Category: Mean machines
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Buckyballs boost flash memory
There’s a problem on the horizon for memory chips called voltage scaling. It comes about because of a fundamental asymmetry in the design of nonvolatile charge-based memory. These chips need to store data for about 10^12 times longer than it takes to program or erase. That’s why it’s novolatile. This asymmetry is usally achieved by…
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Single photons bounced off orbiting satellite
Quantum physicists have been sending qubits through the atmosphere encoded in individual photons for years now. The work is the foundation of a new type of quantum communication that is perfectly secure from eavesdropping. But there are challenges in setting up a global system of quantum communication. Not least is the problem of decoherence, in…
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Holographic quantum computing
After a decade or so in the lab, holographic data storage is about to burst into the hardware market big time. Its USP is that holographic data is stored globally rather than at specific sites in the storage medium. It is written using a pair of lasers to create an interference pattern that is recorded…
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The vibration harvest
All them turbines, drills and shakers in our modern factories make one almighty din. We’re talking about a substantial amount of a-jumpin and a-jiggling which generally goes to waste. Couldn’t there be a way of harvesting this energy so that it can be re-used? Turns out Tom Sterken and pals at IMEC, an independent nanostuff…
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Read it and beep
Reading text is a simple enough task for humans. But unless it’s cleaned up and served on a plate computers just can’t do it. At least they couldn’t until Mireille Boutin and pals from Purdue University took a shot at the problem. These guys have built an impressive algorithm that looks for and finds text…
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Who’s that on the runway?
As an air traffic controller, the last thing you want is the catastrophic failure of your technology infrastructure. And thankfully it doesn’t usually happen like that. More often, there is a gradual degradation as one part of the system or another collapses. Perhaps the communications die, the radar falls over or the computers crash, or…
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Listening out for neutrinos
A lotta neutrino detectors work by looking for the flares ‘n’ flashes of light generated on the rare occasion a neutrino smashes into something solid, like an atom. Ya need to do a lotta lookin’ though, which is why neutrino detectors sit in vast pools of water or are dropped into the oceans or buried…
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Cooling with sound
The next generation of chips are gonna need some major coolin’, perhaps as much as 1000 Watts of cold per square centimetre. We’re talkin’ high-speed microprocessors, optoelectronics, micro- and millimeter-wave power electronics and power conditioning transistors for electronic motor control in hybrid vehicles power converters etc. These are machines that will generate significant heat. Ordinary coolin fans ain’t…
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The Turing alternatives
Ya’ll heard of the Turing test for measuring machine intelligence. Seems kinda odd, doncha think, that after 50 years we ain’t never thought of any other ways to test machine intelligence. Same thing occurred Shane “Hind” Legg at the IDSIA (Istituto Dalle Molle di Studi sull’Intelligenza Artificiale) in Switzerland and his buddy Marcus so they…
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The puzzle of flyby anomolies
On 8 December 1990, something strange happened to the Galileo spacecraft as it flew past Earth on its way to Jupiter. As the mission team watched, the spacecraft’s speed suddenly jumped by 4 mm per second. Nobody took much notice — a few mm/s is neither here or there to mission planners. Then on 23…