Did you know there are more people with genius IQs living in China than there are people of any kind living in the United States?
Mike Grinolds et al at Harvard University have cracked the problem of increasing qubits using MRI (magnetic resonance imaging, previously stuck at about 7 qubits). They have shrunk the business end of a magnetic resonance machine to the size of a pinhead. They've done it by placing a powerful magnet at the scanning tip of an atomic force microscope. In this way, they can create a powerful magnetic field gradient in a volume of space just a few nanometres across. That allows them to stimulate and control the magnetic resonance of single electrons. They've tested their device on so-called nitrogen vacancies in diamond. These are created by burying single atoms of nitrogen in thin sheets of diamond. Quantum physicists are fascinated with these vacancies because they are well protected from the outside world and so stable, and are easy to see by the photons they emit.
Quantum control of individual spins in condensed matter systems is an emerging field with wide-ranging applications in spintronics, quantum computation, and sensitive magnetometry. Recent experiments have demonstrated the ability to address and manipulate single electron spins through either optical or electrical techniques. However, it is a challenge to extend individual spin control to nanoscale multi-electron systems, as individual spins are often irresolvable with existing methods. Here we demonstrate that coherent individual spin control can be achieved with few-nm resolution for proximal electron spins by performing single-spin magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which is realized via a scanning magnetic field gradient that is both strong enough to achieve nanometric spatial resolution and sufficiently stable for coherent spin manipulations. We apply this scanning field-gradient MRI technique to electronic spins in nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond and achieve nanometric resolution in imaging, characterization, and manipulation of individual spins. For NV centers, our results in individual spin control demonstrate an improvement of nearly two orders of magnitude in spatial resolution compared to conventional optical diffraction- limited techniques. This scanning-fi eld-gradient microscope enables a wide range of applications including materials characterization, spin entanglement, and nanoscale magnetometry.
The US economy is supported by a vast network of transportation infrastructure facilities in the form of highways, railroads, waterways, transit ways, pipelines etc. The worth of this infrastructure is estimated to be around $2.5 trillion. In the US there are about four million miles of paved roads and highways and 575,000 bridges. Statistics from the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) indicated that approximately 230,000 bridges are either functionally obsolete or structurally deficient and are in need for immediate rehabilitation requiring a total investment of $70 billion. In another study, (FHWA) estimated that: nearly half of the bridge inventory is deficient due to either structural or traffic inadequacies; a $90 billion backlog of bridge maintenance exists; traffic congestion wastes 1.4 billion gallons of gas and 1.2 billion person-hours each year; and transportation delays add $7.6 billion annually to costs in the US. It is estimated that $78B will be spent over the next 20 years in major rehabilitation of bridges
Thunderbolt will no doubt get more backing from top-tier PC, display and disk drive makers. But it remains to be seen whether it will provide sustained impact or, like FireWire, flame out.
Measurement of intense, high-energy X-rays from the electron beam through 6” of metal demonstrate the technical feasibility of X-Scan spin-off technology
New experiments this month have demonstrated for the first time that the main spin-off technology of our research, the X-Scan instrument to inspect roads, bridges, and other major infrastructure, is technically feasible with a DPF similar to our FF-1. While this is only a laboratory demonstration, far from a commercial product, the new experimental evidence indicates that such a commercial product is feasible, given adequate engineering funding. In our view, this considerably increases the chances that LPP will have a profitable product, even before the development of Focus Fusion.
Transmitting information as pulses of light through fiber-optic cables is the fastest and highest-bandwidth communications technology that exists today. Yet even this technology is being pressed to carry ever-greater quantities of information. One way to overcome this problem is to transmit light of different wavelengths simultaneously—an approach known as wavelength division multiplexing. However, the technique requires the use of tunable lasers, which are relatively expensive to produce. Hong Cai at the A*STAR Institute of Microelectronics and collaborators from Nanyang Technological University and Hong Polytechnic University have now developed a low-cost and tunable laser device made specifically for this purpose
The patterning of graphene is useful in fabricating electronic devices, but existing methods do not allow control of the number of layers of graphene that are removed. We show that sputter-coating graphene and graphene-like materials with zinc and dissolving the latter with dilute acid removes one graphene layer and leaves the lower layers intact. The method works with the four different types of graphene and graphene-like materials: graphene oxide, chemically converted graphene, chemical vapor–deposited graphene, and micromechanically cleaved (“clear-tape”) graphene. On the basis of our data, the top graphene layer is damaged by the sputtering process, and the acid treatment removes the damaged layer of carbon. When used with predesigned zinc patterns, this method can be viewed as lithography that etches the sample with single-atomic-layer resolution.
