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Category: nanotechnology – Page 278

IBM scientists have made carbon nanotube transistors smaller and faster silicon transistors. Carbon nanotube transistors have long had the potential to be better than silicon, but this is the first time when that promise has been realized. Now IBM and others will have to scale up superior carbon nanotube devices.

IBM scientists have been experimenting with carbon nanotubes, rolled-up sheets of carbon atoms just 1 nanometer, or a billionth of a meter, in diameter. But difficulties working with the material have meant that, for optimal performance, nanotube transistors have to be even larger than current silicon transistors, which are about 100 nanometers across. To cut that number down, a team of scientists used a new technique to build the contacts that draw current into and out of the carbon nanotube transistor. They constructed the contacts out of molybdenum, which can bond directly to the ends of the nanotubes, making them smaller. They also added cobalt so the bonding could take place at a lower temperature, allowing them to shrink the gap between the contacts. Another advance allowed for practical transistors. Carrying enough electrical current from one contact to another requires several nanotube “wires.

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(Phys.org)—In the late 1800s when scientists were still trying to figure out what exactly atoms are, one of the leading theories, proposed by Lord Kelvin, was that atoms are knots of swirling vortices in the aether. Although this idea turned out to be completely wrong, it ushered in modern knot theory, which today is used in various areas of science such as fluid dynamics, the structure of DNA, and the concept of chirality.

Now in a new paper published in Physical Review Letters, mathematical physicist Paul Sutcliffe at Durham University in the UK has theoretically shown that nanoparticles called magnetic skyrmions can be tied into various types of knots with different magnetic properties. He explains that, in a sense, these nanoknots represent a “nanoscale resurrection of Kelvin’s dream of knotted fields.”

Skyrmions are the name of a general class of particles that are made by twisting a field. When this field is a magnetic field, the skyrmions are called magnetic skyrmions. Magnetic skyrmions have attracted a lot of attention recently due to their potential applications in spintronics, where electron spins (which are related to the electron’s magnetic properties) are exploited in the design of transistors, storage media, and related devices.

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Researchers from Italy and Canada have made liquid light at room temperatures for the first time. The work paves the way for studying quantum hydrodynamics further and for future applications of this new type of matter in electronics devices.

Thanks to technological advances, scientists now have various ways of manipulating matter. Often times, these result in discovering new types of matter that posses unique properties — like the famous metallic hydrogen and the bizarre time crystal. The discovery of such materials leads to a wide range of potential applications in electronics. One of these is the so-called “liquid light,” a strange matter which researchers from the CNR NANOTECH Institute of Nanotechnology in Italy and the Polytechnique Montréal in Canada recently formed at room temperature for the first time.

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A conspiracy theory article that I think is spreading semi-fake news (but it’s interesting to see how some people react to #transhumanism):

While the title of this article may sound like it belongs on a strange and dark science fiction movie, it doesn’t. Unfortunately, it seems that as the technological world continues to advance, the more the old adage ‘the truth is stranger than fiction’ becomes true.

Throughout the past year or so, we have heard Google’s leading futurist tell us that it will one day be possible to live forever. His belief is that it will start with nanobots in the human body which would work to defeat deadly disease, in place of our immune system. Kurzweil maintains that the human immune system is inadequate and that,

“Your immune system, for example, does a poor job on cancer,” he told Playboy.” It thinks cancer is you. It doesn’t treat cancer as an enemy. It also doesn’t work well on retroviruses. It doesn’t work well on things that tend to affect us later in life because it didn’t select for longevity.”

He also believes that the nanobots will enhance humanity and bring us to a point we could never have reached on our own. “We’re going to be funnier. We’re going to be sexier. We’re going to be better at expressing loving sentiment.”

Continue reading “The Elite Want to Transfer Consciousness Into a New Body and Live Forever” | >

New research from the University of Liverpool, published in the journal Nanoscale, has probed the structure and material properties of protein machines in bacteria, which have the capacity to convert carbon dioxide into sugar through photosynthesis.

Cyanobacteria are a phylum of bacteria that produce oxygen and energy during photosynthesis, similar to green plants. They are among the most abundant organisms in oceans and fresh water. Unique internal ‘machines’ in cyanobacteria, called carboxysomes, allow the organisms to convert to sugar and provide impacts on global biomass production and our environment.

Carboxysomes are nanoscale polyhedral structures that are made of several types of proteins and enzymes. So far, little is known about how these ‘machines’ are constructed and maintain their organisation to perform carbon fixation activity.

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IBM, its Research Alliance partners Globalfoundries and Samsung, and equipment suppliers have developed an industry-first process to build silicon nanosheet transistors that will enable 5 nanometer (nm) chips. The details of the process will be presented at the 2017 Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits conference in Kyoto, Japan. In less than two years since developing a 7nm test node chip with 20 billion transistors, scientists have paved the way for 30 billion switches on a fingernail-sized chip.

The resulting increase in performance will help accelerate cognitive computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), and other data-intensive applications delivered in the cloud. The power savings could also mean that the batteries in smartphones and other mobile products could last two to three times longer than today’s devices, before needing to be charged.

Scientists working as part of the IBM-led Research Alliance at the SUNY Polytechnic Institute Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering’s NanoTech Complex in Albany, NY achieved the breakthrough by using stacks of silicon nanosheets as the device structure of the transistor, instead of the standard FinFET architecture, which is the blueprint for the semiconductor industry up through 7nm node technology.

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A smartphone touchscreen is an impressive piece of technology. It displays information and responds to a user’s touch. But as many people know, it’s easy to break key elements of the transparent, electrically conductive layers that make up even the sturdiest rigid touchscreen. If flexible smartphones, e-paper and a new generation of smart watches are to succeed, they can’t use existing touchscreen technology.

bendable smartphone

Your smartphone can’t do this – yet. (Image: Peter Sobolev)

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China is also planning to use the initiative to flex its scientific and engineering muscles, officials made clear at a 2-day Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation that ended yesterday in Beijing. “Innovation is an important force powering development,” Xi said in a speech to the opening session of the forum. And so the initiative will include technical cooperation in fields including artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, quantum computing, and smart cities. He also mentioned the need to pursue economic growth that is in line with sustainable development goals, and that rests on environmentally friendly approaches.

Investment also planned in artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and other fields.

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Nano Dimension (NASDAQ, TASE: NNDM) is focused on the research and development of advanced 3D printed electronics, including a 3D printer for multilayer printed circuit boards, and the development of nanotechnology-based conductive and dielectric inks, which are complementary products for 3D printers.

Nextbigfuture interviewed Amit Dror, CEO and cofounder of Nano Dimension. Amit is a project leader with extensive experience in company and account management.

Nano Dimension’s novel and proprietary technologies enable the use of conductive and dielectric inks for ultra-rapid prototyping of complex, high-performance multilayer circuit boards. The company’s PCB 3D printer is the result of combining advanced breakthroughs in inkjet technology, 3D printing and nanotechnology.

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For the first time, scientists have succeeded in studying the strength of hydrogen bonds in a single molecule using an atomic force microscope. Researchers from the University of Basel’s Swiss Nanoscience Institute network have reported the results in the journal Science Advances.

Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe and is an integral part of almost all organic compounds. Molecules and sections of macromolecules are connected to one another via , an interaction known as hydrogen bonding. These interactions play an important role in nature, because they are responsible for specific properties of proteins or nucleic acids and, for example, also ensure that water has a high boiling temperature.

To date, it has not been possible to conduct a spectroscopic or electron microscopic analysis of hydrogen and the in single molecules, and investigations using have also not yielded any clear results.

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