World’s first ultrasonic tractor beam can lift and transport objects

tractor-beams

Holograms are images that seem to jump out of a flat surface, full of depth that you can experience through perspective changes and parallax cues. The three-dimensional effect that a hologram creates comes from the three dimensional light field that’s created when photons diffract through the interference pattern on a holographic plate. It’s essentially a structure made of light that gets projected out into space when the seemingly random pattern of features on the plate interact with each other.

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World’s thinnest lightbulb developed using graphene

worldsthinnest
A postdoctoral research scientist, Young Duck Kim,  has led a team of scientists from  Columbia, Seoul National University (SNU), and Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS) that have demonstrated for the first time ever an on-chip visible light source using graphene, an atomically thin and perfectly crystalline form of carbon, as a filament.

New LED light technology sheds light on the future of food

led lights

LED growing lights, delivering sunlight whatever the weather.

This century, the challenges of growing enough food to feed the world have grown more severe. We need to feed more people with limited agricultural land and resources. We need to make better use of land, light and logistics for an increasingly urban population. And we need to incorporate zero-waste and low-energy technologies into the task of food production. (Video)

 

 

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Scientists discover a way to create matter from light

light

Scientists discovered a technique that should produce electrons and positrons by colliding two sets of super-energetic photons.

For a long time, scientists have theorized that you can create matter from light by colliding photons. Proving that theory has been a different story — you need the right high-energy particles to even think of trying. However, it looks like that once-impossible dream is close to becoming reality.

 

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Simple device designed to pull sunlight down to dark city streets

urban lighting

A plastic panel that can harvest light when it hangs off the edge of a rooftop, redirecting sunshine down into dark urban streets below.

Cities keep getting taller as they run out of buildable space.  A record number of skyscrapers are planned in London, places like Bangkok and Panama City have dozens of new towers under construction, and Mumbai is building more skyscrapers than anywhere else in the world.

 

 

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Flexible materials could provide new ways to control sound and light

control-of-waves

A new wrinkle in the control of waves.

Flexible, layered materials textured with nanoscale wrinkles could provide a new way of controlling the wavelengths and distribution of waves, whether of sound or light. The new method, developed by researchers at MIT, could eventually find applications from nondestructive testing of materials to sound suppression, and could also provide new insights into soft biological systems and possibly lead to new diagnostic tools.

 

 

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‘Li-Fi’ – A plan to turn every lightbulb into an ultra-fast alternative to Wi-Fi

Li-Fi doesn’t work in the dark or outdoors, but it only has to be a supplement to existing wireless networks to be valuable.

The more popular wireless networks become the slower they are. Fudan University researchers in Shanghai have just become the latest to demonstrate a technology that transmits data as light instead of radio waves, which gets around the congestion issue and could be ten times faster than traditional Wi-Fi.

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Researchers demonstrate new method for harvesting energy from light

Hybrid optoelectronic nanostructures with controlled variation in photoconduction properties.

University of Pennsylvania reasearchers have demonstrated a new mechanism for extracting energy from light, a finding that could improve technologies for generating electricity from solar energy and lead to more efficient optoelectronic devices used in communications.

 

 

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Light completely stopped for 1 minute inside a crystal

This breakthrough could lead to the creation of long-range quantum networks.

University of Darmstadt scientists in Germany have stopped light for one minute. Light is usually the fastest thing in the known universe and travels at 300 million meters per second, but was stopped dead still inside a crystal for one full minute. This effectively creates light memory, where the image being carried by the light is stored in crystals. Beyond being utterly cool, this breakthrough could lead to the creation of long-range quantum networks — and perhaps, tantalizingly, this research might also give us some clues on accelerating light beyond the universal speed limit.

 

 

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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.