"It ends up being very difficult to make battery electric vehicles work in very cold conditions," University of California, Irvine professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and director of the Clean Energy Institute Jack Brouwer told the NYT. "You cannot charge a battery as fast or discharge a battery as fast if it’s cold. There’s no physical way of getting around." Read More
One solution could be a new open-source app that permits contact tracing for potential coronavirus infections while preserving the privacy of its users. Developed by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, TrackCOVID works by creating an anonymous graph of interactions. Every time a person gathers with others or goes to a public place, he or she can use the app to log contacts by either hosting or joining a checkpoint, which allows possible paths of virus transmission to be discovered.
Cyber-physical systems security researchers at the University of California, Irvine can disrupt the functioning of a power grid using about $50 worth of equipment tucked inside a disposable coffee cup. In a presentation delivered at the recent Usenix Security 2020 conference, Mohammad Al Faruque, UCI associate professor of electrical engineering & computer science, and his team revealed that the spoofing mechanism can generate a 32 percent change in output voltage, a 200 percent increase in low-frequency harmonics power and a 250 percent boost in real power from a solar inverter.
UC Irvine professor of electrical engineering and computer science Peter Burke has broken a Guinness World Record – for flying a drone halfway around the world. Burke and his team used cloud computing and the internet to fly the drone 11,440 miles, from Irvine to the island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean. Read More
A group of current and former University of California, Irvine students managed to fight back a group of hackers after they were targeted in a vicious and gruesome cyberattack, according to one graduate involved. … Alina Kim, a UCI computer science and engineering graduate, put her computer science and software engineering degrees to good use as she teamed together with other users to stop the hack. "If we banned an account in one server, it would ban them universally on all of our servers," said Kim.
A new study from researchers at the University of California, Irvine has reportedly found a link between disruptions to sleep cycles and the onset of Alzheimer’s.
Published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, the study analyzed the overall cognitive abilities of laboratory mice subjected to jet lag-like conditions by regularly shortening their awake time schedules.
An app that has the potential to trace the path of COVID-19, while also maintaining the identity of the individuals who use it, is in the works at the University of California, Irvine. Instead of focusing on who contracts it, the app records that various places the virus itself presents itself, said junior specialist Tyler Ysaka, one of the co-creators of TrackCOVID. … "I tried to think about a design where you really don't keep up with the people as much as possible. You just keep up with the paths that the virus could take," Yasaka said.
The Advanced Power and Energy Program at the University of California, Irvine, joined the U.S. Department of Energy, KB Home, SunPower, Southern California Edison and Schneider Electric on May 22 to officially open the novel microgrid communities located in the Shadow Mountain master plan in Menifee, California.
Tirtha Banerjee, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Irvine, and co-author of the study, explained this study was accomplished by comparing data from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection between 1920-1999 to current wildfire data between 2000-2019. “CALFIRE data show that each new year of the 21st century has been a record-breaker in terms of wildfire damage in California,” Banerjee said. Read More
The National Academy of Inventors has named two University of California, Irvine researchers as fellows. Guann-Pyng (G.P.) Li, a pioneer in the development of microelectronics for advanced health and sustainable energy applications, and David Reinkensmeyer, who combines robotics and neuroscience to create devices to help people with movement rehabilitation after neurological injury, are among 162 academic inventors made fellows by the NAI this year.
