Nanowerk April 12, 2019 An international team of researchers (USA – Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, UC Berkeley, industries, UC San Diego, University of Miami, Duke University, Purdue University, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, Canada, Russia, Australia) predicts that exponential progress in nanotechnology, nanomedicine, AI, and computation will lead this century to the development of a “Human Brain/Cloud Interface” (B/CI), that connects neurons and synapses in the brain to vast cloud-computing networks in real time. According to the researchers the B/CI system mediated by neuralnanorobotics could empower individuals with instantaneous access to all cumulative human knowledge available in […]
Graphene coating could help prevent lithium battery fires
Science Daily April 9, 2019 A team of researchers in the US (University of Illinois, Texas A&M, Argonne National Laboratory) has shown that an atomically thin layer of reduced graphene oxide can suppress oxygen release from LixCoO2 particles and improve their structural stability. They showed that the reduction of Co species from the graphene‐coated samples is delayed when compared with bare cathodes, the rGO layers could suppress O2 formation more effectively due to the strong COcathode bond formation at the interface of rGO/LCO where low coordination oxygens exist. This investigation uncovers a reliable approach for hindering the oxygen release reaction […]
The cost of computation
Science Daily April 8, 2019 An international team of researchers (USA – Arizona State University, Santa Fe Institute, Austria) reviews some of the recent work on the ‘stochastic thermodynamics of computation. After reviewing the salient parts of information theory, computer science theory, and stochastic thermodynamics, they summarize what has been learned about the entropic costs of performing a broad range of computations, extending from bit erasure to loop-free circuits to logically reversible circuits to information ratchets to Turing machines. These results reveal new, challenging engineering problems for how to design computers to have minimal thermodynamic costs. They also allow us […]
Biosensor Could Scale New Sensitivity Heights
Optical Society of America News April 4, 2019 An international team of researchers (Switzerland, Australia) combined dielectric metasurfaces and hyperspectral imaging to develop an ultrasensitive label-free analytical platform for biosensing. The technique can acquire spatially resolved spectra from millions of image pixels and use smart data-processing tools to extract high-throughput digital sensing information at the unprecedented level of less than three molecules per μm2. Spectral data retrieval from a single image without using spectrometers enabled paving the way for portable diagnostic applications. This combination of nanophotonics and imaging optics extends the capabilities of dielectric metasurfaces to analyse biological entities and […]
Bionics: Electric view in murky waters
Science Daily April 9, 2019 African Elephantnose fish use two different types of electro-receptors for active electrolocation. One only measures the intensity of the signal, the other the waveform of the pulse. Researchers in Germany showed that the fish uses the ratio of the two readings to identify its prey. This creates “electric colors” analogous to visual colors perceived by the human eye, but through electrical signals instead of visible light. They introduced an image cue, called the ‘electric outline’, which provided information resembling a target’s optical contour. The results indicate that bio-inspired electric imaging principles provide promising cues for […]
Top 10 Science and Technology Inventions for the Week of April 12, 2019
01. Engineers develop novel techniques to trick object detection systems 02. High-capacity transmission over multi-core fiber link with 19-core optical amplifier 03. Researchers develop way to control speed of light, send it backward 04. Skyrmions could provide next generation data storage 05. A new type of airplane wing that adapts midflight could change air travel 06. Copper-based alternative for next-generation electronics 07. Toward novel computing and fraud detection technologies with on-demand polymers 08. The Transpolar Drift is faltering: Sea ice is now melting before it can leave the nursery 09. Low-bandwidth radar technology provides improved detection of objects 10. Mystery […]
The Transpolar Drift is faltering: Sea ice is now melting before it can leave the nursery
Science Daily April 2, 2019 The dramatic loss of ice in the Arctic is influencing sea-ice transport across the Arctic Ocean. Researchers in Germany report that today only 20 percent of the sea ice that forms in the shallow Russian marginal seas of the Arctic Ocean actually reaches the Central Arctic, where it joins the Transpolar Drift; the remaining 80 percent of the young ice melts before it has a chance to leave its ‘nursery’. Before 2000, that number was only 50 percent. This trend has been confirmed by the outcomes of sea-ice thickness measurements taken in the Fram Strait. […]
Toward novel computing and fraud detection technologies with on-demand polymers
Science Daily April 1, 2019 Researchers in France have constructed synthetic polymers with fully controlled primary structures using solid-phase iterative chemistry, a process that was originally developed to make peptides. In the last few years, the team has been making precisely tailored polymers for data-storage applications. In these polymers, each monomer or subunit stands for a specific piece of information. So far, the researchers have created tiny data storage devices made of layered sequence-coded polymers. Recently observed that the molecular bits that they contain occupy much smaller volumes than do the nucleotides in DNA. They believe that within the next […]
Skyrmions could provide next generation data storage
Science Daily April 1, 2019 Reconfigurable, ordered matter offers great potential for future low-power computer memory by storing information in energetically stable configurations. An international team of researchers (UK, USA – University of Colorado) describe stable, high-degree multi-skyrmion configurations where an arbitrary number of antiskyrmions are contained within a larger skyrmion called skyrmion bags. They have demonstrated the concept experimentally and numerically in liquid crystals and numerically in micromagnetic simulations either without or with magnetostatic effects. They found the skyrmion bags to act like single skyrmions in pairwise interaction and under the influence of current in magnetic materials. The finding […]
Robots to autocomplete Soldier tasks
Science Daily April 4, 2019 The Army envisions a future battlefield wrought with teams of Soldiers and autonomous systems. As part of this future vision, the Army is looking to create technologies that can predict states and behaviors of the individual to create a more optimized team. A team of researchers in the US (ARL, Columbia University, SUNY Buffalo, University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon University, UC Santa Barbara) is looking at ways the dynamics and architecture of the human brain may be coordinated to predict such behaviors and consequently optimize team performance. While this research focuses on a single person, […]