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Category: computing – Page 357

Diseases such as Alzheimer’s and epilepsy will be easier to detect.

A 3D microchip made by a Swiss company will allow scientists to study the complexity of 3D cellular networks. This 3D chip will help to observe complex structures such as the human brain, according to a report published by Labiotech.eu.

Understanding how organs form and how their cells behave is essential to finding the causes and treatment for developmental disorders, as well as understanding certain diseases, said 3Brain.

A microchip that allows scientists to study the complexity of 3D cellular networks at unrivaled scale and precision has been added to 3Brain AG’s brain-on-chip portfolio.

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It’s official: Apple has just sent out invites for its next hardware event. As expected, the company will share what it’s been working on for the past year on September 7th, with a live broadcast from Apple Park starting at 1PM ET. The invite features the words “Far out.” Make of that what you will.

The company is widely expected to announce four new iPhone models at the event. Leading up to today’s announcement, most reports have suggested the 2022 iPhone lineup will consist of a 6.1-inch iPhone 14, a 6.7-inch iPhone 14 Max, a 6.1-inch iPhone 14 Pro and a 6.7-inch iPhone 14 Pro Max. Apple reportedly won’t offer a new “mini” model this year due to lackluster sales of the iPhone 12 mini and iPhone 13 mini.

Enhancements on the standard iPhone 14 models reportedly include the addition of more RAM, longer-lasting batteries and a better selfie camera with autofocus. Meanwhile, the Pro models are expected to feature a new design that trades away Apple’s signature display notch for a Samsung-style hole-punch front camera cutout. Additionally, the Pro variants will reportedly feature a new 48-megapixel main camera and thinner display bezels. They’re also expected to be the only models to ship with Apple’s next-generation A16 chip.

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The technology is based on integrated circuits, which typically rely on silicon semiconductors in order to process information in a way that is similar to the role played by the brain in the human body.

The research team discovered that integrated circuits capable of performing computational tasks could be achieved using “nearly any material” around us.

“We have created the first example of an engineering material that can simultaneously sense, think and act upon mechanical stress, without requiring additional circuits to process such signals,” said Ryan Harne, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Penn State.

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Chip makers will be able to put a trillion transistors in a package by the end of the decade in a move that will shake up the industry, says Pat Gelsinger, CEO of Intel.

This is one of the key drivers for Intel’s move into offering foundry services, he told leading chip designers in a keynote for the HotChips 34 conference in California last night. This will lead to more sharing of IP and drive new EDA tools, he says.

“We see our way clear to getting to a trillion transistors by the end of the decade,” he said. “With Ribbon FETs, using topside signal and backside power distribution and EUV and high NA we have a good path to the end of the decade,” he said, “With 2.5 and 3D packaging, these four together give us a path to a trillion transistor by the end of the decade.”

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In a significant development, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) engineers have developed a new category of wireless wearable skin-like sensors for health monitoring that doesn’t require batteries or an internal processor.

The team’s sensor design is a form of electronic skin, or “e-skin” — a flexible, semiconducting film that conforms to the skin like electronic Scotch tape, according to a press release published by MIT.

“If there is any change in the pulse, or chemicals in sweat, or even ultraviolet exposure to skin, all of this activity can change the pattern of surface acoustic waves on the gallium nitride film,” said Yeongin Kim, study’s first author, and a former MIT postdoc scholar.

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It isn’t alive, and has no structures even approaching the complexity of the brain, but a compound called vanadium dioxide is capable of ‘remembering’ previous external stimuli, researchers have found.

This is the first time this ability has been identified in a material; but it may not be the last. The discovery has some pretty intriguing implications for the development of electronic devices, in particular data processing and storage.

“Here we report electronically accessible long-lived structural states in vanadium dioxide that can provide a scheme for data storage and processing,” write a team of researchers led by electrical engineer Mohammad Samizadeh Nikoo of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland in their paper.

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A pair of researchers at MIT have found evidence suggesting that a new kind of computer could be built based on liquid crystals rather than silicon. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, Žiga Kos and Jörn Dunkel outline a possible design for a computer that takes advantage of slight differences in the orientation of the molecules that make up liquid crystals and the advantages such a system would have over those currently in use.

Most modern screens are made using (LCDs). Such displays are made by growing crystals in a flat plane. These crystals are made up of rod-shaped that line up in a parallel fashion (those that line up the wrong way are removed). The orientation of the molecules in LCDs are not all perfect alignments, of course, but they are close enough to allow for sharp imagery.

In this new effort, Kos and Dunkel, suggest it should be possible to take advantage of those slight misalignments to create a new way to hold and manipulate computer data. They note that such a computer could encode a unique value to each type of misalignment to hold a bit of data. Thus, a computer using this approach would not be constrained to conventional binary bits—it could have a whole host of options, perhaps making it much faster than machines used today (depending on how quickly the orientations could be changed).

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