Using electroencephalogram (EEG) electrodes attached to the scalps of 25 student subjects, a team led by University of Oregon psychology doctoral student David E. Anderson captured synchronized neural activity
Current detectors are need bulky and to be kept cold to operate. That limits their usefulness for applications like weapons and chemical detection and medical imaging and diagnosis, says Jay Guo,
an engineering professor at the University of Michigan. ur detector is sensitive, compact and works at room temperature,
Though ultrasound detectors existncluding those used in medical imaginghe researchers made their own sensitive one in the form of a microscopic plastic ring known as a microring resonator.
The response speed of the new detector is a fraction of a millionth of a second,
because they go dead. estover s wafers consist of electrodes made from silicon that have been treated chemically so they have nanoscale pores on their inner surfaces
Sandwiched between the two electrodes is a polymer film that acts as a reservoir of charged ions similar to the role of the electrolyte paste in a battery.
When the electrodes are pressed together the polymer oozes into the tiny pores in much the same way that melted cheese soaks into the nooks and crannies of the bread in a panini.
of silicon in structural supercapacitors is suited best for consumer electronics and solar cells but Pint and Westover are confident that the rules that govern the load-bearing character of their design will carry over to other materials such as carbon nanotubes and lightweight porous metals like aluminum.
#eurogrid chips mimic the brain to use less energy Compared to the human brain, today computers are ridiculously slow
Boahen and his team have developed a circuit board consisting of 16 custom-designed eurocorechips. Together these 16 chips can simulate 1 million neurons and billions of synaptic connections.
The team designed these chips with power efficiency in mind. 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
Synapse involves a bid to redesign chips, code-named Golden gate, to emulate the ability of neurons to make a great many synaptic connections feature that helps the brain solve problems on the fly.
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.
In his analysis, Boahen creates a single metric to account for total system costncluding the size of the chip,
Each of the current million-neuron Neurogrid circuit boards cost about $40 000. Boahen believes dramatic cost reductions are possible.
Those chips were made using 15-year-old fabrication technologies. By switching to modern manufacturing processes
and fabricating the chips in large volumes, he could cut a Neurocore cost 100-folduggesting a million-neuron board for $400 a copy.
For instance, a chip as fast and efficient as the human brain could drive prosthetic limbs with the speed
#Small tuning fork lets device find greenhouse gas Scientists have created a highly sensitive portable sensor to test the air for the most damaging greenhouse gases.
and the QEPAS sensor findings compared favorably with the lab much larger instrument, Tittel says. his was a milestone for trace-gas sensing,
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
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
Beyond generating power the technology could also provide a new type of self-powered sensor allowing detection of vibrations motion water leaks explosions
and sensor applicationssays Zhong Lin Wang a professor in the School of Materials science and engineering. his opens up a source of energy by harvesting power from activities of all kinds. n its simplest form the triboelectric generator
If an electrical load is connected then to two electrodes placed at the outer edges of the two surfaces a small current will flow to equalize the charges.
Such sensors could be used for monitoring in traffic security environmental science health care and infrastructure applications. or the future Wang and his research team plan to continue studying the nanogenerators
and sensors to improve their output and sensitivity. The size of the material can be scaled up
and freezing rain from forming directly on antennas. But the domes themselves must also be kept clear of ice that could damage them
The 100-nanometer layer of GNRSÂ##thousands of times thinner than a human hairâ##was hooked to platinum electrodes.
#3d-printed loudspeaker plays Obama speech The first 3d-printed consumer electronic is a loudspeaker that comes out of the printer ready to use.
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.
It s not the first time a consumer electronic device was printed in Lipson s lab. Back in 2009 Malone
and former lab member Matthew Alonso printed a working replica of the Vail Register the famous antique telegraph receiver
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:
#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.
The main challenge facing current chip technology is that as size decreases the power required to operate transistors does not decrease in step.
The results can be seen in batteries that drain faster and increasing heat dissipation that can damage delicate electronic circuits.
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.
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.
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
Each antenna has its own hase delayow much light is slowed as it passes through the structure.
and can be achieved by altering the V-shaped antennas. The US Air force Office of Scientific research Army Research Office and the National Science Foundation partially funded the research.
and tested a new approach to cloakingâ##by surrounding an object with small antennas that collectively radiate an electromagnetic field.
and bounce back to your radar detector you detect the mailbox. Eleftheriades and Phd student Michael Selvanyagam s system wraps the mailbox in a layer of tiny antennas that radiate a field away from the box cancelling out any waves that would bounce back.
In this way the mailbox becomes undetectable to radar. e ve demonstrated a different way of doing itsays Eleftheriades. t s very simple:
instead of surrounding what you re trying to cloak with a thick metamaterial shell we surround it with one layer of tiny antennas
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.
