An optical archival storage technology based on femtosecond laser direct writing in glass addresses the practical demands of archival storage.
Category: computing – Page 3
Australian consortium to develop quantum biotechnology platform to transform Alzheimer’s treatment discovery
“Our system provides a pathway towards a fast, scalable tool for measuring real-time brain activity in synthetic tissue cultures that replicate human brain tissue,” Associate Professor Simpson said.
If successful, this brain-on-chip technology could help evaluate the effectiveness of treatments for neurological diseases, including Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, epilepsy and anxiety, in the laboratory before moving into expensive and complex human trials.
Computer run on human brain cells learned to play ‘Doom’
Cortical Labs hopes neuronal chips will do much more than shoot pixelated demons.
Quantum internet materializes in Germany due to a 30-kilometer breakthrough
Something once thought too delicate for real cities just survived them. A quiet test in Germany hints that the next internet may be both unbreakable and already under our feet.
On a 30-kilometer loop of commercial fiber in Berlin, researchers just teleported data while ordinary internet traffic flowed on the same line without a hiccup. The feat, executed by T-Labs with Qunnect’s Carina platform, kept delicate quantum states steady against city vibrations and temperature swings, hitting 95 percent fidelity in real time. It shows that today’s networks can carry tomorrow’s quantum links, with stakes that range from unbreakable cryptography to connected quantum computers. For Deutsche Telekom’s Abdu Mudesir, it also signals a path to European technological sovereignty as the system scales to longer distances and more nodes.
All-in-Focus Fourier Ptychographic Microscopy via 3D Implicit Neural Representation
Microscopy has long been essential to biomedical research, enabling detailed analyses of complex samples. Fourier ptychographic microscopy (FPM), a computational imaging technique, provides high-resolution, wide-field images without requiring extensive hardware modifications. However, current FPM algorithms struggle with samples exhibiting depth variations, such as tilted or 3-dimensional (3D) objects. The limited depth of field (DoF) leads to images with only focal-plane areas in sharp focus, while regions outside appear blurred. To address this limitation, we propose an all-in-focus FPM algorithm using physics-informed 3D neural representations to reconstruct sharp, wide-field images of 3D objects under limited DoF. Unlike previous methods, our approach samples the full depth range to create a 3D feature volume that incorporates spatial and depth information.
Large-Scale Neuromorphic Spiking Array Processors: A Quest to Mimic the Brain
Neuromorphic engineering (NE) encompasses a diverse range of approaches to information processing that are inspired by neurobiological systems, and this feature distinguishes neuromorphic systems from conventional computing systems. The brain has evolved over billions of years to solve difficult engineering problems by using efficient, parallel, low-power computation. The goal of NE is to design systems capable of brain-like computation. Numerous large-scale neuromorphic projects have emerged recently. This interdisciplinary field was listed among the top 10 technology breakthroughs of 2014 by the MIT Technology Review and among the top 10 emerging technologies of 2015 by the World Economic Forum.
3D-printed ‘plug’ links fiber optics to photonic chips with low loss
Physicists and chemists at Heidelberg University have realized a photonic microchip that is driven by light just as easily as electronic components via a “plug.” Their development could serve as the basis for fast and cost-effective production of photonic integrated systems that are of great importance for implementing innovative computing and communications systems.
Prof. Dr. Wolfram Pernice of the Kirchhoff Institute for Physics headed up the research on this novel coupling concept for light-controlled chips. The results appear in the journal Science Advances.
Catching light in air: Programmable Mie voids boost light matter interaction
Atomically thin semiconductors such as tungsten disulfide (WS2) are promising materials for future photonic technologies. Despite being only a single layer of atoms thick, they host tightly bound excitons—pairs of electrons and holes that interact strongly with light—and can efficiently generate new colors of light through nonlinear optical processes such as second-harmonic generation.
These properties make them attractive for quantum optics, sensing, and on-chip light sources. At the same time, their extreme thinness imposes a basic limitation: There is very little material for light to interact with. As a result, emission and frequency conversion are often weak unless the surrounding photonic environment is carefully engineered.
A study published in Advanced Photonics introduces a new way to address this challenge by reshaping not the two-dimensional material itself, but the space beneath it. The researchers demonstrate a hybrid platform in which a monolayer of WS2 is placed on top of nanoscale air cavities, known as Mie voids, carved into a high-index crystal of bismuth telluride (Bi2Te3). The work shows that these voids can strongly enhance light emission and nonlinear optical signals, while also allowing direct visualization of localized optical modes.
A rewritable DNA hard drive may help solve the growing data storage crisis
Around the world, scientists are exploring an unexpected solution to the growing data crisis: storing digital information in synthetic DNA. The idea is simple but powerful—DNA is one of the most compact, durable information systems on Earth. But one issue has held the field back. Once data is written into DNA, it can’t be changed.
Now, researchers at the University of Missouri are helping to solve that problem by transforming DNA from a one-time medium into a rewritable digital hard drive. Their research is published in the journal PNAS Nexus.
“DNA is incredible—it stores life’s blueprint in a tiny, stable package,” said Li-Qun “Andrew” Gu, a professor of chemical and biomedical engineering at Mizzou’s College of Engineering. “We wanted to see if we could store and rewrite information at the molecular level faster, simpler and more efficiently than ever before.”