For example NOAA relies on acoustic waves to send data from tsunami sensors on the sea floor to surface buoys.
and planned underwater sensor networks to laptops smartphones and other wireless devices in real time. Melodia tested the system recently in Lake erie a few miles south of downtown Buffalo.
Hovannes Kulhandjian and Zahed Hossain both doctoral candidates in his lab dropped two 40-pound sensors into the water.
and potentially eliminate the duplicative deployments of sensors and other equipment he says. There are also military and law enforcement applications.
An improved more robust underwater sensor network could help spot these vessels. The framework could also be useful to the energy industry
#Tiny water sensor embedded in plant stems Cornell University Posted by Krishna Ramanujan-Cornell on October 14 2013researchers are completing soil tests on a water sensor within a fingertip-sized silicon chip
They hope to mass produce the sensors for as little as $5 each. Crop growers wine grape and other fruit growers food processors and even concrete makers all benefit from water sensors for accurate steady and numerous moisture readings.
But current sensors are large may cost thousands of dollars and often must be read manually.
The new chip which is a hundred times more sensitive than current devices is fitted with wires that can be hooked up to a card for wireless data transmission
or is compatible with existing dataloggers. Chips may be left in place for years though they may break in freezing temperatures.
Such inexpensive and accurate sensors can be spaced strategically in plants and soil for accurate measurements in agricultural fields.
For example sophisticated vintners use precise irrigation to put regulated water stress on grapevines to create just the right grape composition for a premium cabernet or a chardonnay wine.
While growers can use the sensors to monitor water in soils for their crops civil engineers can embed the chips in concrete to determine optimal moisture levels as the concrete cures. ne of our goals is to try
and develop something that is not only a great improvement but also much cheaper for growers and others to usesays Alan Lakso professor of horticulture at Cornell University.
The sensors make use of microfluidic technologyâ##developed by Abraham Stroock associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineeringâ##that places a tiny cavity inside the chip.
and then the chip may be inserted in a plant stem or in the soil where it through a nanoporous membrane exchanges moisture with its environment and maintains an equilibrium pressure that the chip measures.
Using chips embedded in plants or spaced across soil and linked wirelessly to computers allows growers toâ ontrol the precise moisture of blocks of land based on target goalssays Vinay Pagay who helped develop the chip as a doctoral student in Lakso s lab
. The Cornell Center for Technology Enterprise and Commercialization is handling the intellectual property rights and patents.
Source: Cornell Universityyou are free to share this article under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noderivs 3. 0 Unported license
In medicine such networks could serve as martdrug deliverers or disease detectors at the cellular level.
In the accelerator-on-a-chip experiments electrons are accelerated first to near light-speed in a conventional accelerator.
Then they are focused into a tiny half-micron-high channel within a glass chip just half a millimeter long.
Turning the accelerator on a chip into a full-fledged tabletop accelerator will require a more compact way to get the electrons up to speed before they enter the device.
#Tiny optical tuning fork fits on a chip California Institute of technology rightoriginal Studyposted by Jessica Stoller-Conrad-Caltech on September 27 2013researchers have created an optical equivalent of a tuning fork that can help steady electronic currents
needed to power high-end electronics and stabilize signals of high-quality lasers. Itâ#the first time such a device has been miniaturized to fit on a chip
and may pave the way for improvements in high-speed communication navigation and remote sensing. hen you re tuning a piano a tuning fork gives a standardized pitch or reference sound frequency;
and electronic devices when it is used as a reference. good tuning fork controls the release of its acoustical energy ringing just one pitch at a particular sound frequency for a long timeâ##a sustaining property called the quality factor.
The researchers were able to stabilize the light s frequency by developing a silica glass chip resonator with a specially designed path for the photons in the shape of
what is called an Archimedean spiral. sing this shape allows the longest path in the smallest area on a chip.
In combination with the resonator a special guide for the light was used losing 100 times less energy than the average chip-based device.
In addition to its use as a frequency reference for lasers a reference cavity could one day play a role equivalent to that of the ubiquitous quartz crystal in electronics.
Most electronics systems use a device called an oscillator to provide power at very precise frequencies.
