Since graphite—the dark material used in regular old pencils—and diamonds are both made from carbon, it’s technically feasible to turn the former into the latter. You just need to apply a little pressure—about 150,000 times what the atmosphere on Earth’s surface is like. But researchers at Stanford University claim to have found a shortcut.
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In the summer of 1971, on the campus of one of the nation’s top universities and under the supervision of a faculty member, 11 students tortured 10 others over a six-day period, all in the interest of "science."
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The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is one of those places that makes magic
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Ford is teaming up with the brainy folks at MIT and Stanford University to work on self-driving cars. MIT will focus on technology that anticipates movement by pedestrians and other vehicles, while Stanford will work on sensors that let autonomous vehicles see around obstacles. [Ford via PhysOrg]
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Ford has worked out a new automated driving research project with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Stanford University, where it will continue from where the automated Ford Fusion Hybrid research vehicle left off (which was also unveiled last month, actually), and the combined teams will work on solutions that will hopefully kiss goodbye to a number of technical challenges that have proven to difficult to solve where automated driving is concerned, until now.
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Ford’s New Automated Driving Research Projects In The Pipeline original content from Ubergizmo. 
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In the race to create a better battery, scientists have gazed longingly at silicon, prized for its ability to hold copious energy during charging. The material has a significant drawback, however: it likes to expand during said charging, causing it to eventually crack and become useless. However, scientists at Stanford’s SLAC laboratory have developed silicon electrodes that repair themselves, inspired by — of all things — the latest research into robotic skin. They created a silicon polymer with weak chemical bonds which attract each other when the material cracks, allowing it to regain its shape in a few hours (as pictured above). The team managed a respectable 100 discharge cycles with a battery that used the material, a promising start but still far from their goal of 3,000 cycles for an electric vehicle. You can add that to the growing pile of promising battery tech that may amount to something, some day — but at least the odds keep getting better.
Filed under: Misc, Peripherals, Alt
Via: Forbes
Source: Nature
The problem with lithium ion batteries is that the more discharge cycles you put them through, the less efficient the negative electrode becomes at holding electrons. This just won’t do in our mobile future, so researchers at Stanford University have developed a battery that actually heals itself. It’s nearly alive.
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Particle accelerators range in size from massive to compact, but researchers from Stanford University and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have created one that’s downright miniscule. What you see above is a specially patterned glass chip that’s smaller than a grain of rice, but unlike a broken Coke bottle, it’s capable of accelerating electrons at a rate that’s roughly 10 times greater than the SLAC linear accelerator. Taken to its full potential, researchers envision the ability to match the accelerating power of the 2-mile long SLAC linear accelerator with a system that spans just 100 feet.
For a rough understanding of how this chip works, imagine electrons that are brought up to near-light speed and then concentrated into a tiny channel within the glass chip that measures just a half-micron tall. From there, infrared laser light interacts with patterned, nanoscale ridges within the channel to create an electrical field that boosts the energy of the electrons.
In the initial demonstration, researchers were able to create an energy increase of 300 million electronvolts per meter, but their ultimate goal is to more than triple that. Curiously enough, these numbers aren’t even that crazy. For example, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin were able to accelerate electrons to 2 billion electronvolts over an inch with a technique known as laser-plasma acceleration, which involves firing a laser into a puff of gas. Even if Stanford’s chip-based approach doesn’t carry the same shock and awe, it seems the researchers are banking on its ability to scale over greater distances. Now if we can just talk them into strapping those lasers onto a few sharks, we’ll really be in business.
Filed under: Science
In the 1970s, civilian researchers at places like IBM, Stanford and MIT were developing encryption to ensure that digital data sent between businesses, academics and private citizens couldn’t be intercepted and understood by a third party. This concerned folks in the U.S. intelligence community who didn’t want to get locked out of potentially eavesdropping on anyone, regardless of their preferred communications method. Despite their most valiant efforts, agencies like the NSA ultimately lost out to commercial interests. But it wasn’t for lack of trying.
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Josh Duplan, age 22, just banked $25 million for an app no one really knows much about
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