Research focuses on supercritical carbon dioxide (S-CO2) Brayton-cycle turbines, which typically would be used for bulk thermal and nuclear generation of electricity, including next-generation power reactors. The goal is eventually to replace steam-driven Rankine cycle turbines, which have lower efficiency, are corrosive at high temperature and occupy 30 times as much space because of the need for very large turbines and condensers to dispose of excess steam. The Brayton cycle could yield 20 megawatts of electricity from a package with a volume as small as four cubic meters.
The Brayton cycle, named after George Brayton, originally functioned by heating air in a confined space and then releasing it in a particular direction. The same principle is used to power jet engines today. "This machine is basically a jet engine running on a hot liquid," said principal investigator Steve Wright of Sandia's Advanced Nuclear Concepts group.
A competing system, also at Sandia and using Brayton cycles with helium as the working fluid, is designed to operate at about 925 degrees C and is expected to produce electrical power at 43 percent to 46 percent efficiency. By contrast, the supercritical CO2 Brayton cycle provides the same efficiency as helium Brayton systems but at a considerably lower temperature (250-300 C). The S-CO2 equipment is also more compact than that of the helium cycle, which in turn is more compact than the conventional steam cycle.
Organovo is trying to come up with two products. One of them is focused on blood vessels, which I call vascular grafts and the other focus is on nerve grafts. You need vascular grafts, or substitute blood vessels, when you have a clogged artery or symbiosis where you need to replace blood vessels. We are building blood vessels using the 3D printing technology but we’re not yet at the point where our vessels can be safely introduced into a living organism. We’re very close but we’re not yet there.
Stepwise Synthesis of Giant Unilamellar Vesicles on a Microfluidic Assembly Line
World oil supply rose 0.5 mb/d in January, to 88.5 mb/d, on higher OPEC crude and NGL output. Non‐OPEC supply was unchanged from December at 53 mb/d, as outages continued to constrain production. 2010 estimates remain at 52.8 mb/d, while the 2011 outlook is nudged up 0.1 mb/d to 53.5 mb/d on higher North American output.
In the event that EUV cannot be made commercially viable, there are several other possibilities for future chip scaling, including DSA. But some say DSA and other technologies may have a future role even if EUV is put into volume production for high-end, mainstream logic chips.
DSA—which is potentially much less expensive than EUV production—could have applications in, for example, flash memory production, where the regular structure of circuits and cost sensitivity of the market may make it attractive.
Will the memristor turn out to be a transformative technology, the key to putting hundreds of trillions of devices in the palm of your hand? Or will we be asking, a few years from now, “Whatever happened to the memristor?”
The TiO2 memristor is just one of many contending new technologies. Considering only the realm of switched-resistance memory elements, there are several other candidates, including devices based on phase changes, on magnetic fields and on electron spin. (Chua argues that all these devices should be classified as memristors.) To evaluate the long-term prospects of such technologies, one would have to go beyond basic principles of operation to questions of reliability, longevity, uniformity, cost of manufacturing and dozens of other details.
Solving this maze is then simple. Simply connect a voltage across the start and finish of the maze and wait. "The current flows only along those memristors that connect the entrance and exit points," say Pershin and Di Ventra. This changes the state of those memristors allowing them to be easily identified. The chain of these memristors is then the solution.
That's potentially much quicker than other maze solving strategies which effectively work in series. "The maze is solved in a massively parallel way, since all memristors in the network participate simultaneously in the calculation," they say.
Previously, the standard optical microscope can only see items around one micrometre – 0.001 millimetres – clearly.
But now, by combining an optical microscope with a transparent microsphere, dubbed the ‘microsphere nanoscope’, the Manchester researchers can see 20 times smaller – 50 nanometres (5 x 10^-8m) – under normal lights. This is beyond the theoretical limit of optical microscopy.
Not only have we been able to see items of 50 nanometers, we believe that is just the start and we will be able to see far smaller items.
“Theoretically, there is no limit on how small an object we will be able to see.
The executive, who took a medical leave earlier this year, joked with the audience, saying he "didn't want to miss today."
Mr. Jobs, a cancer survivor and transplant recipient, appeared energetic though thin as he took the stage at the invitation-only event.
The Cupertino, Calif., consumer electronics maker unveiled a second-generation iPad. Mr. Jobs said the iPad 2, which has a dual-core microprocessor and two video cameras, is thinner and lighter than its predecessor.
Current conventional mortar rounds used by the army only have an accuracy of about a 136 meter (446 ft) Circular Area Probable (CEP). This means that 50 percent of rounds will land within 136 m of the target, 43 percent will land between 136 m and 272 m, 7 percent between 272 m and 408 m and the proportion of rounds that land further than this is less than 0.2 percent.
The new 120 mm APMI precision rounds, which have been undergoing testing since late last year, have been able to demonstrate a CEP of less than 10 meters at ranges in excess of 6,500 meters to greatly improve accuracy and reduce the risk of collateral damage. This equates to 50 percent falling within 10 meters of the target, 43 percent between 10 meters and 20 meters and 7 percent within 20 meters to 30 meters.
