The finding offers a potential new technology for advanced sensors high-resolution displays and information processing.
and optical switches small enough to be integrated into computer chips for information processing sensing and telecommunications says Alexander Kildishev associate research professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University.
Laser light shines through the nanoantennas creating the hologram 10 microns above the metasurface. f we can shape characters we can shape different types of light beams for sensing
or recording or for example pixels for 3d displays. Another potential application is the transmission and processing of data inside chips for information technologykildishev says. he smallest featuresâ##the strokes of the lettersâ##displayed in our experiment are only 1 micron wide.
This is a quite remarkable spatial resolution. etasurfaces could make it possible to use single photonsâ##the particles that make up lightâ##for switching
and routing in future computers. While using photons would dramatically speed up computers and telecommunications conventional photonic devices cannot be miniaturized
because the wavelength of light is too large to fit in tiny components needed for integrated circuits. Nanostructured metamaterials however are making it possible to reduce the wavelength of light allowing the creation of new types of nanophotonic devices says Vladimir M. Shalaev scientific director of nanophotonics at Purdue s Birck Nanotechnology Center
and professor of electrical and computer engineering. he most important thing is that we can do this with a very thin layer only 30 nanometers
and this is unprecedentedshalaev says. his means you can start to embed it in electronics to marry it with electronics. he layer is about 1/23rd the width of the wavelength of light used to create the holograms.
and produce very small quantities says James Tour chair in chemistry and professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of computer science at Rice university.
or mechanical structures that allow researchers to conduct their work on the micro/nanoscopic levelsays Jae Kwon associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Missouri. il-based materials or low-surface tension liquids
#Search tool finds pics of you based on tag relationships University of Toronto Posted by Michael Kennedy-Toronto on December 2 2013a new algorithm could profoundly change the way we find photos among the billions on social media sites such as Facebook
Because of your close aggingrelationship with both your mother in the first picture and your father in the second the algorithm can determine that a relationship exists between those two
when you search for photos of your father the algorithm can return the untagged photo because of the very high likelihood he s pictured. wo things are happening:
and Computer engineering at the University of Toronto who helped develop the algorithm. The tool called relational social image search achieves high reliability without using computationally intensive objector facial recognition software. f you want to search a trillion photos normally that takes at least a trillion operations.
It s based on the number of photos you havesays Aarabi. acebook has almost half a trillion photos
but a billion usersâ##it s almost a 500 order of magnitude difference. ur algorithm is simply based on the number of tags not on the number of photos
which makes it more efficient to search than standard approaches. urrently the algorithm s interface is primarily for research
but Aarabi aims to see it incorporated on the back-end of large image databases or social networks. envision the interface would be exactly like you use Facebook searchâ##for users nothing would change.
They would just get better resultssays Aarabi. The National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada supported the project.
It will be presented at the IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia Dec 10 2013. This month the United states Patent and Trademark Office will issue a patent on this technology.
The discovery of a way to trigger these flashes may lead to new telecommunications equipment
The Rice university lab of Junichiro Kono found the flashes which last trillionths of a second change color as they pulse from within a solid-state block.
#Computer gets smarter by looking at online pics 24-7 Carnegie mellon University Posted by Byron Spice-Carnegie mellon on November 26 2013a computer program called the Never Ending Image Learner (NEIL) is running 24
hours a day searching the internet for images and doing its best to understand them on its own.
As NEIL s visual database grows the computer program gains common sense on a massive scale. NEIL leverages recent advances in computer vision that enable computer programs to identify
and label objects in images to characterize scenes and to recognize attributes such as colors lighting and materials all with a minimum of human supervision.
In turn the data it generates will further enhance the ability of computers to understand the visual world
and with NEIL we hope that computers will do so as well. computer cluster has been running the NEIL program
since late July and already has analyzed three million images identifying 1500 types of objects in half a million images and 1200 types of scenes in hundreds of thousands of images.
and catalogued. hat we have learned in the last 5 to 10 years of computer vision research is that the more data you have the better computer vision becomesgupta says.
Some projects such as Imagenet and Visipedia have tried to compile this structured data with human assistance.
