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Jan 28, 2022

Precision machining produces tiny, light-guiding cubes for advancing info tech

Posted by in categories: computing, nanotechnology

Drilling with the beam of an electron microscope, scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory precisely machined tiny electrically conductive cubes that can interact with light and organized them in patterned structures that confine and relay light’s electromagnetic signal. This demonstration is a step toward potentially faster computer chips and more perceptive sensors.

The seeming wizardry of these structures comes from the ability of their surfaces to support collective waves of electrons, called plasmons, with the same frequency as but with much tighter confinement. The light-guiding structures are measured in nanometers, or billionths of a meter—100,000 times thinner than a human hair.

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Jan 28, 2022

Invisible machine-readable labels that identify and track objects

Posted by in categories: media & arts, mobile phones

If you download music online, you can get accompanying information embedded into the digital file that might tell you the name of the song, its genre, the featured artists on a given track, the composer, and the producer. Similarly, if you download a digital photo, you can obtain information that may include the time, date, and location at which the picture was taken. That led Mustafa Doga Dogan to wonder whether engineers could do something similar for physical objects. “That way,” he mused, “we could inform ourselves faster and more reliably while walking around in a store or museum or library.”

The idea, at first, was a bit abstract for Dogan, a 4th-year Ph.D. student in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. But his thinking solidified in the latter part of 2020 when he heard about a new smartphone model with a camera that utilizes the infrared (IR) range of the electromagnetic spectrum that the naked eye can’t perceive. IR light, moreover, has a unique ability to see through certain materials that are opaque to visible light. It occurred to Dogan that this feature, in particular, could be useful.

The concept he has since come up with—while working with colleagues at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and a research scientist at Facebook—is called InfraredTags. In place of the standard barcodes affixed to products, which may be removed or detached or become otherwise unreadable over time, these tags are unobtrusive (due to the fact that they are invisible) and far more durable, given that they’re embedded within the interior of objects fabricated on standard 3D printers.

Jan 28, 2022

DARPA’s RACER Program Sends High-Speed Autonomous Vehicles Off-Road

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, transportation

The goal of DARPA’s Robotic Autonomy in Complex Environments with Resiliency (RACER) program is to develop and demo new autonomy tech that enables ground combat vehicles to maneuver in unstructured, off-road terrain at speeds that are no longer limited by the autonomy software or processing time.

Jan 28, 2022

USRA-Rigetti-NASA team advances to DARPA ONISQ Phase 2

Posted by in categories: quantum physics, robotics/AI, space

Columbia, Maryland — January 27, 2022. Universities Space Research Association (USRA) today announced the start of operations for phase-2 of DARPA’s Optimization with Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum devices (ONISQ) program. This award follows the ONISQ phase 1 launch in 2020, in which USRA was selected to lead the “Scheduling Applications with Advanced Mixers” (SAAM) project, in collaboration with Rigetti Computing and, through DARPA, under DARPA-NASA Interagency agreement (IAA) 8,839 Annex 114, with the NASA Quantum AI Laboratory.

Jan 28, 2022

DARPA Researchers Use Light on Chip to Drive Next-Generation RF Platforms

Posted by in category: computing

https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2022-01-27


What are the next lithography-related issues as device scaling continues to the next process nodes?

Jan 28, 2022

Photomask Challenges At 3nm And Beyond

Posted by in category: futurism

What are the next lithography-related issues as device scaling continues to the next process nodes?

Jan 28, 2022

IRS plan to scan your face prompts anger in Congress, confusion among taxpayers

Posted by in categories: government, robotics/AI

Millions of Americans will soon have to scan their face to access their Internal Revenue Service tax accounts, one of the government’s biggest expansions yet of facial recognition software into people’s everyday lives.

Jan 28, 2022

On this recent Metaverse News Network night, I’m interviewed by the host Richard Mourant and co-host Shauna Lee Lange

Posted by in categories: computing, cosmology, existential risks, physics, singularity, space travel, transhumanism

Topics include the prospects of technological acceleration, Metaverse development and immersive computing, transcendence and cybernetic immortality, neurotechnologies and mind uploading, outer and inner space exploration, Global Mind and phase transition of humanity, physics of time and information, consciousness, evolutionary cybernetics, Chrysalis conjecture and Transcension hypothesis, Artificial General Intelligence and cyberhumanity, transhumanism and singularity, Fermi Paradox, Omega Point cosmology, Cybernetic Theory of Mind, and more. https://www.ecstadelic.net/e_news/metaverse-news-network-liv…x-vikoulov #Metaverse #Singularity #Transhumanism #Transcension #Futurism #Cybernetics #SyntellectHypothesis #AlexVikoulov

Jan 28, 2022

Chinese space plane company targets suborbital tourism, point-to-point travel by 2025

Posted by in category: space travel

Jan 28, 2022

A Novel ‘Artificial Leaf’ Captures 100 Times More Carbon Than Others

Posted by in categories: engineering, nuclear energy

Using less power than a lightbulb. A team of engineers at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) has developed a relatively low-cost “artificial leaf” that can capture carbon dioxide at rates 100 times faster than existing systems, bringing us one step closer to the goal of engineering the process of photosynthesis by which plants convert sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into energy.


Nuclear waste can be very harmful to humans and the ecosystem. Watch how it’s handled in our video.