Titanium Oxide Anode Enhances Li-Ion Battery Charge Times.
In an article in IEE Spectrum the use of Titanium Oxide nano tubes as a component of the Lithium anode of the battery has been shown to enhance charging times dramatically.
While this looks very promising for fast charge smart phones, tablets and other electronic devices. It isn’t clear yet just how well this technology will scale up to larger sizes, like those needed for electric powered vehicles. If this technology does scale up well, then the electric car may finally become competitive with fossil fuel vehicles. When it takes half the day to charge your car, cross country travel becomes more like covered wagon living. But, when it only takes 5 or 10 minutes to charge the batteries, much more like a gas fill up, and it starts to look a lot more like a day trip.
New 3D Printing Technology!
Yes, just when you thought you might try out the new technology of extruded plastic 3D printing, someone has already come up with a better technology. This, like several others is based upon laser hardened liquid resins, much like the dentist now uses to repair minor tooth decay. The major difference with this process is that oxygen, when injected into the resin, stops the resin from hardening. Carbon3D has just announced this new technology.
One of the freely circulating .STL files (the type of file a 3D printer expects to process) is a model of the Eiffel Tower. This is one of the most difficult objects that I have found to print. If you think about it, you will understand. The tower is nothing more than a bunch of connected rods. For the extrusion type printer, this requires the production of a lot of support structures that become difficult to remove without breaking equally fragile structural members. Get the overall size correct, and if you are lucky, you will get something that will stand on its own, and suffer gentle handling. The demonstration video in the above link prints this model flawlessly, even creating the railing on the first landing, which is too thin for an extruding printer. While I’m not certain about the relative strengths of the resin, when compared to ABS or PLA plastics, this would have super uses where precision outweighs strength.
Graphene Light Bulb Ready For Market!
A new light bulb using graphene is described in a recent BBC report that will last longer and take 10% as much energy because of graphene’s great strength and conductivity. The original Edison Light Bulbused carbon from carbonized bamboo. I can’t help but wonder what today’s light bulbs would be like if Edison had started out with graphene instead of carbonized bamboo.
Anglo-Saxon remedy attacks MRSA
A thousand year old Anglo-Saxon recipe reported in New Scientist said to treat the infected eyelash follicle we call a sty is also effective against the super bug MRSA. This is an intricate herbal recipe that appears to involve some fermentation or other processes in its production as the researchers noted that at one point in the process the bacteria introduced by some of the plants being used disappeared from the mix. This is a very promising discovery, but I’m skeptical that the pharmaceutical companies will allow much to happen on this front. However, the recipe is available, and doesn’t need exotic equipment to produce, so maybe it will not matter what the big corporations do.
Beta Release of Rust
Rust is a system programming language that is compiled rather than interpreted. The development team has just recently released the beta version of their compiler. Rustc will compile valid Rust code into an executable directly, with no intermediate steps. It is provided on the three major OS platforms: Windows, Mac, and Linux. While there is no cross-platform support (I could be wrong, but I believe the Windows version of the compiler only creates a Windows executable, etc…) but that is hardly a problem when you can build your code on the target machine. The advantage over interpreted language like Python and others, is the executable file can be run on a machine without any Rust installation. The executable stands alone from the tool chain.
I have had a chance to work through the basic section in the documentation and am finding this to be a very interesting programming language. While not all the elements found in languages like C appear to be found in Rust, I expect to find all the programming tools I need here and much more. If you have any interest in learning to code in a high level language, here is one you can get involved with today!