High-speed graphene transistors achieve world-record 300 GHz
UCLA researchers have fabricated the fastest graphene transistor to date, using a new fabrication process with a nanowire as a self-aligned gate.
Self-aligned gates are a key element in modern transistors, which are semiconductor devices used to amplify and switch electronic signals. Gates are used to switch the transistor between various states, and self-aligned gates were developed to [...]
New ’smart materials’ process promises to revolutionize manufacturing of products
A new “smart materials” process — Multiple Memory Material Technology — developed by University of Waterloo engineering researchers promises to revolutionize the manufacture of diverse products such as medical devices, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), printers, hard drives, automotive components, valves and actuators.
The breakthrough technology will provide engineers with much more freedom and creativity by enabling far [...]
Edible Nanostructures
Sugar, salt, alcohol and a little serendipity led a Northwestern University research team to discover a new class of nanostructures that could be used for gas storage and food and medical technologies. And the compounds are edible. The porous crystals are the first known all-natural metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) that are simple to make. Most other MOFs [...]
Caltech chemists develop simple technique to visualize atomic-scale structures
Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have devised a new technique — using a sheet of carbon just one atom thick — to visualize the structure of molecules.
The technique, which was used to obtain the first direct images of how water coats surfaces at room temperature, can also be used to image a [...]
Building large-scale quantum computers
Dr. Suzanne Gildert will speak on “Building large-scale quantum computers: Fundamentals, technology and applications” at Teleplace, September 4, 10 a.m. PST.
“The talk will explain why quantum computers are useful, and also dispel some of the myths about what they can and cannot do,” she says. “It will address some of the practical ways in which we can [...]
God did not create the universe: Stephen Hawking
God did not create the universe, says Stephen Hawking in a new book, The Grand Design, co-authored with U.S. physicist Leonard Mlodinow (to be released Sept. 7).
He said the 1992 discovery of a planet orbiting another star other than the Sun helped deconstruct the view of the father of physics Isaac Newton that the universe could not [...]
New evidence that fat cells are not just dormant storage depots for calories
Scientists are reporting new evidence that the fat tissue — far from being a dormant storage depot for surplus calories — is an active organ that sends chemical signals to other parts of the body, perhaps increasing the risk of heart attacks, cancer, and other diseases.
They are reporting discovery of 20 new hormones and other [...]
Supercomputing on a cell phone
Researchers in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering have developed software that can simulate complicated physical phenomena — how cracks form in building materials, for instance, or fluids flow through irregular channels — on an ordinary smartphone.
Although the current version of the software is for demonstration purposes, the work could lead to applications that let engineers [...]
Personalized energy systems for heating, cooling, and powering cars
MIT researchers have developed a new concept of personalized energy systems, in which individual homes and small businesses produce their own energy for heating, cooling and powering cars.
“Our goal is to make each home its own power station,” said study leader Daniel Nocera, Ph.D of MIT. “We’re working toward development of ‘personalized’ energy units that [...]
Apple TV Is the One You Date, Google TV Is the One You Marry
Google TV and Apple TV, introduced Wednesday, both aim to redefine the home entertainment experience by creating a seamless system for viewing movies, videos, and music from various sources on a TV.
Google’s Earth
“In Google, we are at once the surveilled and the individual retinal cells of the surveillant, however many millions of us, constantly if unconsciously participatory,” opines novelist William Gibson. ”We are part of a post-geographical, post-national super-state, one that handily says no to China. Or yes, depending on profit considerations and strategy. But we do not [...]
Gmail Priority Inbox lets you get through your email faster
“Gmail Priority Inbox” video on YouTube is self-explanatory.
Writer Neal Stephenson unveils his digital novel The Mongoliad
Author Neal Stephenson has launched Subutai, which has developed the “PULP platform” for creating digital novels, using a new model for publishing books in which authors can add additional material like background articles, images, music, and video. There are also social features that allow readers to create their own profiles, earn badges for activity on the [...]
