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Category: computing – Page 583

To make particles flow more efficiently, put an obstacle in their way

Scientists used to perform experiments by stirring biological and chemical agents into test tubes.

Nowadays, they automate research by using the size of postage stamps. In these tiny devices, millions of microscopic particles are captured in droplets of water, each droplet serving as the “test tube” for a single experiment. The chip funnels these many droplets, one at a time, through a tiny channel where a laser probes each passing droplet to record thousands of experimental results each second.

These chips are used for such things as testing new antibiotics, screening drug compounds, sequencing the DNA and RNA of single cells, and otherwise speeding up the pace of scientific discovery.

Mind over matter: brain chip allows paralysed man to write

Tokyo (AFP)

Paralysed from the neck down, the man stares intently at a screen. As he imagines handwriting letters, they appear before him as typed text thanks to a new brain implant.

The 65-year-old is “typing” at a speed similar to his peers tapping on a smartphone, using a device that could one day help paralysed people communicate quickly and easily.

Physicists unveil the condensation of liquid light in a semiconductor one-atom-thick

An international team of physicists has shown experimentally for the first time how a Bose-Einstein condensate — tens of thousands of quanta of ‘liquid light’ — is formed in the thinnest monatomic film of a semiconductor crystal. The team includes the head of the Spin Optics Laboratory at St Petersburg University, Professor Alexey Kavokin. This discovery will help create new types of lasers capable of producing qubits — the main integral parts of quantum computers of the future.

New neuroelectronic system can read and modify brain circuits

As researchers learn more about the brain, it has become clear that responsive neurostimulation is becoming increasingly effective at probing neural circuit function and treating neuropsychiatric disorders, such as epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease. But current approaches to designing a fully implantable and biocompatible device able to make such interventions have major limitations: their resolution isn’t high enough and most require large, bulky components that make implantation difficult with risk of complications.

A Columbia Engineering team led by Dion Khodagholy, assistant professor of electrical engineering, has come up with a new approach that shows great promise to improve such devices. Building on their earlier work to develop smaller, more efficient conformable bioelectronic transistors and materials, the researchers orchestrated their devices to create implantable circuits that enable allow reading and manipulation of brain circuits. Their multiplex-then-amplify (MTA) system requires only one amplifier per multiplexer, in contrast to that need an equal number of amplifiers as number of channels.

“It is critical to be able to detect and intervene to treat brain-disorder-related symptoms, such as epileptic seizures, in real time,” said Khodagholy, a leader in bio-and neuroelectronics design. “Not only is our system much smaller and more flexible than current devices, but it also enables simultaneous stimulation of arbitrary waveforms on multiple independent channels, so it is much more versatile.

Hologram experts can now create real-life images that move in the air

They may be tiny weapons, but Brigham Young University’s holography research group has figured out how to create lightsabers—green for Yoda and red for Darth Vader, naturally—with actual luminous beams rising from them.

Inspired by the displays of science fiction, the researchers have also engineered battles between equally small versions of the Starship Enterprise and a Klingon Battle Cruiser that incorporate photon torpedoes launching and striking the enemy vessel that you can see with the naked eye.

“What you’re seeing in the scenes we create is real; there is nothing computer generated about them,” said lead researcher Dan Smalley, a professor of electrical engineering at BYU. “This is not like the movies, where the lightsabers or the photon torpedoes never really existed in physical . These are real, and if you look at them from any angle, you will see them existing in that space.”

Tiny, wireless, injectable chips use ultrasound to monitor body processes

Widely used to monitor and map biological signals, to support and enhance physiological functions, and to treat diseases, implantable medical devices are transforming healthcare and improving the quality of life for millions of people. Researchers are increasingly interested in designing wireless, miniaturized implantable medical devices for in vivo and in situ physiological monitoring. These devices could be used to monitor physiological conditions, such as temperature, blood pressure, glucose, and respiration for both diagnostic and therapeutic procedures.

To date, conventional implanted electronics have been highly volume-inefficient—they generally require multiple chips, packaging, wires, and external transducers, and batteries are often needed for . A constant trend in electronics has been tighter integration of electronic components, often moving more and more functions onto the integrated circuit itself.

Researchers at Columbia Engineering report that they have built what they say is the world’s smallest single– system, consuming a total volume of less than 0.1 mm3. The system is as small as a dust mite and visible only under a microscope. In order to achieve this, the team used ultrasound to both power and communicate with the device wirelessly. The study was published online May 7 in Science Advances.

Faster, More Secure Memory Storage: Physicists Find a Novel Way to Switch Antiferromagnetism On and Off

The findings could lead to faster, more secure memory storage, in the form of antiferromagnetic bits.

When you save an image to your smartphone, those data are written onto tiny transistors that are electrically switched on or off in a pattern of “bits” to represent and encode that image. Most transistors today are made from silicon, an element that scientists have managed to switch at ever-smaller scales, enabling billions of bits, and therefore large libraries of images and other files, to be packed onto a single memory chip.

But growing demand for data, and the means to store them, is driving scientists to search beyond silicon for materials that can push memory devices to higher densities, speeds, and security.