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Nanoengineered spintronic device can store data in four different ways

Over the past decades, electronics engineers have been trying to develop increasingly smaller devices that can store information reliably, even when they are not powered on. A promising type of non-volatile memory device is spintronics, solid-state systems that store and process information leveraging the spin (i.e., an intrinsic form of angular momentum) of electrons.

Researchers at University of Maryland and other institutes recently introduced a new spintronic device based on nanoscale structures based on materials that exhibit ferromagnetism (i.e., a permanent yet switchable magnetic order) and ferroelectricity (i.e., a permanent yet switchable electric polarization). This device, presented in a paper published in Nature Nanotechnology, can switch between four stable resistance states and could thus serve as a multistate memory.

The system that was nanoengineered by the researchers combines two different types of devices, known as magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs) and ferroelectric tunnel junctions (FTJs). An MTJ consists of two magnetic thin films separated by an insulating thin film, while an FTJ is composed of two different metal electrode layers separated by a thin ferroelectric film. Both these types of devices have proved to be promising information storage solutions.

Perovskite crystals can host qubits, challenging long-held assumptions

For the first time, researchers have demonstrated that the properties of the perovskite family of materials can be used to create so-called quantum bits. The findings, published in the journal Nature Communications, pave the way for more affordable materials in future quantum computers.

According to the researchers from Linköping University, Sweden, behind the study, few within the field believed it would be possible. The reason is that the atoms in perovskite materials should, in theory, interact so strongly that the qubit would collapse before the calculation could be completed. However, the experiments conducted by the Linköping team show that it works.

“Our findings open up an entirely new research field,” says Yuttapoom Puttisong, associate professor at Linköping University.

Joscha Bach: Galactic Game Theory

Joscha Bach on the possibility that advanced / mature civs converge on strategy and value, and join the cosmic collective. https://www.scifuture.org/transparency-of-history-in-galactic-game-theory/ Many thanks for tuning in! Please support SciFuture by subscribing and sharing! Buy me a coffee? https://buymeacoffee.com/tech101z Have any ideas about people to interview? Want to be notified about future events? Any comments about the STF series? Please fill out this form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1mr9PIfq2ZYlQsXRIn5BcLH2onbiSI7g79mOH_AFCdIk/ Kind regards, Adam Ford — Science, Technology & the Future — #SciFuture — http://scifuture.org …

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Why You Should Question Genetic Risk Scores

Whole genome sequencing is powerful but still very new. Many companies offer genetic predictions for diseases without clearly explaining how those models are built or validated. Most people don’t ask basic questions like: How accurate is this? What data was used? What are the limitations? In this video, we break down why transparency matters and why you should always question genetic risk scores before trusting them. Youtube Video: https://www.youtube.com/LongevityScienceNews/membership Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/polygenic-scores-152170836?utm…=join_link https://www.herasight.com/

Three anesthesia drugs all have the same effect in the brain, MIT researchers find

When patients undergo general anesthesia, doctors can choose among several drugs. Although each of these drugs acts on neurons in different ways, they all lead to the same result: a disruption of the brain’s balance between stability and excitability, according to a new MIT study.

This disruption causes neural activity to become increasingly unstable, until the brain loses consciousness, the researchers found. The discovery of this common mechanism could make it easier to develop new technologies for monitoring patients while they are undergoing anesthesia.

“What’s exciting about that is the possibility of a universal anesthesia-delivery system that can measure this one signal and tell how unconscious you are, regardless of which drugs they’re using in the operating room,” says Earl Miller, the Picower Professor of Neuroscience and a member of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory.

Miller, Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience Emery Brown, and their colleagues are now working on an automated control system for delivery of anesthesia drugs, which would measure the brain’s stability using EEG and then automatically adjust the drug dose. This could help doctors ensure that patients stay unconscious throughout surgery without becoming too deeply unconscious, which can have negative side effects following the procedure.

Miller and Ila Fiete, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences, the director of the K. Lisa Yang Integrative Computational Neuroscience Center (ICoN), and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, are the senior authors of the new study, which appears today in Cell Reports. MIT graduate student Adam Eisen is the paper’s lead author.

Excellent work Earl Miller and team!

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The Secret Life of Claude Code: Reading Code You Didn’t Write

How to orient yourself in an unfamiliar codebase — and how Claude Code can help you find your footing without losing your judgment.

Margaret is a senior software engineer. Timothy is her junior colleague. They work in a grand Victorian library in London — the kind of place where inherited collections are treated with respect, and where no one pretends to have read something they haven’t. Timothy has arrived today with someone else’s problem.

Episode 6

Scientists say there is one sea on Earth that touches no land, and that is because it has no shore

The Atlantic Ocean holds a secret: a patch of calm water ringed by swift currents, sitting about 590 miles east of Florida yet never touching land. Known as the Sargasso Sea, sailors have crossed it for centuries, but few notice the border when they slip into glassy indigo waters.

Those who linger find the surface scattered with golden-brown seaweed – Sargassum – named for the Portuguese word sargaço, a type of grape-like algae. The plants bob in slow motion, rolling gently like tumbleweeds on a prairie of water.

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