Currently the antenna loops must be attuned manually to the electromagnetic frequency they need to cancel
but in future they could function both as sensors and active antennas adjusting to different waves in real time much like the technology behind noise-canceling headphones Work on developing a functional invisibility cloak began around 2006
but early systems were necessarily large and clunkyâ##if you wanted to cloak a car for example in practice you would have to completely envelop the vehicle in many layers of metamaterials in order to effectively hieldit from electromagnetic radiation.
or light waves could use the same principle as the necessary antenna technology matures. here are more applications for radio than for lightsays Eleftheriades. t s just a matter of technologyâ##you can use the same principle for light
and the corresponding antenna technology is a very hot area of research. h
#New giant clam species hid in plain sight One type of giant clam turns out to be two separate species report researchers who discovered the new species on reefs in the Solomon islands and at Ningaloo
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
and also has electrical properties superior to the silicon used to make the chips found in modern electronics.
For example Hone explains MEMS sensors figure out how your smartphone or tablet is tilted to rotate the screen.
and then retrieved the musical signals again using an ordinary FM radio receiver. his device is by far the smallest system that can create such FM signalssays Hone.
and processing radio-frequency signals are much harder to miniaturizesays project co-leader Kenneth Shepard an electrical engineering professor. hese off-chip components take up a lot of space and electrical power.
At the same time they are also trying to demonstrate integration of graphene NEMS with silicon integrated circuits making the oscillator design even more compact.
The secret is a stretchy polymer that coats the electrode binds it together and spontaneously heals tiny cracks that develop during battery operation. elf-healing is very important for the survival and long lifetimes of animals
whose group has been working on flexible electronic skin for use in robots sensors prosthetic limbs and other applications.
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.
One of the most promising electrode materials is silicon; it has a high capacity for soaking up lithium ions from the battery fluid during charging
This is a problem for all electrodes in high-capacity batteries says Hui Wu a former Stanford postdoc who is now a faculty member at Tsinghua University in Beijing
The self-healing electrode which is made from silicon microparticles that are used widely in the semiconductor
The researchers think this approach could work for other electrode materials as well and they will continue to refine the technique to improve the silicon electrode s performance and longevity.
They detailed the results in an article published in the journal Nature Chemistry. The Department of energy through SLAC s Laboratory Directed Research and development program
#Russian meteor was a wake-up call University of California Davis rightoriginal Studyposted by Andy Fell-UC Davis on November 18 2013consumer video cameras
Such semiconductors are used often in lasers optics and infrared detectors. The National Science Foundation and USC funded the work.
#Photon detector is quantum leap from semiconductors A new superconducting detector array can measure the energy of individual photons.
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;
through near-IR using Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors (MKIDS. An MKID is a type of superconducting photon detector;
microwave refers to the readout frequency rather than the frequency at which the detectors operate.
MKIDS were developed first a decade ago by Mazin his Ph d. adviser Jonas Zmuidzinas professor of physics at the California Institute of technology and Henry Leduc at NASA s Jet propulsion laboratory.
In his lab at UC Santa barbara Mazin has adapted these detectors for the ultraviolet optical and near-IR parts of the spectrum.
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 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.
and copper energy conductors wired together on a circuit board to convert microwaves into 7. 3v of electrical energy.
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
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 small amount of energy generated from these signals might power a sensor network in a remote location such as a mountaintop
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.
The twin inverted pulse radar (TWIPR) is able to distinguish true argetssuch as electronic circuits that can be used in explosive
The antenna is typical of circuitry in devices associated with covert communications espionage or explosives.
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
This allowed them to create surfaces with optimal nanostructures for supercapacitor electrodes but it left them with a major problem.
since it is very expensive and wasteful to produce thin silicon wafers. int s group is currently using this approach to develop energy storage that can be formed in the excess materials or on the unused backsides of solar cells and sensors.
#Tunable antenna could end annoying dropped calls Cornell University rightoriginal Studyposted by Anne Ju-Cornell on October 22 2013.
Like a radio tuned to different stations cell phone antennas have tuning circuits that quickly switch frequencies
#There s a thermostat that stops neurons from spazzing out Brandeis University rightoriginal Studyposted by Leah Burrows-Brandeis on October 17 2013for the first time scientists have seen evidence in a living animal of a hermostatthat controls
Scientists have theorized long a larger internal system monitors these individual gauges like a neural thermostat regulating average firing rates across the whole brain.
Without this thermostat they reasoned our flexible neurons would fire out of control making bad connections or none at all.
The average firing rate is regulated so well by this neural thermostat that the rates do not change between periods of sleep and wakefulness.
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
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 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.
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
Eventually oscillators in high-performance electronics systems while outwardly appearing to be electronic devices will internally be purely opticalvahala says. he technology that Kerry
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.
For decades progress in electronics has meant shrinking the size of each transistor to pack more transistors on a chip.
leader in chip research. He called the Stanford work major benchmarkin moving CNTS toward practical use.
But with billions of nanotubes on a chip even a tiny degree of misaligned tubes could cause errors
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.
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.
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.
#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
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 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.
To make their uniquely compact electrode Li s team exploited an adaptive graphene gel film they had developed previously.
Unlike in traditional#hard#porous carbon where space is wasted with unnecessarily large pores density is maximized without compromising porosity in Li s electrode.
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.
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