But the scale of the Internet is so vast##Facebook alone holds more than 200 billion images that the only hope to analyze it all is to teach computers to do it largely by themselves.
A Google Image search for instance might convince NEIL that inkis just the name of a singer rather than a color. eople don t always know how or
what to teach computershe says. ut humans are good at telling computers when they are wrong. eople also tell NEIL what categories of objects scenes etc. to search
It can be anticipated for instance that a search for pplemight return images of fruit as well as laptop computers.
The program runs on two clusters of computers that include 200 processing cores. The Office of Naval Research and Google Inc. support the project.
The research team will present its findings on Dec 4 at the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision in Sydney Australiasource:
Carnegie mellon Universit t
#RNA readout tool could lead to tougher crops Scientists have developed a method that enables more-accurate prediction of how RNA molecules fold within living cells.
but now we have data on almost all the RNA molecules in a cell more than 10000 different RNASASSMANN says. e are the first to determine on a genome-wide basis the structures of the RNA molecules in a plant
Arabidopsis thaliana commonly known as mouse-ear cress is an ideal organism for RNA studies the researchers say
When radio waves hit the mailbox and bounce back to your radar detector you detect the mailbox.
and this layer radiates back a field that cancels the reflections from the object. heir experimental demonstration effectively cloaked a metal cylinder from radio waves using one layer of loop antennas.
And though their tests showed the cloaking system works with radio waves retuning it to work with Terahertz (T-rays)
In future work Chen and his team will investigate how to develop an automatic design approach for heterogeneous material distribution according to user-specified physical properties
#Engineers create smallest FM radio transmitter Columbia University rightoriginal Studyposted by Holly Evarts-Columbia on November 20 2013to build the world s smallest system that can create FM signals
And it s an important first step in advancing wireless signal processing and designing ultrathin efficient cell phones. ur devices are much smaller than any other sources of radio signals
For example Hone explains MEMS sensors figure out how your smartphone or tablet is tilted to rotate the screen.
In this new study published in Nature Nanotechnology the team took advantage of graphene s mechanical tretchabilityto tune the output frequency of their custom oscillator creating a nanomechanical version of an electronic component known as a voltage controlled oscillator (VCO.
They used low-frequency musical signals (both pure tones and songs from an iphone) to modulate the 100 MHZ carrier signal from the graphene
While graphene NEMS will not be used to replace conventional radio transmitters they have many applications in wireless signal processing. ue to the continuous shrinking of electrical circuits known as Moore s Law today s cell phones have more computing
In addition most of these components cannot be tuned easily in frequency requiring multiple copies to cover the range of frequencies used for wireless communication. raphene NEMS can address both problems:
and say it could open the door to better batteries for phones cars and other gadgets.
The electrodes worked for about 100 charge-discharge cycles without significantly losing their energy storage capacity. hat s still quite a way from the goal of about 500 cycles for cell phones
and from all our data it looks like it s working. esearchers worldwide are racing to find ways to store more energy in the negative electrodes of lithium ion batteries to achieve higher performance while reducing weight.
And scientists say this may help explain why honey bee populations are declining. e usually think of animals chemical signals (called pheromones) as communication systems that convey only very simple sorts of informationsays Christina Grozinger professor of entomology
which excites electrons and causes them to flow in a certain direction. This flow of electrons is electric current.
LED lightingâ##allowing for brighter more efficient lights. hese guidelines should permit the discovery of new and improved phosphors in a rational rather than trial-and-error mannersays Ram Seshadri a professor in the department of materials at University of California
or 300 lumens per wattsays Denbaars who also is a professor of electrical and computer engineering and co-director of the Solid State Lighting & Energy Center.
The design and construction of an instrument based on these arrays as well as an analysis of its commissioning data appear in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. hat we have made is essentially a hyperspectral video camera with no intrinsic noisesays Ben Mazin assistant professor
of physics at University of California Santa barbara. n a pixel-per-pixel basis it s a quantum leap from semiconductor detectors;
which use light to change a chemical emulsionmazin explains. hen we switched from photographic plates to the charge couple devices (CCDS) contained in today s electronics per-pixel performance of the detectors went up by a factor of 20. n the last decade CCDS
and other semiconductor-based detectors for the optical and near-IR have started to hit fundamental limits in their per-pixel performancemazin adds. hey ve gotten about as good as they can get in a given pixel.
