and outputs of this process but a microscopic quantum mechanical description of how the light excites the electrons is lacking.
and optical communications that are the basis for the internet and cable TV. The optical and electronic properties of metals cause excitons to last no longer than approximately 100 attoseconds (0. 1 quadrillionth of a second.
They connected their system to a computer and demonstrated that they could use it to scan
This possibility is one of the reasons for the current interest in building the capacity to store electrical energy directly into a wide range of products such as a laptop
today computers are ridiculously slow and take about 40,000 times more power to run. rom a pure energy perspective,
Their strategy was to enable certain synapses to share hardware circuits. The result was called a device Neurogrid.
It about the size of an ipad and can simulate many more neurons and synapses than other brain mimicking devices using only about the power it takes to run a tablet computer.
But it still a power hog compared to the brain. he human brain, with 80,000 times more neurons than Neurogrid, consumes only three times as much power,
which aims to simulate a human brain on a supercomputer. By contrast the US BRAIN Projecthort for Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologiesas taken a tool-building approach by challenging scientists to develop new kinds of tools that can read out the activity of thousands
Zooming from the big picture, Boahen article focuses on two projects comparable to Neurogrid that attempt to model brain functions in silicon and/or software.
IBM OLDEN GATECHIP One of these efforts is IBM Synapse Projecthort for Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics.
with IBM on track to greatly increase the numbers of neurons in the system. HICANN CHIP FOR BRAIN SIMULATORS Heidelberg University Brainscales project has the ambitious goal of developing analog chips to mimic the behaviors of neurons and synapses.
Their HICANN chiphort for High Input Count Analog Neural Networkould be the core of a system designed to accelerate brain simulations
with a roadmap to greatly expand that hardware base. Each of these research teams has made different technical choices,
such as whether to dedicate each hardware circuit to modeling a single neural element (e g.,, a single synapse) or several (e g.,
, by activating the hardware circuit twice to model the effect of two active synapses. These choices have resulted in different trade-offs in terms of capability and performance.
With that cheaper hardware and compiler software to make it easy to configure, these neuromorphic systems could find numerous applications.
and their collaborators, offers the possibility that such devices may soon be as small as a typical smartphone.
professor of electrical and computer engineering and a professor of bioengineering. ethane is emitted by natural sources, such as wetlands,
and that excites the quartz tuning fork. he tuning fork is a piezoelectric element, so when the wave causes it to vibrate,
Extended outlook: more clouds. The scrutinized planet which is known as GJ1214B is classified as a super-Earth type planet
and Jacob Bean of the University of Chicago has detected clear evidence of clouds in the atmosphere of GJ 1214b from data collected with the Hubble space telescope.
which monitors two thousand red dwarf stars for transiting planets. The planet was targeted next for follow-up observations to characterize its atmosphere.
The best explanation for the new data is that there are high-altitude clouds in the atmosphere of the planet
According to study author Larry Young of the department of psychiatry at Emory University this is the first study to demonstrate that variation in the oxytocin receptor gene influences face recognition skills.
because these families are known to show a wide range of variability in facial recognition skills. Two-thirds of the families were from the United kingdom and the remainder from Finland.
This suggests an ancient conservation in genetic and neural architectures involved in social information processing that transcends the sensory modalities used from mouse to man.
Skuse credits Youngâ#previous research that found mice with a mutated oxytocin receptor failed to recognize mice they previously encountered. his led us to pursue more information about facial recognition and the implications for disorders in
computers go for good enough Purdue University rightoriginal Studyposted by Emil Venere-Purdue on December 23 2013computers capable of pproximate computingcould potentially double efficiency
Researchers are developing computers that could perform calculations good enough for certain tasks that don t require perfect accuracy. he need for approximate computing is driven by two factors:
a fundamental shift in the nature of computing workloads and the need for new sources of efficiencysays Anand Raghunathan a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University. omputers were designed first to be precise calculators that solved
However the demand for computing today is driven by very different applications. obile and embedded devices need to process richer media
and having more natural user interfaces. On the other hand there is an explosion in digital data searched interpreted and mined by data centers. growing number of applications are designed to tolerate oisyreal-world inputs
and use statistical or probabilistic types of computations. he nature of these computations is different from the traditional computations where you need a precise answersays Srimat Chakradhar department head for Computing systems Architecture at NEC Laboratories America
who collaborated with the Purdue team. ere you are looking for the best match since there is no golden answer
or you are trying to provide results that are of acceptable quality but you are not trying to be perfect. owever today s computers are designed to compute precise results even
when it is not necessary. Approximate computing could endow computers with a capability similar to the human brain s ability to scale the degree of accuracy needed for a given task.
Researchers presented their findings during the IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture earlier this month at the University of California Davis. The inability to perform to the required level of accuracy is inherently inefficient
but computer software and hardware are not like that. They often compute to the same level of accuracy all the time. urdue researchers have developed a range of hardware techniques to demonstrate approximate computing showing a potential for improvements in energy efficiency.
Recently the researchers have shown how to apply approximate computing to programmable processors which are ubiquitous in computers servers
and consumer electronics. n order to have a broad impact we need to be able to apply this technology to programmable processorssays Kaushik Roy professor of electrical
and computer engineering at Purdue. nd now we have shown how to design a programmable processor to perform approximate computing. he researchers achieved this milestone by altering the nstruction setwhich is the interface between software
and hardware. uality fieldsadded to the instruction set allow the software to tell the hardware the level of accuracy needed for a given task.
