Researchers at MIT have filled in a crucial piece of the puzzle that could enable the creation of photonic chips on the standard silicon material that forms the basis for most of today’s electronics The new component is a “diode for light,” says Caroline Ross, the Toyota Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT. …
The D-Wave One Quantum Computer: Technology and Applications (30 pages) Dwave System’s CTO Geordie Rose gave a presentation at SC11. Previously Dwave had sold a 128 qubit system and services for $10 million It appears from the chart Dwave will have a 256 qubit by mid-2012 and a 512 qubit by the end of 2012. …
Arxiv – Adaptive on-chip control of nano-optical fields with optoplasmonic vortex nanogates (11 pages) A major challenge for plasmonics as an enabling technology for quantum information processing is the realization of active spatio-temporal control of light on the nanoscale. The use of phase-shaped pulses or beams enforces specific requirements for on-chip integration and imposes strict …
Microsoft offers a glimpse into what they see as the future of productivity in 2016-2021. (H/T KurzweilAI) All of the ideas in the video are based on real technology. Some of the capabilities, such as speech recognition, real time collaboration and data visualization already exist today. Others are not yet available in specific products, but …
Toshiba Mobile Display announced that it has developed a liquid crystal display (LCD) panel that features a world-class, high-definition 498 pixels-per-inch (ppi) image in a direct-view, compact 6.1-inch screen. Despite the small screen size, the display resolution format is 2,560 × 1,600 pixels, a higher resolution than even the full HD resolution format of 1,920 …
It is commonly believed that the fundamental limit to MOSFET feature-size scaling is direct source-drain tunneling. We may hit this limitation around the 5nm node. For CMOS logic transistors, when we approach the direct source-drain tunneling limit, we could move to recessed channel devices and use channel lengths longer than the minimum feature size. This …
At Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park in Nevada is a site where the remains of nine 45-foot (14-meter) ichthyosaurs, of the species Shonisaurus popularis can be found. These were the Triassic’s counterpart to today’s predatory giant squid-eating sperm whales. The new thinking is that there was a Kraken (giant octopus) that preyed on the ichthyosaurs. They hypothesize …
Neutrinos sent through the ground from Cern toward the Gran Sasso laboratory 732km away seemed to show up a tiny fraction of a second early. “We tried to find all possible explanations for this,” said report author Antonio Ereditato of the Opera collaboration. Opera Collaboration website The OPERA particle detector may have spotted neutrinos traveling …
University of Massachusetts Amherst environmental toxicologist Edward Calabrese, whose career research shows that low doses of some chemicals and radiation are benign or even helpful, says he has uncovered evidence that one of the fathers of radiation genetics, Nobel Prize winner Hermann Muller, knowingly lied when he claimed in 1946 that there is no safe …
Researchers at the University of Toronto have developed a new method for creating 3D hydrogel scaffolds that will aid in the development of new tissue and organs grown in a lab. Hydrogels, a “Jell-O”-like substance, are highly flexible and absorbent networks of polymer strings that are frequently used in tissue engineering to act as a …
An artist’s rendering of an array of pressurized graphene membranes. A CU-Boulder team recently discovered that graphene has surprisingly high adhesion properties, findings that may help lead to the development of new graphene-based mechanical devices like gas separation membranes. (Illustration courtesy Victor Tzen and Rex Tzen.) graphene has surprisingly powerful adhesion qualities — are expected …