This new battery charges to 70% in two minutes, and lasts for 20 years

Researchers have developed a groundbreaking new lithium ion battery that charges super quickly and lasts 10 times longer than today’s batteries. It’ll be on the market within two years.

Sick of waiting an hour for your phone to charge before you leave the house? Researchers at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore have come up with the best solution yet - a lithium ion battery that charges to 70 percent in just two minutes. 

Even better, it also lasts for 20 years, and will reportedly be available to the public within two years.

Rechargeable lithium ion batteries are already common in our mobile phones, tablets and laptops - but most only last around 500 recharge cycles, which is around two to three years of typical use. And at the moment batteries take around two hours to fully charge.

The new battery drastically improves this process, and will allow you to charge your phone while you look for your keys on the way out the door. It would also help make electric vehicles a more viable alternative to fossil-fuel-powered cars, by reducing battery replacement costs and allowing drivers to recharge their cars in minutes. 

“Electric cars will be able to increase their range dramatically, with just five minutes of charging, which is on par with the time needed to pump petrol for current cars,” said Professor Chen Xiaodong who led the study, in a press release. “Equally important, we can now drastically cut down the toxic waste generated by disposed batteries, since our batteries last 10 times longer than the current generation of lithium-ion batteries.”

The breakthrough came after the scientists replaced the traditional graphite that makes up theanode (the negative pole of the battery) in lithium-ion batteries with a new gel material made from titanium dioxide nanotubes that they created themselves.

These nanotubes are a thousand times thinner than a human hair, and they speed up the rate at which electrons and ions can transfer in and out of the batteries, allowing for super-fast charging. They also allow more energy to be packed into the batteries. This means that the battery can now offer 10,000 charging cycles, instead of the usual 500.

Even better, the new batteries will be relatively cheap, as titanium dioxide is inexpensive and already readily available in soil. The team has published details on how they formed the titanium dioxide gel in Advanced Materials, and have already had the technology licensed to eventually produce the devices. They expect they’ll be on the market within two years.

We literally can’t wait.

Scientists have created the most effective “invisibility cloak” so far, and you can make one for $100

One of the most promising invisibility cloak devices has been unveiled, along with instructions for how to create it at home.

Created by scientists at the University of Rochester in New York, the device can hide large objects from sight using cheap and readily available lenses.

“There’ve been many high tech approaches to cloaking and the basic idea behind these is to take light and have it pass around something as if it isn’t there, often using high-tech or exotic materials,” said John Howell, a professor of physics at the University of Rochester in a press release.

But while it works like an invisibility cloak, it looks more like something your optometrist would use to check your eyes - and when something is placed behind the layered lens, it disappears from view, leaving the background untouched.

“This is the first device that we know of that can do three-dimensional, continuously multidirectional cloaking, which works for transmitting rays in the visible spectrum,” graduate student Joseph Choi, who helped develop the technology with Howell, said in the release.

Previously, scientists had struggled to hide objects from varying angles, so they would be masked when you looked at them from straight on, but would be visible again when you moved your head. Now this new device has been used to cloak a hand, a face and a ruler from all angles. And the applications are pretty incredible - for example, a doctor could look through the lens and see the organs he was operating on below his hand. They could also let drivers see through their vehicle to their blind spot. Not to mention the fact that it can make you invisible, which is just freaking awesome.

The device can also be scaled up depending on the size of the lens, and would allow large objects to be cloaked. It also works for the whole visible spectrum of light, which means there are no limitations to what it can block.

It works by using four separate lenses with different focal lengths. By carefully calculating the distance between these lenses, Choi and Howell managed to bend the light around an object. They've submitted their results to the journal Optics Express, and the paper is also available on arXiv.org.

The team has now released instructions and equations that will help people build a similar device at home for around $100.

1. Purchase two sets of two lenses with different focal lengths f1 and f2 (four lenses total, two with f1 focal length, and two with f2 focal length)

2. Separate the first two lenses by the sum of their focal lengths (So f1 lens is the first lens, f2 is the second lens, and they are separated by t1= f1+ f2).

3. Do the same in Step 2 for the other two lenses.

4. Separate the two sets by t2=2 f2 (f1+ f2) / (f1— f2) apart, so that the two f2 lenses are t2 apart.

They also note that achromatic lenses provide the best image quality. And fresnel lenses can be used to reduce the total length (2t1+t2). Smaller total length should reduce edge effects and increase the range of angles.

Well, we know what we’re going to be trying to make at home this weekend.

Check it out in action in the video below:

New solar device converts Sun's energy to hydrogen more efficiently than ever

An international team of scientists has invented a cheap solar device that can store energy from the Sun more efficiently than anything on the market.

