Lifeboat Foundation

UT RESEARCHERS DEVELOP ®EVOLUTIONARY CIRCUITS

Researchers of the MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology and the CTIT Institute for ICT Research at the University of Twente in The Netherlands have demonstrated working electronic circuits that have been produced in a radically new way, using methods that resemble Darwinian evolution. The size of these circuits is comparable to the size of their conventional counterparts, but they are much closer to natural networks like the human brain. The findings promise a new generation of powerful, energy-efficient electronics, and have been published in the leading British journal Nature Nanotechnology.

One of the greatest successes of the 20th century has been the development of digital computers. During the last decades these computers have become more and more powerful by integrating ever smaller components on silicon chips. However, it is becoming increasingly hard and extremely expensive to continue this miniaturisation. Current transistors consist of only a handful of atoms. It is a major challenge to produce chips in which the millions of transistors have the same characteristics, and thus to make the chips operate properly. Another drawback is that their energy consumption is reaching unacceptable levels. It is obvious that one has to look for alternative directions, and it is interesting to see what we can learn from nature. Natural evolution has led to powerful ‘computers’ like the human brain, which can solve complex problems in an energy-efficient way. Nature exploits complex networks that can execute many tasks in parallel.

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The superfluid Universe.

Quantum effects are not just subatomic: they can be expressed across galaxies, and solve the puzzle of dark matter.

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Transport Quantum bits via superconducting nanowires. Definite step forward in information transmittal capabilities.

Although 74 picoseconds may not sound like much — a picosecond is a trillionth of a second — it is a big deal in the quantum world, where light particles, or photons, can carry valuable information. In this case it means that much less “jitter,” or uncertainty in the arrival time of a photon. Less jitter means that photons can be spaced more closely together but still be correctly detected. This enables communications at a higher bit rate, with more information transmitted in the same period.

Every little bit helps when trying to receive faint signals reliably. It helped, for example, in NIST’s recent quantum teleportation record and difficult tests of physics theories. In such experiments, researchers want to decode as much information as possible from the quantum properties of billions of photons, or determine if “entangled” photons have properties that are linked before — or only after — being measured.

Continue reading “Less jitter, more bits: new material for detecting photons captures more quantum information” »

Physicists have proposed a new kind of dark matter that might consist of dark protons and dark electrons that could form dark atoms, and build up dark matter disks around galaxies.

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Illustration of a particle (red sphere) trapped by the 3D trapping node created by two superimposed, orthogonal (at right angles), standing surface acoustic waves and induced acoustic streaming (credit: Carnegie Mellon University)

A team of researchers at three universities has developed a way to use “acoustic tweezers” (which use ultrasonic surface acoustic waves, or SAWs, to trap and manipulate micrometer-scale particles and biological cells — see “Acoustic tweezers manipulate cellular-scale objects with ultrasound “) to non-invasively pick up and move single cells in three mutually orthogonal axes of motion (three dimensions).

The new 3D acoustic tweezers can pick up single cells or entire cell assemblies and deliver them to desired locations to create 2D and 3D cell patterns, or print the cells into complex shapes — a promising new method for “3D bioprinting” in biological tissues, the researchers say in an open-access paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

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The burgeoning field of nanotechnology promises an indefinite range of capabilities in medicine, optics, communications, and other facets of applied science and engineering. On that front, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Atoms 2 Products program (A2P) is funding 10 companies, universities, and institutions to develop mass-manufacturing techniques and technologies for functional products made up of nanoscale constituents. The project demonstrates a mere slice of the contributions in the mass movement to make nanotechnology a part of our everyday lives.

The following gallery highlights the work of five DARPA-funded projects in the program. The slides describe an atomic calligraphy technique for 2D atomic printing, a manufacturing method for producing high-frequency “Nanolitz” wires, the construction of pop-up sensors for laparoscopy, and a conjunct effort to use micro-robotics to build the assemblers of nanodevices.

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Over the last 12,000 years or so, human civilization has noticeably reshaped the Earth’s surface. But changes on our own planet will likely pale in comparison when humans settle on other celestial bodies. While many of the changes on Earth over the centuries have been related to food production, by way of agriculture, changes on other worlds will result, not only from the need for on-site production of food, but also for all other consumables, including air.

As vital as synthetic biology will be to the early piloted missions to Mars and voyages of exploration, it will become indispensable to establish a long-term human presence off-Earth, namely colonization. That’s because we’ve evolved over billions of years to thrive specifically in the environments provides by our home planet.

Our physiology is well-suited to Earth’s gravity and its oxygen-rich atmosphere. We also depend on Earth’s magnetic field to shield us from intense space radiation in the form of charged particles. In comparison, Mars currently has no magnetic field to trap particle radiation and an atmosphere that is so thin that any shielding against other types of space radiation is negligible compared with the protection that Earth’s atmosphere affords. At the Martian surface, atmospheric pressure never gets above 7 millibars. That’s like Earth at an altitude of about 27,000 m (89,000 ft), which is almost the edge of space. And it’s not like the moon is a better option for us since it has no atmosphere at all.

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Researchers succeeded in calculating effects in ultra-cold atom clouds which can only be explained in terms of the quantum correlations between many atoms. Such atom clouds are known as Bose-Einstein condensates and are an active field of research.

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Scientists claim to have made yet another step towards the ultimate goal of achieving nuclear fusion, by partially solving an outstanding problem in the field: heat loss.

The research was led by scientists at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, in collaboration with the University of California at San Diego, General Atomics, and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.

Continue reading “Nuclear Fusion’s ‘Heat Loss’ Problem May Have Been Solved” »