While these optical oscillators are currently too large for use in small electronics there is an effort under way to miniaturize their key subcomponentsâ##like Vahala s chip-based reference cavity. miniaturized optical oscillator will represent a shift in the traditional
and electronics. urrently electronics perform signal processing while photonics rule in transporting information from one place to another over fiber-optic cable.
Eventually oscillators in high-performance electronics systems while outwardly appearing to be electronic devices will internally be purely opticalvahala says. he technology that Kerry
The achievement is reported in an article on the cover of the journal Nature. eople have been talking about a new era of carbon nanotube electronics moving beyond siliconsays Subhasish Mitra an electrical engineer
Here is the proof. xperts say the achievement will galvanize efforts to find successors to silicon chips which could soon encounter physical limits that might prevent them from delivering smaller faster cheaper electronic devices. arbon nanotubes CNTS have long been considered as a potential successor to the silicon transistorsays Professor
Jan Rabaey a world expert on electronic circuits and systems at the University of California Berkeley.
But until now it hasn t been clear that CNTS a semiconductor material could fulfill those expectations. here is no question that this will get the attention of researchers in the semiconductor community
Mihail Roco a senior advisor for nanotechnology at the National Science Foundation called the work n important scientific breakthrough. t was roughly 15 years ago that carbon nanotubes were fashioned first into transistors the on-off switches
at the heart of digital electronic systems. But a bedeviling array of imperfections in these carbon nanotubes has frustrated long efforts to build complex circuits using CNTS.
and its cousins. uch concerns arise from the demands that designers place upon semiconductors and their fundamental workhorse unit those on-off switches known as transistors.
For decades progress in electronics has meant shrinking the size of each transistor to pack more transistors on a chip.
But as transistors become tinier they waste more power and generate more heatâ##all in a smaller and smaller space as evidenced by the warmth emanating from the bottom of a laptop.
Many researchers believe that this power-wasting phenomenon could spell the end of Moore s Law named for Intel Corp. cofounder Gordon Moore who predicted in 1965 that the density of transistors would double roughly every two years
leading to smaller faster and as it turned out cheaper electronics. But smaller faster and cheaper has meant also smaller faster and hotter. nergy dissipation of silicon-based systems has been a major concernsays Anantha Chandrakasan head of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and a world
leader in chip research. He called the Stanford work major benchmarkin moving CNTS toward practical use.
and low-power switching make carbon nanotubes excellent candidates to serve as electronic transistors. NTS could take us at least an order of magnitude in performance beyond where you can project silicon could take uswong said.
But with billions of nanotubes on a chip even a tiny degree of misaligned tubes could cause errors
Depending on how the CNTS grow a fraction of these carbon nanotubes can end up behaving like metallic wires that always conduct electricity instead of acting like semiconductors that can be switched off.
Then they pumped the semiconductor circuit full of electricity. All of that electricity concentrated in the metallic nanotubes
The Stanford team used this imperfection-immune design to assemble a basic computer with 178 transistors a limit imposed by the fact that they used the university s chip-making facilities rather than an industrial fabrication process.
Though it could take years to mature the Stanford approach points toward the possibility of industrial-scale production of carbon nanotube semiconductors according to Naresh Shanbhag a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
and director of SONIC a consortium of next-generation chip design research. he Wong/Mitra paper demonstrates the promise of CNTS in designing complex computing systemsshanbhag says adding that this will motivate researchers elsewhere toward greater efforts in chip design
and looks like a chemistry experiment with two electrodes one positive the other negative plunged into a bottle of wastewater.
Inside that murky vial attached to the negative electrode bacteria feast on particles of organic waste
and produce electricity that is captured by the battery s positive electrode. e call it fishing for electronssays Craig Criddle a professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford university.
As reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences at the battery s negative electrode colonies of wired microbes cling to carbon filaments that serve as efficient electrical conductors.
Using a scanning electron microscope the Stanford team captured images of these microbes attaching milky tendrils to the carbon filaments. ou can see that the microbes make nanowires to dump off their excess electronscriddle says.
and convert it into biological fuel their excess electrons flow into the carbon filaments and across to the positive electrode
After a day or so the positive electrode has absorbed a full load of electrons and has largely been converted into silver says Xing Xie an interdisciplinary researcher.
The new approach could have applications for the semiconductor and magnetic storage industries. Researchers were able to increase the resolution of their intricate structure fabrication from approximately 200 nanometers to approximately 15 nanometers.
and other oftmaterials has the potential to enable new classes of electronics diagnostic devices and chemical sensors.
