Month: February 2016

(credit: Drexel University)

Since the tech boom began decades ago, we’ve seen a dramatic transformation of electronics. Today, some technological dreamers are talking about “smart environments” where electronics are seamlessly integrated into our environment, providing comfort and convenience.

For these dreams to be achieved, we need to get electronics—not just the chips—miniaturized to the point where sensors can be pervasive. This involves developing high-performance electrochemical storage devices to enable long-lived sensors and radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. But efficient miniaturized energy storage devices have proven to be challenging to create; it can be done, but it's hard to integrate the results with other electronics.

Supercapacitors

According to an article in Science, an international team of scientists has now reported some progress in this area—specifically with the design of micro-supercapacitors. Supercapacitors are a class of materials that can store energy through accumulation of charge at the surface of a high-surface-area carbon sheet. They typically have a good cycle life, moderate energy density (6 Wh/kg), and high power densities (> 10 kW/kg). Supercapacitors are a great replacement for batteries in applications that require high power delivery and uptake with a very long charge-discharge cycle life; micro-supercapacitors are the same kind of material but much, much smaller.

A 50-percent model of Snowspeed in Toyota Motorsport's wind tunnel. (credit: Toyota Motorsport GmbH)

Did you know there's a speed record for gravity-powered snow sledges? It's currently held by bike racer Guy Martin at 83.5mph (134.36km/h). But perhaps not for long: over in Germany, Norwegian-based Snowspeed and Toyota Motorsport are working on a carbon fiber sledge that hopes to smash Martin's record by hitting at least 155mph (250km/h).

Based in Cologne, Germany, Toyota Motorsport GmbH is best known for its World Endurance Championship-winning race team, which took the 2014 crown in a dominant fashion with the 1000-horsepower hybrid TS040. Unfortunately, 2015 wasn't such a great year for the team. Although its revised car was a couple of seconds per lap quicker than the year before, both Audi and Porsche found even more speed, and the team had to settle for third place.

TMG is developing the new TS050 for this year's WEC, but the company does a lot more than build race cars. One of the ways it spends its considerable engineering and aerodynamics experience is on the Snowspeed, a gravity-powered sledge that looks like a Formula 1 car minus the wheels and wings.

While Microsoft's DirectX 12 may have been the first low-level API to appear on PC (excepting AMD's proprietary Mantle API), its arch-rival Vulkan is potentially more interesting. Vulkan promises to be more widely adopted, thanks to support for Windows, Linux, and Android, and companies like Valve and Epic are firmly behind its development.

With Vulkan now at version 1.0 and drivers from Nvidia and AMD available, we can finally take a crack at answering the big questions: can Vulkan live up to all the low-level API hype? And will AMD see the same huge performance gains that it did in early DirectX 12 benchmarks?

But first, some caveats: The Talos Principle is technically the first game with Vulkan support, but it's in beta testing. The Talos Principle also isn't designed to take advantage of the CPU utilization and draw call improvements that are central to Vulkan, unlike Stardock's Ashes of the Singularity demo does with DX12. Furthermore, the new Vulkan drivers from AMD and Nvidia are also both still in beta.

Kanye West is reportedly meeting with his legal team to discuss the possibility of suing file-sharing hub The Pirate Bay. West's new album The Life of Pablo has been "setting illegal download records" as would-be listeners flock to grab it from illicit file-sharing sites, including The Pirate Bay.

Back on February 14, The Life of Pablo was released exclusively on Tidal, a subscription-based music streaming service. The exclusive release had two effects: first, the Tidal app rocketed to the number-one spot on the iPhone App Store, and second, hundreds of thousands of people flocked to file-sharing websites to grab a free copy of the album.

West's new album also appeared briefly as a direct download from his website for $20, but the download link vanished soon after launch, possibly to drive more people toward a Tidal subscription. There are reports that some people paid their $20 for the direct download but were unable to download the album before it was pulled.

Charon's Serenity Chasma is highlighted, along with color-coded highlights to illustrate its extreme topography. (credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI)

Pluto's moon Charon looks dark, foreboding, and dry in pictures taken by the New Horizons spacecraft last summer. A brownish feature near its pole appeared so ominous that scientists actually named it "Mordor." But after further analysis of Charon's fractured surface, scientists now think they've discovered evidence of an ancient, subsurface ocean.

Today, the gray outer layer of Charon is composed primarily of water ice. More than 4 billion years ago, however, even though Charon and Pluto were far from the Sun, decaying radioactive elements and other sources of internal heat would have kept them relatively warm. In fact, there probably would have been enough heat to melt water near Charon's core.

As Charon cooled over billions of years, this chthonic ocean would also have cooled, and then finally frozen, causing its volume to expand. Scientists looking at data collected by New Horizons believe this may explain a set of features they see on the surface of Charon today: a series of ridges, scarps, and valleys that sometimes plunge more than six kilometers deep.