The way they continue to improve is by making huge pixel mosaics which is appropriate for many
which uses very similar technology to a cellphone base station. This means the number of MKIDS that can be read out for a given price is increasing according to Moore s Lawâ##overall processing power for computers doubles every two yearsâ
##which should enable megapixel arrays within a decade. Mazin and his team lens-coupled a 2024-pixel array to the Palomar 200-inch and the Lick 120-inch telescopes in Southern California and Northern California respectively.
ARCONS was on these telescopes for 24 observing nights during which data was collected on optical pulsars compact binaries high redshift galaxies and planetary transits.
RCONS is very sensitive but it s been coupled with 5-meter telescopesmazin says. he 8-to 10-meter telescopes such as Keck are at better sites with four times the collecting area. e hope to deploy MKID instruments in the next several
years at Keck and other telescopes to make fascinating new observations including using MKIDS coupled to a coronagraph to directly discover
and take spectra of planets around nearby stars. Source: UC Santa Barbar
#Wireless device grabs lost energy from Wi-fi Using inexpensive materials configured and tuned to capture microwave signals researchers have designed a power harvesting device with efficiency similar to that of modern solar panels.
The device wirelessly converts the microwave signal to direct current voltage capable of recharging a cell phone battery or other small electronic device according to a report appearing in Applied Physics Letters.
It operates on a similar principle to solar panels which convert light energy into electrical current. But this versatile energy harvester could be tuned to harvest the signal from other energy sources including satellite signals sound signals
or Wi-fi signals the researchers say. The key to the power harvester lies in its application of metamaterials engineered structures that can capture various forms of wave energy and tune them for useful applications.
Undergraduate engineering student Allen Hawkes working with graduate student Alexander Katko and lead investigator Steven Cummer professor of electrical and computer engineering designed an electrical circuit capable of harvesting microwaves.
By comparison Universal serial bus (USB) chargers for small electronic devices provide about 5v of power. e were aiming for the highest energy efficiency we could achievesays Hawkes. e had been getting energy efficiency around 6 to 10 percent
and recover a Wi-fi signal that would otherwise be lost Katko says. Another application could be to improve the energy efficiency of appliances by wirelessly recovering power that is now lost during use. he properties of metamaterials allow for design flexibility not possible with ordinary devices like antennassays Katko. hen traditional antennas are close to each other in space they talk to each other
The design process used to create our metamaterial array takes these effects into account allowing the cells to work together. ith additional modifications the researchers say the power harvesting metamaterial could potentially be built into a cell phone allowing the phone to recharge wirelessly while not in use.
This feature could in principle allow people living in locations without ready access to a conventional power outlet to harvest energy from a nearby cell phone tower
or desert allowing data collection for a long-term study that takes infrequent measurements. The Army Research Office supported the research.
and maneuverable can also be found in the hovering behavior of hummingbirds and bees says senior author Cowan who directs the Locomotion in Mechanical and Biological Systems Lab at Johns Hopkins Whiting School of engineering. s an engineer
#Dendrites are like minicomputers in your brain University of North carolina at Chapel hill rightoriginal Studyposted by Mark Derewicz-UNC on October 30 2013the branch-like projections of neurons called dendrites are not just passive wiring
but act more like tiny computers multiplying the brain s processing power. uddenly it s
Dendrites effectively act as mini-neural computers actively processing neuronal input signals themselves. Directly demonstrating this required a series of intricate experiments that took years
They used patch-clamp electrophysiology to attach a microscopic glass pipette electrode filled with a physiological solution to a neuronal dendrite in the brain of a mouse.
