Science Daily April 1, 2019 To prevent ice formation on aircraft during flight, current systems utilize the heat generated by burning fuel, but these high-temperature, fuel-dependent systems cannot be used on the proposed all-electric, temperature-sensitive materials of next-generation aircraft. An international team of researchers (China, USA – Iowa State University) has shown that equipment important in controlling landing and takeoff can double-up to control icing based on plasma acutators. When high voltage is applied across electrodes most is converted into heat and the rest is converted into an induced flow or ionic wind over the actuator, so the plasma actuator […]
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Signals from distant lightning could help secure electric substations
Science Daily February 26, 2019 To monitor the power grid substation activities researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a radio frequency-based distributed intrusion detection system (RFDIDS) that utilizes a radio receiver as a diagnostic tool to provide air-gapped, independent, and verifiable information about the radio emissions from substation components, particularly at low frequencies. The simulation and experimental results verified that four types of diagnostic information can be extracted from radio emissions of power system substation circuits: i) harmonic content of the circuit current, ii) fundamental frequency of the circuit current, iii) impulsive signals from rapid circuit current […]
New Cryptography Must Be Developed and Deployed Now, Even Though a Quantum Computer That Could Compromise Today’s Cryptography Is Likely at Least a Decade Away, Says New Report
National Academies December 4, 2018 According to a NAS [Open Access] report it is still too early to be able to predict the time horizon for a practical quantum computer. The current research on quantum computing has clear implications for national security. Any entity that has a large-scale quantum computer could break today’s cryptography to read intercepted communications or stored data. Continued support from the U.S. to this field is imperative if the country wants to maintain its leadership position…read more.
Hybrid qubits solve key hurdle to quantum computing
Phys.org December 28, 2018 Single-spin qubits in semiconductor quantum dots hold promise for universal quantum computation. However, initialization and readout of a qubit is orders of magnitude slower than control. An international team of researchers (Japan, France, Germany, Switzerland) combined slow initializing single-spin qubit called a Loss-DiVincenzo qubit, which has very high control fidelity and a singlet-triplet qubit, which has quick initialization and read out, but quickly becomes decoherent. For the study they combined the two types with a type of quantum gate known as a controlled phase gate, which allowed spin states to be entangled between the qubits in […]
New attack could make website security captchas obsolete
Science Daily December 5, 2018 Using Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) an international team of researchers (China, UK) has created a captcha solver. A captcha synthesizer automatically generates synthetic captchas to learn a base solver, and then fine-tuning the base solver on a small set of real captchas using transfer learning. They evaluated their approach by applying it to 33 captcha schemes, including those used by popular websites. It outperformed state-of-the-art text-captcha solvers with higher accuracy. Their approach can solve a captcha within 0.05 second using a desktop GPU bypassing the advanced security features employed by most modern text captcha schemes…read […]
High-temperature electronics? That’s hot
Science Daily December 7, 2018 Commercial electronics operate between minus 40 and 85 degrees Celsius. A team of researchers in the US (Purdue University, UC Santa Cruz, Stanford University) created a material by blending a semiconductor, which can conduct electricity, and a conventional insulating polymer. They had to find the right ratio so that they merge nicely, and one doesn’t dominate the other. This results in an organized, interpenetrating network that allows the electrical charge to flow evenly throughout while holding its shape in extreme temperatures. The performance of these new polymer blend remained stable across a wide temperature range, […]
Top 10 Science and Technology Inventions for the Week of August 31, 2018
01. Enzyme can convert any blood into universally donated type O 02. Nanobot pumps destroy nerve agents 03. Quantum bugs, meet your new swatter 04. D-Wave demonstrates first large-scale quantum simulation of topological state of matter 05. Future information technologies: Nanoscale heat transport under the microscope 06. These lithium-ion batteries can’t catch fire because they harden on impact 07. Research team finds evidence of matter-matter coupling 08. Chemists make breakthrough on road to creating a rechargeable lithium-oxygen battery 09. Breaking down band structures 10. Bowtie-funnel combo best for conducting light; team found answer in simple equation And others… Big data and technology […]
Top 10 Science and Technology Innovations for the Week of August 10, 2018
01. Memristor based equation solver could cut energy used by 100 times for longer lasting smartphones 02. Quantum dot floating gates improve light-erasable memories 03. Physicists Tied Laser Beams into Knots 04. Switchable plasmonic routers controlled by external magnetic fields by using magneto-plasmonic waveguides 05. The ultimate combination: A 3D-printed optical deep learning network 06. Nanotube ‘rebar’ makes graphene twice as tough 07. Algorithms Help Power Grids Survive GPS Spoofs 08. Artificial intelligence can predict your personality … simply by tracking your eyes 09. The Defense Department has produced the first tools for catching deepfakes 10. Analysis Chronicles Changes in […]
Optical neural network demo
Science Daily July 28, 2018 Researchers at NIST stacked waveguides made of silicon nitride to form a three-dimensional grid with 10 inputs or “upstream” neurons each connecting to 10 outputs or “downstream” neurons, for a total of 100 receivers. They created software to automatically generate signal routing, with adjustable levels of connectivity between the neurons. Laser light was directed into the chip through an optical fiber routing each input to every output group, following a selected distribution pattern for light intensity or power. To evaluate the results, researchers made images of the output signals. The output was highly uniform, with […]
TechSight Snapshot Reports
While we are no longer providing contractor support to the Office of Net Technical Assessments (ONTA) of ASD(R&E) (now USDR&E), we are proud of the work we performed and are pleased to share some of the products that have been cleared for publicly release. Over the course of several months in 2017, we helped ONTA develop several bibliometric reports on key emerging technologies using their TechSight system. These TechSight Snapshot Reports were cleared for public release and sent to S&T News Bulletin readers and TechSight users on a monthly cycle. After receiving multiple inquiries about where these can be found, we decided to […]