Physorg February 12, 2018 Bipolar effect of resistive switching (BERS) can be used for developing nonvolatile two-terminal memory cells, as well as for memristors. Researchers in Russia have shown that epitaxial fields that form on the surface of a single-crystalline substrate of strontium titanate can be used to create memristors for a new generation of computers. The innovation in this research is in applying the lithography which allows developing the technology for miniaturization of resistive memory elements…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Author Archives: Hema Viswanath
The USA is no longer guaranteed future military technology dominance
Next Big Future February 17, 2018 According to the IISS 2018 Military Balance, annual assessment of the military capabilities and defense economics of 171 countries, the West no longer has a monopoly on world-leading defense innovation and production or the funds to enable these. Indeed, China might be the one to leap ahead. For the past three decades, air dominance has been a key advantage for the US and its allies. This can no longer be assumed. The availability of affordable and competitive military technology will also be exported to other countries…read more.
Why even a moth’s brain is smarter than an AI
MIT Technology Review February 19, 2018 Some critical machine-learning mechanisms have no analogue in the natural world, where learning seems to occur in a different way. Researchers at the University of Washington have created an artificial neural network that mimics the structure and behavior of the olfactory learning system in Manduca sexta moths. Their model can robustly learn new odors, and their simulations of integrate-and-fire neurons match the statistical features of in vivo firing rate data. This work that could have significant implications for the design of synthetic neural networks that need to learn quickly…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
China will fortify islands with railguns, drones, missiles and stealthy planes
Next Big Future February 17, 2018 By 2022, China should have twenty fortified islands in the South China Sea. This will be up from about 7 to 12 today. China should have over fifty fortified islands by 2030. Dozens of man-made islands with railguns and planes will make it impossible for the US to defeat the defenses using conventional forces. The US would have to use nuclear weapons to overcome those defenses… read more.
Modeling Uncertainty Helps MIT’s Drone Zip Around Obstacles
IEEE Spectrum February 12, 2018 Researchers at MIT have developed a new motion planning framework called NanoMap, which uses a sequence of 3D snapshots to allow fast-moving (10 m/s) drones to safely navigate around obstacles even if they’re not entirely sure where they are. The key idea of NanoMap is to store a history of noisy relative pose transforms and search over a corresponding set of depth sensor measurements for the minimum-uncertainty view of a queried point in space… read more. Video.
Precision experiments reveal gaps in van der Waals theory
Science Daily February 16, 2018 An international team of researchers (Denmark, Japan) measured a single TiS2 crystal to show that the interlayer interactions are in fact stronger than theory indicates, and involve significant electron sharing. The outstanding agreement of the synchrotron diffraction data with theoretical calculations in describing the intralayer Ti-S interactions, supports the validity of these new-found differences for the long-range interactions across the interlayer gaps. The research contributes to the fundamental understanding of weak chemical bonding in 2D layered materials in general, and to the development of TMD materials… read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Researchers invented light-emitting nanoantennas based on halide perovskites
Nanowerk February 12, 2018 Using hybrid perovskite an international team of researchers (Russia, USA – UT Dallas, Australia) managed to combine a nanoantenna and a light source in a single nanoparticle. It can generate, enhance and route emission via excited resonant modes coupled with excitons. The study shows that combination of excitons with the Mie resonance in perovskite nanoparticles makes them efficient light sources at room temperature. In addition, the radiation spectrum of the nanoparticles can be changed by varying the anions in the composition of the material. The research makes the new nanoparticles a promising platform for creating compact […]
Smart Swarms Seek New Ways to Cooperate
Quanta Magazine February 14, 2018 Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are experimenting with flapping robots called “smarticles” which can’t move on their own. But when a lot of these objects are put together they start to work as a unit. Researchers are learning how to control these systems so that when the swarm comes together, its members can carry out complex behaviors without any centralized direction. Other efforts in the field of self-organizing robots include “droplet-size robots” being developed at the University of Colorado, “Kilobot swarms” at Harvard University, and “swarmanoids” out of a pioneering lab in Belgium… […]
Top 10 Science and Technology Innovations for the Week of 02/16/2018
01. Breakthrough in controlling light transmission 02. Worm ‘uploaded’ to computer and taught amazing tricks 03. Light controls two-atom quantum computation 04. Taking terahertz data links around the bend 05. Researchers help robots think and plan in the abstract 06. Using technology to detect hidden threats 07. The quantum internet has arrived (and it hasn’t) 08. Energy-efficient encryption for the internet of things 09. Cyberwarfare is taking to the skies, aboard drones 10. What causes ionic wind?
Breakthrough in controlling light transmission
Physorg February 8, 2018 A team of researchers in the US (UT Austin, City University of New York) has shown that a non-magnetic device free of an external power source can dramatically break transmission symmetry and realize efficient broadband isolation. Using two judiciously designed nonlinear resonators connected through a delay line, they showed that this is the minimal configuration for enabling low-loss one-way transmission over a broad bandwidth. The combined components, which were printed on a circuit board, formed a highly effective, fully passive isolator that provides excellent signal integrity… read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE