Lifeboat Foundation

On a chilly evening last fall, I stared into nothingness out of the floor-to-ceiling windows in my office on the outskirts of Harvard’s campus. As a purplish-red sun set, I sat brooding over my dataset on rat brains. I thought of the cold windowless rooms in downtown Boston, home to Harvard’s high-performance computing center, where computer servers were holding on to a precious 48 terabytes of my data. I have recorded the 13 trillion numbers in this dataset as part of my Ph.D. experiments, asking how the visual parts of the rat brain respond to movement.

Printed on paper, the dataset would fill 116 billion pages, double-spaced. When I recently finished writing the story of my data, the magnum opus fit on fewer than two dozen printed pages. Performing the experiments turned out to be the easy part. I had spent the last year agonizing over the data, observing and asking questions. The answers left out large chunks that did not pertain to the questions, like a map leaves out irrelevant details of a territory.

But, as massive as my dataset sounds, it represents just a tiny chunk of a dataset taken from the whole brain. And the questions it asks—Do neurons in the visual cortex do anything when an animal can’t see? What happens when inputs to the visual cortex from other brain regions are shut off?—are small compared to the ultimate question in neuroscience: How does the brain work?

There’s no question about it: climate technology is in again.

Over the past several quarters, entrepreneurial activity and investment interest in climate tech have skyrocketed. New funds devoted specifically to climate have launched at an astonishing rate in 2021: from blue-chip venture capital firms like Union Square Ventures, from large private equity players like TPG and General Atlantic, from a whole new breed of climate-specific VCs like Lowercarbon Capital. Scarcely a day goes by now without a climate tech startup announcing a major new funding round. A whopping $49 billion of venture capital funding will pour into climate tech in 2021.

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink aptly captured the current ebullience when he declared last week that “the next 1,000 unicorns” will be in climate tech.

Advances make high-density, 5D optical storage practical for long-term data archiving.

Researchers have developed a fast and energy-efficient laser-writing method for producing high-density nanostructures in silica glass. These tiny structures can be used for long-term five-dimensional (5D) optical data storage that is more than 10,000 times denser than Blue-Ray optical disc storage technology.

“Individuals and organizations are generating ever-larger datasets, creating the desperate need for more efficient forms of data storage with a high capacity, low energy consumption and long lifetime,” said doctoral researcher Yuhao Lei from the University of Southampton in the UK. “While cloud-based systems are designed more for temporary data, we believe that 5D data storage in glass could be useful for longer-term data storage for national archives, museums, libraries or private organizations.”

The change occurs as SpaceX prepares for a nationwide rollout of Starlink before the end of the month.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg accused other tech companies of “stifling innovation” with high fees and little choice for consumers during a live stream on Thursday, all while his company faces an antitrust lawsuit from the federal government and heightened pressure from Congress over recently-leaked internal documents

Zuckerberg made the comments at the Facebook Connect event Thursday, where he announced the company has changed its name to Meta.

He also laid out the company’s plans to build a metaverse — a virtual reality experience where people can meet online. His comments seemed to allude to mobile operating systems like those created by Apple and Google, though he did not mention any company by name or specify the types of platforms he was talking about.

It is challenging to store the exponentially increasing amount of data in the information age. The multiplexed optical data storage with merits of high data density (hundreds of terabytes/disk), low energy consumption, and long lifetime could open a new era in data storage technology. The recent progress in five-dimensional (5D) optical data storage based on anisotropic nanostructures written by femtosecond (fs) laser pulses in transparent materials reveals its potential for real-world applications, but high writing speed and density remain a major challenge. Here, we propose a method for rapid and energy-efficient writing of highly localized anisotropic nanostructures in silica glass by energy modulated megahertz-rate fs pulses. An isotropic nanovoid is initially generated with pulse energy above the microexplosion threshold and then elongated to an anisotropic nanolamella-like structure via the near-field enhancement effect by lower energy pulses, minimizing the unwanted thermal effects from megahertz-rate fs pulses. The anisotropic nanostructures are exploited for 5D data storage with a rate of 106voxels/s, corresponding to a demonstrated fast information recording of ∼225kB/s and a potentially high-density data storage of ∼500TB/disk.

In Optica, The Optical Society’s (OSA) journal for high impact research, Qiu and colleagues describe a new approach for digitizing color. It can be applied to cameras and displays — including ones used for computers, televisions and mobile devices — and used to fine-tune the color of LED lighting.

“Our new approach can improve today’s commercially available displays or enhance the sense of reality for new technologies such as near-eye-displays for virtual reality and augmented reality glasses,” said Jiyong Wang, a member of the PAINT research team. “It can also be used to produce LED lighting for hospitals, tunnels, submarines and airplanes that precisely mimics natural sunlight. This can help regulate circadian rhythm in people who are lacking sun exposure, for example.”

The discovery demonstrates a practical method to overcome current challenges in the manufacture of indium gallium nitride (InGaN) LEDs with considerably higher indium concentration, through the formation of quantum dots that emit long-wavelength light. The researchers have uncovered a new way t.

A type of group-III element nitride-based light-emitting diode (LED), indium gallium nitride (InGaN) LEDs were first fabricated over two decades ago in the 90s, and have since evolved to become ever smaller while growing increasingly powerful, efficient, and durable. Today, InGaN LEDs can be found across a myriad of industrial and consumer use cases, including signals & optical communication and data storage – and are critical in high-demand consumer applications such as solid state lighting, television sets, laptops, mobile devices, augmented (AR) and virtual reality (VR) solutions.

Ever-growing demand for such electronic devices has driven over two decades of research into achieving higher optical output, reliability, longevity and versatility from semiconductors – leading to the need for LEDs that can emit different colors of light. Traditionally, InGaN material has been used in modern LEDs to generate purple and blue light, with aluminum gallium indium phosphide (AlGaInP) – a different type of semiconductor – used to generate red, orange, and yellow light. This is due to InGaN’s poor performance in the red and amber spectrum caused by a reduction in efficiency as a result of higher levels of indium required.

Continue reading “New Way To Generate Light Through Pre-Existing Defects in Semiconductor Materials” »

The world’s largest semiconductor manufacturers—Intel, Samsung, and the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC)—have all announced plans to build new chip factories in the US. Everyone is bragging about those plans: American lawmakers say bringing chip manufacturing back onto US soil will strengthen national security, while the chip makers, chastened by this year’s disastrous semiconductor shortage, are diversifying their supply chains to avoid future crises.

But there’s one problem: Who will pay?

Intel, Samsung, and TSMC have all threatened to pull the plug on their US factory plans unless government subsidies are on the table. Company executives claim that if they don’t get a rich package of incentives and tax breaks, they’ll build their semiconductor factories elsewhere, effectively ending American ambitions to return chip manufacturing to its shores after ceding the bulk of the market to Taiwan in the 1990s.