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July 9 (Reuters) – Fujitsu Ltd (6702.T), Japan’s biggest IT services provider, said on Friday it plans to invest 100 billion yen ($1.1 billion) in its cloud-computing business this financial year, the majority of its companywide capital spending.
Fujitsu, the world’s third biggest IT services vendor after IBM (IBM.N) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ.N), also said it would keep its 2011/12 targets for 250 billion yen in operating profit and 130 billion yen in net profit. (Reporting by Sachi Izumi)
Washington, Sep 13 (ANI): A Northeastern University neurobiologist is collaborating with Harvard University researchers to develop micro flying robots that will emulate the bees’ brain, body and collective behaviour.
Biology professor Joseph Ayers would create robots, called the robobees, which would mimic the communal feeding behaviour of bee colonies.
The project will draw on the knowledge of computer scientists, engineers, and biologists to construct an electronic nervous system, a supervisory architecture and a high-energy source to power the innovative robots.
“This project will integrate the efforts and expertise of a diverse team of investigators to create a system that far transcends the sum of its parts. We expect substantial advances in basic science at the intersection of these seemingly disparate disciplines to result from this effort,” said Ayers.
Inspired by the biology of the bee and the insect’s colonial behaviour, the project aims to advance miniature robotics and the design of compact high-energy power sources.
The project would also spur innovations in ultra-low-power computing and electronic “smart” sensors that mediate biomimetic control.
In addition, it would refine coordination algorithms to manage multiple, independent machines.
Ayers is widely known for his work in biomimetics- the science of adapting the control systems found in nature to inform design of engineered systems to solve real-world problems-including the development of RoboLobster and RoboLamprey.
The autonomous, biomimetic underwater robotic models emulate the operations of the animals’ nervous systems using an electronic controller based on nonlinear, moving models of neurons and synapses.
“Animals have evolved to occupy every environmental niche where we would hope to operate robots, save outer space. They provide proven solutions to problems that confound even the most sophisticated robots, and our challenge is to capture these performance advantages in engineered devices,” said Ayers. (ANI)
London, August 31 (ANI): A team of American scientists have created the world’s smallest laser by squeezing light into a space smaller than a protein molecule.
Project leader Xiang Zhang, a professor at the University of California (UC) at Berkeley, says that the breakthrough heralds a revolution in optical technology.
The researcher believes that this advance may pave the way for “nanolasers” that can probe and manipulate DNA.
It may also prove helpful in creating super-fast computers and for telecommunications, the researcher says.
“This work shatters traditional notions of laser limits and makes a major advance towards applications in the biomedical, communications and computing fields,” the Scotsman quoted Prof. Zhang as saying.
According to Prof. Zhang, the new “plasmon” laser compresses light into a gap five nanometres wide, the size of a single protein molecule.
Plasmons are the wave-like motions of excited electrons on the surfaces of metals. Binding light to these oscillations allows it to be squeezed much further than normal.
“Plasmon lasers represent an exciting class of coherent light sources capable of extremely small confinement. This work can bridge the worlds of electronics and optics at truly molecular length scales,” said Prof. Zhang.
The research team behind this breakthrough hope that one day they will be able to shrink light down to the size of an electron’s wavelength, about one billionth of a metre.
A research article on their latest work has been published in the journal Nature. (ANI)
Washington, August 31 (ANI): Researchers at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, have created the world’s smallest semiconductor laser, capable of generating visible light in a space smaller than a single protein molecule, an invention that breaks new ground in the field of optics.
The UC Berkeley team not only successfully squeezed light into such a tight space, but found a novel way to keep that light energy from dissipating as it moved along, thereby achieving laser action.
While it is traditionally accepted that an electromagnetic wave – including laser light – cannot be focused beyond the size of half its wavelength, research teams around the world have found a way to compress light down to dozens of nanometers by binding it to the electrons that oscillate collectively at the surface of metals.
This interaction between light and oscillating electrons is known as surface plasmons.
Scientists have been racing to construct surface plasmon lasers that can sustain and utilize these tiny optical excitations.
However, the resistance inherent in metals causes these surface plasmons to dissipate almost immediately after being generated, posing a critical challenge to achieving the buildup of the electromagnetic field necessary for lasing.
Zhang and his research team took a novel approach to stem the loss of light energy by pairing a cadmium sulfide nanowire – 1,000 times thinner than a human hair – with a silver surface separated by an insulating gap of only 5 nanometers, the size of a single protein molecule.