The challenge is that many of these materials are fundamentally incompatible with the sorts of lithographic techniques that are used traditionally in the integrated circuit industry.
I look back at my career I will be most proud ofmuller says. t s the first time that anyone has been able to see the arrangement of atoms in a glass. hat s more two-dimensional glass could someday find a use in transistors by providing a defect-free ultra-thin material that could improve the performance of processors
#Quantum system teleports an atom For the first time physicists have transmitted an atom from one location to another inside an electronic chip.
and more functional electronic chips says Arkady Fedorov of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum systems
and a receiver. nce entanglement is created this â##impossible information transfer becomes in fact possible thanks to laws of quantum mechanicsfedorov says. or
the first time the stunning process of quantum teleportation has now been used in a circuit to relay information from one corner of the sample to the other. hat makes our work interesting is the system uses a circuit much like modern computer chips. n our system the quantum
 ventually this technology will be used to create more powerful devices. his research indicates that questions relating to the physics of quantum communication can be addressed using electronic circuits at microwave frequencies. ne may even foresee future experiments in which quantum information will be distributed over larger distances
#Clay supercapacitors built to handle extreme heat Researchers have used cheap and abundant clay as a key ingredient in a supercapacitor that can operate at very high temperatures.
The supercapacitor could be useful for powering devices in extreme environments On earth and in space. ur intention is to completely move away from conventional liquid
A supercapacitor combines the best qualities of capacitors that charge in seconds and discharge energy in a burst and rechargeable batteries that charge slowly but release energy on demand over time.
The ideal supercapacitor would charge quickly, store energy, and release it as needed. esearchers have been trying for years to make energy storage devices like batteries and supercapacitors that work reliably in high-temperature environments,
but this has been given challenging the traditional materials used to build these devices, explains Pulickel Ajayan,
and two current collectors to form a supercapacitor. Tests and subsequent electron microscope images of the device showed no change in the materials after heating it to 200 degrees Celsius.
In fact, Reddy says, there was very little change in the material up to 300 degrees Celsius. They reported their findings in the journal Scientific Reports. he ionic conductivity increases almost linearly until the material reaches 180 degrees,
the supercapacitors were stable through 10,000 test cycles. Both energy and power density improved by two orders of magnitude as the operating temperature increased from room temperature to 200 degrees Celsius, the researchers found.
rate paving the way for a more lightweight material for cars and electronics. Weighing in at two thirds less than aluminum magnesium is the lightest structural metal.
#In an era of light-weighting for energy and emissions reductions there is a great demand for magnesium alloys in everything from portable electronics to air
Fine control over these light beams will enable improvements for on-chip biomedical devices and super resolution imaging. or all these applications,
#Silicon system produces squeezed light California Institute of technology rightoriginal Studyposted by Kimm Fesenmaier-Caltech on August 9 2013caltech (US)# A new system constructed on a silicon microchip offers a more useful way to produce the ultraquiet
Although other research groups previously have produced squeezed light the new system generates the ultraquiet light in a way that can be adapted more easily to a variety of sensor applications.#
#Our experiment brings together in a tiny microchip package many aspects of work that has been done in quantum optics and precision measurement over the last 40 years.#
and integration enabling a great many applications in electronics.##Cancel each other outin this new system a waveguide feeds laser light into a cavity created by two tiny silicon beams.
Once there the light bounces back and forth a bit thanks to the engineered holes which effectively turn the beams into mirrors.
And as is the case with the noise-canceling technology used for example in some headphones the fluctuations that shake the beams interfere with the fluctuations of the light.
#Compact graphene device could shrink supercapacitors Monash University rightoriginal Studyposted by Emily Walker-Monash on August 5 2013monash U. AUS)# A new strategy to engineer graphene-based supercapacitors could make them viable
for widespread use in renewable energy storage portable electronics and electric vehicles. Supercapacitors are made generally of highly porous carbon impregnated with a liquid electrolyte to transport the electrical charge.
Known for their almost indefinite lifespan and the ability to recharge in seconds the drawback of existing supercapacitors is their low energy-storage-to-volume ratio#known as energy density.
Low energy density of five to eight watt-hours per liter means supercapacitors are unfeasibly large or must be recharged frequently.
