Al and Ziggy

Researchers at Yale have created the first ever fully functional quantum processor. Harnessing the bizarre qualities of quantum mechanics, the processor can perform simple calculations.

Typical computers use electrons (through transistors) to compute—reading and writing information in bits. Bits have binary states; they’re either “on” or “off,” 1 or 0. Quantum computers use atoms and “qubits,” which have multiple states. Qubits can be 1, 0, 1-0, 0-1, 0+1, or 0 AND 1 simultaneously. Thus a single qubit can store much more information than a bit. Additionally, typical computers read and write numbers and solve problems sequentially. Quantum computers can read and write long strings of numbers all at once, boosting speed tremendously.

The Yale computer is made up of two artificial atoms—billions of aluminum atoms that act as a single atom—in a solid-state system. The processor is extremely unstable, capable of hanging around for only a millisecond before evaporating. Still, it’s a major breakthrough in quantum computing that will lead to more stable and capable computers in the future.

Because of their tremendous computing power and speed, quantum computers have the potential to truly revolutionize computing.

Link to TG Daily article

A team at the University of Maryland has developed a new breed of supercapacitor that could replace conventional batteries in electric cars. The new supercapacitors can store as much juice as the best batteries, but deliver that juice as quickly as a capacitor.

It’s a big deal, especially for electric cars. To get an electric car to burn rubber (accelerate briskly), you need a lot of current, quickly. Batteries can’t do it without the help of capacitors—the superchargers of the electrical world. Capacitors store energy on the surface of two plates separated by an insulator. They store and release electricity much faster than batteries.

The team at the University of Maryland joined forces with engineers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology to create a grid of nano capacitors. Their prototype contains more than 10 billion nano capacitors linked together with electrodes. And they did it on aluminum foil.

Gary Rubloff, a physicist at the University of Maryland, anodized (added a layer of oxide) a sheet of foil to create a uniform grid of nanopores. Using atomic layer deposition, the team filled the pores with three layers of material that mimic the conductor-insulator-conductor layout of a normal capacitor.

A kilogram of the new supercapacitor could deliver a megawatt of power—enough to power 10,000 100-watt light bulbs.

Whiz kids at MIT have also found a way to make lithium batteries speedier. Gerbrand Ceder, the Richard P. Simmons Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT, has drastically improved the charge and discharge rate of lithium batteries by redesigning their structure.

Everyday lithium batteries store tons of energy, but they can’t absorb or discharge it very quickly. Turns out that the slow charge/discharge rate is due to a kind of atomic traffic jam. Charged ions get gummed up traveling in and out of the battery.

Ceder and grad student Byoungwoo Kang found that they could fee up the traffic jam by engineering a beltway of material around the battery. The result is a small battery that can be charged and discharged between 10 and 20 seconds. The discovery should lead to faster-charging gadgets and quick recharges for electric vehicles.

Link to NewScientist article

Link to MIT article

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.

Link to University of Pittsburgh press release

Link to Wired article

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.

Your dreams of commanding an unholy army of insectoid cyborgs may finally come true. Scientists at UC Berkeley showed off a remote-controlled Rhino beetle at a conference this week, demonstrating a mastery of electronic arthropod control by piloting the beetle around a room of creeped-out scientists like a William S. Burroughs RC plane.

To achieve such precision control, the scientists installed six electrodes into the beetle’s brain and muscles. They strapped a circuit board, radio receiver, and battery to its back and used a basic hobby RC controller to fly the bug.

Turns out the Rhino beetle is a great platform for this sort of thing. It can fly with up to 3 grams of cargo and is fairly robust and crash resistant. 

The project is part of the DARPA Hybrid Insect MEMS (HI-MEMS) project, thus future upgrades could include audio/video equipment for insectoid surveillance.

Link to Gizmodo article

Link to Tech-On article

Intel's wireless charging prototype. Photo by John Herrman, via Gizmodo

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

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.

Link to ScienceDaily article.

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.