written in the article, does not give much hope that this actually gives much more insight than what we had nor that it could be used in any way to improve current PV cells soon:
e.g.
"To fully exploit these carriers for such applications, researchers need to understand the physical processes behind plasmon-induced hot-carrier generation. Nordlander's team has now developed a simple model that describes how plasmons produce hot carriers in spherical silver nanoparticles and nanoshells. The model describes the conduction electrons in the metal as free particles and then analyses how plasmons excite hot carriers using Fermi's golden rule - a way to calculate how a quantum system transitions from one state into another following a perturbation.
The model allows the researchers to calculate how many hot carriers are produced as a function of the light frequency used to excite the metal, as well as the rate at which they are produced. The spectral profile obtained is, to all intents and purposes, the "plasmonic spectrum" of the material.
Particle size and hot-carrier lifetimes
"Our analyses reveal that particle size and hot-carrier lifetimes are central for determining both the production rate and the energies of the hot carriers," says Nordlander. "Larger particles and shorter lifetimes produce more carriers with lower energies and smaller particles produce fewer carriers, but with higher energies."
Imaging of gas giant orbiting its central star (related to Jai's YGT proposal):
With GPI, astronomers image the actual planet--a remarkable feat given that an orbiting world typically appears a million times fainter than its parent star. This is possible because GPI's adaptive optics sharpen the image of the target star by cancelling out the distortion caused by the Earth's atmosphere; it then blocks the bright image of the star with a device called a coronagraph, revealing the exoplanet.