Intel recently pulled the wraps off its mystical wireless charging device at the Intel Developers Forum in San Francisco. The gadget uses resonant magnetic fields to transmit power over a short distance. In their demonstration, the wireless power transmitter sent enough juice through the ether to power a 60-watt lightbulb a few feet away.

It works like this: The charger sends power through the air across two resonating electromagnetic coils. Electromagnetic waves are emitted from one coil and are received by another a few feet away. The magic frequency for this power transmission seems to be 10 MHz. The result is a steady flow of juice at the receiving coil, enough to, say, power a lightbulb.

The technology has been around since the days of Tesla, but it hasn’t been deemed efficient enough or stable enough for everyday use. Until recently, engineers working at MIT could only get about 45 percent efficiency out of the system, meaning that more than half of the electricity going into the first coil never made it across the gap to the second. Intel claims that its new charger operates at 75 percent efficiency, a huge leap over previous systems.

Intel researchers say that that there’s no chance of getting zapped by the wireless charger. Magnetic waves pass through human bodies without interference, they say. The company hopes to develop a wireless charging system for laptops in the future.

Link to New York Times article

All computer data boils down to ones and zeros. Until now, that is. A team of computer engineers at the University of Pennsylvania have figured out how to throw a “two” into the mix using copper nanowires, adding a third dimension to computing. They call the data triumvirates “trits,” and they could vastly increase the capacity of memory storage devices.

It works like this: Each nanowire is made up of two materials, a central core and a casing. Flashing a current through the wire causes either the core or the casing to phase change from crystalized (neat and orderly) to amorphous (jumbled and messy). The whole wire can either be crystalized or amorphous, representing a one or a zero, a traditional bit. Zapping the core crystalized and the casing amorphous or vice versa, adds the “two,” giving birth to the “trit.” 

Team member Ritesh Agarwal spoke to PhysOrg.com about the discovery:

“The use of nanowires to create electronic memory is advantageous for several reasons, but a non-binary form of nanowire memory like we have created could allow for a huge increase in the memory density of potential future devices.”

That means more memory in smaller packages and, eventually, digital wristwatches that are smarter than I am.

Link to PhysOrg.com article.

Before swarms of nanites can organize to eradicate the human race, they’ll need a leader. Engineers in Japan have made the first steps in creating such a microscopic overlord, building a nanomachine that imitates human brain cells. The tiny machine can receive information from the macro world and transmit it to a small cadre of its companions. Working in concert, teams of the molecular contraptions could do everything from terminate tumors to crunch vast amounts of data in the blink of an eye.

Dr. Anirban Bandyopadhyay of the International Center for Young Scientists, in Tsukuba, Japan, led the team that developed the nanobrain. It’s made from 17 molecules of an compound called duroquinone, 16 arranged in orbit around one. The whole thing is held together by weak hydrogen bonds. Using a scanning electron microscope, Bandyopadhyay was able to send electrical impulses to the central molecule to change its configuration or state. The lead molecule then transfers its state to the other 16, like dominoes falling one after another.

It’s basically parallel processing on a micro scale, the same kind of number crunching that our brains are capable of. In fact, Bandyopadhyay modeled the microbrain on human glial cells, which pass info between neurons in the brain. They call it “one-to-many computation” and it’s key to parallel processing.

So what can it do? Bandyopadhyay estimates that the simple assembly is capable of generating more than 4 billion different outcomes from one input instruction. There’s no comparing true parallel processing to current processors, which crunch computations linearly. Parallel processors can take on millions of lines of instruction at once. That’s the kind of computing power that can keep Moore’s Law of exponential computing growth chugging away into stratospheric heights. 

And it’s not just powerful—the nanocomputer would represent a completely new way of computing. It’s purely visual, using patterns to replace the differential equations that are at the heart of current computing.

There’s also a potential to manufacture billions of molecules of a custom drug with just one instruction. Imagine a single drop of water hitting a placid pool. Waves radiate out from the site of impact, quickly covering the entire surface. A single instruction dropped into a field of similar nanomachines would spread in the same manner.

Bandyopadhyay is currently working to create more complex versions of his nanobrain and hopes to have a functional computer within a few years. The trick is finding something other than a massive tunneling electron microscope to interact with the machines. Bandyopadhyay hopes other control methods will be developed, including optical readers for the nanocomputers, or chemical triggers for the medical nanofactories.

Link to MSNBC article.

Link to BBC article.

Researchers at the Zernike Institute of Advanced Materials at the University of Groningen have developed super-cheap plastic memory that will likely end up in next-gen RFID tags. It works like Flash memory, but it’s easier and cheaper to manufacture. How do they do it? Flash memory is like a club sandwich—layers of semiconductors between ferro-electric toast. The new memory mixes everything up into one blended semiconductor cake. Current can be channeled through the mixture, leaving programming in its wake. The researchers aren’t totally clear on how they’ve managed this feat, but they say it works wonderfully.

Link to ScienceDaily article.

