Category: Record Breaker

Impact Lab > Record Breaker
cutting edge, Record Breaker, Science & Technology News, Solar Energy, Solar Power

These hyper-efficient solar panels could actually live on your roof soon

355B2526-844E-4F80-8F91-99000702D318

The clean energy boffins in their labs are always upping the theoretical limit on how much power you can get out of sunshine, but us plebes actually installing solar cells are stuck with years-old tech that’s not half as good as what they’re seeing. This new design from Insolight could be the one that changes all that.

Insolight is a spin-off from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, where they’ve been working on this new approach for a few years — and it’s almost ready to hit your roof.

Usually solar cells collect sunlight on their entire surface, converting it to electricity at perhaps 15-19 percent efficiency — meaning about 85 percent of the energy is lost in the process. There are more efficient cells out there, but they’re generally expensive and special-purpose, or use some exotic material.

Continue reading… “These hyper-efficient solar panels could actually live on your roof soon”

Aviation, Engineering, Record Breaker, Science & Technology News, Travel

Airlander 10: prototype of world’s longest aircraft retired

4252

The Airlander 10 in flight at Cardington airfield in Bedfordshire in 2016.

UK firm behind plane-airship hybrid says it will ‘rethink the skies’ to build new model.

A prototype of the world’s longest aircraft, the Airlander 10, will not be rebuilt but engineers are set to “rethink the skies” with a production-ready model.

Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV), the Bedford-based company that created Airlander 10, has already received Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) approval, and it is hoped the new airship model will take to the skies by the early 2020s.

“Our focus is now entirely on bringing the first batch of production-standard, type-certified Airlander 10 aircraft into service with customers,” said Stephen McGlennan, the company’s chief executive.

Continue reading… “Airlander 10: prototype of world’s longest aircraft retired”

China, Inventions, Record Breaker

A Chinese company said it created a photo with such a high resolution that you can zoom from thousands of meters away to see people’s facial expressions

5c1c90f8e04d6243c7019cf6-1920-960

You might call this the pinnacle of high-resolution images.

  • The image, the brainchild of a company called Jingkun Technology, or BigPixel, was taken from atop the Oriental Pearl Tower in Shanghai, China.
  • The company said the photo’s resolution is a mind-blowing 195 gigapixels.
  • The resolution of digital cameras and smartphones is often measured in megapixels, or 1 million pixels — so a 12-megapixel camera, for example, can produce images with 12 million total pixels. But in this case we’re talking about gigapixels, or 1 billion pixels.

Click the link below to try the zoom feature yourself.

Continue reading… “A Chinese company said it created a photo with such a high resolution that you can zoom from thousands of meters away to see people’s facial expressions”

3D Printer, Engineering, Record Breaker, Science & Technology News

MIT team develops 3D printer that’s 10x faster than comparable 3D printers

23764C81-3163-43B1-9EA8-ACF031DBA4A1

Professors Jamison Go and John Hart of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Mechanosynthesis Group have developed new hardware that enables what they call FastFFF (fast fused filament fabrication). And it’s fast, see for yourself.

Desktop 3D printers are fantastic at creating high-quality and complex parts on demand, but their greatest weakness has always been speed. They can only print one object at a time, one thin layer at a time. And there are several speed-limiting factors to FDM/FFF 3D printers, with the main four being: the amount of force that can be applied to the filament as it’s pushed through the nozzle, how quickly heat can be transferred to the filament to melt it, how fast the printhead can move around the build area, and the rate that the material solidifies after it’s extruded because it needs to support the next layer.

Continue reading… “MIT team develops 3D printer that’s 10x faster than comparable 3D printers”

Engineering, Inventions, Record Breaker, Science & Technology News

‘Human brain’ supercomputer with 1 million processors switched on for first time

C8573089-4187-4669-94AE-297BCA469014

The world’s largest neuromorphic supercomputer designed and built to work in the same way a human brain does has been fitted with its landmark one-millionth processor core and is being switched on for the first time.

The newly formed million-processor-core Spiking Neural Network Architecture (SpiNNaker) machine is capable of completing more than 200 million million actions per second, with each of its chips having 100 million moving parts.

To reach this point, it has taken £15million in funding, 20 years in conception and over 10 years in construction, with the initial build starting way back in 2006. The project was initially funded by the EPSRC and is now supported by the European Human Brain Project. It is being switched on for the first time on Friday, 2 November.

Continue reading… “‘Human brain’ supercomputer with 1 million processors switched on for first time”

Engineering, Inventions, Record Breaker, Science & Technology News

Scientists create a rare fifth form of matter in space for the first time ever

F66CF898-C590-4D04-A5A9-088BD035EB32

For a few minutes on Jan. 23, 2017, the coldest spot in the known universe was a tiny microchip hovering 150 miles over Kiruna, Sweden.

