Two teams of U.S. scientists have pushed Moor’s Law into overdrive, crafting transistors and memory storage material on the nano scale.
Jeremy Levy and his team at the University of Pittsburgh have created two-nanometer transistors out of lanthanum aluminate and strontium titanate. Levy used an atomic force microscope to etch a miniscule wire between the two insulators, creating the world’s smallest transistor. Even more intriguing, the team was able to use the microscope to “erase” the wire. Using this technique, the team could conceivably reconfigure the transistor to make memory modules.
Levy says he got the idea for the transistor from an Etch A Sketch, which uses a stylus to scrape aluminum powder off a glass plate.
The new transistor is several times smaller than the smallest silicon transistor (currently 45 nanometers).
Even better, Levy says that atomic force microscopes could be miniaturized down to the size of a wristwatch. Not that you’d ever want to set up a nano transistor factory on your wrist, but still.
Meanwhile, engineers/scientists/all-around-good-guys-and-gals at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the University of California Berkeley have created a method of reliably making thin-film polymer memory material. Others have tried to make polymer thin-film memory material, but it usually falls apart when spread over large surfaces.
The teams at Amherst and Berkeley used a lattice of sapphire crystals to make a grid to lay the thin-film sheet on. This makes nearly perfect arrays of film that’s 15 times denser than anything that’s ever been made before. And we’re talking dense, about 250 DVDs worth of data on a surface the size of a quarter.
Behold your Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. Or at least the bits and pieces that could make one.
David Merrill from MIT Media Lab shows off his latest creation at TED 2009, programmable computerized play blocks called Siftables.
The blocks are packed with OLED touch screens, accelerometers, and wireless communications. Merrill and his team have programmed the blocks to do everything from math to cranking out extremely cool chiptunes with a live synthesizer. They’ve also made a killer word game that’s a cross between Boggle and Scrabble, complete with Speak-N-Spell sound effects.
Merrill says the blocks represent a new way to teach and learn, and it’s not hard to imagine them on a glowing plexiglass desk in one of the Enterprise’s classrooms, Data awkwardly arranging them in an attempt to teach a group of wily toddlers.
I want a set. That word game would be fantastic at parties.
In its never-ending quest to create a Seussian paradise full of precariously leaning buildings, organically bulbous apartment complexes, and poofy truffula trees, the city of Madrid has approved plans to build a sparkling eco-hive convention center: the new Centro Internacional de Convenciones de la Ciudad de Madrid (CICCM).
The new building was designed by Mansilla + Tunon Architects and features a translucent gelatinous skin filled with solar cells and a design that funnels sunlight into its deepest recesses. It’s pretty neat.
A car’s shocks dissipate a lot of energy when they soak up bumps. Engineers at Tufts University have figured out how to turn that energy into electricity that could be used to power the car.
The team has built electro-magnetic shocks that are essentially linear generators, using the up-and-down motion of the shock’s travel to generate electricity. The engineers envision using their shocks on hybrid vehicles. They estimate that a 2,500 pound car traveling at 45 mph would recover between 20 and 70 percent of the electricity it uses from the shocks.
The shocks could greatly extend the range of plug-in hybrid vehicles, but they may be put to better use on trucks. Massive rigs have a far greater potential for generating energy—when they hit a bump, tons of force compresses the shock. Good tech, for sure.
There’s nothing quite like the rapturous chills of a body battling to incorporate man-made uber compounds into its delicately balanced chemistry. And the shivers are even more exhilarating when those chemicals glom on to bodily tissues at the atomic level. Turns out that bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical in plastic may (probably does) lead to heart disease, diabetes, and liver failure, sticks around in the system much longer than scientists previously thought.
Richard Stahlhut of the University of Rochester Medical Center and his team measured the blood levels of BPA in a group of 1,469 adults. After 24 hours of fasting, his test subjects still had high levels of BPA in their blood.
After ingesting BPA, blood levels dropped off quickly within hours, then stabilized at moderate levels. Stahlhut believes that PBA could hide out in fat, which would make it especially difficult to get rid of.
BPA leeches from plastic bottles and PVC pipes. About 93 percent of Americans are thought to carry BPA in their blood. The chemical mimics the female hormone estrogen, leading to hormone imbalances and, scientists are beginning to think, serious health problems. Recent studies have linked the chemical to abnormal development in children and even obesity. Still, the US FDA and EPA say it’s safe.
