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Category: computing – Page 716

DARPA’s Handheld Nuclear Fusion Reactor

fusionsunLast year, Pentagon mad science arm DARPA was working on one of its wildest projects yet: a microchip-sized nuclear reactor. The program is now officially done, the agency says. But these sorts of far-out projects have a habit of being reemerging under new managers and new names.

The project, known as the “Chip-Scale High Energy Atomic Beams” program, is an effort aimed at working on the core technologies behind a tiny particle accelerator, capable of firing subatomic particles at incredible speeds. It’s part of a larger DARPA plan to reduce all sorts of devices to microchip-scale – including cryogenic coolers, video cameras and multi-purpose sensors. All of the projects are ambitious (this is DARPA, after all). But this had to be the most ambitious of the lot. Here’s how DARPA’s plans for fiscal year 2009 described it:

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Gene editing turns cells into minicomputers that can record data

Gene editing can turn living cells into minicomputers that can read, write and perform complex calculations. The technology could track what happens inside the body over time.

DNA computers have been around since the 1990s, when researchers created DNA molecules able to perform basic mathematical functions. Instead of storing information as 0s and 1s like digital computers do, these computers store information in the molecules A, C, G and T that make up DNA.

‘Electron pairing’ found well above superconductor’s critical temperature

Physicists have found “electron pairing,” a hallmark feature of superconductivity, at temperatures and energies well above the critical threshold where superconductivity happens.

Rice University’s Doug Natelson, co-corresponding author of a paper about the work in this week’s Nature, said the discovery of Cooper pairs of electrons “a bit above the critical temperature won’t be ‘crazy surprising’ to some people. The thing that’s more weird is that it looks like there are two different energy scales. There’s a higher energy scale where the pairs form, and there’s a lower energy scale where they all decide to join hands and act collectively and coherently, the behavior that actually brings about superconductivity.”

Electrical resistance is so common in the modern world that most of us take it for granted that computers, smartphones and warm up during use. That heating happens because electricity doesn’t flow freely through the metal wires and silicon chips inside the devices. Instead, flowing electrons occasionally bump into atoms or one another, and each collision produces a tiny bit of heat.

The World’s First MRI of a SINGLE Atom Is Here, and It Could Revolutionize Imaging

Magnetic resonance imaging is nothing new, but scientists were able to perform an MRI on a single atom. But how?
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Scientists recently captured the smallest MRI ever while scanning an individual atom. The technique successfully reached a breakthrough level of resolution in the world of microscopy, the detailed MRI can reveal single atoms as well as different types of atoms based on their magnetic interactions.

This breakthrough has potential applications in all kinds of fields, like quantum computing where it could be used to design atomic-scale methods of storing info or when it comes to drug development, the ability to control individual atoms could potentially be used to study how proteins fold and then lead to the development of drugs for diseases like Alzheimers.

In a sense, the researchers combined a version of an MRI machine with a special instrument called a scanning tunneling microscope, which turned out to be a match made in microscopy heaven.

An MRI scanner creates an extremely strong magnetic field around whatever it’s trying to image, temporarily re-aligning the protons in your body with that magnetic field. Then the MRI machine pulses the sample (or patient) with a radiofrequency, which pulls the protons slightly out of alignment with the magnetic field. And after the brief radiofrequency pulse is over, the protons snap back into alignment with the field, and the energy that’s released as the protons move back into place with the magnetic field is what is detected and visualized by the machine.

And a scanning tunneling microscope is used for imaging really tiny surfaces, and it can pick up certain properties like size and molecular structure.

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A 127-year-old physics riddle solved

He solved a 127-year-old physics problem on paper and proved that off-centered boat wakes could exist. Five years later, practical experiments proved him right.

“Seeing the pictures appear on the computer screen was the best day at work I’ve ever had,” says Simen Ådnøy Ellingsen, an associate professor at NTNU’s Department of Energy and Process Engineering.

That was the day that Ph.D. candidate Benjamin Keeler Smeltzer and master’s student Eirik Æsøy had shown in the lab that Ellingsen was right and sent him the photos from the experiment. Five years ago, Ellingsen had challenged accepted knowledge from 1887, armed with a pen and paper, and won.

With open data, scientists share their work

Cranmer is a member of ATLAS, one of the two general-purpose experiments that, among other things, co-discovered the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. He and other CERN researchers recently published a letter in Nature Physics titled “Open is not enough,” which shares lessons learned about providing open data in high-energy physics. The CERN Open Data Portal, which facilitates public access of datasets from CERN experiments, now contains more than two petabytes of information.

It could be said that astronomy, one of the oldest sciences, was one of the first fields to have open data. The open records of Chinese astronomers from 1054 A.D. allowed astronomer Carlo Otto Lampland to identify the Crab Nebula as the remnant of a supernova in 1921. In 1705 Edward Halley used the previous observations of Johannes Kepler and Petrus Apianus—who did their work before Halley was old enough to use a telescope—to deduce the orbit of his eponymous comet.

In science, making data open means making available, free of charge, the observations or other information collected in a scientific study for the purpose of allowing other researchers to examine it for themselves, either to verify it or to conduct new analyses.

Scientists continue to use open data to make new discoveries today. In 2010, a team of scientists led by Professor Doug Finkbeiner at Harvard University found vast gamma-ray bubbles above and below the Milky Way. The accomplishment was compared to the discovery of a new continent on Earth. The scientists didn’t find the bubbles by making their own observations; they did it by analyzing publicly available data from the Fermi Gamma Ray Telescope.

“Qutrit”: Complex quantum teleportation achieved for first time

Researchers from the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the University of Vienna have experimentally demonstrated what was previously only a theoretical possibility. Together with quantum physicists from the University of Science and Technology of China, they have succeeded in teleporting complex high-dimensional quantum states. The research teams report this international first in the journal “Physical Review Letters”.

In their study, the researchers teleported the quantum state of one photon (light particle) to another distant one. Previously, only two-level states (“qubits”) had been transmitted, i.e., information with values “0” or “1”. However, the scientists succeeded in teleporting a three-level state, a so-called “qutrit”. In quantum physics, unlike in classical computer science, “0” and “1” are not an ‘either/or’ – both simultaneously, or anything in between, is also possible. The Austrian-Chinese team has now demonstrated this in practice with a third possibility “2”.

Novel experimental method.

Newly Discovered State of Matter Could Vastly Enhance Computing

A team of physicists claims to have discovered a new state of matter — a breakthrough that could vastly improve traditional as well as quantum computing.

The new state, called “topological superconductivity,” could help to increase storage capabilities in electronic devices and enhance quantum computing.

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