Author: Sampada Bhatnagar

Sampada Bhatnagar

Can We Have Safer Car Designs With This New Material?

Can We Have Safer Car Designs With This New Material?

In a new paper published in ‘Materials & Design’, an engineering team from the University of Glasgow engineers have developed a new metamaterial, which is capable of higher impact resistance than its counterparts. But despite being lightweight, how is it able to integrate safety during car crashes?

Crux of the Matter

What Is The Material?
3-D-printed material, which is made by combining commonly-used plastics with carbon nanotubes. This makes it tougher and lighter than similar forms of aluminium.

So This Is A Metamaterial?
Yes. Metamaterials are artificially-created, to manifest properties which do not occur in the natural world. Eg: plate-lattices

How Are Plate-lattices Light?
They are cubic structures made from intersecting layers of plates, which have high stiffness and strength, despite having space between them. These spaces called porosity, make the plate-lattices lightweight.

Impact Resistance Offered?
Those designs were then subjected to a series of impact tests. Eg: Dropping a 16.7kg mass from a range of heights to determine their ability to withstand physical shocks.

What Were The Results?
Using specific energy absorption that determines a material’s ability to absorb energy relative to its mass, the polypropylene hybrid plate-lattice was found to withstand 19.9 joules per gram.

Would The Plastic Used Be Recyclable?
Yes, as per Dr. Shanmugam Kumar, Reader in Composites and Additive Manufacturing. “In a net-zero world, circular economic models will be central to making the planet more sustainable.”

Intersection of M&M
This output of Mechanics and materials can help develop safer, lighter and more durable structures for use in the automotive, aerospace, renewables and marine industries.

  • Generic futuristic car concept. Source: AI Trends

Curiopedia
  • The Hall–Héroult process is the major industrial process for smelting aluminium. Aluminium became much more available to the public with the Hall–Héroult process developed in 1886, and the mass production of aluminium led to its extensive use in industry and everyday life.
  • The year 1886 is regarded as the birth year of the modern car when German inventor Karl Benz patented his Benz Patent-Motorwagen. One of the first cars accessible to the masses was the 1908 Model T, an American car manufactured by the Ford Motor Company.
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2 Far Away Devices Work As A Single Quantum Machine

2 Far Away Devices Work As A Single Quantum Machine

Physicist, Severin Daiss and his team at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany, have linked devices in two separate laboratories to make them work as a single, rudimentary quantum machine. Let’s see how they achieved this feat!

Crux of the Matter

What Is A Quantum Computer?
A computer that performs faster calculations than regular machines, using qubits or quantum bits that are subatomic particles like electrons or photons.

Quantum Phenomena Behind It 

  • Superposition – The ability of a qubit to simultaneously be in multiple states.
  • Entanglement – When 2 members of a qubit pair exist in a single quantum state.

What Did They Do This Time?
Scientists suspended a rubidium atom inside an optical cavity i.e a pair of small mirrors facing each other 0.5 mm apart in a room.  

What Happened Next?
An identical setup was placed in another room. Then the team shot one photon at a time, alongside an optical fibre running towards the first cavity.

What Did This Lead To?
Photons bouncing back from that trap and being routed along another 60m of fibre to the second cavity. 

Voila, A Quantum Machine!
The photons’ interactions with the devices made the two atoms assume a shared quantum state, which helped perform quantum calculations, as if they were inside the same device.

Quantum Networking?
The experiment demonstrates how instead of making the devices larger and tedious to built, scientists could simply network several devices together.

Curiopedia
  • Quantum computing began in the early 1980s when physicist Paul Benioff proposed a quantum mechanical model of the Turing machine. Richard Feynman and Yuri Manin later suggested that a quantum computer had the potential to simulate things that a classical computer could not. In 1994, Peter Shor developed a quantum algorithm for factoring integers that had the potential to decrypt RSA-encrypted communications.
  • In computability theory, the Church–Turing thesis is a hypothesis about the nature of computable functions. It states that a function on the natural numbers can be calculated by an effective method if and only if it is computable by a Turing machine.
  • IBM’s Deep Blue was the first computer to defeat a world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, in 1997. The computer did so by examining 200 million possible moves per second. But, if it had been a quantum machine, it would have calculated 1 trillion moves per second, 4 trillion moves in 2 seconds, and 9 trillion moves in 3 seconds.
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As Indians ‘Koo’ And Not ‘Tweet’, Here’s All You Need To Know About Koo

As Indians ‘Koo’ And Not ‘Tweet’, Here's All You Need To Know About Koo

Becoming popular as the Indian alternative to Twitter, Koo is a Personal Updates and Opinion sharing micro-blogging platform. Let’s know more about why users are shifting to Koo and what does Twitter have to say in the given turn of events.

Crux of the Matter

Made In India App
In August last year, Koo – a microblogging platform like Twitter – won the Aatmanirbhar Bharat App Innovation Challenge. Since then, 3 million people have installed the app on both Android and iOS.

Why Is It In The News?
Recently, Ministers, Ministries and Departments like Digital India, Digi Locker, India Post, NIC, etc have signed up on Koo.

#BanTwitter Trends On Twitter Itself?
India’s MeitY wanted to block 250+ Twitter handles for inciting public disorder. But Twitter is delaying action, which has angered many users to boycott Twitter and shift to Koo.