One of the biggest problems with solar power becoming a more viable and cost effective alternative to fossil fuels is what to do when the sun isn’t shining. An international team of scientists has figured out a solution, and it just might be the most promising one yet.

Led by Michael Graetzel, director of the Laboratory of Photonics and Interfaces at the Ecole Polytechnique in Switzerland, the team has created a device that can collect energy from sunlight and convert it to hydrogen, which can be stored and burned as fuel or fed through a fuel cell to generate electricity.

Named a ‘water splitter’, the device has been tipped as the next big thing in solar technology, says Kevin Bullis at MIT’s Technology Review, because it meets three of the four criteria needed to create a practical device. Firstly, it’s highly efficient. It’s made from a new type of material called perovskite, which was discovered in 2009 and found to absorb light much more efficiently than silicon, which is what solar cells are currently made from. According to Bullis, it can store 12.3 percent of the energy in sunlight in the form of hydrogen, which is pretty huge, seeing as 10 percent is the accepted benchmark for efficient solar-hydrogen converters.

Secondly, it’s cheap to produce, using only inexpensive materials. And thirdly, these materials are abundant to source, so the device is also easy to make. On top of perovskite, the device uses cheap nickel and iron to act as catalysts in its two 'water-splitting' electrodes - one that produces hydrogen and one that produces oxygen when they react with water.

"The catalysts built on previous work showing that nickel hydroxide is a promising catalyst, and that adding iron could improve it. The researchers added iron to nickel hydroxide to form a layered structure, and put the catalyst on a porous nickel “foam” to increase the area across which reactions can take place, speeding them up,” says Bullis.

The fourth criteria needed for a practical device is reliability, which the team is now working on increasing. Right now, it only lasts for a few hours before the performance of the solar cell starts to decrease. This is because perovskite degrades much faster than silicon. But the team, which includes researchers from Switzerland, Singapore and Korea, has figured out how to extend this lifespan to over a month by adding a layer of carbon to it. They’ve published their results in the journal Science. They're now working on increasing this further.

What the device in action below:

I am back

I JUST CAN'T WAIT FOR THIS IT IS SO AWESOME

NARUTO ULTIMATE NINJA STORM REVOLUTION RELEASING ON 12 SEPTEMBER 2014




















must watch.

The DIY droplet lens could revolutionise science and medicine, and its inventors are one of the finalists for ANSTO's 2014 Eureka Prize for Innovative Use of Technology.

Palau is establishing a no-fishing zone the size of France

The Pacific island of Palau is establishing a no-fishing zone that will cover 630,000 square kilometres to let the populations 'heal' after years of relentless commercial fishing.

In 2009, the island of Palau, located in the western Pacific Ocean just above New Guinea, established the first shark sanctuary in the world. Officials from the country say they've seen such success with the shark sanctuary as a buzzing tourist destination that they’ve launched plans to ban all commercial fishing in Palau's large ocean territory by 2018.

The free fishing zone will span 630,000 square kilometres (240,000 square miles) - an area the size of France - and has been described as “unprecedented”.

The reason behind the no-fishing zone, according to the President of Palau Tommy Remengesau, was to allow the ocean to heal and replenish its populations of fish after decades of overfishing by commerical enterprises from around the world. 

"Remengesau said Pacific island nations, which are also struggling to deal with climate change, were effectively "the conscience of the world" on environmental matters and had to lead by example because of their special connection with the ocean,” says Neil Sands for AFP.

"The ocean is our way of life," Remengesau told journalists. "It sustains and nurtures us, provides us with the basics of our Pacific island cultures, our very identities.”

Remengesau added that sharks offered more value to Palau as eco-tourism assets, saying that a 2011 study conducted by the Australian Institute of Marine Science concluded that a single reef shark could raise almost US$2 million for the local economy over 10 years thanks to the tourists that visit it. Figures put the tourism industry as being almost 30 times more lucrative to Palau than the commercial tuna industry. No attacks have ever occurred as the operators are careful to make sure everyone keeps a safe distance from the sharks.

This new robotic vacuum is powered by a 360-degree 'eye'

British technology company Dyson has revealed its new robotic vacuum cleaner that's remotely operated and powered by a 360-degree camera to map every room.

Named the Dyson 360 Eye, this robotic vacuum cleaner doesn't simply roam your house on its own, cleaning your floors and climbing over obstacles, it also moves using a completely new type of navigation technology that prevents it from going over the same spot twice and running down the battery.

"Where contemporary robot vacuum cleaners use everything from random motion to laser range finders and ultrasound to navigate, the Dyson builds a floor plan with its camera, knows where it is and where it hasn’t been and uses infrared for collision avoidance,” says Stuart Kennedy forThe Australian.