In this structure, the gap region stores light within an area 20 times smaller than its wavelength.
Because light energy is largely stored in this tiny non-metallic gap, loss is significantly diminished.
With the loss finally under control through this unique “hybrid” design, the researchers could then work on amplifying the light.
Trapping and sustaining light in radically tight quarters creates such extreme conditions that the very interaction of light and matter is strongly altered, the study authors explained.
“This work shatters traditional notions of laser limits, and makes a major advance toward applications in the biomedical, communications and computing fields,” said Xiang Zhang, professor of mechanical engineering and director of UC Berkeley’s Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center.
The achievement helps enable the development of such innovations as nanolasers that can probe, manipulate and characterize DNA molecules; optics-based telecommunications many times faster than current technology; and optical computing in which light replaces electronic circuitry with a corresponding leap in speed and processing power.
Scientists hope to eventually shrink light down to the size of an electron’s wavelength, which is about a nanometer. (ANI)
Bangalore, Aug 28 (ANI): After creating waves by completing Bachelors’ degree at the age of 10 and Masters at 12, Tathagat Avatar Tulsi, well known as child prodigy has achieved another milestone by becoming a PhD in Physics.
He has completed his doctorate in Physics at the age of 21 from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore, spending six years like anyone else.
Tulsi has the special distinction of being one of the world’s youngest scientists.
He credited his family members especially his father for helping him achieve the feat.
“Of course, there is some gift part there. I cannot ignore that because not all six-year-old boys are that sharp in Maths and have that kind of memory, which I had. So I think that there was a gift and I feel very lucky that I got proper environment in terms of my family members particularly my father. He did his best to encourage my talent,” said Tulsi.
The young Indian scientist has an invite from the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo, Canada, for post- doctoral work.
But he wants to continue his research in software development for quantum computing, the super fast future of number crunching in India given a chance and proper funding.
He said that he hopes to set up his own quantum computing company someday and is working hard for it.
Tulsi got a place for himself in the Guinness Book of World Records for holding MSc in physics from Patna University, at the age of 12 years and 2 months in 1999.
A native of Bihar, he was born into a lower middle-class family on September 9, 1987. His over ambitious parents wanted him to finish studies at the very young age to break all the world records.
Apart from spending his time amid an array of computers, Tulsi likes to play badminton, snookers, billiards and loves to listen to music. (ANI)
Washington, August 22 (ANI): A scientist of Indian origin has created a new supercomputer, called Cystorm, which can carry out 28.16 trillion calculations per second.
Cystorm, a Sun Microsystems machine, was developed by Srinivas Aluru from the Iowa State University.
The 3,200 computer processor cores that power Cystorm makes it perform 28.16 trillion calculations per second, which is five times the peak of CyBlue, an IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer that’s been on campus since early 2006 and uses 2,048 processors to do 5.7 trillion calculations per second.
According to Aluru, the Ross Martin Mehl and Marylyne Munas Mehl Professor of Computer Engineering and the leader of the Cystorm project, the new machine also scores high on a more realistic test of a supercomputer’s actual performance: 15.44 trillion calculations per second compared to CyBlue’s 4.7 trillion per second.
That measure makes Cystorm 3.3 times more powerful than CyBlue.
“Cystorm is going to be very good for data-intensive research projects,” Aluru said. “The capabilities of Cystorm will help Iowa State researchers do new, pioneering research in their fields,” he added.
The supercomputer is targeted for work in materials science, power systems and systems biology.
Aluru said that materials scientists will use the supercomputer to analyze data from the university’s Local Electrode Atom Probe microscope, an instrument that can gather data and produce images at the atomic scale of billionths of a meter.
Systems biologists will use the supercomputer to build gene networks that will help researchers understand how thousands of genes interact with each other.
Power systems researchers will use the supercomputer to study the security, reliability and efficiency of the energy infrastructure of the US.
Computer engineers will use the supercomputer to build a software infrastructure that helps users make decisions by identifying relevant information sources.
“These research efforts will lead to significant advances in the penetration of high performance computing technology,” said a summary of the Cystorm project. (ANI)
Washington, August 21 (ANI): High-performance computing systems, visualization resources, and software tools provided by the National Science Foundation TeraGrid helped make the Hayden Planetarium’s new space show the most scientifically accurate and advanced planetarium show ever produced.
The Hayden Planetarium is a public planetarium located on Central Park West, New York City, next to and organizationally part of the American Museum of Natural History.
“Journey to the Stars,” which debuted this summer at the American Museum of Natural History, is being hailed as the most beautiful planetarium show to date.
