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Tiny semiconductor dots could lead to a new type of circuit based on magnetism rather than current flow. At least that’s the hope of researchers who’ve made the dots and are hoping to build them into a workable device. ”We want to make it into a so-called nonvolatile transistor,” says Kang Wang, head of the Device Research Laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles. Such a ”spintronic” transistor would retain its logic state in the absence of current and require less power to switch a bit, reducing the electrical power required by a computer chip by as much as 99 percent. Wang’s research, supported in part by Intel, was published in March in the online version of Nature Materials. Where electronic transistors rely on the presence or absence of current to register the ones and zeros of digital logic, spintronic transistors depend on ”spin,” a quantum characteristic of the electron. Picture the electron as a rotating globe. When the north pole is pointing upward, that’s spin up; when pointing the other way, it’s spin down. When the spins of most electrons are aligned, the material is magnetic. When their spins are random, the material isn’t. An applied current can align or randomize the spins, allowing for spin-based switches.

(Nanowerk News) While the laws of physics weren’t made to be broken, sometimes they need revision. A major current law has been rewritten thanks to the three-port transistor laser, developed by Milton Feng and Nick Holonyak Jr. at the University of Illinois.

Superconductivity is one of those nearly magical properties that seem to defy all intuition for how the physical world ought to work. In a superconductor, electric currents flow without resistance—an electron passes unimpeded through the material like a torpedo through some frictionless ocean. After discovering the phenomenon in 1911 Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes showed that an electric current in a closed superconducting loop of mercury would keep flowing long after the driving potential was removed; he demonstrated his discovery by carrying such a persistent current from the Netherlands to England. Since then physicists have discovered superconductors based on other metals and even ceramics. The latest entry is one rooted in a hydrocarbon, which superconducts at a relatively high temperature compared with elemental metals.

The Fringe Original Soundtrack is coming to a universe near you on March 23rd, 2010. Amazon currently have it listed (aff link) for $17.98. Continue past the break for the product details. Details are sketchy -- there’s no news on which tracks will feature or how many, but here’s what Amazon currently have on the product: Audio CD (March 23, 2010) Composed by: Michael Giacchino, Chris Tilton, Chad Seiter Number of Discs: 1 Format: Soundtrack Label: Varese Sarabande ASIN: B0038EG2AW

A test circuit built with nanowires of silicon could point the way to much smaller transistors, say the IBM researchers who created it. Researchers from IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center announced today at the annual Symposium on VLSI Technology, in Honolulu, that they have built a ring oscillator out of field-effect transistors (FETs) based on nanowires with diameters as small as 3 nanometers. The oscillator—is composed of 25 inverters using negative- and positive-channel FETs. The device, which demonstrated a delay of just 10 picoseconds per stage, shows that engineers can build a working circuit from transistors with much shorter channel lengths than today’s devices. Current flows through an FET’s channel under the control of the device’s gate. Scaling down the channel length will be critical if the dimensions of circuits on silicon chips are to continue to shrink, says Jeffrey Sleight, a senior technical staff member at IBM.

In addition to voice connectivity, digital cellular wireless networks such as GSM and its enhancement, GSM-EDGE, can now provide increased data speeds up to a (theoretical) limit of 384ﾠKbps. Third generation mobile networks, such as CDMA2000 and WCDMA or UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications Standards) and TD-SCDMA (China only) are currently being deployed worldwide. These systems offer services such as video streaming, Internet browsing and, by using a technique called High Speed Packet Access (HSPA), they can in theory deliver downlink speeds up to 14,4 Mbps.

In its latest episode, the Robots Podcast interviews the lead researcher of the Distributed Flight Array and one of my colleagues at the ETH Zurich's IDSC, Raymond Oung. The Distributed Flight Array (DFA) is an aerial modular robot. Each individual module has a single, large propellor and a set of omniwheels to move around. Since a single propellor does not allow stable flight, modules move around to connect to each other. As shown in this video of the DFA, the resulting random shape then takes flight. After a few minutes of hovering the structure breaks up and modules fall back to the ground, restarting the cycle. As most projects at the IDSC, the DFA is grounded in rigorous mathematics and design principles and combines multiple goals: It serves as a real-world testbed for research in distributed estimation and control, it abstracts many of the real-world issues of the next generation of distributed multi-agent systems, and it provides an illustration for otherwise abstract concepts like distributed sensing and control to a general public. For more information on current work, future plans and real-world applications, read on or tune in!

The conservation of Mayan wall paintings at the archaeological site of Calakmul (Mexico) will be one on the subjects touched upon by Piero Baglioni (based at the University of Florence) in his invited lecture at the 3rd European Chemistry Congress in Nürnberg in September. In a special issue of Chemistry-A European Journal, which contains papers by many of the speakers at this conference, he reports on the latest developments on the use of humble calcium and barium hydroxides nanoparticles as a versatile and highly efficient tool to combat the main degradation processes that affect wall paintings. La Antigua Ciudad Maya de Calakmul is located in the Campeche state (Mexico) and is one of the most important cities of the Classic Maya period (AD 250-800). The excavation of this site (set up in 1993) involves, under the supervision of the archaeologist Ramon Carrasco, archaeologists, architects, engineers, conservators and epigraphists, besides other specialists. Since 2004, the Center for Colloid and Surface Science (CSGI) at the University of Florence (CSGI), and currently directed by Piero Baglioni, has been an active partner, being involved in the study of the painting technique and in the development of nanotechnology for the consolidation and protection of the wall paintings and limestone.