We give new evidence that quantum computers—moreover, rudimentary quantum computers built entirely out of linear-optical elements—cannot be efficiently simulated by classical computers. In particular, we define a model of computation in which identical photons are generated, sent through a linear-optical network, then nonadaptively measured to count the number of photons in each mode. This model is not known or believed to be universal for quantum computation, and indeed, we discuss the prospects for realizing the model using current technology On the other hand, we prove that the model is able to solve sampling problems and search problems that are classically intractable under plausible assumptions.
The use of precisely applied mechanical forces to induce site-specific chemical transformations is called positional mechanosynthesis, and diamond is an important early target for achieving mechanosynthesis experimentally. The next major experimental milestone may be the mechanosynthetic fabrication of atomically precise 3D structures, creating readily accessible diamond-based nanomechanical components engineered to form desired architectures possessing superlative mechanical strength, stiffness, and strength-to-weight ratio. To help motivate this future experimental work, the present paper addresses the basic stability of the simplest nanoscale diamond structures—cubes and octahedra—possessing clean, hydrogenated, or partially hydrogenated surfaces. Computational studies using Density Functional Theory (DFT) with the Car-Parrinello Molecular Dynamics (CPMD) code, consuming ∼1,466,852.53 CPU-hours of runtime on the IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer (23 TFlops), confirmed that fully hydrogenated nanodiamonds up to 2 nm (∼900-1800 atoms) in size having only C(111) faces (octahedrons) or only C(110) and C(100) faces (cuboids) maintain stable sp3 hybridization. Fully dehydrogenated cuboid nanodiamonds above 1 nm retain the diamond lattice pattern, but smaller dehydrogenated cuboids and dehydrogenated octahedron nanodiamonds up to 2 nm reconstruct to bucky-diamond or onion-like carbon (OLC). At least three adjacent passivating H atoms may be removed, even from the most graphitization-prone C(111) face, without reconstruction of the underlying diamond lattice.
Historically, the first computer to achieve terascale computing (10^12, or one trillion operations per second) was demonstrated in the late 1990s. In the 2000s, the first petascale computer was demonstrated with a thousand-times better performance. Extrapolating these trends, we can expect the first exascale computer (with one million trillion operations per second) to appear around the end of this next decade.
Emerging technologies such as photonics, nonvolatile memory, 3D stacking, and new datacentric workloads offer compelling new opportunities. The confluence of these trends motivates a rethinking of the basic systems’ building blocks of the future and a likely new design approach called nanostores that focus on data-centric workloads and hardware-software codesign for upcoming technologies.
The next hot-water-cooled IBM system is already on the drawing board, this time in Germany. It will be significantly larger than Aquasar and is expected to go into operation at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Munich, Germany, by 2012. Called SuperMUC, this new computer will be part of the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) HPC infrastructure and made available to scientists and research institutes throughout Europe. The system has a peak performance of 3 petaflop/s (10^15 arithmetic operations per second) and is based on an IBM System X iDataPlex ®, which contains more than 14,000 Intel Xeon next-generation processors. SuperMUC will be more powerful than 110,000 PCs, enabling LRZ scientists to verify theories, develop experiments and predict results to an unprecedented extent—all this, while still requiring massively less energy.
Closed timelike curves (CTCs) are trajectories in spacetime that effectively travel backwards in time: a test particle following a CTC can interact with its former self in the past. A widely accepted quantum theory of CTCs was proposed by Deutsch. Here we analyze an alternative quantum formulation of CTCs based on teleportation and postselection, and show that it is inequivalent to Deutsch’s. The predictions or retrodictions of our theory can be simulated experimentally: we report the results of an experiment illustrating how in our particular theory the “grandfather paradox” is resolved.
We will present our recent progress in 1 Terabit/in.2 BPM fabrication. We will report a novel strategy to integrate directed self-assembly of block copolymer (BCP) with nano-imprint lithography for >1 Terabit/in.2 template fabrication. A concentric full track disk template at an areal density of 1 Terabit/in.2 has been demonstrated for the first time. This full-track template with pillar-tone dot features was fabricated on a 6" quartz substrate by combining rotating e-beam lithography with imprint lithography and BCP process. 1 Terabit/in.2 hole-tone resist dot pattern with good size uniformity and position was formed on a disk using UV imprint lithography. A reverse-tone process was used to create the thin hard mask layer that is needed in the following dry etch process to form 1 Terabit/in.2 magnetic dots. We will present the preliminary results on size sigma and positioning accuracy, magnetic sigma, and spinstand recording test. Several key challenges will be addressed, such as defect reduction in the template fabrication, servo pattern integration, and the improvement of magnetic signal uniformity.