As the mice viewed visual stimuli on a computer screen the researchers saw an unusual pattern of electrical signalsâ##bursts of spikesâ##in the dendrite.
and found that known mechanisms could support the dendritic spiking recorded electrically further validating the interpretation of the data. ll pointed the data to the same conclusionsmith says. he dendrites are not passive integrators of sensory-driven input;
and co-author on the paper. e want to know how nature builds these catalystsâ##from a chemist s perspective these are really strange things. he bacterial catalysts are organized based on precisely clusters of iron and sulfur atoms with side groups of cyanide and carbon monoxide.
It can carry the bandwidth to search for mobile phone resonances to locate victims from their mobile phones even
when the phones are turned off or the batteries have no charge remaining. n addition to the applications discussed above such technology could be extended to other radiations such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and light detection and ranging (LIDAR)
#First supercapacitor on a silicon chip could power phones Vanderbilt University rightoriginal Studyposted by David Salisbury-VU on October 24 2013engineers have constructed the first supercapacitor made out of silicon.
These power cells could allow mobile devices that recharge in seconds and stay charged for weeks.
In fact it should be possible to construct these power cells out of the excess silicon that exists in the current generation of solar cells sensors mobile phones
Like a radio tuned to different stations cell phone antennas have tuning circuits that quickly switch frequencies
Cell phone companies want to improve these circuits to pack more discrete signals into a finite allocation of spectrum
which drains cell phone batteries. The new type of tunable dielectric could greatly improve the performance of microwave circuit capacitors found in every cell phone
and open up new possibilities for wireless communication at much higher frequencies. The scientific achievement is twofold.
The tunable dielectric and its properties were envisioned first on paper tested on the computer created in the lab atom by atom patterned into a capacitor device
and greatly lower the films performance in circuitsâ##a problem cell phone companies would like to solve.
Scientists have theorized long a larger internal system monitors these individual gauges like a neural thermostat regulating average firing rates across the whole brain.
Soon the neocortical neural firing rates were the same in both hemispheres one with visual data and one without.
#Drop an internet in the ocean to detect tsunamis University at Buffalo rightoriginal Studyposted by Cory Nealon-Buffalo on October 14 2013a deep-sea internet network is expected to improve the way scientists detect tsunamis monitor pollution
and analyze data from our oceans in real timesays Tommaso Melodia associate professor of electrical engineering at the University at Buffalo
and the projectâ#lead researcher. aking this information available to anyone with a smartphone or computer especially when a tsunami or other type of disaster occurs could help save lives. elodia will present his paper at the Association for Computing Machineryâ
Land-based wireless networks rely on radio waves that transmit data via satellites and antennae. Unfortunately radio waves work poorly underwaterâ
##which is why agencies like the Navy and National oceanic and atmospheric administration use sound wave-based techniques to communicate underwater.
For example NOAA relies on acoustic waves to send data from tsunami sensors on the sea floor to surface buoys.
The buoys convert the acoustic waves into radio waves to send the data to a satellite which then redirects the radio waves back to land-based computers.
but sharing data between them is difficult because each system often has a different infrastructure.
The new framework will solve that problem by transmitting data from existing 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.
Kulhandjian typed a command into a laptop. Seconds later a series of high-pitched chirps ricocheted off a nearby concrete wall an indication that the test worked.
A deep-sea internet has many applications Melodia says including linking together buoy networks that detect tsunamis.
It may also help collect oceanographic data and monitoring pollution. The framework will encourage collaboration among researchers
and marine mammals and find out how to best protect them from shipping traffic and other dangersmelodia says. n internet underwater has so many possibilities. ource:
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
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
. or their analysis the researchers used ultraviolet spectroscopy data obtained with the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph on board the Hubble space telescope of the white dwarf GD 61.
The Hubble and Keck data allows the researchers to identify the different chemical elements that are polluting the outer layers white dwarf.
Using a sophisticated computer model of the white dwarf atmosphere developed by Detlev Koester at the University of Kiel they were able to infer the chemical composition of the shredded minor planet.
and studied could provide a scalable inexpensive platform to monitor toxic vapors from industrial solvents.
when lava and water meet in aerial environments the water instantly flashes to steamsays Gregg associate professor of geology. hatâ#a volume increase of eight timesâ##boom.?
if you hit that same stop sign at 40 miles an hourgregg says. hereâ#a lot more energy that will be released. he Iceland formations some over 2 meters tall display telltale features that hint at how they were created.
or Java##to rogramhow DNA molecules interact in a test tube or cell. A team has developed a programming language for chemistry that it hopes will streamline efforts to design a network that can guide the behavior of chemical-reaction mixtures in the same way that embedded electronic controllers guide cars robots and other devices.
