Proof-of-concept paper shows how data centers could help manage the grid.
Category: computing – Page 530
The Large Hadron Collider is sucking in graphics cards at a rapidly increasing rate
It’s no secret that, while the humble GPU was originally conceived for the express purpose of chucking polygons around a screen in the most efficient way, it turns out the parallel processing prowess of modern graphics chips makes for an incredibly powerful tool in the scientific community. And an incredibly efficient one, too. Indeed A Large Ion Collider Experiment (ALICE) has been using GPUs in its calculations since 2010 and its work has now encouraged their increased use in various LHC experiments.
The potential bad news is that it does mean there’s yet another group desperate for the limited amount of GPU silicon coming out of the fabs of TSMC and Samsung. Though at least this lot will be using it for a loftier purpose than mining fake money coins.
New brain imaging technique suggests memories are stored in the connections between your neurons
All memory storage devices, from your brain to the RAM in your computer, store information by changing their physical qualities. Over 130 years ago, pioneering neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal first suggested that the brain stores information by rearranging the connections, or synapses, between neurons.
Since then, neuroscientists have attempted to understand the physical changes associated with memory formation. But visualizing and mapping synapses is challenging to do. For one, synapses are very small and tightly packed together. They’re roughly 10 billion times smaller than the smallest object a standard clinical MRI can visualize. Furthermore, there are approximately 1 billion synapses in the mouse brains researchers often use to study brain function, and they’re all the same opaque to translucent color as the tissue surrounding them.
A new imaging technique my colleagues and I developed, however, has allowed us to map synapses during memory formation. We found that the process of forming new memories changes how brain cells are connected to one another. While some areas of the brain create more connections, others lose them.
A new paradigm to break the electromagnetic reciprocity in 3D bulk metamaterials
Transistors based on semiconductor materials are widely used electronic components with many remarkable properties. For instance, they have a nonreciprocal electrical response, which means that they can isolate two parts of a circuit in such a way that one of the parts (the input section) can influence the other part (the output section), but not the other way around. In addition, transistors can amplify voltage signals, and thereby can supply energy to a system. Non-energy conserving interactions are usually referred to as “non-Hermitian.”
Researchers from Instituto de Telecomunicações at the University of Coimbra and University of Lisbon have recently introduced a new class of bulk materials that draws inspiration from the non-reciprocal and non-Hermitian responses of conventional semiconductor-based transistors. They presented these transistor-like three-dimensional (3D) bulk metamaterials in a paper published in Physical Review Letters.
Mário Silveirinha, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org, “The ideas developed in our paper were mostly driven by the question: Would it be possible to somehow imitate the response of standard transistors in a bulk metamaterial? We were intrigued if it would be feasible to have a bulk material which, when suitably biased, could manipulate electromagnetic waves in the same way as a transistor manipulates a voltage signal.”
A CMOS-based chip that integrates silicon quantum dots and multiplexed readout electronics
Researchers at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the Hitachi Cambridge Laboratory have recently designed an integrated circuit (IC) that integrates silicon quantum dots with conventional readout electronics. This chip, introduced in a paper published in Nature Electronics, is based on a 40-nm cryogenic complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology that is readily and commercially available.
“Our recent paper builds on the expertise of the two groups involved,” Andrea Ruffino, one of the researchers at EPFL who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “The goal of our group was to build cryogenic (Bi)CMOS integrated circuits for readout and control of quantum computers, to be co-packaged or co-integrated in the final stage with silicon quantum processors. On the other hand, the team at the Hitachi Cambridge Laboratory have been studying silicon quantum devices for many years.”
Ruffino and his colleagues at EPFL joined forces with the team at the Hitachi Cambridge Laboratory with the common goal of uniting classical circuits and quantum devices on a single chip. Their paper builds on some of their previous efforts, including the proposal of cryogenic CMOS ICs for quantum computing, as well as the realization of fast-sensing and time-multiplexed sensing of silicon quantum devices.
The Neuroscience of Consciousness
𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐝 𝐄𝐧𝐜𝐲𝐜𝐥𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐚 𝐨𝐟 𝐏𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐨𝐩𝐡𝐲:
The Neuro-Network.
𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐍𝐞𝐮𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐜𝐢𝐨𝐮𝐬𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬.
First published Tue Oct 9, 2018.
Conscious experience in humans depends on brain activity, so neuroscience will contribute to explaining consciousness. What would it be for neuroscience to explain consciousness? How much progress has neuroscience made in doing so? What challenges does it face? How can it meet those challenges? What is the philosophical significance of its findings? This entry addresses these and related questions.
To bridge the gulf between brain and consciousness, we need neural data, computational and psychological models, and philosophical analysis to identify principles to connect brain activity to conscious experience in an illuminating way. This entry will focus on identifying such principles without shying away from the neural details. The notion of neuroscientific explanation here conceives of it as providing informative answers to concrete questions that can be addressed by neuroscientific approaches. Accordingly, the theories and data to be considered will be organized around constructing answers to two questions (see section 1.4 for more precise formulations):
Tesla cut a steering component from some cars to deal with chip shortage, sources say
Under pressure to hit fourth-quarter sales goals while coping with widespread semiconductor shortages, Tesla decided to remove one of the two electronic control units that are normally included in the steering racks of some made-in-China Model 3 and Model Y cars, according to two employees and internal correspondence seen by CNBC.
Tesla did not disclose the exclusion, which has already affected tens of thousands of vehicles being shipped to customers in China, Australia, the U.K., Germany and other parts of Europe. It was not immediately clear whether Tesla would make similar changes to cars manufactured in or shipped to the U.S.
Alistair Fulton — Connecting & Enabling A Smarter Planet — VP, Wireless & Sensing Products, Semtech
Connecting & enabling a smarter planet — alistair fulton, VP, wireless & sensing products, semtech.
Alistair Fulton (https://www.semtech.com/company/executive-leadership/alistair-fulton) is the Vice President and General Manager of Semtech’s Wireless and Sensing Products Group.
Semtech Corporation is a supplier of analog and mixed-signal semiconductors and advanced algorithms for consumer, enterprise computing, communications and industrial end-markets. It has 32 locations in 15 countries in North America, Europe, and Asia.
Semtech is the developer of LoRa, a long-range networking initiative for the Internet of Things. As of March 2021, over 178 million devices use LoRa worldwide. LoRa has been used in satellites, tracking of animals, and natural disaster prediction.
Mr. Fulton joined Semtech in 2018 with over 25 years of experience in the Internet of Things (IoT), connected devices, machine to machine (M2M)/embedded, and analytics spaces.
