Research on skyrmions suggests that the vortex-shaped particles could potentially be used in denser, faster storage.
Category: computing – Page 865
A new computer program can almost instantaneously decode people’s thoughts based on spikes in their brain activity, a new study suggests.
Researchers are only steps away from bioprinting tissues and organs to solve a myriad of injuries and illnesses. TechRepublic has the inside story of the new product accelerating the process.
If you want to understand how close the medical community is to a quantum leap forward in 3D bioprinting, then you need to look at the work that one intern is doing this summer at the University of Louisville.
A transparent material that can be attached to a smartphone’s touch screen could help the device generate electricity whenever anyone taps it, researchers in China say.
Touch screens are now found on most cell phones and tablet computers. Using a touch screen typically involves finger taps, and scientists at Lanzhou University in China reasoned that the mechanical energy from these motions could be converted into electricity to charge the phone’s batteries, which could significantly extend the working time of these portable devices.
The researchers developed a new material based on a transparent silicone rubber known as PDMS. Scientists embedded wires in this rubber that were made of lead zirconate titanate that were only 700 nanometers, or billionths of a meter, wide. For perspective, this is about 140 times thinner than the average width of a human hair. [Top 10 Inventions That Changed the World].
It’s that time of the year again when techno pundits are once again breathlessly telling us all about the technology and innovation trends that will be big in 2013. That’s great, but many of those predictions will be hopelessly wrong by the end of March. That’s why it’s so fascinating that Ray Kurzweil, one of the leading thinkers when it comes to the future of technology, has had such a strong track record in making predictions about technology for nearly two decades. In fact, of the 147 predictions that Kurzweil has made since the 1990’s, fully 115 of them have turned out to be correct, and another 12 have turned out to be “essentially correct” (off by a year or two), giving his predictions a stunning 86% accuracy rate. So how does he do it?
The fact is, Ray has a system and this system is called the Law of Accelerating Returns. In his new book How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, Kurzweil points out that “every fundamental measure of information technology follows predictable and exponential trajectories.” The most famous of these trajectories, of course, has been the price/performance path of computing power over more than 100 years. Thanks to paradigms such as Moore’s Law, which reduces computing power to a problem of how many transistors you can cram on a chip, anyone can intuitively understand why computers are getting exponentially faster and cheaper over time.
The other famous exponential growth curve in our lifetime is the sheer amount of digital information available on the Internet. Kurzweil typically graphs this as “bits per second transmitted on the Internet.” That means the amount of information on the Internet is doubling approximately every 1.25 years. That’s why “Big Data” is such a buzzword these days — there’s a growing recognition that we’re losing track of all the information we’re putting up on the Internet, from Facebook status updates, to YouTube videos, to funny meme posts on Tumblr. In just a decade, we will have created more content than existed for thousands of years in humanity’s prior experience.
Researchers have discovered a new method of heat conduction that is a ten-thousand-fold improvement over earlier attempts. The novel invention forms a necessary step in the creation of super-cooled quantum computing.
A group of Finnish scientists at Aalto University have made a stunning breakthrough in heat transference, and the implications are potentially revolutionary.
The discovery made by quantum physicist Mikko Möttönen and his team involves something known as “quantum-limited heat conduction,” a rather cumbersome term for, simply, the most efficient possible heat conduction from one point to another.
Did you know that Quantum Theory does not know how probabilities are implemented in Nature? And for that matter neither does any other physical theory. Why? Or why not? The closest Quantum Theory comes to explaining probabilities, is to guess that a particle’s wave function is related to its probabilities. That’s it!
Why do we need to ask this question? Commercial opportunities. Imagine if you could control where a photon localizes (captured by an atom). Particle detectors become significantly more sensitive. Boring? No, in fact, DARPA aims to precisely spot single photons and explore the Fundamental Limits of Photon Detection. Anti-stealth is one application. Imagine if you didn’t need 1,000,000 radio wave photons to determine an aircraft’s radar signature, but only a 1,000?
Using probabilities to control photon switching “circuits”, probability switches. Imagine an empty box with optical cables entering and exiting. These probability switches cause photons to exit through different optical cables by controlling where they localize within the box. What if we could build computers with materials lighter than a feather to switch photon paths, instead of heavy silicon or gallium arsenide to switch electron paths? Imagine how fast these switches could operate, as no matter is involved.
Pop music is littered with titles that relay how romantic yearning is sparked and experienced wordlessly with one person staring at the other. Animals don’t have it so good. “Most mammals generally interpret direct gaze as threatening or as a sign of dominance,” wrote researchers in Frontiers In Human Neuroscience.
People, however, usually take gazing with positive interpretations, such as affection, love and attraction. “A preference for direct gaze seems to be present at a very early age: Farroni et al. (2002) found that infants as young as 2 days old prefer to look at faces that gazed directly at them compared to faces with averted gaze.”
If social gazing goes down so well between humans, what about between robot and human? Sean Andrist, doctoral candidate in computer science, UW-Madison Graduate School, has seriously explored that question.
Becoming immortal is one of mankind’s many quixotic notions that most people will relegate to the world of fantasy and science fiction. However, there is a subset of prominent scientists who believe that immortality is not only attainable, but it is something that will come to fruition in as little as 25 years. This idea is shared by men like Google’s Director of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil; Tesla Motors CEO, Elon Musk; and one of the most interesting presidential candidates outside of Donald Trump and Deez Nuts, Zoltan Istvan. All three men identify as trans-humanist, and for those who don’t know, trans-humanism is the idea that mankind will one day be able to transcend our biological limitations through the use of science and technology; not to mention, the movement has accumulated over 3 million supporters worldwide. So the question remains, with the multitude of prominent intellectuals who believe immortality is a tangible goal, just how will they go about achieving it? Well, the six answers below could possibly hold the key to everlasting life.
Number Six: Uploading Minds to Computers. Futurists believe that at some point in the near future we will be able to copy and scan all of the data that exists in our brains and upload the information into a computer. This will allow us to perpetually exist as incorporeal inhabitants of cyberspace. Of course, the idea of mind uploading is still purely science fiction, but if it ever becomes tangible, progeny could possibly live in a limitless world, that echoes notions expressed in the Matrix; minus the robot despots.
UT RESEARCHERS DEVELOP ®EVOLUTIONARY CIRCUITS
Researchers of the MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology and the CTIT Institute for ICT Research at the University of Twente in The Netherlands have demonstrated working electronic circuits that have been produced in a radically new way, using methods that resemble Darwinian evolution. The size of these circuits is comparable to the size of their conventional counterparts, but they are much closer to natural networks like the human brain. The findings promise a new generation of powerful, energy-efficient electronics, and have been published in the leading British journal Nature Nanotechnology.
One of the greatest successes of the 20th century has been the development of digital computers. During the last decades these computers have become more and more powerful by integrating ever smaller components on silicon chips. However, it is becoming increasingly hard and extremely expensive to continue this miniaturisation. Current transistors consist of only a handful of atoms. It is a major challenge to produce chips in which the millions of transistors have the same characteristics, and thus to make the chips operate properly. Another drawback is that their energy consumption is reaching unacceptable levels. It is obvious that one has to look for alternative directions, and it is interesting to see what we can learn from nature. Natural evolution has led to powerful ‘computers’ like the human brain, which can solve complex problems in an energy-efficient way. Nature exploits complex networks that can execute many tasks in parallel.