New, low-cost chips for sensing thermal energy could lead to a raft of new night-vision products, engineers say, ushering in everything from smarter cars to handheld devices for spelunking. A new technology used by Raytheon, “wafer-level packaging,” dramatically reduces the cost of making these thermal sensors. The advances could – for the first time – …
Parabolic Arc has the transcript of Russia’s statement about space operations with or without the United States. As for the International Space Station (ISS), this is an extremely sensitive issue. We were somewhat surprised, if not amused, by the fact that the United States is prepared to reduce cooperation in every area with the Russian …
Today’s sub-22-nanometer chips are placing a strain on the ability to connect their billions of transistors with traditional copper interconnects. As the number of metallization layers escalates from nine to fifteen or more, the fineness of the copper lines is causing open circuits from voids during manufacturing and electromigration after the chips are deployed. New …
Researchers have taken a step toward practical applications for “hyperbolic metamaterials,” ultra-thin crystalline films that could bring optical advances including powerful microscopes, quantum computers and high-performance solar cells. Optical metamaterials harness clouds of electrons called surface plasmons to manipulate and control light. However, some of the plasmonic components under development rely on the use of …
In April 2014, the Tianhe 2 supercomputer began offering computing power to public users while the system continues debugging and fine tuning. It has a peak processing speed of 33.86 quadrillion floating-point operations per second (petaflops), derived from 16,000 computer nodes, while it has a theoretical peak processing power of 54.9 petaflops. The closest competitor …
The Black Knight Transformer’s patented technology is a first-of-its-kind in vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. The vehicle design is highly modular for a wide variety of payloads including a ground drive-train unit that allows it drive like an automobile. The Advanced Tactics Black Knight Transformer is a multi-engine rotorcraft drawing inspiration from small electric “multicopters” …
Swinburne researchers have developed a high-quality continuous graphene oxide thin film that shows potential for ultrafast telecommunications. Associate Professor Baohua Jia led a team of researchers from Swinburne’s Centre for Micro-Photonics to create a micrometre thin film with record-breaking optical nonlinearity suitable for high performance integrated photonic devices used in all-optical communications, biomedicine and photonic …
Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (MPI-P) in Mainz and the National University of Singapore have attested that the thermal conductivity of graphene diverges with the size of the samples. This discovery challenges the fundamental laws of heat conduction for extended materials. Davide Donadio, head of a Max Planck Research Group at …
China’s academy of engineering is talking about a global high speed rail network. There are reasons to doubt that the politics and negotiations can come together. However, China plans to have 50,000 kilometers high speed rail network built inside of China by 2020. The external line to the US via Russia and Canada would be …
Japan had caught up in about 25 years from having 10% of US per capita GDP. In the 1970s, Japans GDP growth was 0-6% and mostly about 2-4%. However, the currency strengthened a lot and then moved up from 37% of nominal US gdp per capita to 100%. China has nominal GDP per capita of …
South Korean plastic surgeons are among the best in the world. In fact they’re so good that people from other countries like China and Japan are actually having trouble getting back home. That’s sounds really crazy, but it’s true. When most people get a nose job or a lip job, they just look like ‘enhanced’ …