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Category: engineering – Page 309

MIT designs small, modular, efficient fusion power plant

A cutaway view of the proposed ARC reactor (credit: MIT ARC team)

MIT plans to create a new compact version of a tokamak fusion reactor with the goal of producing practical fusion power, which could offer a nearly inexhaustible energy resource in as little as a decade.

Fusion, the nuclear reaction that powers the sun, involves fusing pairs of hydrogen atoms together to form helium, accompanied by enormous releases of energy.

The new fusion reactor, called ARC, would take advantage of new, commercially available superconductors — rare-earth barium copper oxide (REBCO) superconducting tapes (the dark brown areas in the illustration above) — to produce stronger magnetic field coils, according to Dennis Whyte, a professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering and director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center.

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Affordable genetic diagnostic technique for target DNA analysis developed

Professor Hyun-Gyu Park of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) has developed a technique to analyze various target DNAs using an aptamer, a DNA fragment that can recognize and bind to a specific protein or enzyme. This technique will allow the development of affordable genetic diagnosis for new bacteria or virus, such as Middle Ease Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). The research findings were published in the June issue of Chemical Communications, issued by the Royal Society of Chemistry in the United Kingdom. The paper was selected as a lead article of the journal.

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You’ll soon get 10TB SSDs thanks to new memory tech

SSDs and other flash memory devices will soon get cheaper and larger thanks to big announcements from Toshiba and Intel. Both companies revealed new “3D NAND” memory chips that are stacked in layers to pack in more data, unlike single-plane chips currently used. Toshiba said that it’s created the world’s first 48-layer NAND, yielding a 16GB chip with boosted speeds and reliability. The Japanese company invented flash memory in the first place and has the smallest NAND cells in the world at 15nm. Toshiba is now giving manufacturers engineering samples, but products using the new chips won’t arrive for another year or so.

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The World’s First 3D Printed Building To Be Built In Dubai — Ana Alves WTVOX

Fast-growing Dubai, where something new is always being added to the skyline, may have found a way to make construction move even faster.

In a bid to become a global hub of innovation, Dubai announced plans to build an office that will be “the most advanced 3-D printed structure ever built at this scale” and the first to be put into actual use.

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IBM Watson CTO: Quantum computing could advance artificial intelligence

IBM Watson CTO: Quantum computing could advance artificial intelligence by orders of magnitude.

Quantum computers have already been used to test artificial intelligence by researchers in China, albeit in a very limited capacity. Earlier in 2015, a team from the country’s University of Science and Technology developed a quantum system capable of recognising handwritten characters in a demonstration they dubbed quantum artificial intelligence.

This demonstration was on a quantum computer using only four qubits, leading to speculation of what a system using hundreds – or even thousands – of qubits would be capable of. Such machines do not yet exist, at least not commercially, but Canada-based quantum computing firm D-Wave systems recently claimed it has built a 1,000 qubit quantum computer.

According to Seth Lloyd, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a machine of just 300 qubits could be used to “map the whole universe”, processing all the information that has existed since the Big Bang.

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