Thanks to its 360-degree camera that can see around the room at a 45-degree angle, the vacuum cleaner can record 30 pictures of its surroundings every second to create an instant map.

“We navigate by coming out of the charging station and then looking back at the charging station,” inventor James Dyson told Kennedy. “In that process it’s already got a picture of the room and knows where the charging station is in the room. It then cleans an area in a square spiral of 3 metres by 3 metres, then moves on to do another area 3 metres by 3 metres. It may come across a TV or something else in the way but it just goes round it and deals with it.”

The vacuum is also connected to a smartphone app, so you can set up cleaning schedules for it to start remotely when you’re not at home.

According to Margaret Rhodes at Wired, Dyson released a vacuum cleaner model called the Dyson DC06 in 2001, before swiftly taking if off the market. The novel vacuum cleaner had 84 sensors, ran with three computers and had a price tag of several thousand dollars, which of course was too much, and the machinery was too heavy to ever be a hit with customers.

In the years that followed, Dyson looked into how they could improve on this idea. Dyson himself invested more than $8 million in a robotics lab at Imperial College London, says Rhodes, with a particular interest in vision-powered systems. With the help of their research, the Dyson 360 Eye was created and will be released worldwide early next year.

Watch how it works below:

This wind turbine can fold into your backpack and charge your laptop

Scientists have 3D-printed a wind turbine that’s small and light enough to fit into a backpack.

Called AirEnergy3D, the turbine can plug directly into a laptop or phone to charge it with renewable energy, or can feed electricity back into a household power system, as Adele Peters reports for Fast Company. 

The turbine is designed to be portable so that it can be carried around by users, or moved around a house depending on where the windiest spot is. Its creators at Poland-based company Omni3D are now raising funds on Kickstarter for the device.

The vertical-shape of the turbine is designed to capture as much energy as possible from the relatively low wind speeds that come through city roofs and backyards, Peters explains. The blade shape is still being refined, but the turbine can already power a lightbulb, and with the Kickstarter funding the team is working towards a design that will be able to produce 300 watts, which is enough to charge computers and other electronic devices.

Impressively, the company is going to make all the plans for the 3D-printed turbine open source, so that others can customise the blades or continue to improve their design. "We want to make it as easy to develop upon the original project," Kamil Dziadkiewicz, an engineer from Omni3D, told Fast Company. "Thanks to 3D printing, everybody as a community can experiment and prototype better solutions for the machine."

The final kit is projected to cost users around US$350, and users assemble it themselves from some electronics and parts that they can 3D print. DIY lovers can also use their own parts and make it from scratch using the open source plans.

And for every US$4,000 (£2,500) pledged, Omni3d will send one of the constructed wind turbines to off-the-grid African villages, to help generate electricity where it’s needed most. The device can also be used in natural disaster situations in regions where solar power may not be the most efficient option.

So, you'll soon have no excuse for leaving home without renewable energy again. Check out theKickstarter campaign video below:

The Germans Have Figured Out How to 3-D Print Cars

The assembly line isn’t going away, but 3-D printing is going to reshape how we make cars. The EDAG Genesis points the way, with an beautifully crafted frame made from a range of materials and inspired by a turtle’s skeleton.

The German engineering firm showed off the Genesis design concept at the Geneva Motor Show as proof that additive manufacturing–EDAG’s fancy term for 3-D printing–can be used to make full-size car components. It’s on an entirely different scale than the tiny, 3-D printed creations coming out of a desktop Makerbot, but it’s also just a frame–a stylized chassis that’s more art than reality.

Before settling on 3-D printing, EDAG tried a few different acronym-heavy options, including selective laser sintering (SLS), selective laser melting (SLM), and stereolithography (SLA). But after extensive tinkering, the final process they used was a modified version of fused-deposition modeling, or FDM.

EDAG’s robot built the Genesis concept by creating a thermoplastic model of the complex interior, although the company says they could use carbon fiber to make the structure both stronger and lighter. EDAG envisions the Genesis as being surrounded by an exterior frame–likely steel or aluminum–to provide a tough exterior to protect the lattice-like monocoque.

We’ve seen 3-D printing applied to cars before, but EDAG’s design is unique because it shows that with the right equipment you can produce a structure at a massively larger scale. Rather than printing out tiny parts and assembling them together to create a whole, the Genesis proposes that future cars could be produced in fewer steps by assembling large, exceptionally strong unibody parts.

Printing of this size is still years from reality due to both cost and scale, but the design is the opening salvo in an arms race for creating large objects with a single process.

