A new type of “quasiparticle” theorized by Caltech’s Gil Refael, a professor of theoretical physics and condensed matter theory, could help improve the efficiency of a wide range of photonic devices—technologies, such as optical amplifiers, solar photovoltaic cells, and even barcode scanners, which create, manipulate, or detect light.
Memory loss is a truly devastating part of dementia, but this invention aims to fix that by bypassing the damage, and repairing long term memory.
Alzheimer’s and dementia are complex diseases, and there’s currently no effective treatment. Given the unpleasant nature of the disease, there’s an urgent need for results. Instead of taking the usual biological route, one team has constructed a prosthetic made up of a small electrode array — which can help re-encode short term memory into long term.
Built using decades of research, the device operates using a new algorithm based on accumulated neural data. New sensory information is normally translated into a quick memory and transported as an electrical signal through the hippocampus, potentially for long term storage. If this region is damaged then the process is disturbed, and new experiences fail to be encoded. Alzheimer’s patients can often remember childhood events, but struggle with recent experiences; specifically because of this hippocampal damage.
A British tech company has come up with a new way of powering wearables and smart home devices: a device called the Freevolt, which can harvest the ambient energy from radio waves and turn it into a small amount of electricity for low-energy gadgets to tap into.
As CNET reports, this level of energy can’t keep a smartphone running, but it could be enough to power that remote sensor on your garden gate. If sensors and beacons have a wireless energy source plus wireless connectivity, it opens up more possibilities for kitting out our homes and gardens with these kind of devices.
“Companies have been researching how to harvest energy from Wi-Fi, cellular, and broadcast networks for many years,” Drayton Technologies CEO and chairman, Lord Drayson, said in a press statement. “But it is difficult, because there is only a small amount of energy to harvest and achieving the right level of rectifying efficiency has been the issue — up until now. For the first time, we have solved the problem of harvesting usable energy from a small radio frequency signal.”
Sign language has helped the hearing-impaired communicate for many centuries, way before it was formalised and officially recognised, but this long-standing language of gestures has now been given a 21st-century technological upgrade. Saudi designer and media artist Hadeel Ayoub has invented a smart glove that recognises hand movements and converts them into the relevant text.
Much like Google Translate can give anyone a basic grasp of a foreign language in an instant, this glove is designed to help sign language users make themselves understood by those who can’t usually interpret it.
Five flex sensors sit on the fingers, monitoring how they’re being manipulated, while an accelerometer integrated into the fabric of the glove figures out how the hand is being held and the direction in which it’s pointing. Through three successive prototypes, the glove has been made thinner, lighter, and faster, and the latest version includes a text-to-speech chip to vocalise the words as they’re signed.
Founded in 2005, Polyera has developed deep and unique expertise spanning science, engineering, and design focused on flexible electronics.
As implants and bio-hacking gain popularity, could tweaking the body’s circuits become a mainstay in future medicine?
Bioelectronics offer everything from precise diabetes treatment to appetite reduction. In a world where most of us have a phone glued to our hand at all times, combining ‘wetware’ with hardware is starting to make real sense.
IBM announced a major engineering breakthrough that could open the way to replacing silicon transistors with carbon nanotubes in future electronics and computing technologies.
Silicon transistors have become dramatically smaller in the last decades following Moore’s Law — the observation that the number of transistors per unit area doubles every two tears. However, silicon transistor technology is approaching a point of physical limitation.
With Moore’s Law running out of steam, shrinking the size of transistors — including the channels and contacts — without compromising performance is a research and manufacturing challenge. Carbon nanotube technology could lead to much smaller transistors and keep electronics and computing devices on the Moore’s Law of exponentially decreasing size and thus increasing performance. However, as devices become smaller, increased contact resistance for carbon nanotubes has hindered performance gains until now.
It’s easy to forget how amazing the dexterity and anatomy of our own hands are–until you learn how difficult they are to replicate for machines. MIT has made big strides in robotic hands this year, and now it’s published a new one.
This week at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Bianca Homberg, Daniela Rus (the director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) and their colleagues are showing off the latest advance in robotic digits: Modular fingers made of silicone and embedded with sensors, dexterous enough to pick up everything from soft toys to single pieces of paper without needing to be programmed to understand what it’s gripping.
New findings published by quantum scientists in Germany could pave the way towards computer chips that use light instead of electricity to control their internal logic. Where today’s silicon-based electrical computer chips are capable of speeds in the gigahertz range, the German light-based chips would be some 1,000,000 times faster, operating in the petahertz range.
Rather than focusing on an exciting new semiconductor, or some metamaterial that manipulates light in weird and wonderful ways, this research instead revolves around dielectrics. In the field of electronics, materials generally fall into one of three categories: charge carriers (conductors), semiconductors, and dielectrics (insulators). As the name suggests, a semiconductor only conduct electricity some of the time (when it receives a large enough jolt of energy to get its electrons moving). In a dielectric, the electrons are basically immobile, meaning electricity can’t flow across them. Apply too much energy, and you destroy the dielectric. As a general rule, there’s no switching: A dielectric either insulates, or it breaks.
Basically, the Max Planck Institute and Ludwig Maximilian University in Germany have found that dielectrics, using very short bursts of laser light, can be turned into incredibly fast switches. The researchers took a small triangle of silica glass (a strong insulator), and then coated two sides with gold, leaving a small (50nm) gap in between (see below). By shining a femtosecond infrared laser at the gap, the glass started conducting and electricity flowed across the gap. When the laser is turned off, the glass becomes an insulator again.
Engineers at MIT have built a three-fingered robotic hand that can identify and safely grasp delicate objects by relying on an increasingly popular approach to making robots useful: making them soft.
Human hands are not easy for robotics engineers to emulate. The simple act of picking up an item involves all kinds of abilities that humans don’t notice. Among other things, our grip has to be secure without crushing the thing we’re grasping, and our fingers have to form shapes that can fit many types of objects — everything from a sheet of paper or a piece of fruit to a pencil or a living thing.
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