Twitter’s Defense

Who Is Behind Koo?
Aprameya Radhakrishna is the CEO & co-founder, along with Mayank Bidawatka. Koo has also raised $4.1 million (₹30 crores) as part of its Series A funding.

Made By Indians, For Indians
It supports Indian languages Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, and Hindi as of now. Other mother tongues will be added soon.

Curiopedia
  • The “AatmaNirbhar Bharat App Innovation Challenge” was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on July 4. The challenge had entries for nine different categories namely Business, eLearning, Entertainment, Games, Health, News, Office and Work from Home, Others and Social.
  • Aprameya Radhakrishna also Co-founded ride-sharing startup TaxiForSure. He co-founded TaxiForSure with Raghunandan G. In 2015, the startup was sold to rival Ola.
  •  A major hack of Twitter on July 15, 2020, affected 130 high-profile accounts, both verified and unverified ones such as Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk; the hack allowed bitcoin scammers to send tweets via the compromised accounts that asked the followers to send bitcoin to a given public address, with the promise to double their money. Within a few hours, Twitter disabled tweeting and reset passwords from all verified accounts. 
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India Makes World’s First 3D Printed Rocket Engine

India Makes World’s First 3D Printed Rocket Engine

An Indian space startup, based out of Chennai called Agnikul Cosmos has successfully fired its 3D printed, higher stage semi-cryogenic rocket engine, Agnilet. Let’s see how they managed to achieve this feat.

Crux of the Matter

About The Making
Chennai based Agnikul Cosmos. CEO Srinath Ravichandran says, “This entire engine, Agnilet, is just one piece of hardware from start to finish and has zero assembled parts.”

What’s Special About Agnilet?
Agnilet has no complex assembly. Moreover, the turnaround time for the entire setup is less than 4 days.

How ‘Strong’ Is It?
It is capable of carrying 100 kg to low earth orbit, which is 700 km above the Earth’s surface.

Agnikul was also the first Indian startup to enter into a non-disclosure agreement with the Department of Space under the newly established IN-SPACe.

Is It The Only One Then?
Well, Hyderabad based Skyroot Aerospace revealed their 3D printed rocket engine last year, Called Dhawan-I, which will also be used to power their Vikram-II rocket.

Future Of 3D Printing
NASA is investing funds in advanced manufacturing for future lunar landers, that can have 3D printed parts, to reduce costs and production time. 

Curiopedia
  • Computer-aided design (CAD) is the use of computers to aid in the creation, modification, analysis, or optimization of a design. CAD software is used to increase the productivity of the designer, improve the quality of design, improve communications through documentation, and to create a database for manufacturing.
  • The general concept of and procedure to be used in 3D-printing was first described by Raymond F. Jones in his story, “Tools of the Trade,” published in the November 1950 issue of Astounding Science Fiction magazine. He referred to it as a “molecular spray” in that story.
  • In 1971, Johannes F Gottwald patented the Liquid Metal Recorder, US3596285A, a continuous Inkjet metal material device to form a removable metal fabrication on a reusable surface for immediate use or salvaged for printing again by remelting. This appears to be the first patent describing 3D printing with rapid prototyping and controlled on-demand manufacturing of patterns.
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Rise Of Reddit In The Recent

Rise Of Reddit In The Recent

Reddit has been in the news in recent. From airing a 5-second commercial at the Super Bowl to sending the GameStop stock skyrocketing, they seem to have done it all! The cherry on top is a $250 million investment. Let’s dive deeper into all these interesting incidents.

Crux of the Matter

One Pricey Bowl!
 In 2021, a 30-second in-game commercial spot during Super Bowl cost about $5.5 million. The same duration of time cost around $5.6 million back in 2020.

Reddit’s Static Ad
Reddit said it used up all of its marketing funds to get a 5 second Super Bowl ad slot. Their ad started with a video of cars followed by the following static image which many thought be a glitch.

The Reddit ad was among the most-searched Super Bowl commercials on Google on Sunday night. It received 270,000+ upvotes on Reddit as well.

Another Show Of Reddit’s Power
Members of the SubReddit r/WallStreetBets forum decided to send the GameStop stock skyrocketing last month in order to take on the short sellers that had bet against GameStop.

Read more about the GameStop Drama here.

Reddit Raises Money
Recently, the website raised $250 million in funding led by venture-capital firm Vy Capital, which took the social media company’s valuation to $6 billion.

Reddit aired a 5-second commercial that left the Super Bowl fans wondering if it was a technical glitch or an actual advertisement. Read about the details of that advertisement here.

Curiopedia
  • The Super Bowl is the second-largest day for U.S. food consumption, after Thanksgiving Day. In 2015, Super Bowl XLIX became the most-watched American television program in history with an audience of 114.4 million viewers. 
  • As of February 2021, Reddit ranks as the 18th-most-visited website in the world and 7th most-visited website in the US, according to Alexa Internet. About 42-49.3% of its user base comes from the United States.
  • The name “Reddit” is a play-on-words with the phrase “read it”, i.e., “I read it on Reddit.” According to Reddit, in 2019 there were approximately 430 million monthly users, who are known as “Redditors.”
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