The Extraordinary Tale of Red Rain, Comets and Extraterrestrials
For years, claims have circulated that red rain that fell in India in 2001 contained cells unlike any found on Earth. Now new evidence that these cells can reproduce is about to set the debate alive.
“The flourescence behaviour of the red cells is shown to be in remarkable correspondence with the extended red emission observed [...]
Living Data
The AlloSphere, a three-story-high globe at the California NanoSystems Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara, facilitates interactive 3-D visualizations to enables scientists to dive into data in unprecedented ways. Inside the sphere, they can get their hands on the atoms making up the crystal structure of new solar-cell materials or enter a brain and [...]
Nano Switches that Store More Data Head to Market
Hewlett-Packard announced today that it has entered an agreement with the Korean electronics manufacturer Hynix Semiconductor to make memristors, starting in 2013. Storage devices made of memristors will allow PCs, cellphones, and servers to store more and switch on instantly.
“The goal is to be at least double whatever flash memory is in three years–we know we’ll [...]
Silicon nanocrystals break miniaturization barrier for memory chips
Rice University scientists have created the first two-terminal memory chips that use only silicon to generate nanocrystal wires as small as 5 nanometers — far smaller than circuitry in even the most advanced computers and electronic devices. The technology breakthrough promises to extend the limits of miniaturization subject to Moore’s Law, and should be easily [...]
Modern science map
Crispian Jago has developed a draft timeline (based on an original London underground map) showing the last 500 years of science, reason and critical thinking “to celebrate the achievements of the scientific method through the age of reason, the enlightenment and modernity.”
Some of the lines are still sketchy, such as the one for Mathematics and [...]
Google Shows Off Chrome, HTML5 With Interactive Music “Experience”
Google has released its latest “Chrome Experiment” in the form of a music video “experience” that shows off the power of tools like HTML5 and Google products like Chrome, Maps and Street View, using real-time graphics rendering and real-world imagery pulled from Google Maps satellite and Street View imagery from your own home town.
Opens up an exciting new [...]
Advances Offer Path to Shrink Computer Chips Again
Scientists at Rice University and Hewlett-Packard are reporting this week that they can overcome a fundamental barrier to the continued rapid miniaturization of computer memory by using memristors, or memory resistors, switches that retain information without a source of power.
Medical nanotech could find unconventional oil
Researchers are developing methods borrowed from medical nanotech to locate and extract the estimated 360 billion barrels of remaining oil in old U.S. oil fields.
Diversity of neurons increases information in the brain
Carnegie Mellon University researchers have discovered that the diversity in how neurons respond to incoming stimuli, formerly ignored by neuroscientists, is actually critical to overall brain function and to how neurons process complex stimuli and code information.
“I think neuroscientists have, at an intuitive level, recognized the variability between neurons, but we swept it under the [...]
Research Experiment Disrupts Internet, for Some
An experiment run by Duke University and a European group responsible for managing Internet resources went wrong Friday, disrupting a small percentage of Internet traffic.
The incident shows just how fragile one of the Internet’s core protocols really is, security experts say. The damage from Friday’s experiment was minimal, but if someone had been able to intentionally [...]
Don’t Tell the Creative Department, but Software Can Produce Ads, Too
“Creative Artificial Intelligence” (CAI) software developed by BETC Euro RSCG, an ad agency in Paris, can be programmed to randomly generate an estimated 200,000 ads for a specified combination of product category, type of product, marketing objective, and benefits.
Does Your Language Shape How You Think?
The habits of mind that our culture has instilled in us from infancy shape our orientation to the world and our emotional responses to the objects we encounter, and their consequences probably … have a marked impact on our beliefs, values and ideologies, says Guy Deutscher, author of Through the Language Glass: Why the World [...]
MIT researchers unveil autonomous oil-absorbing robot
Researchers at MIT have created a robotic prototype that could autonomously navigate the surface of the ocean to collect surface oil and process it on site.
