A who’s who of CEOs, engineers and scientists from the technology industry—including Google DeepMind, the XPRIZE Foundation and Elon Musk—have signed a pledge to “neither participate in nor support the development, manufacture, trade, or use of lethal autonomous weapons”. Released in Stockholm at the 2018 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), the world’s leading…
New Ultrathin Material for Splitting Water Could Make Hydrogen Production Cheaper
UNSW Sydney chemists have invented a new, cheap catalyst for splitting water with an electrical current to efficiently produce clean hydrogen fuel. The technology is based on the creation of ultrathin slices of porous metal-organic complex materials coated onto a foam electrode, which the researchers have unexpectedly shown is highly conductive of electricity and active…
Researchers Use Nature’s Weaving Formula to Engineer Advanced Functional Materials
For the first time, UNSW biomedical engineers have woven a ‘smart’ fabric that mimics the sophisticated and complex properties of one nature’s ingenious materials, the bone tissue periosteum. Having achieved proof of concept, the researchers are now ready to produce fabric prototypes for a range of advanced functional materials that could transform the medical, safety…
Swarm of Satellites to Explore Earth’s Shield from ISS
A flotilla of 50 small satellites – known as cubesats and weighing an average of two kilos each – will be launched from the International Space Station in the European-led as QB50 mission to explore the little-understood region above Earth known as the thermosphere. The QB50 cubesats have been built by 48 universities and research…
In Cities, Flooding and Rainfall Extremes to Rise as Climate Changes
Cities face harsher, more concentrated rainfall as climate change not only intensifies storms, but draws them into narrower bands of more intense downpours, UNSW engineers have found. This has major implications for existing stormwater infrastructure, particularly in large cities, which face higher risks of flash flooding. In the latest issue of Geophysical Research Letters, doctoral…
Atoms Placed Precisely in Silicon Can Act As Quantum Simulator
In a proof-of-principle experiment, researchers at UNSW Australia have demonstrated that a small group of individual atoms placed very precisely in silicon can act as a quantum simulator, mimicking nature – in this case, the weird quantum interactions of electrons in materials. The publication of this latest advance towards the development of a silicon-based quantum…
Nearby Star Hosts Closest Alien Planet In The ‘Habitable Zone’
UNSW Australia astronomers have discovered the closest potentially habitable planet found outside our solar system so far, orbiting a star just 14 light years away. The planet, more than four times the mass of the Earth, is one of three that the team detected around a red dwarf star called Wolf 1061. “It is a…