They have created a prototype programmable processor called Quora based on this approach. ou are able to program for quality
and that s the real hallmark of this worksays lead author doctoral student Swagath Venkataramani. he hardware can use the quality fields
and perform energy-efficient computing and what we have seen is that we can easily double energy efficiency. n other recent work led by former doctoral student Vinay K. Chippa the Purdue team fabricated an approximate cceleratorfor recognition
and data mining. e have an actual hardware platform a silicon chip that we ve had fabricated which is an approximate processor for recognition
and data miningraghunathan says. pproximate computing is far closer to reality than we thought even a few years ago. he National Science Foundation partially funded the project.
Source: Purdue Universityyou are free to share this article under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noderivs 3. 0 Unported license a
The new motor has a core and two arms made of DNA one above and one below the core.
As it moves along a carbon-nanotube track it continuously harvests energy from strands of RNA molecules vital to a variety of roles in living cells
The core is made of an enzyme that cleaves off part of a strand of RNA. After cleavage the upper DNA arm moves forward binding with the next strand of RNA
transparent flexible displays for electronic devices; special filters for water purification; new types of sensors; and computer memory.
Cellulose could come from a variety of biological sources including trees plants algae ocean-dwelling organisms called tunicates
and bacteria that create a protective web of cellulose. ith this in mind cellulose nanomaterials are inherently renewable sustainable biodegradable and carbon-neutral like the sources from
or of cars driving by to power your smartphone. That s the concept researchers at the Georgia Institute of technology are developing using
##or even rain falling. e are able to deliver small amounts of portable power for today s mobile
Their latest paper published in the journal ACS Nano described harvesting energy from the touch pad of a laptop computer.
The generators can be made from nearly transparent polymers allowing their use in touch pads and screens.
The Rice university lab of chemist James Tour in collaboration with Lockheed martin developed the compound to protect marine and airborne radars with a robust coating that is also transparent to radio frequencies.
and metallic elements must be installed far from the source of radio signals to keep from interfering. t s very hard to deice these alumina domestour says. t takes a lot of power to heat them
because they re very poor conductors. nter graphene the single-atom-thick sheet of carbon that both conducts electricity and because it s so thin allows radio frequencies to pass unhindered.
Further experiments found them to be nearly invisible to radio frequencies. Tour says the availability of nanoribbons is no longer an issue
#3d-printed loudspeaker plays Obama speech The first 3d-printed consumer electronic is a loudspeaker that comes out of the printer ready to use.
It s an achievement that 3d printing evangelists feel will soon be the norm; rather than assembling consumer products from parts and components complete functioning products could be fabricated at once on demand. verything is 3d printedsays Apoorva Kiran as he launched a demo by connecting the newly printed mini speaker to amplifier wires.
For the demo the amplifier played a clip from President Barack Obama s State of the Union speech that mentioned 3d printing.
Lipson says he hopes this simple demonstration is just the ip of the iceberg. 3d printing technology could be moving from printing passive parts toward printing active integrated systems he adds.
Most printers cannot efficiently handle multiple materials. It s also difficult to find mutually compatible materialsâ##for example conductive copper
and plastic coming out of the same printer require different temperatures and curing times. In the case of the speaker Kiran used one of the lab s Fab@Homes a customizable research printer originally developed by Lipson
and former graduate student and lab member Evan Malone that allows scientists to tinker with different cartridges control software and other parameters.
For the conductor Kiran used a silver ink. For the magnet he employed the help of Samanvaya Srivastava graduate student in chemical
hat hath God wrought. reating a market for printed electronic devices Lipson says could be like introducing color printers after only black and white had existed. t opens up a whole new space that makes the old look primitive. ource:
For the study published in Physical Review Letters researchers used the first data from SPTPOL a polarization-sensitive camera installed on the telescope in January 2012. he detection of B-mode polarization by South pole Telescope
To tease out the B modes in their data the scientists used a previously measured map of the distribution of mass in the universe to determine where the gravitational lensing should occur.
The scientists are currently working with another year of data to further refine their measurement of B modes.
#New transistors offer high output at low voltage A new type of transistor could pave the way for fast computing devices that would use very low energy including smart sensor networks and implanted medical devices.
or resources to efficiently screen and follow up with infected patientsâ##a person with active TB has only a 50 percent chance of survival.
Data from the Moon Mineralogy Mapper that flew aboard India'#Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter shows a diverse mineralogy in the subsurface of the giant South pole Aitken basin.
Using Moon Mineralogy Mapper data the researchers looked at the light reflected from each of the four central peaks.
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)
#Faster 3d printing with multiple materials University of Southern California Posted by Megan Hazle-USC on November 21 2013researchers have developed a faster 3d printing process
3d printing Multi-Material Objects Faster from USC Viterbi on Vimeo. With this newly developed 3d printing process
however the team has shaved the fabrication time down to minutes bringing the manufacturing world one step closer to achieving its goal. igital material design
This new 3d printing process will allow heterogeneous prototypes and objects such as dental and robotics models to be fabricated more cost-and time-efficiently than ever before.
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
and can be put on the same chip that s used for data processing. raphene a single atomic layer of carbon is the world s strongest material
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
and televisions LED TECHNOLOGY is becoming more popular as it becomes more versatile and brighter. According to Seshadri all of the recent advances in solid-state lighting have come from devices based on gallium nitride LEDS a technology that is largely credited to UC Santa barbara materials professor Shuji Nakamura who invented the first high-brightness
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
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