The system, called Seaswarm, is a fleet of vehicles that may make cleaning up future oil spills both less expensive and more efficient than current skimming methods.
The Seaswarm robot uses a [...]
Scientists find link in humans between nerve cell production, memory
Production of new nerve cells in the human brain is linked to learning and memory, according to a new study from the University of Florida (UF). The research is the first to show such a link in humans. The findings, published online and in an upcoming print issue of the journal Brain, provide clues about processes [...]
Walking for 40 minutes three times a week can make you smarter
Walking at one’s own pace for 40 minutes three times a week can enhance the connectivity of important brain circuits, combat declines in brain function associated with aging, and increase performance on cognitive tasks, researchers have found.
The new study used fMRI to determine whether aerobic activity increased connectivity in the default mode network (DMN), which [...]
How DARPA Plans to Reinvent U.S. Manufacturing
DARPA is proposing a “foundry-style manufacturing capability” to reinvent manufacturing.
Its new iFAB program will make everything from powered exoskeletons to tanks in a generic fabrication facility. It will soon ask for requests for proposals from private industry.
Hand-held detector aims to diagnose disease
Cambridge Consultants is developing CliniHub, a cheap detector that senses a telltale fluorescent glow from disease markers.
Credit-card-sized sample trays inserted in a modem-sized reader hold antibody-coated polystyrene beads containing a fluorescent label. The antibodies interact with specific disease markers, causing the beads to clump together, quickly producing a strong red fluorescence under UV light from an [...]
Google Gives Real-Time Search Its Own Page
Google’s new real-time search page displays only results from timely sources, like updates from Twitter, Buzz, Facebook, Friendfeed, MySpace, Jaiku and Identi.ca.
Google sorts real-time search results based on many elements, including how many followers the writer has, how often the subject is being written about and how many times people are reposting messages.
Seeing the world with new eyes: Biosynthetic corneas restore vision in humans
A new study from researchers in Canada and Sweden has shown that biosynthetic corneas can help regenerate and repair damaged eye tissue and improve vision in humans.
They initiated a clinical trial in 10 Swedish patients with advanced keratoconus or central corneal scarring. Each patient underwent surgery on one eye to remove damaged corneal tissue and [...]
Japan develops ‘touchable’ 3D TV technology
The world’s first 3D television system that allows users to touch, pinch or poke images floating in front of them has been developed by a research team at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology.
The creators see it being used to simulate surgical operations and in video game software, allowing players to experience [...]
Generating electricity from water in the air
Water in the atmosphere can accumulate electrical charges from dust particles and droplets of other liquids, and transfer the charges to other materials it comes into contact with, Fernando Galembec of the University of Campinas in Brazil has found. “We are calling this ‘hygroelectricity,’ meaning ‘humidity electricity,’” he said.
Galembeck and colleagues conducted laboratory experiments that simulated [...]
Touchless Gesture User Interface to be demo’d IFA
Touchless Gesture User Interface technology developed by Elliptic Labs will allow control of devices with unrestricted hand movements.
One application would be waving your hand to change radio stations in a car, which is safer than searching for a button to push.
Virus-built wearable batteries could power military
Researchers have used two different viruses to create the cathode and anode for a lithium ion battery.
University of Maryland research could allow the parts for lithium ion batteries to be grown in and harvested from tobacco plants. MIT research could produce lithium ion batteries that could be woven into clothing to power a wide [...]
Robots learning from experience
Software that enables robots to move objects around a room, building up knowledge about their environment, is being developed by robotics researchers at the EU-funded Xpero project.
Computers that read minds are being developed by Intel
Intel’s scientists are creating detailed maps of the activity in the brain for individual words that can then be matched against the brain activity of someone using the computer, allowing the machine to determine the word they are thinking.
The technology currently uses fMRI, but work is under way to produce smaller devices that can be [...]
A Search Service that Can Peer into the Future
Yahoo’s Barcelona research lab has launched a prototype news search engine called Time Explorer that could evolve into an effective forecasting tool.