Dan Li a materials engineering professor at Monash University and his team created a supercapacitor with energy density of 60 watt-hours per liter#comparable to lead-acid batteries and around 12 times higher than commercially available supercapacitors.#
#It has long been a challenge to make supercapacitors smaller lighter and compact to meet the increasingly demanding needs of many commercial uses#says Li.
Graphene which is formed when graphite is broken down into layers one atom thick is very strong chemically stable and an excellent conductor of electricity.
To make their uniquely compact electrode Li s team exploited an adaptive graphene gel film they had developed previously.
They used liquid electrolytes#generally the conductor in traditional supercapacitors#to control the spacing between graphene sheets on the subnanometer scale.
Unlike in traditional#hard#porous carbon where space is wasted with unnecessarily large pores density is maximized without compromising porosity in Li s electrode.
Each image corresponds to one LED element in the LED array. Therefore in the various images, light coming from known different directions illuminates the sample.
The neutrino beam is monitored by a detector complex in Tokai and aimed at the gigantic Super-Kamiokande underground detector in Kamioka near the west coast of Japan 295 kilometers (185 miles) away from Tokai.
An analysis of the data from the Super-Kamiokande detector associated with the neutrino beam time from J-PARC reveals that there are more electron neutrinos (a total of 28 events) than would be expected (4. 6 events) without this new process.
The current T2k collaboration consists of over 400 physicists from 59 institutions in 11 countries.
The National Science Foundation, Google, Qualcomm, Adobe, Intel, and the Okawa Foundation supported the research a
Commercial applications in small electronic devices solar cells batteries and even medical devices are just around the corner.
Electron microscope images confirmed that graphene entered the cells starting at rough edges and corners. The experiments showed that even fairly large graphene sheets of up to 10 micrometers could be internalized completely by a cell.
while at the same time reducing high data usage charges for consumers Panwar explains that#in the best-case scenario we ll at the same time relieve some of the bandwidth crunch for wireless carriers
One of the first applications of graphene may be as a conducting layer in flexible displays. ut CVD graphene is titchedtogether from many small crystalline grainsike a quiltt grain boundaries that contain defects in the atomic structure,
or more in size, says Hone. his strength will be invaluable as scientists continue to develop new flexible electronics and ultrastrong composite materials.
Strong, large-area graphene can be used for a wide variety of applications such as flexible electronics and strengthening componentsotentially,
while sensors onboard collect and send in real time the data scientists need to predict the intensity and trajectory of storms:
and release dropsondes sensors that free-fall and might or might not collect helpful data.
We have cheap sensors but with a lot of them you can significantly increase the accuracy of your measurements.
Some of the photons are allowed to escape from the device to serve a purpose such as reading data off a CD or etching a circuit board.
#One benefit of the electrically driven polariton laser is it only needs to be attached to a power supply to emit photons allowing it to be integrated easily with existing semiconductor chips in the future.
and requires constant cooling by liquid helium to prevent the excitons inside the gallium arsenide semiconductors from being pulled apart by thermal energy.
#We re hoping we can replace conventional semiconductor lasers with these polariton lasers in the future#Kim says.#
Existing infrared detectors use cryogenically cooled semiconductors or thermal detectors known as microbolometers in which changes in electrical resistance can be correlated to temperatures.
#Rather than changes in resistance our detector works by connecting mechanical motion to changes in temperature.#
#Other researchers have developed optomechanical infrared sensors based on this principle but their sensitivities have been comparatively low.
so you don t need any additional material to make these antennas#Cubukcu says.##We take the same exact platform
and by patterning it with these nanoscale antennas the conversion efficiency of the detector improves 10 times.#
#Our antennas can be engineered to absorb at any wavelength.##While only a proof-of-concept at this stage future research will demonstrate the device s capabilities as a low-cost way of analyzing individual proteins and gas molecules.
#Ambiq Micro has made a chip that consumes 10 times less energy Ambiq Micro, a semiconductor company in Austin,
so in high-enough densities and manufacturing volume to make it worth the consumer electronic industry time.
On Monday, it launched its Apollo microcontroller, which can lower the power consumption of the tiny chips used inside wearable devices by as much as 10 times in wake mode
and 38 times in sleep mode depending on the type of ARM core used inside the chip.
