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    Category Technology/Electronics

    Polymer Film Protects from Electromagnetic Radiation, Signal Interference

    February 23, 2021, Categories  Physics, Technology/Electronics

    One-dimensional TaSe3 nanowires used to fill an EMI-shielding polymer film. (Zahra Barani)

    As electronic devices saturate all corners of public and personal life, engineers are scrambling to find lightweight, mechanically stable, flexible, and easily manufactured materials that can shield humans from excessive electromagnetic radiation as well as prevent electronic devices from interfering with each other.

    In a breakthrough report published in Advanced Materials—the top journal in the field— engineers at the University of California, Riverside describe a flexible film using a quasi-one-dimensional nanomaterial filler that combines excellent electromagnetic shielding with ease of manufacture.

    “These novel films are promising for high-frequency communication technologies, which...

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    A System that Automatically Generates Comic Books from Movies and other Videos

    February 20, 2021, Categories  Physics, Technology/Electronics

    A system that automatically generates comic books from movies and other videos
    The overall pipeline of the researchers’ system. (a): Keyframe Extraction and Stylization. (b): Automatic Multi-Page Layout Framework, red, purple and green dotted boxes mean different groups. (c): Balloon Generation and Placement. In step (a), we perform keyframe selection and stylization to get the stylized keyframes of the input video frames. In step (b), we first obtain four layout parameters of the frames including region of interest, importance rank, semantic relation, and allocate the frames across different pages. Then, we perform the layout algorithm in [2] for multi-page layout. In step (c), we designed an emotion-aware model for balloon generation and placement. Credit: Yang et al.

    Over the past few years, computer scientists have created numerous computational techniques ...

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    This Robot Doesn’t Need any Electronics

    February 19, 2021, Categories  Physics, Technology/Electronics

    Image
    The robot’s walking process is driven by a series of valves. 

    Walking quadruped is controlled and powered by Pressurized Air. Engineers at the University of California San Diego have created a four-legged soft robot that doesn’t need any electronics to work. The robot only needs a constant source of pressurized air for all its functions, including its controls and locomotion systems.

    The team, led by Michael T. Tolley, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego, details its findings in the Feb. 17, 2021 issue of the journal Science Robotics.

    “This work represents a fundamental yet significant step towards fully-autonomous, electronicsfree walking robots,” said Dylan Drotman, a Ph.D...

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    Supercomputer Turns Back Cosmic Clock

    February 18, 2021, Categories  Technology/Electronics, Astronomy/Space

    Schematic diagram of the evolution of the Universe from the inflation (left) to the present (right). The “reconstruction method” winds back the evolution from right to left on this illustration to reproduce the primordial density fluctuations from the current galaxy distribution. (Credit: The Institute of Statistical Mathematics)

    Astronomers have tested a method for reconstructing the state of the early Universe by applying it to 4000 simulated universes using the ATERUI II supercomputer at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). They found that together with new observations the method can set better constraints on inflation, one of the most enigmatic events in the history of the Universe...

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