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Finally a massively multi-core general-purpose architecture.

Well, nice, but I wonder how much cache per core will be available... With 48 cores a single memory bus becomes nothing more than one big (small? :) ) bottleneck.

Apparently they have separated L2 cache per-tile (i.e., every two processors) and a high speed bus connecting the tiles. As usual, whether it will be fast enough will depend from the specific applications (which BTW is also true for other current multi-core architectures). The nice thing is of course that porting software to this architecture will be one order of magnitude less difficult than going to Tesla/Fermi/CELL architectures. Also, this architecture will also be suitable for other tasks than floating point computations (damn engineers polluting computer science :P) and it has the potential to be more future-proof than other solutions.

still only a few percent of conversion efficiency but very promising since working at reasonably focussing and unpolarised light; they announce the publication of a first design of such a system .... to be followed!! Duncan: you wanna have a closer look at it?

99% house advertising, 1% scientific results. I think this is still a conservative guess... And I'm sure this "completely new" effect that you don't see when "staring at the equations of motion" (doggone, how I love this USish "I-am-better-than-the-rest-of-the-world" jargon) certainly has been predicted at least 50 years ago by some smart USSR researcher!!

not very advanced and maybe non practical but...

From the alternative computing series...

This could become quite relevant in future control systems if the setup can be made simple to keep alive and stable. I was doing some follow-up on a story about people controlling aircraft with their brainwaves (through EEG) when I ran into this really cool story. The idea of growing the neurons in patterns is incidentally very similar to the Physarium slime-mold stuff that Dario and me were curious about a little while ago.

I think we already had a discussion on this during a wednesday meeting :P

Oh, I thought that was on the little robot that was controlled by rat neurons and bumped into EVERYTHING. The interesting thing here is that they add a surface patterning (with some kind of nutrient) to control the growth of cells. (Maybe that is not new either, though.)

Yes, you read correctly. Apply current to your brain to get smarter. Ariadna anyone?

There is this optical neuron that gets stimulated from motion. Mapping it is difficult in the lab: "The stumbling block is a lack of fine-grained anatomical detail about how the neurons in the retina are wired up to each other." So, use people deciphering from 2D images --> the 3D neuron structure using the human spatial reasoning to figure out what is part of a branching cell and what is just background noise in the images (yet incomparable to their best algorithms' performance) 120.000 users so far mapped 2% of the retina

The first complete theory of how plasmons produce "hot carriers" has been developed by researchers in the US. The new model could help make this process of producing carriers more efficient, which would be good news for enhancing solar-energy conversion in photovoltaic devices.

I did not read the paper but what is further down written in the article, does not give much hope that this actually gives much more insight than what we had nor that it could be used in any way to improve current PV cells soon: e.g. "To fully exploit these carriers for such applications, researchers need to understand the physical processes behind plasmon-induced hot-carrier generation. Nordlander's team has now developed a simple model that describes how plasmons produce hot carriers in spherical silver nanoparticles and nanoshells. The model describes the conduction electrons in the metal as free particles and then analyses how plasmons excite hot carriers using Fermi's golden rule - a way to calculate how a quantum system transitions from one state into another following a perturbation. The model allows the researchers to calculate how many hot carriers are produced as a function of the light frequency used to excite the metal, as well as the rate at which they are produced. The spectral profile obtained is, to all intents and purposes, the "plasmonic spectrum" of the material. Particle size and hot-carrier lifetimes "Our analyses reveal that particle size and hot-carrier lifetimes are central for determining both the production rate and the energies of the hot carriers," says Nordlander. "Larger particles and shorter lifetimes produce more carriers with lower energies and smaller particles produce fewer carriers, but with higher energies."

not for space but the air breathing battery still is a nice concept - would make robots more "human" if they have to breath :-)

Looks like crowdsourcing for astronomy stuff is already being done.

For the first time, researchers have shown that they can capture CO2 from the air, and convert it directly into methanol, which can then be used as an alternative fuel, as well as for hydrogen storage, in fuel cells, or as a building block for plastic.

Solar power to suck out co2 during the day and make it fuel finally solves global warming?

"Windows and solar panels in the future could be made from one of the best -- and cheapest -- construction materials known: wood. Researchers at Stockholm's KTH Royal Institute of Technology have developed a new transparent wood material that's suitable for mass production"

A rocking bed might help you to fall asleep and maintain you in deep sleep!

With electrical signals, cells can organize themselves into complex societies and negotiate with other colonies.

Using AI to design and build a micro organism to perform a task. Full publication can be found here: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2020/01/07/1910837117.full.pdf