In medicine such networks could serve as martdrug deliverers or disease detectors at the cellular level.
and of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. he vision is that eventually you can use this technology to build general-purpose tools. urrently
Seelig likens this new approach to programming languages that tell a computer what to do. think this is appealing
because it allows you to solve more than one problemseelig says. f you want a computer to do something else you just reprogram it.
and Microsoft Research. The National Science Foundation the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and the National Centers for Systems Biology supported the research.
In the past several years optical-based oscillatorsâ##which require optical reference cavitiesâ##have become better than electronic oscillators at delivering stable microwave and radio frequencies.
Stanford university rightoriginal Studyposted by Tom Abate-Stanford on September 27 2013engineers have built a basic computer using carbon nanotubes a success that points to a potentially faster more efficient alternative to silicon chips.
and computer scientist at Stanford university who co-led the work. ut there have been few demonstrations of complete digital systems using this exciting technology.
and entice them to explore how this technology can lead to smaller more energy-efficient processors in the next decaderabaey says.
but effective circuit that shows that computation is doable using CNTS. s Mitra says: t s not just about the CNT COMPUTER.
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
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
The Stanford researchers created a powerful algorithm that maps out a circuit layout that is guaranteed to work no matter
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.
It runs a basic operating system that allows it to swap between these processes. In a demonstration of its potential the researchers also showed that the CNT COMPUTER could run MIPS a commercial instruction set developed in the early 1980s by then Stanford engineering professor and now university President John Hennessy.
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
beyond silicon. hese are initial necessary steps in taking carbon nanotubes from the chemistry lab to a real environmentsays Supratik Guha director of physical sciences for IBM s Thomas J. Watson Research center
But in this case that technology wasn t sensitive enough to identify the binding site of the expansin protein.
#Earth s inner core spins faster than rest of planet University of Leeds rightoriginal Studyposted by Ben Jones-U. Leeds on September 17 2013the Earth s
inner core made up of solid iron uperrotatesin an eastward direction while the outer core comprising mainly molten iron spins westwards at a slower pace.
Although Edmund Halley who also discovered the famous comet showed the westward-drifting motion of the Earth s geomagnetic field in 1692 it is the first time that scientists have been able to link the way the inner core spins to the behavior of the outer core.
The planet behaves in this way because it is responding to the Earth s geomagnetic field.
The findings published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences help scientists to interpret the dynamics of the core of the Earth the source of our planet s magnetic field.
In the last few decades seismometers measuring earthquakes travelling through the Earth s core have identified an eastwards
or superrotation of the solid inner core relative to Earth s surface. he link is explained simply in terms of equal and opposite actionsays Philip Livermore of the School of Earth
and Environment at the University of Leeds. he magnetic field pushes eastwards on the inner core causing it to spin faster than the Earth
but it also pushes in the opposite direction in the liquid outer core which creates a westward motion. he solid iron inner core is about the size of the Moon.
It is surrounded by the liquid outer core an iron alloy whose convection-driven movement generates the geomagnetic field.
The fact that the Earth s internal magnetic field changes slowly over a timescale of decades means that the electromagnetic force responsible for pushing the inner and outer cores will itself change over time.
This may explain fluctuations in the predominantly eastwards rotation of the inner core a phenomenon reported for the last 50 years by Tkalä iä#et al. in a recent study published in Nature Geoscience.
Viewed within the conclusions of the new model this suggests that the inner core may have undergone a westwards rotation in such periods.
The authors used a model of the Earth s core that was run on the giant supercomputer Monte Rosa part of The swiss National Supercomputing Centre in Lugano Switzerland.
Using a new method they were able to simulate the Earth s core with an accuracy about 100 times better than other models.
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