For the consumer this means a battery life for a smart watch or activity tracker that could last for weeks or months longer than the current standard.
when sending power through the chip. Most chips send their signaling information, which determines if it is sending zeros or ones, at between 1 and 1. 8 volts,
but the Ambiq chip sends its information. 5 volts. That means it uses much less energy overall.
Ambiq VP of Marketing Mike Salas says he expects to see Ambiq microcontrollers in shipping products by the middle of the year.
Its microcontrollers will compete with those already on the market from Atmel, ST MICROELECTRONICS and other large chipmakers.
or they could use smaller batteries and then design smaller enclosures for their electronics. As a woman who finds almost all of the smart watches on the market today to be too large
I love to see a slightly more delicate form factor using a smaller battery and more power-efficient chip h
#Coupling microfluidics with recent advances in consumer electronics can make certain lab-based diagnostics accessible to almost any population with access to smartphones.
The sensors are attached to satellites designed to only last a few years. There are so many that if one fails it doesn take down the entire system,
and no moving parts to break and since the TEG is made from solid state semiconductor elements,
#Tiny new sensor could simplify brain wave research Two years ago, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the U s. developed a tiny magnetic sensor that could detect the human heartbeat without touching the subject's skin.
Now, the same team has improved the sensitivity of the device tenfold, making it capable of measuring human brain activity
the researchers came up with a magnetic sensor the size of a sugar cube that is also cheaper to manufacture
"Our sensors can be fabricated in parallel with techniques usually adopted for microelectronics, "says Kitching.""Moreover, while SQUID-based imaging systems require a large magnetically-shielded room to operate,
an imaging system based on our sensors could probably be operating in a much smaller (person-sized) shielded enclosure.
an array of over 306 SQUID sensors is mounted in heavy helmet-shaped flasks containing cryogenic coolants.
But the peculiar characteristics of the newly developed sensor might enable lightweight and flexible MEG helmets that contain much fewer sensors."
"We are targeting 32 sensors for our system right now, "says Kitching. The NIST sensor was used to measure alpha waves in the brain associated with a person opening
and closing their eyes as well as signals resulting from stimulation of the hand; the measurements were verified then by comparing them with signals recorded by a SQUID.
The sensor measured magnetic signals of about 1 picotesla (trillionth of a tesla), which is 50 million times weaker than the Earth's magnetic field."
#Inexpensive sensor measures ripeness of fruit As fruit matures, it releases a gas known as ethylene,
inexpensive ethylene sensors that could be used in places such as supermarkets. There, they could let shopkeepers know which batches of fruit need to sold the soonest
each sensor utilizes an array of tens of thousands of carbon nanotubes, which have had copper atoms attached to them.
the sensors are able to determine ethylene levels. As a result, the sensors can reportedly measure concentrations as low as 0. 5 parts per million for context
a concentration of between 0. 1 and one part per million is what is required generally for most types of fruit to ripen.
The sensors were tested on bananas, avocados, apples, pears and oranges, and were able to accurately gauge the ripeness of all of them.
Swager now envisions the sensors being built into the cardboard boxes used to store fruit, and equipped with radio-frequency identification chips that would allow them to transmit ripeness data to handheld reading devices used by shopkeepers.
Each sensor and chip combined should cost about US$1, as opposed to the $1, 200 or so that gas chromatography
or mass spectroscopy systems currently run at. Another system, developed at the UK's National Physical Laboratory, uses radio frequencies, microwaves, terahertz radiation and far-infrared light to determine the ripeness of strawberries
such as the gut-on-a-chip, can therefore significantly accelerate our ability to develop effective new drugs that will help people who suffer from these disorders."
"The gut-on-a-chip is the latest in a series of engineered organ models developed at the Wyss Institute,
which began with the lung-on-a-chip. The institute has received also funding to develop a heart-lung micromachine to test the safety and efficacy of inhaled drugs on the integrated heart and lung function,
and a spleen-on-a-chip to treat sepsis. The team gut-on-a-chip is detailed in the journal Lab on a Chip.
Source: Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineerin e
#Crab shells used to produce cheaper pharmaceuticals Crabs and lobsters...they're not just for eating, anymore.
Chitin, one of the main components of their exoskeletons, has recently found use in things such as self-healing car paint, biologically-compatible transistors, flu virus filters,
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