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Category: computing – Page 505

Many of us have been wracking our brains why Nvidia would spend a fortune – a whopping $40 billion – to acquire Arm Holdings, a chip architecture licensing company that generates on the order of $2 billion in sales – since the deal was rumored back in July 2020. As we sat and listened to the Arm Vision Day rollout of the Arm V9 architecture, which will define processors ranging from tiny embedded controllers in IoT device all the way up to massive CPUs in the datacenter, we may have figured it out.

There are all kinds of positives, as we pointed out in our original analysis ahead of the deal, in our analysis the day the deal was announced in September 2020, and in a one-on-one conversation with Nvidia co-founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang in October 2020.

We have said for a long time that we believe that Nvidia needs to control its own CPU future, and even joked with Huang that it didn’t need to have to buy all of Arm Holdings to make the best Arm server CPU, to which he responded that this was truly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create value and push all of Nvidia’s technologies – its own GPUs for compute and graphics and Mellanox network interface chips, DPU processors, and switch ASICs – through an Arm licensing channel to make them all as malleable and yet standardized as the Arm licensing model not only allows, but encourages.

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When the researchers used their system to measure the qubits’ state, they achieved an accuracy of 98 percent, exactly the same as when they carried out the measurement using a conventional electrical cable.

The authors acknowledge that work is already underway to try and reduce the heat produced by current approaches, including the development of thinner wires, proposals to replace wires with superconducting cables, or a process called multiplexing that makes it possible to send many signals over the same cable simultaneously.

But optical fiber is a well-established technology, and is already replacing electrical wires in many areas of computing thanks to its ability to carry far more data. The authors also point out that components used in this experiment were designed to work at room temperature, so optimizing them for cryogenic temperatures could provide significant performance gains.

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**Five years ago, scientists created a single-celled synthetic organism that, with only 473 genes, was the simplest living cell ever known.** However, this bacteria-like organism behaved strangely when growing and dividing, producing cells with wildly different shapes and sizes.

Now, scientists have identified seven genes that can be added to tame the cells’ unruly nature, causing them to neatly divide into uniform orbs. This achievement, a collaboration between the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Center for Bits and Atoms, was described in the journal Cell.

Identifying these genes is an important step toward engineering synthetic cells that do useful things. Such cells could act as small factories that produce drugs, foods and fuels; detect disease and produce drugs to treat it while living inside the body; and function as tiny computers.

But to design and build a cell that does exactly what you want it to do, it helps to have a list of essential parts and know how they fit together.

“We want to understand the fundamental design rules of life,” said Elizabeth Strychalski, a co-author on the study and leader of NIST’s Cellular Engineering Group. “If this cell can help us to discover and understand those rules, then we’re off to the races.”

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The very first moments of the Universe can be reconstructed mathematically even though they cannot be observed directly. Physicists from the Universities of Göttingen and Auckland (New Zealand) have greatly improved the ability of complex computer simulations to describe this early epoch. They discovered that a complex network of structures can form in the first trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. The behavior of these objects mimics the distribution of galaxies in today’s Universe. In contrast to today, however, these primordial structures are microscopically small. Typical clumps have masses of only a few grams and fit into volumes much smaller than present-day elementary particles. The results of the study have been published in the journal Physical Review D.

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A new type of 3D-printed battery which uses electrodes made from vegetable starch and carbon nanotubes could provide mobile devices with a more environmentally-friendly, higher-capacity source of power.

A team of engineers led from the University of Glasgow have developed the battery in a bid to make more sustainable batteries capable of storing and delivering power more efficiently. The battery’s design and fabrication is outlined in a paper published in the Journal of Power Sources.

Lithium-ion batteries provide a useful combination of lightweight, compact form factors and the ability to withstand many cycles of charging and discharging. That has made them ideally suited for use in a wide array of devices, including laptops, mobile phones, smart watches, and electric vehicles.

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“The quality of VR headsets has improved exponentially since the 1990s. These graphs illustrate how the rapid improvement is likely to continue in the coming decades, with graphical resolutions practically indistinguishable from real life by 2040.”