The chip was small — about the size of a postage stamp — and loaded with thousands of tightly-packed rubidium-87 atoms. Scientists launched that chip into space aboard an unpiloted, 40-foot-long (12 meters) rocket, then bombarded it with lasers until the atoms inside it cooled to minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 273.15 degrees Celsius) — a fraction of a fraction of a degree above absolute zero, the coldest possible temperature in nature.

Continue reading… “Scientists create a rare fifth form of matter in space for the first time ever”

cutting edge, Inventions, Record Breaker

At 10 trillion frames per second, this camera captures light in slow motion

IMG_9471

Light is the fastest thing in the universe, so trying to catch it on the move is necessarily something of a challenge. We’ve had some success, but a new rig built by Caltech scientists pulls down a mind-boggling 10 trillion frames per second, meaning it can capture light as it travels along — and they have plans to make it a hundred times faster.

Understanding how light moves is fundamental to many fields, so it isn’t just idle curiosity driving the efforts of Jinyang Liang and his colleagues — not that there’d be anything wrong with that either. But there are potential applications in physics, engineering, and medicine that depend heavily on the behavior of light at scales so small, and so short, that they are at the very limit of what can be measured.

You may have heard about billion- and trillion-FPS cameras in the past, but those were likely “streak cameras” that do a bit of cheating to achieve those numbers.

Continue reading… “At 10 trillion frames per second, this camera captures light in slow motion”

Aviation, Record Breaker, Transportation, Travel

18 hours in the air: The world’s longest commercial flight is brand new, and it’s just about to land in New York. Here’s what flying it is like

IMG_9436

Nearly 20 hours in the air. What’s that like, and why would you even do it?

In a few hours, Singapore Airlines Flight 22 is scheduled to touch down at Newark Liberty International Airport, after a nearly 18 hour trip from Singapore.

It’s the longest scheduled commercial flight in history, on a route that the airline already tried once before–and yet failed to turn into a stable, profitable route.

Continue reading… “18 hours in the air: The world’s longest commercial flight is brand new, and it’s just about to land in New York. Here’s what flying it is like”

Aviation, Breakthrough Thinking, new technology, Record Breaker, Science & Technology News

Record-breaking Perlan 2 glider soars ever closer to the edge of space

IMG_8606

The Perlan 2 glider in action during a record-breaking flight last week.

Airbus’ Perlan 2 glider is continuing to push the limits of engineless flight, hitting a succession of record altitudes throughout the last week, culminating in a unprecedented 76,000-ft (23,000-m) climb on Sunday.

The overarching objective of the Perlan project is to harness what are known as stratospheric mountain waves to soar upwards to the edge of space without using an engine. These powerful airstreams are created when winds collide with tall mountain ranges and are diverted upwards.

The Perlan 2 engineless glider is built to leverage these waves with an ultralight construction that tips the scales at just 1,100 lb (500 kg) when empty, and a generous wingspan of 84 ft (27 m). Following its maiden flight in Oregon in 2015, when it reached an altitude of 5,000 ft (1,524 m) after being released from its towplane, the team promptly set its sights on far, far greater heights.

Continue reading… “Record-breaking Perlan 2 glider soars ever closer to the edge of space”

DaVinci Institute, Money Talk, Record Breaker, Tom Frey

Will we ever have trillionaires?

21st Annual HRC National Dinner

Do you know what you’d do with a trillion dollars? Would you buy a fleet of private jets or dune buggies or maybe dine on gold-plated chicken wings ? Or would you just withdraw a huge pile of cash and burn it for fun ?

Some sums of money are so large, they defy imagination: a trillion dollars is just shy of Mexico’s gross domestic product. So, for some perspective: to accrue a billion dollars on the median US household income of just under $60,000 would take more than 16,000 years, assuming you spent none of it. To make a trillion would take you over 16 million years.

Apple recently became the first US-listed company with a market value of $1 trillion . So how long will it be before an individual passes the same milestone, and what will they have to do to get so filthy rich?

Continue reading… “Will we ever have trillionaires?”

Big Data, new technology, Record Breaker

Move over, China: U.S. is again home to the world’s speediest supercomputer

IMG_7311

Summit, the world’s fastest supercomputer, is made up of rows of black refrigerator-size units that weigh a total of 340 tons.

The United States just won bragging rights in the race to build the world’s speediest supercomputer.

For five years, China had the world’s fastest computer, a symbolic achievement for a country trying to show that it is a tech powerhouse. But the United States retook the lead thanks to a machine, called Summit, built for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

Continue reading… “Move over, China: U.S. is again home to the world’s speediest supercomputer”

Discover the Hidden Patterns of Tomorrow with Futurist Thomas Frey
Unlock Your Potential, Ignite Your Success.

By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.

Learn More about this exciting program.