New materials may also enable entirely new paradigms for individual chip components and their overall design. One long-promised advance is the ferroelectric field-effect transistor, or FE-FET. Such devices could switch states rapidly enough to perform computation, but also be able to hold those states without being powered, enabling them to function as long-term memory storage. …
AI chip Startup Graphcore IPU systems are designed to lower the cost of accelerating AI applicationsA in cloud and enterprise datacenters to increase the performance of both training and inference by up to 100x compared to the fastest systems today. Graphcore systems excel at both training and inference. The highly parallel computational resources together with …
Cells in the amniotic fluid that surrounds a developing baby can revive ageing and weak bones, say UK scientists. The discovery could help babies with genetic diseases, elderly people and even astronauts, they say. The findings in mice, published in Scientific Reports, showed cells in the fluid strengthened bone and cut fractures by 80%. Human …
The IMF predictions for nominal GDP and PPP were inaccurate in the early 2000s, because of adjustments that shifted purchasing power parity and currency fluctuations. Currency is still fluctuating as the Chinese yuan has weakened enough to eliminate projected nominal GDP gains in 2016. IMF nominal GDP projections Purchasing power parity had a large adjustment …
An Earth-like planet that orbits Proxima Centauri in its habital zone has been found. The discovery was made by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) using the La Silla Observatory‘s reflecting telescope. The European Southern Observatory (ESO) will be announcing the finding at the end of August. Universe Today reported the discovery from a der Spiegel …
No other aircraft can match the F-22’s range of capabilities—many of which remain classified—for speed, agility, stealth, and battlefield sensor power. With 183 in service, a reboot could mean, theoretically, the delivery of 194 additional planes that were planned before the program was canceled. The F-22s built for the current fleet were restricted from foreign …
China has successfully completed a seventh flight test of its new hypersonic glide vehicle last week in its northern central Shanxi province, according to an article on People’s Daily Online. The “DF-ZF” glider can travel at speeds between Mach 5 and Mach 10, which is 5 to 10 times the speed of sound. Pentagon officials …
The possibility that quantum processing with nuclear spins might be operative in the brain is proposed and then explored. Phosphorus is identified as the unique biological element with a nuclear spin that can serve as a qubit for such putative quantum processing – a neural qubit – while the phosphate ion is the only possible …
Technology Review – Professor Dirk Helbing of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich wants to build a “living earth simulator” to probe the kind of dangerous cascading effects that he believes threaten financial markets, power grids and other complex systems that modern life relies upon. He has a good chance at getting €1bn ($1.2bn) …
The carnival of nuclear energy 92 is up at the ANS Nuclear cafe Idaho Samizdat has coverage on the Areva high temperature reactor selected for the next generation reactor project According to the >a href=”http://nuclear.gov/HTGCR/overview.html” target=blank>U.S. Department of Energy, every 750 MWt of installed HTGR capacity will offset 1 million metric tons of CO2 emissions …
CNN has a peak at several DARPA projects Disc-Rotor Compound Helicopter The Disc-Rotor is a collaboration between DARPA and Boeing. Hoping to marry the best features of a helicopter and an airplane, the Disc-Rotor program aims to develop a new type of aircraft capable of a seamlessly transitioning from hovering like a helicopter to flying …