Virtual reality – future trends.

The quality of virtual reality (VR) headsets has improved exponentially since the 1990s. These graphs illustrate how the rapid improvement is likely to continue in the coming decades, with graphical resolutions practically indistinguishable from real life by 2040.

Early concepts of alternative realities presented to a viewer had emerged as far back as the 19th century. However, it was not until the late 20th century that head-mounted display systems began to see practical and widespread use. Philosopher and computer scientist Jaron Lanier popularised the term “virtual reality” in the 1980s, and the first consumer headsets emerged in the 1990s.

Continue reading “Virtual reality – future trends” | >

Once particularly useful future application, according to Harvard Business Review, will be the potential development of new drugs, a task it is “uniquely suited for” because it would operate on the same laws of quantum physics as the molecules it is simulating.

And so, Abu Dhabi has joined the community of nations endeavouring to accomplish this next step in human history.

The Advanced Technology Research Council is building the computer at its Quantum Research Centre labs in Abu Dhabi, in collaboration with Barcelona-based Qilimanjaro Quantum Tech.

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A new class of quantum dots deliver a stable stream of single, spectrally tunable infrared photons under ambient conditions and at room temperature, unlike other single photon emitters. This breakthrough opens a range of practical applications, including quantum communication, quantum metrology, medical imaging and diagnostics, and clandestine labeling.

“The demonstration of high single-photon purity in the infrared has immediate utility in areas such as quantum key distribution for secure communication,” said Victor Klimov, lead author of a paper published today in Nature Nanotechnology by Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists.

The Los Alamos team has developed an elegant approach to synthesizing the colloidal-nanoparticle structures derived from their prior work on visible light emitters based on a core of cadmium selenide encased in a cadmium sulfide shell. By inserting a mercury sulfide interlayer at the core/shell interface, the team turned the into highly efficient emitters of that can be tuned to a specific wavelength.

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The torsion balance contains a rigid balance beam suspended by a fine thread as an ancient scientific instrument that continues to form a very sensitive force sensor to date. The force sensitivity is proportional to the lengths of the beam and thread and inversely proportional to the fourth power of the diameter of the thread; therefore, nanomaterials that support the torsion balances should be ideal building blocks. In a new report now published on Science Advances, Lin Cong and a research team in quantum physics, microelectronics and nanomaterials in China have detailed a torsional balance array on a chip with the highest sensitivity level. The team facilitated this by using a carbon nanotube as the thread and a monolayer graphene coated with aluminum films as the beam and mirror. Using the experimental setup, Cong et al. measured the femtonewton force exerted by a weak laser. The balances on the chip served as an ideal platform to investigate fundamental interactions up to zeptonewton in accuracy.

A modern role for ancient scientific instruments

The torsion pendulum is an ancient scientific instrument used to discover Coulomb’s law in 1785 and to determine the density of Earth in 1798. The instrument is useful across a range of applications including existing scientific explorations of precisely determining the gravitational constant. The most efficient method to achieve high sensitivity in the setup is by reducing the diameter of the suspension thread as much as possible. For instance, in 1931, Kappler et al. used a centimeters-long thread to develop a highly sensitive torsion balance to set a record for a hitherto unattained intrinsic force sensitivity. At present, carbon nanotubes form one of the strongest and thinnest materials known. In this work, the team synthesized ultra-long carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and large-area graphene to substantially increase the lengths of the balance beam and suspension thread to significantly improve the sensitivity of the instrument.

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Bright semiconductor nanocrystals known as quantum dots give QLED TV screens their vibrant colors. But attempts to increase the intensity of that light generate heat instead, reducing the dots’ light-producing efficiency.

A new study explains why, and the results have broad implications for developing future quantum and photonics technologies where replaces electrons in computers and fluids in refrigerators, for example.

In a QLED TV screen, dots absorb blue light and turn it into green or red. At the low energies where TV screens operate, this conversion of light from one color to another is virtually 100% efficient. But at the higher excitation energies required for brighter screens and other technologies, the efficiency drops off sharply. Researchers had theories about why this happens, but no one had ever observed it at the atomic scale until now.

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