Lifeboat Foundation

Coombes described the process to CBC’s Calgary Eyeopener podcast. Her thoughts would be processed by headset via a computer, and then converted to voltages before being assigned to a parameter on the synth.

Thinking about images and questions that stimulated more brainwave activity yielded more dramatic results — even thinking about the word “why” had an effect on volume and pitch.

Continue reading “Canadian musician Angie C just used a brainwave-reader to play the monster analogue synth TONTO with her mind” »

There is the potential for benefits from providing more direct controls.

“The important thing to realise here is that, when you’re bringing a new technology like this to the market, it’s very, very important that it’s as transparent as possible to developers initially, right?” Pomianowski says. “You can’t bring something like this to the market, that’s a departure from the traditional memory subsystem on the GPU, and have a high barrier of entry to the developers where they have to programme in a particular way to get benefit from it.”

But what if a developer did program specifically for Infinity Cache? That’s a question raised during an AMD roundtable discussion ahead of the RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 release date, and AMD is quietly optimistic for future performance if a developer were to team up with the red team for a little more juice.

Continue reading “AMD’s Infinity Cache is the MVP of the RX 6000-series, and it’s only going to get better” »

Sneezes from people who have congested noses and a full set of teeth travel about 60% farther than from people who don’t, according to a new study.

New research from the University of Central Florida has identified physiological features that could make people super-spreaders of viruses such as COVID-19.

In a study appearing this month in the journal Physics of Fluids, researchers in UCF’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering used computer-generated models to numerically simulate sneezes in different types of people and determine associations between people’s physiological features and how far their sneeze droplets travel and linger in the air.

As our need for electronic gadgets and sensors grows, scientists are coming up with new ways to keep devices powered for longer on less energy.

The latest sensor to be invented in the lab can go for a whole year on a single burst of energy, aided by a physics phenomenon known as quantum tunnelling.

The tunnelling aspect means that with the help of a 50-million-electron jumpstart, this simple and inexpensive device (made up of just four capacitors and two transistors) can keep going for an extended period of time.

Think of something as simple as “smile” and the system would generate a matching headshot.

This discovery opens the door to topological quantum computing. Current quantum computing systems, where the elemental units of calculation are qubits that perform superfast calculations, require superconducting materials that only function in extremely cold conditions. Fluctuations in heat can throw one of these systems out of whack.

“The properties inherent to materials such as TaP could form the basis of future qubits,” says Nguyen. He envisions synthesizing TaP and other topological semimetals — a process involving the delicate cultivation of these crystalline structures — and then characterizing their structural and excitational properties with the help of neutron and X-ray beam technology, which probe these materials at the atomic level. This would enable him to identify and deploy the right materials for specific applications.

“My goal is to create programmable artificial structured topological materials, which can directly be applied as a quantum computer,” says Nguyen. “With infinitely better heat management, these quantum computing systems and devices could prove to be incredibly energy efficient.”

Ever since Nikola Tesla spewed electricity in all directions with his coil back in 1891, scientists have been thinking up ways to send electrical power through the air. The dream is to charge your phone or laptop, or maybe even a healthcare device such as a pacemaker, without the need for wires and plugs. The tricky bit is getting the electricity to find its intended target, and getting that target to absorb the electricity instead of just reflect it back into the air—all preferably without endangering anyone along the way.

These days, you can wirelessly charge a smartphone by putting it within an inch of a charging station. But usable long-range wireless power transfer, from one side of a room to another or even across a building, is still a work in progress. Most of the methods currently in development involve focusing narrow beams of energy and aiming them at their intended target. These methods have had some success, but are so far not very efficient. And having focused electromagnetic beams flying around through the air is unsettling.

Now, a team of researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD), in collaboration with a colleague at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, have developed an improved technique for wireless power transfer technology that may promise long-range power transmission without narrowly focused and directed energy beams. Their results, which widen the applicability of previous techniques, were published Nov. 17, 2020 in the journal Nature Communications.

With lithium-containing batteries facing constraints on many of the metals they contain, Nina Notman looks at whether its group 1 neighbour sodium can supply the answer.

The lithium-ion battery powers much of our modern lives, a fact reflected in this year’s Nobel prize. It resides in devices ranging from very small wearable electronics, through mobile phones and laptops, to electric vehicles and ‘the world’s biggest battery’ – the huge 100MW/129MWh Tesla battery installed on an Australian wind farm in 2017.

‘Lithium-ion has a massive span of applications,’ explains Jonathan Knott, an energy storage researcher at the University of Wollongong in Australia. ‘It is being used as a hammer to crack every nut and we need to start getting a little bit more sophisticated in the use of the best tool for the job.’

AMD’s new RDNA 2 architecture packs something called Infinity Cache, which is a superpower in its fight against the Ampere GPUs.