The prototype of Time Explorer was built using a collection of 1.8 million articles released by the New York Times stretching from 1987 to 2007 to stimulate research into new ways of exploring news [...]
Stem Cell Ruling Will Be Appealed
The Obama administration said Tuesday that it would appeal a court ruling challenging the legality of President Obama’s rules governing human embryonic stem cell research.
The head of the National Institutes of Health said the decision would most likely force the cancellation of dozens of experiments in diseases ranging from diabetes to Parkinson’s, and suspend $54 million in financing for 22 scientific [...]
Google Tests Streaming, As-You-Type Search Results
Google has gone increasingly real-time recently. In February, Google Reader began showing real-time feeds using PubSubHubbub, and then in March, the company began developing a new feature that would allows publishers to push content to the search engine’s index in real time.
Now, Google is testing a feature that searches as you type (similar functionality is already in place [...]
Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime
When people keep their brains busy with digital input, they are forfeiting downtime that could allow them to better learn and remember information, or come up with new ideas.
At the University of California, San Francisco, scientists have found that when rats have a new experience, like exploring an unfamiliar area, their brains show new patterns of [...]
Eating berries may activate the brain’s natural housekeeper for healthy aging
Scientists on Monday reported the first evidence that eating blueberries, strawberries, acai berries, and possibly walnuts may help the aging brain stay healthy in a crucial but previously unrecognized way. Their study concluded that berries activate the brain’s natural “housekeeper” mechanism, which cleans up and recycles toxic proteins linked to age-related memory loss and other mental [...]
Synaptic Behaviour Captured By New Memristor Circuit Design
Farnood Merrikh-Bayat and Saeed Bagheri at the University of Tehran have connected memristors (memory resistors) together in a way that mimics the wiring of human brains, reproducing Hebbian-type synapse strengthening.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1008.3450: Bottleneck Of Using Single Memristor As A Synapse And Its Solution
Mining Mood Swings on the Real-Time Web
Social-media analytics startup Viralheat is now offering free, real-time access to the data it is collecting on attitudes toward particular topics or products. One of the first customers for this new service — called Social Trends — is ESPN, which plans to use Social Trends to show live popularity rankings for different NFL teams.
Viralheat uses [...]
Ready for 2020? Advice for every career stage
As the effects of accelerating technology ripple across the corporate world and combine with the forces of the Web, mobile computing, consumerization and virtualization, “traditional IT organizations won’t look [the way] they do now,” says Thomas Druby, an IT executive.
To address the gap between college and real-world experience, the ACM has introduced new curriculum guidelines [...]
Frog cells give artificial nose the power of super smell
Bioengineers at the University of Tokyo have created a more sensitive e-nose by genetically modifying frog eggs to express proteins known to act as smell receptors.
They placed the modified cells between electrodes and measured the telltale currents generated when different molecules bound to the receptors. They found this method can distinguish between many nearly identical [...]
Replacing a Pile of Textbooks With an iPad
A new company called Inkling hopes to break the standard textbook model and help textbooks enter the interactive age by letting students share and comment on the texts and interact with fellow students, using an iPad.
Other features include interactive graphics within a book and the ability to search text, change the size of the type, purchase [...]
Protein that destroys HIV discovered
Loyola University researchers have identified the key components of a protein called TRIM5a that destroys HIV in rhesus monkeys.
The finding could lead to new TRIM5a-based treatments that would knock out HIV in humans, said senior researcher Edward M. Campbell, PhD, of Loyola University Health System.
Campbell and colleagues report their findings in an article featured on [...]
Alien hunters ’should look for artificial intelligence’
The odds favor detecting alien AI rather than biological life because the time between aliens developing radio technology and artificial intelligence would be short, says SETI Institute senior astronomer Seth Shostak.
He also says that artificially intelligent alien life would be likely to migrate to places where both matter and energy — the only things he [...]
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