Plastic typically insulates, protecting you from nervous-system-frying electrocution. But a team of Dutch researchers have discovered that if you mash two types of plastic together just right, they’ll conduct electricity as well as metal and exhibit properties that trump high-tech semiconductors.

Alberto Morpurgo and a team at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands squashed a micrometer of the organic polymer TTF to another micro-layer of a polymer called TCNQ. The two plastics stick together due to van der Waals forces—weak magnetic forces that act on molecules. Both polymers are insulators, but when they’re forced together electricity flows along the junction as well as it flows through metal.

Morpurgo believes that electrons are able to jump between spaces in the TCNQ molecules, allowing current to flow. It’s a new way to channel current and the researchers expect to discover many “interesting electronic properties” as they examine the material further.

The new polymer combo could replace semiconductors in circuitry. (Semiconductors are used to control the flow of electrons and are indispensable to modern electronics.) According to researchers, it’s much better at conducting electricity than current semiconductors.

Jochen Mannhart at the University of Augsburg in Germany told NewScientist:

“The electron concentration there is an order of magnitude higher,” he says. “That has the power to create new effects, from magnetism to superconductivity.”

Link to NewScientist article.

A newly designed nanomotor could be used to craft custom molecules one atom at a time, like a molecular ink jet printer. The motor, designed by Colin Lambert and his team at Lancaster University in the UK, would be constructed using three carbon nanotubes—one suspended between two others. A stream of electrons would spin the central tube, like a waterwheel in a river. 

Researchers claim they could pump atoms through the central tube, controlling chemical reactions to form exotic molecules with unfathomable properties. The motors could also be tiny, tiny computer components—using the positions of individual atoms within the central tube to represent ones and zeroes. The components would be incredibly dense, about 10 times as small as current processors and memory chips.

Researchers say that the motors should be pretty easy to build.

No news on whether they could be used to build indestructible colonies of nanites that would eventually devour the human race, however.

Link to NewScientist article.

Photo: MRAM never forgets. Ever.

Any technology that employs “spintronics” has got to be aces. MRAM (Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory) exploits the quantum spin states of electrons to store and access data. It’s basically a matter of measuring the resistance caused by different magnetic fields, then making the stuff that generates those fields do what you want it to do. It involves a lot of technical jiggery-pokery, but the end result is RAM that can store data permanently like a hard drive or flash drive, but is as fast as volatile system RAM. MRAM can essentially replace all the memory in a computer—system RAM, video RAM and storage media. Oh, and it uses about 10 percent of the power of DRAM.

The technology has been chugging along on the flat bit of the exponential Kurzweil curve for a few decades now, but it could be ready to shoot into the stratosphere. Several major corporations have decided to dump research money and talent into MRAM and consumers could see MRAM-equipped electronics before 2015.

Freescale Semiconductor, a company that cut its teeth on the venerable Motorola PowerPC chips, announced this week that it will join forces with a few venture capital firms to make MRAM. The new venture, called EverSpin Technologies, will attempt to create MRAM chips that can compete with ever-improving flash memory.

Toshiba and Hitachi are also funding big MRAM projects, as are the U.S. and Korean governments. I can’t wait.

Link to Cnet story.

Link to gizmodo story.

In a move reminiscent of one of the most popular sci-fi plots of the 20th century, the U.S. military is planning to use the world’s fastest super computer to watch over its nukes. The computer, made by IBM, goes by the name “Roadrunner” and uses about 20,000 processors. It runs at ”petaflop speeds,” the equivalent of one thousand trillion calculations per second and is about twice as powerful as the last great super computer, also made by IBM. 

Roadrunner uses the famed “cell” processor, developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba for the PlayStation 3, to crunch numbers. It employs other standard processors for autonomic functions. Combined, Roadrunner has enough juice to keep an eye on the U.S. nuclear stockpile while simultaneously parsing astronomical, genomic and weather data. The computer will be housed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

IBM has several more petaflop computers in the works and plans to make the computers commercially available.

Link to BBC article.

A story’s been bouncing around the blogs about Queen’s University computing professor Roel Vertegaal and the so-called flexible computer prototypes (computers imbedded in a flexible surface like a piece of paper) in his Human Media Laboratory. Here’s the thing: He hasn’t actually made any of the computers. Instead, his team has created a novel projection system that tracks the movement of surfaces and users to create the illusion of a flexible computer. The projectors cast an image on paper (or any surface) as it moves through space. It also identifies the movements and actions of users, allowing them to control the interface through simple movements and gestures.

Vertegaal is testing a user interface based on the assumption that everybody would prefer their computers to be on pieces of paper. Here’s how it works: To scroll trough a document, simply flip the paper compute over vertically. To move from page to page in a browser, flip it over horizontally. To transfer an image or video from one computer (or display) to another, place the computer on top of the other and give it a rub as if you’re making an ink transfer. Voila, the content is transferred. The team demonstrates their interface in a video.

It’s awkward when compared to interfaces being developed by Jeff Han and others. Still, it’s going around, so I’m covering it.

Link to Physorg.com article.