Global shifts, advancing tech, and data center demand: Here’s what’s coming in 2025 and beyond.
Category: computing – Page 14
Atomic-level view of plant cell death enzyme offers path to safer crop protection
In a discovery three decades in the making, scientists at Rutgers and Brookhaven National Laboratory have acquired detailed knowledge about the internal structures and mode of regulation for a specialized protein and are proceeding to develop tools that can capitalize on its ability to help plants combat a wide range of diseases.
The work, which exploits a natural process where plant cells die on purpose to help the host plant stay healthy, is expected to have wide applications in the agricultural sector, offering new ways to protect major food crops from a variety of devastating diseases, the scientists said.
In a study published in Nature Communications, a team led by Eric Lam at Rutgers University-New Brunswick and Qun Liu at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York reported that advanced crystallography and computer modeling techniques have enabled them to obtain the best picture yet of a pivotal plant protease, a protein enzyme that cuts other proteins, known as metacaspase 9.
Exploiting the full potential of multiferroic materials for magnetic memory devices
As the digital world demands greater data storage and faster access times, magnetic memory technologies have emerged as a promising frontier. However, conventional magnetic memory devices have an inherent limitation: they use electric currents to generate the magnetic fields necessary to reverse their stored magnetization, leading to energy losses in the form of heat.
This inefficiency has pushed researchers to explore approaches that could further reduce power consumption in magnetic memories while maintaining or even enhancing their performance.
Multiferroic materials, which exhibit both ferroelectric and ferromagnetic properties, have long been considered potential game changers for next-generation memory devices.
Customizable chips mimic real-life blood vessel structures for disease research
Blood vessels are like big-city highways; full of curves, branches, merges, and congestion. Yet for years, lab models replicated vessels like straight, simple roads.
To better capture the complex architecture of real human blood vessels, researchers in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Texas A&M University have developed a customizable vessel-chip method, enabling more accurate vascular disease research and a drug discovery platform.
Vessel-chips are engineered microfluidic devices that mimic human vasculature on a microscopic scale. These chips can be patient-specific and provide a non-animal method for pharmaceutical testing and studying blood flow. Jennifer Lee, a biomedical engineering master’s student, joined Dr. Abhishek Jain’s lab and designed an advanced vessel-chip that could replicate real variations in vascular structure.
Quantum visualization technique confirms UTe₂ is an intrinsic topological superconductor
Scientists at University College Cork (UCC) in Ireland have developed a powerful new tool for finding the next generation of materials needed for large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computing.
The significant breakthrough means that, for the first time, researchers have found a way to determine once and for all whether a material can effectively be used in certain quantum computing microchips.
The major findings have been published in Science and are the result of a large international collaboration which includes leading theoretical work from Prof. Dung-Hai Lee at the University of California, Berkeley, and material synthesis from professors Sheng Ran and Johnpierre Paglione at Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Maryland, respectively.
Laser qubits in the sky over Long Island — scientists test quantum communication in the air
American scientists plan to implement a project to test quantum communication in free space. Using lasers, they want to launch qubits over the Long Island Sound.
It is noted, that three laser beams from the telescope on top of the Kline Tower on the Yale University campus will be directed across the Long Island Sound at a distance of nearly 43.5 km and captured on the opposite side by a similar telescope on the roof of the University Hospital Stony Brook.
The goal of the Quantum Laser Across the Sound project is to expand the ability to send and receive quantum information and demonstrating the potential for possible future quantum computing infrastructures. The telescope on top of the Kline Tower will send entangled photons 43.4 km across the Long Island Sound.
Superconducting diode bridge efficiently converts AC to DC for quantum circuits
Superconductivity is an advantageous property observed in some materials, which entails an electrical resistance of zero at extremely low temperatures. Superconductors, materials that exhibit this property, have proved to be highly promising for the development of various electronic components for both classical and quantum technologies.
Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of California–Riverside and SEEQC Inc. recently introduced a new system comprised of four superconducting diodes (SDs), which are electronic devices that allow electric current to flow in only one direction and are made of superconducting materials.
Their superconducting diode bridge, introduced in a paper published in Nature Electronics, was found to perform remarkably well at cryogenic temperatures, achieving rectification efficiencies as high as 42% ± 5%.
Twisting light for memory: New chiral photonic device enables real-time control of light polarization and data storage
As fast as modern electronics have become, they could be much faster if their operations were based on light, rather than electricity. Fiber optic cables already transport information at the speed of light; to do computations on that information without translating it back to electric signals will require a host of new optical components.
Researchers at the John and Marcia Price College of Engineering have now developed such a device: one that can be adjusted on the fly to give light different degrees of circular polarization. Because information can be stored in this chiral property of light, the researchers’ device could serve as a multifunctional, reconfigurable component of an optical computing system.
Led by Weilu Gao, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, and Jichao Fan, a Ph.D. candidate in his lab, a study demonstrating the device was published in the journal Nature Communications. Fellow Gao lab members Ruiyang Chen, Minhan Lou, Haoyu Xie, Benjamin Hillam, Jacques Doumani, and Yingheng Tang contributed to the study, as did Nina Hong of the J.A. Woollam Company.