A new energy harvester developed by University of Michigan researchers can harness energy from vibrations and convert it to electricity with five to ten times greater efficiency and power than other devices in its class. Credit: Erkan Aktakka Electrical engineers from the University of Michigan claim to have invented a technique for micro-machining piezoelectric MEMS …
Arxiv – memristors be immune to most types of noise, their memory ought to be enhanced by it. Researchers calculate that high frequency noise has little effect on memristance because the device cannot respond quickly enough to the changes that this noise produces. Low frequency noise also has little effect because it produces changes that …
Researchers at Northwestern University have created a new kind of cloaking material that can render objects invisible in the terahertz range. Though this design can’t translate into an invisibility cloak for the visible spectrum, it could have implications in diagnostics, security, and communication. Humans generally recognize objects through two features: their shape and color. To …
It seems likely that the National Security Agency is spending about ten times more money and using a generator that is ten times larger to bring an exaFLOP supercomputer into existence 4-5 years earlier than a 2019/2020 expectation. $896 million and 60 megawatts instead of $100 million and 6 megawatts. A similar increase in budget …
The ASCI Red supercomputer first broke the teraFLOPS barrier in December 1996. On May 25, 2008, an American military supercomputer built by IBM, named ‘Roadrunner’, reached the computing milestone of one PetaFLOP by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second The budget was $100 million. A 20 PetaFLOP supercomputer is being completed in 2012 …
Ars Technica describes the creation of the HPU4Science cluster. The cluster, known as HPU4Science, began with a $40,000 budget and a goal of building a viable scientific computation system with performance roughly equivalent to that of a $400,000 “turnkey” system made by NVIDIA, Dell, or IBM. They spent $30,000 and built a system with estimated …
The world’s most advanced submarine company, Triton Subs,and high pressure glass fabricator Rayotek Scientific, have joined forces to design a full ocean depth submersible that will revolutionize man’s relationship with the deep ocean. James Cameron is working on a submarine powered with an electric motor and made of composite materials. Richard Branson is working on …
NIST measurements show that interactions of the graphene layers with the insulating substrate material causes electrons (red, down arrow) and electron holes (blue, up arrow) to collect in “puddles”. The differing charge densities creates the random pattern of alternating dipoles and electon band gaps that vary across the layers. Credit: NIST Researchers at the National …
North Dakota’s Oil Transportation Infrastructure report projects North Dakota and Montana Oil production to 2017 (7 pages by the North Dakota Pipeline Authority) The state also has been setting new production records almost every month, the report states. Studies conducted by the North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources in 2008 and 2010 indicate 4 billion …
The National Security Agency is designing a new $895.6 million supercomputing center that will be constructed at its Fort Meade, Md., headquarters over the next several years, Department of Defense budget documents reveal. The NSA’s new High Performance Computing Center, slated to be complete by December 2015, will be designed to with energy efficiency, security, …
Researchers at Oregon State University have found a way to use magnetic “nanobeads” to help detect chemical and biological agents, with possible applications in everything from bioterrorism to medical diagnostics, environmental monitoring or even water and food safety. When fully developed as a hand-held, portable sensor, like something you might see in a science fiction …