Lithium-ion batteries power our lives.
Because they are lightweight, have high energy density and are rechargeable, the batteries power many products, from laptops and cell phones to electric cars and toothbrushes.
However, current lithium-ion batteries have reached the limit of how much energy they can store. That has researchers looking for more powerful and cheaper alternatives.
Two-dimensional (2D) magnetic insulators, which are electrically insulating materials with long-range magnetic order, could be used to fabricate compact magneto-electric or magneto-optical devices. Efficiently and reliably controlling the properties of these atomically thin magnets through electrical means, however, has so far proved to be highly challenging, as the materials’ charge levels often cannot be largely adjusted and their crystal fields cannot be considerably altered using external electric fields.
Researchers at University of Maryland and their collaborators recently devised a new strategy that could be used to efficiently control 2D magnetic insulators. This strategy, outlined in a paper in Nature Electronics, relies on the use of a thin ferroelectric polymer that can modulate the 2D materials’ magnetic responses.
“When it comes to electronic devices, people are primarily pursuing a smaller form factor (relating to higher integration density, which means more devices can be integrated on the unit area/volume of a chip), lower energy consumption, and higher performance,” Cheng Gong, the lead principal investigator for the study, told Tech Xplore.
An international team of researchers from Leibniz University Hannover (Germany), the University of Twente (Netherlands), and the start-up company QuiX Quantum has presented an entangled quantum light source fully integrated for the first time on a chip. The results of the study were published in the journal Nature Photonics.
“Our breakthrough allowed us to shrink the source size by a factor of more than 1,000, allowing reproducibility, stability over a longer time, scaling, and potentially mass-production. All these characteristics are required for real-world applications such as quantum processors,” says Prof. Dr. Michael Kues, head of the Institute of Photonics, and board member of the Cluster of Excellence PhoenixD at Leibniz University Hannover.
Quantum bits (qubits) are the basic building blocks of quantum computers and the quantum internet. Quantum light sources generate light quanta (photons) that can be used as quantum bits. On-chip photonics has become a leading platform for processing optical quantum states as it is compact, robust, and allows to accommodate and arrange many elements on a single chip. Here, light is directed on the chip through extremely compact structures, which are used to build photonic quantum computing systems. These are already accessible today through the cloud. Scalably implemented, they could solve tasks that are inaccessible to conventional computers due to their limited computing capacities. This superiority is referred to as quantum advantage.
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Researchers from John Hopkins University together with Dr. Brett Kagan, chief scientist at Cortical Labs in Melbourne, have recently led the development of the DishBrain project, in which human cells in a petri dish learnt to play Pong.
The team claims that biological computers could surpass today’s electronic computers for certain applications while using a small fraction of the electricity required by today’s computers and server farms.
A tiny computer chip was implanted into seven mice at once
The implant created by the engineers at Columbia is record-breakingly small, but it’s also breaking new ground in simply existing as a wholly functional, electronic circuit whose total volume is less than 0.1 cubic millimeter. In other words, it’s the size of a dust mite, not to mention far more compact than the world’s smallest computer, which is a cube-shaped device precisely 0.01-inches (0.3 mm) on each side. The smaller, new chip is only visible with a microscope, and pushed the envelope in power-sourcing and communications ingenuity design.
Typically, small electronics feature radio frequency (RF) modules capable of transmitting and receiving electromagnetic signals, this method generates wavelengths too large to originate from devices as small as the new one. Alternatively, ultrasound wavelengths are far smaller at specific frequencies because the speed of sound is a lot slower than the speed of light at which all electromagnetic waves move. Consequently, the Colombia team of engineers integrated a piezoelectric transducer capable of functioning like an “antenna” for wireless communication and powering using ultrasound waves.
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The cells in your body are like computer software: they’re “programmed” to carry out specific functions at specific times. If we can better understand this process, we could unlock the ability to reprogram cells ourselves, says computational biologist Sara-Jane Dunn. In a talk from the cutting-edge of science, she explains how her team is studying embryonic stem cells to gain a new understanding of the biological programs that power life — and develop “living software” that could transform medicine, agriculture and energy.
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😗 year 2010 :3.
(PhysOrg.com) — Scientists have literally taken a leap into a new era of computing power by making the world’s smallest precision-built transistor — a “quantum dot” of just seven atoms in a single silicon crystal. Despite its incredibly tiny size — a mere four billionths of a metre long — the quantum dot is a functioning electronic device, the world’s first created deliberately by placing individual atoms.
It can be used to regulate and control electrical current flow like a commercial transistor but it represents a key step into a new age of atomic-scale miniaturisation and super-fast, super-powerful computers.
The discovery is reported today in the journal Nature Nanotechnology by a team from the UNSW Centre for Quantum Computer Technology (CQCT) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Year 2022 😗
Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, IL
A team of scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, have achieved efficient quantum coupling between two distant magnetic devices, which can host a certain type of magnetic excitations called magnons. These excitations happen when an electric current generates a magnetic field. Coupling allows magnons to exchange energy and information. This kind of coupling may be useful for creating new quantum information technology devices.
This instant communication does not require sending a message between magnons limited by the speed of light. It is analogous to what physicists call quantum entanglement. Following on from a 2019 study, the researchers sought to create a system that would allow magnetic excitations to talk to one another at a distance in a superconducting circuit. This would allow the magnons to potentially form the basis of a type of quantum computer. For the basic underpinnings of a viable quantum computer, researchers need the particles to be coupled and stay coupled for a long time.
face_with_colon_three year 2022.
For the first time, scientists have created a quantum computing experiment for studying the dynamics of wormholes – that is, shortcuts through spacetime that could get around relativity’s cosmic speed limits.
Wormholes are traditionally the stuff of science fiction, ranging from Jodie Foster’s wild ride in Contact to the time-bending plot twists in Interstellar. But the researchers behind the experiment, reported in the December 1 issue of the journal Nature, hope that their work will help physicists study the phenomenon for real.
“We found a quantum system that exhibits key properties of a gravitational wormhole, yet is sufficiently small to implement on today’s quantum hardware,” Caltech physicist Maria Spiropulu said in a news release. Spiropulu, the Nature paper’s senior author, is the principal investigator for a federally funded research program known as Quantum Communication Channels for Fundamental Physics.
We flew out to Salt Lake City, Utah, to get an exclusive look at the company behind some of the most advanced implantable neurotechnologies, Blackrock Neurotech. Brain implants are here, and they’re becoming more and more advanced every day. The Utah Array and Neuroport system allows for high-quality data recording and stimulation. It has the most in-subject research hours of any brain-computer interface on the market and has been a part of the most advanced BCIs since 2004, inspiring hope in persons with movement disorders. We also saw their newly announced Neuralace interface debuted in November 2022. Learn what it takes to work at a company at the forefront of brain-computer interface development.
Thanks to Blackrock Neurotech for sponsoring this video. The opinions expressed in this video are that of The BCI Guys and should be taken as such.
Blackrock Neurotech’s Website: https://blackrockneurotech.com/
By the way, Blackrock Neurotech is not affiliated with the BlackRock financial firm — this is a frequent question.
