The consumer-electronics research arm has been quiet for years—but it’s also been busy. Its new mission: Make Google hardware as smart as Google software.
Adidas GMR, a smart insole for soccer players, is powered by Google ATAP’s Jacquard technology. [Photo: courtesy of Google].
Dark matter must exist, but has evaded all attempts to find it. Now comes our boldest plan yet – sensing its minuscule gravitational force as it brushes past us.
Samsung has announced its latest lineup of high-capacity consumer solid-state drives: the 870 QVO. It starts at $129.99 for the 1TB SSD, working all the way up to Samsung’s first 8TB model made for consumers.
For half a millennium, people have tried to enhance human vision by technical means. While the human eye is capable of recognizing features over a wide range of size, it reaches its limits when peering at objects over giant distances or in the micro- and nanoworld. Researchers of the EU funded project ChipScope are now developing a completely new strategy towards optical microscopy.
The conventional light microscope, still standard equipment in laboratories, underlies the fundamental laws of optics. Thus, resolution is limited by diffraction to the so called Abbe limit’ – structural features smaller than a minimum of 200 nm cannot be resolved by this kind of microscope.
So far, all technologies for going beyond the Abbe limit rely on complex setups, with bulky components and advanced laboratory infrastructure. Even a conventional light microscope, in most configurations, is not suitable as a mobile gadget to do research out in the field or in remote areas. In the ChipScope project funded by the EU, a completely new strategy towards optical microscopy is explored. In classical optical microscopy the analyzed sample area is illuminated simultaneously, collecting the light which is scattered from each point with an area-selective detector, e.g. the human eye or the sensor of a camera.
When neurons fire an electrical impulse, they also experience a surge of calcium ions. By measuring those surges, researchers can indirectly monitor neuron activity, helping them to study the role of individual neurons in many different brain functions.
One drawback to this technique is the crosstalk generated by the axons and dendrites that extend from neighboring neurons, which makes it harder to get a distinctive signal from the neuron being studied. MIT engineers have now developed a way to overcome that issue, by creating calcium indicators, or sensors, that accumulate only in the body of a neuron.
“People are using calcium indicators for monitoring neural activity in many parts of the brain,” says Edward Boyden, the Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology and a professor of biological engineering and of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT. “Now they can get better results, obtaining more accurate neural recordings that are less contaminated by crosstalk.”
Chemistry Nobel
Olof Ramström, from the Nobel Committee, said lithium-ion batteries had “enabled the mobile world”.
Three scientists have been awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of lithium-ion batteries.
John B Goodenough, M Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino share the prize for their work on these rechargeable devices, which are used for portable electronics.
At the age of 97, Prof Goodenough is the oldest ever Nobel laureate.
Electrons are very much at the mercy of magnetic fields, which scientists can manipulate to control the electrons and their angular momentum—i.e. their “spin.”
A Cornell team led by Greg Fuchs, assistant professor of applied and engineering physics in the College of Engineering, in 2013 invented a new way to exert this control by using acoustic waves generated by mechanical resonators. That approach enabled the team to control electron spin transitions (also known as spin resonance) that otherwise wouldn’t be possible through conventional magnetic behavior.
The finding was a boon for anyone looking to build quantum sensors of the sort used in mobile navigation devices. However, such devices still required a magnetic control field—and therefore a bulky magnetic antenna—to drive certain spin transitions.
Imagine working in the hot streets of Manila in the early 1990s. You are a butcher, slaving away in a loud, humid market for long hours. You only make several dollars a day to support a large family.
One evening, you are holding a Pepsi bottle cap in your hand. On it is a number. You bought several of these sodas in hopes of winning a big $40,000 giveaway at the end of the promotion. This money could change your family’s life. It is a mountain of earnings in a world of limited opportunities. You watch as Pepsi begins reading off the winners on TV.
Suddenly, you realize you’ve won. Incredulous, you quadruple check your numbers. The number is accurate. Your heart begins racing as you rush to call your wife and kids. However, you, and many winners like you, will never see that money. But at least you won’t lose your life, like some.
Acoustic waves have been found to be highly versatile and promising carriers of information between chip-based electronic devices. This characteristic is ideal for the development of a number of electronic components, including microwave filters and transducers.
In the past, some researchers have tried to build devices in which waves are transmitted between two ports in a non-symmetric way. These are known as nonreciprocal devices. These devices could be particularly promising for the manipulation and routing of phonons, quasiparticles associated with acoustic waves. Building nonreciprocal devices that transmit acoustic waves, however, can be highly challenging, as acoustic systems typically transmit waves in a linear way.
Researchers at Harvard University have recently achieved the non-reciprocal transmission of non-reciprocal acoustic waves using a nonlinear parity-time symmetric system. This system, presented in a paper published in Nature Electronics, is based on two coupled acoustic resonators placed on a lithium niobate surface.
