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Submission + - Scientists Discover a New Kind of Magnet (ieee.org)

Submitted by Wave723
Wave723 writes: "A new kind of magnet, theorized for decades, may now have been experimentally proven to exist. And it could eventually lead to better data storage devices.

In a normal magnet, the magnetic moments of individual grains align with each other to generate a magnetic field. In contrast, in the new "singlet-based" magnet, magnetic moments are temporary in nature, popping in and out of existence."

Submission + - Scientists Create Super-Thin 'Sheet' That Could Charge Our Phones (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have created super-thin, bendy materials that absorb wireless internet and other electromagnetic waves in the air and turn them into electricity. The lead researcher, Tomás Palacios, said the breakthrough paved the way for energy-harvesting covers ranging from tablecloths to giant wrappers for buildings that extract energy from the environment to power sensors and other electronics. Details have been published in the journal Nature. Palacios and his colleagues connected a bendy antenna to a flexible semiconductor layer only three atoms thick. The antenna picks up wifi and other radio-frequency signals and turns them into an alternating current. This flows into the molybdenum disulphide semiconductor, where it is converted into a direct electrical current. [M]olybdenum disulphide film can be produced in sheets on industrial roll-to-roll machines, meaning they can be made large enough to capture useful amounts of energy.

Ambient wifi signals can fill an office with more than 100 microwatts of power that is ripe to be scavenged by energy-harvesting devices. The MIT system has an efficiency of between 30% and 40%, producing about 40 microwatts when exposed to signals bearing 150 microwatts of power in laboratory tests. “It doesn’t sound like much compared with the 60 watts that a computer needs, but you can still do a lot with it,” Palacios said. “You can design a wide range of sensors, for environmental monitoring or chemical and biological sensing, which operate at the single microwatt level. Or you could store the electricity in a battery to use later.”

Comment Re:I for one welcome... (Score 1) 221

The article didn't say what the robot did... did it continue along it's programmed route spraying employees along the way? I think that if unsupervised robots are going to handle potentially hazardous materials they should be able to detect an issue and have a response of at least stop and send off an alert, so they do not continue to contaminate a larger area.

Comment Re:Cart before the horse. (Score 5, Insightful) 265

by FuzzyDustBall (#48143467) Attached to: Confidence Shaken In Open Source Security Idealism
On the third hand, if you can't trust RSA for security, a major closed source project whose entire purpose is security, who can you trust in the OS world? The real difference from security Between open source and closed source is attitude towards the product, In closed source there is incentives to hide issues, where in open source there are very few.

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