Researchers at CMU and Intel are attempting to map and understand human brain activity well enough that individual words can be detected. Currently, giant MRI machines are being used but the future holds smaller devices that can be worn like a helmet according to Dean Pomerleau, senior researcher at Intel. The efficiency and productivity of word detection will be superior to existing technology that allows an operator to simply control a cursor. This technology will no doubt make its way into robotic telepresence applications including remote surgery and construction in dangerous environments such as the ocean and space.

No currently accepted scientific theory makes use of the notion of causality. Scientists may interpret some math equations involved in a scientific theory to denote causality—but unlike, say, “force” or “attraction”, causality is not really part of the formal language of modern science. Roughly, causality consists of “predictive implication, plus assumption of a causal mechanism.” Predictive implications are part of science: science can tell us “If X happens, then expect Y to happen with a certain probability.” But science cannot tell us whether X is the “cause” of Y, versus them both habitually being part of some overall coordinated process.

At three separate industry events last week, engineers said they are gearing up to deliver in 2011 chips that can handle serial data streams running at 25 Gbits/second to drive next-generation 100 and 400 Gbit/second networks. But they say it's still a mystery how—or if—they can deliver follow-on components for the terabit networks today's Internet data centers are already demanding. The kinds of jobs required to run today's Web 2.0 services such as Google and Facebook can completely overwhelm current 10 Gbit/s Ethernet links in the warehouse-sized data centers those companies use. Such data centers could use hundreds of 100 Gbit/s Ethernet links today, although standards for such networks are still being completed.

DSP core licensor Ceva Inc. is due to unveil a software-programmable multimedia video processor architecture at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week. The multicore architecture, called MM3000, which comes complete with C compilers, power management provision and an RTOS/multithreading scheduler is intended to be able to process any and all video codecs up to the highest resolutions and frame rates currently available as well as future codecs for things like 3-D video.

For the price of a sports car, you can have a pint of your blood drawn and a month later receive your entire genome—all 6 billion base pairs—encoded in a 1.5-gigabyte data file. That means the price has dropped to 1/50 000 of what it was less than a decade ago (the first genome, after all, cost US $3 billion). Yet the price is expected to fall to 1/1000 of the current price in the next four years. The cultural ramifications of a $100 genome—which is where we’re headed, whether it takes 4 years or 10—are as wide and deep as those of any other recent innovation, including search engines and cellphones.

The European Union has today formally approved Oracle's takeover of Sun Microsystems. The EU has been investigating the merger since September 2009 under EU Merger Regulation, expressing concern that Oracle may try and kill MySQL, a move that it felt could potentially have a detrimental impact on competition in the database market. Launching her investigation, outgoing Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes stated: The Commission has to examine very carefully the effects on competition in Europe when the world's leading proprietary database company proposes to take over the world's leading open source database company. In particular, the Commission has an obligation to ensure that customers would not face reduced choice or higher prices as a result of this takeover. Databases are a key element of company IT systems. In the current economic context, all companies are looking for cost-effective IT solutions, and systems based on open-source software are increasingly emerging as viable alternatives to proprietary solutions. The Commission has to ensure that such alternatives would continue to be available.

Verification of algorithm-intensive systems is a long, costly process. Studies show that the majority of flaws in embedded systems are introduced at the specification stage, but are not detected until late in the development process. These flaws are the dominant cause of project delays and a major contributor to engineering costs. For algorithm-intensive systems —including systems with communications, audio, video, imaging, and navigation functions— these delays and costs are exploding as system complexity increases. It doesn't have to be this way. Many designers of algorithm-intensive systems already have the tools they need to get verification under control. Engineers can use these same tools to build system models that help them find and correct problems earlier in the development process. This can not only reduce verification time, but also improves the performance of their designs. In this article, we'll explain three practical approaches to early verification that make this possible. First, let's examine why the current algorithm verification process is inefficient and error-prone. In a typical workflow, designs start with algorithm developers, who pass the design to hardware and software teams using specification documents.

In 2008 a team of physicists from Argonne National Laboratory, in Illinois, and other institutions stumbled upon an odd phenomenon. They called it superinsulation, because in many ways it was the opposite of superconductivity. Now they’ve worked out the theory behind it, potentially opening the doors to better batteries, supersensitive sensors, and strange new circuits. Superconductors lose all resistance once they fall below a certain temperature. In superinsulators, on the other hand, the resistance to the flow of electricity becomes infinite at very low temperatures, preventing any flow of electric current.

Experimental microbial fuel cells could turn bacteria into batteries that generate electricity from biomass. The key to this technology is the ability of bacteria to transfer electrons to their surroundings—for example, to the anode of a microbial fuel cell. But if the organisms have to be in direct contact with the anode, such devices would have to have extremely large surface areas. Researchers from Aarhus University, in Denmark, report today in the journal Nature that bacteria appear to conduct electricity while separated by several millimeters, at least a thousand times as far apart than previously demonstrated. The naturally occurring electric currents, if confirmed, would allow bacteria spaced at least 12 millimeters apart to communicate electrically. The discovery might lead to new paths to treating infection and a better understanding of microbial ecosystems.