Ericsson and PowerLight Technologies have developed a method to send power wirelessly to 5G base stations using lasers. The power lasers can send 480 watts over 300 metres and are expecting to upscale to 1,000 watts over 1km.
Researchers at Northwestern University have developed a flying microchip sensor device. The microfliers are modelled on how maple trees spread their seed and fly in a slow stable rotation when moving through the air. The tiny devices include sensors, a power source, data storage and antennae for wireless communication. The goal is to be able to use the microfliers to sense the environment for contamination monitoring, population surveillance, or disease tracking.
Researchers at MIT and Maynooth University have created a telecoms chip that can universally error correct noise found during transmission of data on a network without needing to know the structure of the noise beforehand. Hat tip to the Maynooth part of the team who I presume had dibs on naming the chip GRAND (Guessing Random Additive Noise Decoding)!
The U.S. Navy have created a crowd control device that can record speech and project it back at a target within milliseconds, which results in so much confusion that the target person stops talking. The acoustic hailing and disruption (AHAD) device can also project sound at a wall so that it seem the sound originates from the wall.
Quanta Magazine published an interesting article on the new frontiers of graph theory within computer science where big data is starting the stretch the capabilities of regular graphs in favour of, in some circumstances, hyper-graphs and higher order interactions to better model and analyse relationships within the highly connected data.
If you have an old iPhone (7+), you can turn off Apple's built-in performance degradation by setting the device location to France. Apple had to pay a fine & stop the policy in France for slowing down older phones, whereas in other countries they were able to avoid this by reducing the price of replacement batteries.
A team at Malmö University have developed a new soundproofing screw that, when used between dry wall panels and wooden studs, can reduce through-the-wall sound levels by 9 Db!
A study of freely volunteered data from fitness trackers of 243 people with COVID was compared with the tracker data of 641 sick people without COVID. The study showed that it takes the body two to three months to recover from COVID-19. Resting heart rate takes the longest to return to baseline after two to three months, with step count returning to normal levels at around day 24.
Melvin Conway stated in 1968 that "Any organisation that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organisation’s communication structure.". Andreas Wolff published an interesting post on CTO Craft about using an inverse Conway Law when designing the struture of an organisation.
