Lifeboat Foundation

Breakthrough research from The University of Texas at Arlington and The University of Vermont could lead to a dramatic reduction in the cost and energy consumption of high-speed internet connections.

Nonlinear-optical effects, such as intensity-dependent refractive index, can be used to process data thousands of times faster than what can be achieved electronically. Such processing has, until now, worked only for one optical beam at a time because the nonlinear-optical effects also cause unwanted inter-beam interaction, or crosstalk, when multiple light beams are present.

An article published in the prestigious Nature Communications journal, by the research group of Michael Vasilyev, an electrical engineering professor at UTA, in collaboration with Taras I. Lakoba, a mathematics professor at UVM, detailed an experimental demonstration of an optical medium in which multiple beams of light can autocorrect their own shapes without affecting one another.

Continue reading “Discovery could reduce cost, energy for high-speed Internet connections” »

Practical quantum computing has been big news this year, with significant advances being made on theoretical and technical frontiers.

But one big stumbling block has remained – melding the delicate quantum landscape with the more familiar digital one. This new microprocessor design just might be the solution we need.

Continue reading “BREAKING: Engineers Just Unveiled The First-Ever Design of a Complete Quantum Computer Chip” »

Future robots won’t be limited to humanoid form (like Boston Robotics’ formidable backflipping Atlas). They’ll be invisibly embedded everywhere in common objects.

Such as a shoe that can intelligently support your gait, change stiffness as you’re running or walking, and adapt to different surfaces — or even help you do backflips.

Some of the earliest computers relied upon tape drives for storage, but we’ve since moved on to faster and more versatile storage technologies. Still, tape drives continue to exist in enterprise, and they’ve been advancing by leaps and bounds while you haven’t been paying attention. IBM just announced a new record in data storage density — 201 gigabits per square inch on a magnetic tape (that’s one square inch of it above). That works out to a whopping 330TB of uncompressed data on a single tape drive cartridge.

IBM reached this plateau in magnetic tape density by developing several new technologies. Older versions of IBM’s magnetic tape used a thin film of barium ferrite particles applied to the surface like paint. “Sputtered tape” uses several layers of thin metal film that are applied using a new vacuum technology. A layer of lubricant is also applied to the reading surface of the tape to keep the tape in good working order as it’s run through the drive. The higher density arrangement of magnetic nanoparticles will, of course, require new drive technology to read.

Continue reading “IBM Stuffs a Whopping 330TB of Data into a Tiny Cartridge” »

For many of us, remembering faces from 30 years ago can be something of a challenge. But cells in our immune system can remember old foes just fine, and we’ve never really been sure exactly how they manage it.

A new study has filled in missing details on the steps our body takes to remember pathogens, finally revealing the steps our immune cells take to preserve a reference library of past battles.

Scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, used a hydrogen isotope to label white blood cells inside volunteers, and tracked a specially selected virus from infection to immunity in order to record significant steps in the immune process.

Continue reading “We Finally Know How Our Immune Cells Remember Diseases For So Long” »

Researchers successfully constructed a first-of-its-kind chemical oscillator that uses DNA components. DNA molecules that follow specific instructions could offer more precise molecular control of synthetic chemical systems, a discovery that opens the door for engineers to create molecular machines…

An experiment that created a 3.5 Mbps broadband internet connection won’t sound very impressive to most of us, especially since the average download speed in the US is about 75 megabits per second. But the surprising part is that it was established using a 6ft 7in piece of wet string.

While broadband connections tend to rely on wires made of materials such as copper, engineers at a small British internet service provider called Andrews and Arnold wanted to see if it was possible to send data through something less conventional.

They soaked the long piece of twine in a salt water as it’s a good conductor of electricity, though it had to be re-soaked every half an hour, and used a pair of alligator clips to establish the connection. “The upkeep of these wet string connections is very hard; in our tests, we had to continually re-wet the string approximately every 30 minutes to avoid a complete loss of sync, and this process was always disruptive to the signals,” wrote Adrian Kennard, the ISP’s director, in a blog post.

Continue reading “UK ISP creates 3.5 Mbps broadband internet connection using wet string” »

A new technique for recording image information onto a surface creates the ability for one space to contain multiple holographic snapshots, depending on how you look at it.

With this new research, cramming numerous holograms without loss of resolution on the same material could open the way to some fascinating new applications.

Holograms have been around for over half a century, serving as art, entertainment, and foils to counterfeiting. It’s been a hard and fast rule that no matter which way you view a hologram, the same object would appear in three dimensions. Until now.

Continue reading “Engineers Just Figured Out How to Put Several Holograms Into a Single Surface” »

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