“As for the target of using additive manufacturing to produce complete vehicle bodies, there is still a long way to go before this becomes an industrial application,” EDAG says in its announcement. “So for the time being, it remains a vision.”

Activating a specific gene makes fruit flies live 30% longer

Scientists have found that activating a gene in the intestines of fruit flies can slow down ageing throughout the body and increase their lifespan by almost a third.

A team of biologists has shown that activating a gene called AMPK in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster can add two weeks to their usual six-week lifespan.

And the fruit flies didn’t just live longer, their brains aged more slowly and they stayed healthier for longer as well.

AMPK is a gene that helps regulate energy in cells - when cellular energy levels are low, it gets activated. It’s also found in humans in low levels, which led the researchers to believe that understanding its pathway could help us work out how to delay our own ageing process.

As journalist Liat Clark explains for Wired magazine, the team are driven by the idea that by repairing the molecular damage that occurs as cells degrade, we can help to avoid diseases associated with ageing.

"Instead of studying the diseases of ageing - Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, cancer, stroke, cardiovascular disease, diabetes - one by one, we believe it may be possible to intervene in the ageing process and delay the onset of many of these diseases," David W Walker, a molecular biologist whose lab conducted the research at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), said in a press release.

A key part of this cellular ageing process is a build up of “molecular garbage” - this is molecular waste that is usually cleared out through a process known as autophagy. But as we age, autophagy can slow down and molecular garbage and protein can build up, something that has already been linked to neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. 

Scientists have previously shown that AMPK  was known to activate authopahgy, but scientists weren’t sure of how this process occurred.

The research, led by Matthew Ulgherait from UCLA, involved stimulating AMPK in more than 100,000 fruit flies, and that activating AMPK in the intestine could increase levels of autophagy around the body - even in the brain. This is an important discovery, because in humans it would be much easier to trigger a similar process via the intestine rather than neurally.

“Matt moved beyond correlation and established causality,” Walker said in a press release. “He showed that the activation of autophagy was both necessary to see the anti-aging effects and sufficient; that he could bypass AMPK and directly target autophagy.” The research is published in Cell Reports.

Obviously this cellular pathway now needs to be tested in humans, but it’s a very promising first step towards better understanding the way our cells age - and potentially working out how to slow that natural process down.

Scientists have worked out the genetic ‘recipe’ that lets lizards regrow their tails

Researchers have discovered the genes that prompt tail regeneration in lizards, which takes them a step closer to understanding how to stimulate regeneration in humans

When lizards are caught by predators, they can drop their tails to escape and then grow the appendage back. Scientists have studied this regeneration process for decades, in the hopes of understanding how to regenerate human tissues, such as damaged spinal chords and even lost limbs. 

Now a team of scientists from Arizona State University in the US has performed the first analysis of all RNA molecules, which translate genes into proteins, during the tail regeneration of a green anole lizard  (Anolis carolinensis), and worked out the genetic “recipe” that controls the regrowth process. Their results have been published in PLOS ONE.

"Using next-generation technologies to sequence all the genes expressed during regeneration, we have unlocked the mystery of what genes are needed to regrow the lizard tail,” said lead author Kenro Kusumi in a press release.

“Lizards are the most closely-related animals to humans that can regenerate entire appendages. We discovered that they turn on at least 326 genes in specific regions of the regenerating tail, including genes involved in embryonic development, response to hormonal signals and wound healing."

Interestingly, 302 of those 326 genes have already had homologues (similar genes) identified in mammalian DNA.

The scientists also found that tail regeneration in lizards involves genetic activity along the entire tail, not just at the tip, which is the case for other animals with regenerative abilities, such as salamanders and zebrafish. 

"Regeneration is not an instant process," said Elizabeth Hutchins, a co-author of the paper. "In fact, it takes lizards more than 60 days to regenerate a functional tail. Lizards form a complex regenerating structure with cells growing into tissues at a number of sites along the tail.”

For the first 10 days, the lizard’s tail heals similarly to any other wound—new blood vessels form, and epithelial tissue (the soft, white skin under a scab) closes the gap over raw flesh. Then the tail starts to regrow, beginning with nerve tissue from the spinal cord (days 10-15), soft muscle, and tissue for transporting fluids. By day 20, the muscular tissue is starting to firm up around a cartilaginous tube that will eventually harden, and segment into tail bones.” 

This research is a big step forward for scientists hoping to use the abilities of lizards to improve therapeutic options for humans.

“By following the genetic recipe for regeneration that is found in lizards, and then harnessing those same genes in human cells, it may be possible to regrow new cartilage, muscle or even spinal cord in the future,” said Kusumi.

