CuriouTech

German car manufacturer Audi has reportedly invented a carbon-neutral diesel fuel, made solely from water, carbon dioxide and renewable energy sources. And the crystal clear 'e-diesel' is already being used to power the Audi A8 owned by the country’s Federal Minister of Education and Research, Johanna Wanka. The creation of the fuel is a huge step forward for sustainable transport, but the fact that it’s being backed by an automotive giant is even more exciting. Audi has now set up a pilot plant in Dresden, Germany, operated by clean tech company Sunfire, which will pump out 160 litres of the synthetic diesel every day in the coming months. Their base product, which they’re calling 'blue crude' is created using a three-step process. The first step involves harvesting renewable energy from sources such as wind, solar and hydropower. They then use this energy to split water into oxygen and pure hydrogen, using a process known as reversible electrolysis. This hyd...

Three-dimensional holographic images are a mainstay in many sci-fi films. But in real life, we’ve struggled to achieve the same effect without the use of annoying 3D glasses. Now scientists from Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia have used a graphene-based material to create a full-colour, pop-up, 3D floating display - visible from a wide angle with the naked eye. The effect was created using a graphene oxide, and could be applied to the touch-screen surface of smartphones or watches, the authors Min Gu and Xiangping Li explain over at The Conversation. Holograms work by bending light off the screen in a carefully controlled way so that, instead of bouncing directly back into your eye, it makes it appear as though it's projected off a separate display. The Swinburne researchers were able to create the floating 3D display by tweaking the refractive index - the measure of how much light bends as it passes through a medium - of graphene...

Aerogels have long been one of those ‘gee whiz’ materials that gets people to take notice—watching a solid float on air tends to do that. To accomplish their remarkable feats, aerogels are essentially a gel in which the liquid component of the gel has been replaced with gas. We’ve seen them used in applications from “ invisibility cloaks ” to  oil spill remediation . Now researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have produced an aerogel out of graphene  that could have applications ranging from electronics to energy storage. Boosting the ‘gee whiz’ factor: the new material is produced through  3-D printing . In research published in  Nature Communications , the LLNL research team were able to produce a predetermined architecture for a graphene-based aerogel, which previously had always been random, by using 3-D printing. By being able to define the architecture, the researchers were able to improve the material’s performance. ...

A new study has narrowed the theoretical speed limit for how quickly quantum computers of the future will be able to transmit and process information. Quantum computing systems have the potential to perform certain calculations exponentially faster than classical computers. As such, they could offer enormous advantages for solving complex problems, like searching expansive databases, cracking modern encryption, and modelling atomic-scale systems for drug development. The fundamental building blocks of these computers are quantum bits, or qubits. While several candidate particles exist, most - if not all - qubits are single atoms. Information is stored on the magnetic spin of these atomic particles, which can point either "up" or "down" - states that are considered equivalent to the 0 and 1 of binary code. Importantly, qubits can harness a strange quantum phenomenon called superposition, which allows the spin to exist in both states simultaneously. A scal...

MIT physicists have developed a new tabletop particle detector that is able to identify single electrons in a radioactive gas. As the gas decays and gives off electrons, the detector uses a magnet to trap them in a magnetic bottle. A radio antenna then picks up very weak signals emitted by the electrons, which can be used to map the electrons’ precise activity over several milliseconds. The team worked with researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the University of Washington, the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), and elsewhere to record the activity of more than 100,000 individual electrons in krypton gas. The majority of electrons observed behaved in a characteristic pattern: As the radioactive krypton gas decays, it emits electrons that vibrate at a baseline frequency before petering out; this frequency spikes again whenever an electron hits an atom of radioactive gas. As an electron ping-pongs against multiple atoms in the detector, its energy a...

United Launch Alliance (ULA) has been working on a secretive new rocket program for a while now, and they’ve finally settled on a name — it’s the Vulcan. The announcement date seemed planned to take some wind out of SpaceX’s sails, as the company was supposed to launch a rocket yesterday. That Falcon 9 mission was scrubbed because of weather , but in a few years we could all be waiting for clouds to clear for a ULA Vulcan to launch. ULA is a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing formed in December 2006 to provide commercial launch services to the Department of Defense and NASA. The company has been working on a number of government contracts over the years, but all of its launches have been done with pre-existing Atlas V and Delta IV Heavy rockets. The Vulcan will be ULA’s first completely in-house rocket design, akin to the SpaceX Falcon 9 — though the two will be very different vehicles. So why go to the trouble of designing a new rocket? F...

CuriouTech: Gold Nanotubes To Cure Cancer : Scientists has found out that Gold nanotubes can be used in fighting Cancer; internal nanoprobes for high-resolution imaging; drug deliver...