Circa 2014
New research on nanoparticles shows that they could be used to encode information when suspended in a liquid. This could one day allow us to store vast amounts of data in a very small volume of “digital colloid.”
Circa 2015
Stanford bioengineer Manu Prakash and his students have developed a synchronous computer that operates using the unique physics of moving water droplets.
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Want to monitor the brain of a running tiger?
First, catch the tiger.
Then attach Bio-FlatScope, the latest iteration of lensless microscopy being developed at Rice University.
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Computer engineers at Duke University have developed virtual eyes that simulate how humans look at the world accurately enough for companies to train virtual reality and augmented reality programs. Called EyeSyn for short, the program will help developers create applications for the rapidly expanding metaverse while protecting user data.
The results have been accepted and will be presented at the International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), May 4–6, 2022, a leading annual forum on research in networked sensing and control.
“If you’re interested in detecting whether a person is reading a comic book or advanced literature by looking at their eyes alone, you can do that,” said Maria Gorlatova, the Nortel Networks Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke.
In findings that could help advance another “viable pathway” to fusion energy, research led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) physicists has proven the existence of neutrons produced through thermonuclear reactions from a sheared-flow stabilized Z-pinch device.
The researchers used advanced computer modeling techniques and diagnostic measurement devices honed at LLNL to solve a decades-old problem of distinguishing neutrons produced by thermonuclear reactions from ones produced by ion beam-driven instabilities for plasmas in the magneto-inertial fusion regime.
While the team’s previous research showed neutrons measured from sheared-flow stabilized Z-pinch devices were “consistent with thermonuclear production, we hadn’t completely proven it yet,” said LLNL physicist Drew Higginson, one of the co-authors of a paper recently published in Physics of Plasmas.
A scientist opens a laptop in front of a patient. On screen, a boy, tied to a fleet of balloons, fades in. As he rises into the air, the scene cuts abruptly to an office, where a man sits in front of his boss. A question then appears: “Was anyone in the video wearing a tie?”
Jie Zheng, a postdoctoral fellow at Boston Children’s Hospital, had flown to Los Angeles to show the video to this patient, who has a severe seizure disorder. Like with the 18 other patients who were part of the study, neurosurgeons had placed electrodes in the patient’s brain to pinpoint what had been causing their seizures. Zheng and a group of scientists in a federally funded BRAIN Initiative consortium used this opportune moment to find neurons involved in the creation of memories. While subjects watched clips from movies and answered questions that tested their memory of the videos, the electrical activity of their brains was monitored.
Over three years, the work — a collaboration between researchers at Cedars-Sinai in L.A., Boston Children’s, and the University of Toronto — led to the discovery of two new groups of brain cells: boundary and event cells. The researchers theorized that these neurons are involved in cleaving experiences into distinct events that humans can better remember. The study, published in Nature Neuroscience, may pave the way for new treatments for memory disorders, the authors said.
Details have emerged about a now-patched high-severity vulnerability in the Linux kernel that could potentially be abused to escape a container in order to execute arbitrary commands on the container host.
The shortcoming resides in a Linux kernel feature called control groups, also referred to as cgroups version 1 (v1), which allows processes to be organized into hierarchical groups, thereby making it possible to limit and monitor the usage of resources such as CPU, memory, disk I/O, and network.
Tracked as CVE-2022–0492 (CVSS score: 7.0), the issue concerns a case of privilege escalation in the cgroups v1 release_agent functionality, a script that’s executed following the termination of any process in the cgroup.
Circa 2021
Researchers think these flexible semiconductors will be able to monitor your heartbeat or tell you whether your milk has spoiled.
Hard drives and flash storage have gotten more reliable over the years, but only on a human timescale. What if we need data storage that lasts longer? Decades? Millennia? The key to that vision might be 5D optical storage, which has a data density 10,000 times that of a Blu-ray disc. But it’s always been far too slow to write data onto glass plates in this way—until now. A new technique developed at the University of Southampton speeds up the process dramatically, without impacting the reliability of the data.
This type of data storage uses three layers of nanoscale dots in a glass disc. The size, orientation, and position (in three dimensions) of the dots gives you the five “dimensions” used to encode data. Researchers say that a 5D disc could remain readable after 13.8 billion years, but it would be surprising if anyone was even around to read them at that point. In the shorter term, 5D optical media could also survive after being heated to 1,000 degrees Celsius. You can see an earlier, smaller version of the disc above.
This is not the first time 5G optical data storage has popped up. It was just impractically slow before. Data is added to the discs with lasers, but if the laser moves too fast, the disc’s structural integrity is compromised. The technique devised by doctoral researcher Yuhao Lei uses a femtosecond laser with a high repetition rate. The process starts with a seeding pulse that creates a nanovoid, but the fast pulse doesn’t need to actually write any data. The repeated weak pulses leverage a phenomenon known as near-field enhancement to sculpt the nanostructures in a more gentle way.
By understanding your body language, Google wants its products to offer you just what you want, just when you need it.