World's largest laser compresses diamond to pressures of 50 million Earth atmospheres

Physicists in the US have compressed a synthetic diamond to pressures of 50 million Earth atmospheres to recreate conditions in the cores of giant planets.

A team of physicists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facilityin California have used the world's largest and most powerful laser to compress a synthetic diamond to pressures of 50 million times the Earth's atmosphere. This has allowed them to recreate the conditions found deep in the cores of gas giant and super-Earth planets for the first time.

To do this, they created a synthetic diamond, extracted a tiny, millimetre-sized sample of it, and zapped it with 176 high-powered fusion laser beams, half on the top of the sample, and half on the bottom. "Upon firing, the physicists measured the rate of diamond material moving under the tremendous heating and counter-reactions,” says Neomatica. "As the cylindrical piece of diamond is compressed, its middle bulges out at extremely high velocities. The measured peak velocity was 109,000 miles per hour, or about 45 kilometres per second.”

The team measured the peak pressure their diamond sample experienced to be 5 trillion pascals - or 5 terapascals - and at this point the density of the diamond had more than tripled, packing its mass into almost a quarter of the volume it had been in originally. This allowed the team to simulate how dense matter would behave in the incredible pressure within the cores of gas giants such as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, and super-Earth planets outside the Solar System.

The team plans to use this technique to complete planet evolution models, and in future experiments, they will exert pressures on their diamond samples at 7 terapascals, which is thought to be the pressure in the deep centre of Jupiter. “[The study] paves the way for study of even more extreme environments," Neomatica reports, "for example at the centre of stars."

A mind-blowing swarm of Velella velella - relatives of jellyfish - appeared off the coast of Washington state in the US last week, and researchers aren't entirely sure why...

Children with autism have extra brain synapses

New research has shown that children with autism have a very high number of synapses - connections between neurons in the brain. So researchers have developed a new drug that promotes synaptic pruning, and reverses autistic-like behaviour in mice.

Children with autism have extra synapses in their brain due to a slowdown in the normal brain "pruning" process during development, say US neuroscientists.

They found a drug that restores synaptic pruning also reverses autistic-like behaviours in mice, they report in the journal Neuron.

"We were able to treat mice after the [disorder] had appeared," says study co-author neurobiologist David Sulzer of Columbia University Medical Center.

The findings suggest the condition could one day be treated in teenagers and adults, "though there is a lot of work to be done," he says.

The work is "extremely exciting", says Professor Ralph-Axel Mueller of San Diego State University, who was not involved in the research.

A synapse is where one neurone communicates with another.

With too many synapses, a "brain region that should be talking only to a select number of other regions is receiving irrelevant information from many others," explains Mueller, who has done pioneering work in over-connectivity.

During brain development, a burst of synapse formation occurs in infancy, particularly in the cortex, a region involved in autistic behaviours; pruning eliminates about half of these cortical synapses by late adolescence.

For the new study, the researchers painstakingly counted synapses in a key region of the cortex of 26 children and adolescents aged between 2 and 20 with autism who had died from other causes. They compared that to 22 brains from children without autism that were donated to science.

In the autistic brains, synaptic density was more than 50 per cent higher than that in the brains of children without autism and sometimes two-thirds greater.

"It's the first time that anyone has looked for, and seen, a lack of pruning during development of children with autism," says Sulzer, "although lower numbers of synapses in some brain areas have been detected in brains from older patients and in mice with autistic-like behaviours."

Over-connectivity

It is not clear if too many synapses are the main reason for autism, but many genes linked to autism play a role in synapse pruning. And the discovery that synapse pruning reversed autistic behaviour in the lab mice suggests over-connectivity may be key.

The researchers traced the pruning effect to a protein called mTOR. When mTOR is overactive brain cells lose much of their self-trimming ability.

"Almost all of our human subjects had overactive mTOR and decreased autophagy, and all appear to have a lack of normal synaptic pruning," says Sulzer.

To restore normal synaptic pruning and reverse autistic-like behaviours in mice, the researchers administered rapamycin, an immunosuppressant drug that prevents organ rejection and inhibits mTOR.

However, even if the findings are confirmed -- and Sulzer notes that treatments that work in lab animals often fail in people -- it is unlikely that rapamycin would be used in people with autism because its widescale immune-suppressing effects would likely cause serious side effects.

"But there could be better drugs," says Sulzer "such as a molecule that dials up production of synapse-pruning proteins."

One remaining puzzle is how the mice's brains, or the drug, know which synapses to keep and which to prune.

"But the mice started behaving normally" after receiving the synapse-pruning drug, "which suggests the right ones are being pruned," says Sulzer.