Lifeboat Foundation

We are currently witnessing an explosion of network traffic. Numerous emerging services and applications, such as cloud services, video streaming platforms and the Internet of Things (IOT), are further increasing the demand for high-capacity communications. Optical communication systems, technologies that transfer information optically using fibers, are the backbone of today’s communication networks of fixed-line, wireless infrastructure and data centers.

Over the past decade, the growth of the internet was enabled by a technique known as digital signal processing (DSP), which can help to reduce transmission distortions. However, DSP is currently implemented using CMOS integrated circuits (ICs), thus it relies heavily on Moore’s Law, which has approached its limits in terms of power dissipation, density and feasible engineering solutions.

As a result, distortions caused by a phenomenon known as fiber nonlinearity cannot be compensated by DSP, as this would require too much computation power and resources. Fiber nonlinearities remain the major limiting effect on long-distance transmission systems.

Cages meshed over with women’s tights and crawling with mosquitoes are stashed in a Swedish laboratory. Every day, researchers feed them beetroot juice laced with deadly toxins, part of a grand plan designed to fight malaria.

With hopes of field trials delayed repeatedly by the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers in Sweden still believe they have found the secret to a new environmentally friendly way of killing off the Anopheles species of mosquitoes that transmit malaria.

So hopeful are they, they have founded a company with a view to turning their discovery into a commercially viable alternative to the pesticides currently used to kill mosquitoes, but which can also harm humans and the environment.

In a groundbreaking new study, researchers at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities used a customized printer to fully 3D print a flexible organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display. The discovery could result in low-cost OLED displays in the future that could be widely produced using 3D printers by anyone at home, instead of by technicians in expensive microfabrication facilities.

The research is published in Science Advances.

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Technology is increasingly moving towards miniaturization and energy efficiency. This also applies to electronic chips. Light, and optics more broadly, are functional in making compact and portable chips. Researchers from the Photonic Systems Laboratory, headed by Professor Camille Brès, have successfully applied a novel principle for introducing second-order optical nonlinearity into silicon nitride chips. A first reported in the journal Nature Photonics.

Technology is increasingly moving towards miniaturization and energy efficiency. This also applies to electronic chips. Light, and optics more broadly, are functional in making compact and portable chips. Researchers from the Photonic Systems Laboratory, headed by Professor Camille Brès, have successfully applied a novel principle for introducing second-order optical nonlinearity into silicon nitride chips. A first reported in the journal Nature Photonics.

Different colors of light

“When using a green laser pointer for example, the laser itself is not green because these are particularly difficult to manufacture. So we change the frequency of an existing laser. It emits at a frequency which is half that of green, then we double it by using nonlinearity in a crystal which gives us green. Our study consists of integrating this functionality but on chips that can be manufactured with standard techniques developed for electronics (CMOS). Thanks to this, we will be able to efficiently generate different colors of light on a chip,” explains Camille Brès. The demonstrated approach had never been implemented before. Current photonic chips compatible with CMOS processes use standard photonic materials, such as silicon, which do not possess second-order nonlinearity and therefore are not inherently capable of transforming light in this way. “This turns out to be a barrier to the advancement of technology,” adds the professor.

Apple was hit with a wave of criticism earlier this year when it announced plans to scan iPhones to stop the distribution of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM). Critics fretted that Apple’s hash-checking system could be co-opted by governments to spy on law-abiding iPhone users. In response to the backlash, Apple might end up making changes to that program, but Google has its own way of spotting CSAM, and it might be even more intrusive for those who use all of Google’s cloud services.

The specifics on Google’s CSAM scanning come by way of a warrant issued in early 2020 and spotted by Forbes. According to the filing, Google detected CSAM in Google Drive, its cloud storage platform. And here’s where things get a little weird; the warrant stemming from this report targeted digital artwork, not a photo or video depicting child abuse.

Apple’s system under its “Expanded Protections for Children” banner uses hashes for known child abuse materials, scanning iDevices for matching hashes. This should prevent false positives and it doesn’t require Apple to look at any of the files on your phone. The issue cited most often with this approach is that Apple is still scanning your personal files on your smartphone, and it could be a privacy nightmare if someone manages to substitute different hashes. Apple says this isn’t possible, though.

Real-estate transactions in the metaverse are reaching record highs. We spoke with companies investing in digital real estate to understand the economic model, and why investors are spending millions on virtual property. Photo: Republic Realm.

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So far, dozens of cases of the new strain dubbed ‘Deltacron’ have been diagnosed.

You might not have to send your devices in (or buy replacement parts) if the display breaks — you could just make new screens yourself. University of Minnesota Twin Cities researchers have developed what they say is the first fully 3D-printed flexible OLED display. In theory, you wouldn’t have to depend on panels made at large, distant factories to build or repair your gadgets.

The new approach combines two methods of 3D printing to print the six layers needed for a functional display. The team used extrusion printing to make the electrodes, encapsulation, insulation and interconnects, while active layers were spray-painted at room temperature. Past attempts by various teams either had issues with light uniformity (consistency across the whole panel) or relied on techniques beyond 3D printing to put some components in place, such as spin-coating or thermal evaporation.

The prototype was just 1.5 inches wide and used just 64 pixels. Any practical uses would require much higher resolutions (a 1080p display requires over 2 million pixels), and the scientists also want to improve brightness. It might also take a while to adapt the technology for home use. The university used a custom 3D printer that costs as much as a Tesla Model S — it might take a while for the method to be viable on off-the-shelf printers, even including high-end models like FormLabs’ $4,850 3B+.