Science Daily January 21, 2021 Researchers at Michigan Technological University studied the five Laurentian Great Lakes bordering the U.S. and Canada; the three African Great Lakes, Tanganyika, Victoria, and Malawi; Lake Baikal in Russia; and Great Bear and Great Slave lakes in Canada. These 11 lakes hold more than 50% of the surface freshwater that millions of people and countless other creatures rely on. The rate of carbon fixation, that is the rate at which the algae photosynthesize, indicates change in the whole lake and that has ramifications all the way up the food chain, from the zooplankton to the […]
Author Archives: Hema Viswanath
Top 10 Science and Technology Inventions for the Week of January 15, 2021
01. Studying chaos with one of the world’s fastest cameras 02. Electrically switchable qubit can tune between storage and fast calculation modes 03. Nanosheet-based electronics could be one drop away 04. New state of matter in one-dimensional quantum gas 05. Researchers report quantum-limit-approaching chemical sensing chip 06. Scientists tame photon-magnon interaction 07. Trapping light without back reflections 08. Using electricity to increase the amount of data that can be stored by DNA 09. Bound-charge engineering: A new strategy to develop nanowire transistors 10. The changing paradigm of next-generation semiconductor memory development And others… 10 Exciting Engineering Milestones to Look for […]
10 Exciting Engineering Milestones to Look for in 2021
IEEE Spectrum January 7, 2021 According to the IEEE Spectrum the following areas may make significant progress in 2021: A Shining Light – Care222 lamp modules, Quantum Networking, Wind power, Driverless Race Cars, Robots Below, Mars or Bust, Stopping Deep fakes, Faster Data, Your Next TV, Brain Scans Everywhere…read more.
Bound-charge engineering: A new strategy to develop nanowire transistors
Phys.org January 13, 2021 Low-dimensional materials can have a relatively small number of free charges and weak screening compared to 3-D materials. This screening is especially crucial for the development of tunnel field-effect transistors, which heavily rely on the quantum tunneling of electrons across junctions. By atomistic quantum transport simulations researchers in Canada show how bound charges can be engineered at interfaces of Si and low- oxides to strengthen screening. To avoid compromising gate control, low- and high- oxides are used in conjunction. They demonstrated that in Si nanowire tunnel field-effect transistors bound charge engineering increases the on-state current by […]
Calculations Show It’ll Be Impossible to Control a Super-Intelligent AI
Science Alert January 14, 2021 Superintelligence is a hypothetical agent that possesses intelligence far surpassing that of the brightest and most gifted human minds. Considering recent advances in machine intelligence, several scientists, philosophers, and technologists predict potentially catastrophic risks entailed by such an entity. An international team of researchers (Spain, Germany, USA – UC San Diego, Chile) trace the origins and development of the neo-fear of superintelligence, and some of the major proposals for its containment. They argue that total containment is, in principle, impossible, due to fundamental limits inherent to computing itself. Assuming that superintelligence will contain a program […]
The changing paradigm of next-generation semiconductor memory development
Nanowerk January 12, 2021 It has been reported that spins are formed inside a nanomagnet if electric current is applied to the nanomagnet. There have been no studies on the physical results of these spins. Researchers in South Korea have established a theoretical system by developing a spin diffusion equation that describes the spin conductance in magnetic materials. They discovered that when the spins formed by electric current is emitted to the outside, only the sign is opposite to that of the spins injected from the outside, and the effects are the same. Therefore, the directions of the N pole […]
Creating Silicon Valley 2.0
IEEE Spectrum January 12, 2021 Silicon Valley’s magical concentration of talent, capital, and culture in a single place has led to decades of unparalleled wealth creation. This spectacular success has induced attempts to emulate it in such enclaves as Silicon Mountain (one in the African nation of Cameroon, and another in the U.S. state of Colorado), Silicon Hills (Texas), Silicon Desert (Arizona), and many more. These seedlings may indeed grow to become forests, but the ingredients are there for even more promising transformations—metamorphoses that would bring far greater resources together at abstracted, or virtual, focal points. According to the author […]
Electrically switchable qubit can tune between storage and fast calculation modes
Science Daily January 11, 2021 An international team of researchers (Switzerland, the Netherland) has created the qubits in the form of “hole spins” that can be switched from a stable idle mode to a fast calculation mode. The spins can be selectively coupled — via a photon, for example — to other spins by tuning their resonant frequencies. They can be coherently flipped from up to down in as little as a nanosecond allowing up to a billion switches per second. For their experiments, the researchers used a semiconductor nanowire made of silicon and germanium wire that has a diameter […]
Expert prognosis for the planet – we’re on track for a ghastly future
Science Daily January 13, 2021 An international team of researchers (Australia, USA – Stanford University, Virginia Tech, UC Berkeley, industry, Oregon State University, UCLA, Mexico) outlines clearly and unambiguously the likely future trends in biodiversity decline, mass extinction, climate disruption, planetary toxification, all tied to human consumption and population growth to demonstrate the near certainty that these problems will worsen over the coming decades, with negative impacts for centuries to come. It also explains the impact of political impotence and the ineffectiveness of current and planned actions to address the ominous scale of environmental erosion…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Nanosheet-based electronics could be one drop away
Nanowerk January 8, 2021 Researchers in Japan overcame the “coffee ring” effect of drop casting by controlled convection using a pipette and a hotplate. They found that dropping a solution containing 2D nanosheets with a simple pipette onto a substrate heated on a hotplate to a temperature of about 100°C, followed by removal of the solution, causes the nanosheets to come together in about 30 seconds to form a tile-like layer. They demonstrated controlled thermal convection by depositing particle solutions of titanium dioxide, calcium niobate, ruthenium oxide, and graphene oxide. They also tried different sizes and shapes of a variety […]