Narrated by Whoopi Goldberg, the 25-minute presentation takes viewers on a journey through the universe.
The space show projects cutting-edge visualizations of the universe onto the 87-foot, seven-million-pixel dome of the museum’s Hayden Sphere at the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York City.
Piecing together a new narrative of life’s origins, the space show explains how dark matter’s gravity gathered the primordial gas in the universe to form the first stars, and how these massive stars exploded, seeding the galaxy with new stars and the chemical elements that made life possible.
The centerpiece of the show, and the most difficult sequence to depict scientifically, is a flight into the center of the Sun.
The visuals of the Sun were produced using supercomputing resources provided by the NSF TeraGrid, a national cyberinfrastructure for open scientific research.
According to Ro Kinzler, the show’s producer, “We wanted to treat the Sun in a terrific and powerful way to [not just] reveal the surface, but to take our audience into the Sun, through the convective layer and into the core.”
“The results are beautiful. No one has seen the Sun in this way, and the software from NCAR and computational resources from TACC made it possible,” he said.
The visual sequences are based on the research of Juri Toomre, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and run on TACC’s Ranger supercomputer.
“It’s not enough to know what comes out of the surface,” Toomre said.
“We would like to understand how the magnetic engine of a star works, how it churns away and how it builds orderly fields. This is one of the top 10 questions in physics,” Toomre added.
“A very dramatic moment in the show is when we actually peel away the surface of the Sun, revealing the dynamic convective motion below,” Kinzler said. “We take the audience through the convective region and into the Sun’s core,” he added. (ANI)
Washington, August 21 (ANI): You may soon get to enjoy facilities like flexible high-resolution home theatre displays, wearable health monitors, and biomedical imaging devices because scientists are working on a novel process for creating new classes of lighting and display systems.
John Rogers, the Flory-Founder Chair Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois, has revealed that the new process is all about creating and assembling ultrathin, ultrasmall inorganic light-emitting diodes (LEDs) into large arrays offers new classes of lighting and display systems with interesting properties, such as see-through construction and mechanical flexibility.
He said that such properties would be impossible to achieve with existing technologies.
“Our goal is to marry some of the advantages of inorganic LED technology with the scalability, ease of processing and resolution of organic LEDs,” said Rogers.
Compared to their organic counterparts, inorganic LEDs are brighter, more robust and longer-lived.
Organic LEDs, however, are attractive because they can be formed on flexible substrates, in dense, interconnected arrays.
Rogers and his colleagues-including collaborators from Northwestern University, the Institute of High Performance Computing in Singapore, and Tsinghua University in Beijing-say that the new technology combines features of both.
“By printing large arrays of ultrathin, ultrasmall inorganic LEDs and interconnecting them using thin-film processing, we can create general lighting and high-resolution display systems that otherwise could not be built with the conventional ways that inorganic LEDs are made, manipulated and assembled,” Rogers said.
To overcome requirements on device size and thickness associated with conventional wafer dicing, packaging and wire bonding methods, the researchers have developed epitaxial growth techniques for creating LEDs with sizes up to 100 times smaller than usual.
They have also developed printing processes for assembling these devices into arrays on stiff, flexible, and stretchable substrates.
To create an array, a rubber stamp contacts the wafer surface at selected points, lifts off the LEDs at those points, and transfers them to the desired substrate.
“The stamping process provides a much faster alternative to the standard robotic ‘pick and place’ process that manipulates inorganic LEDs one at a time. The new approach can lift large numbers of small, thin LEDs from the wafer in one step, and then print them onto a substrate in another step,” Rogers said.
The researcher says that shifting position and repeating the stamping process can transfer LEDs to other locations on the same substrate, and, in this fashion, large light panels and displays can be crafted from small LEDs made in dense arrays on a single, comparatively small wafer.
Given that the LEDs can be placed far apart and still provide sufficient light output, Rogers says that the panels and displays can be nearly transparent.
He even envisions the creation of flexible and even stretchable sheets of printed LEDs, which can have potential use in the health-care industry.
“Wrapping a stretchable sheet of tiny LEDs around the human body offers interesting opportunities in biomedicine and biotechnology, including applications in health monitoring, diagnostics and imaging,” Rogers said.
A research article describing the researchers’ work has been published in the journal Science. (ANI)
Washington, July 9 (ANI): Coimbatore-based experts have turned to neural networks to help photographers clean up blur’s noise and distortion in images.
S. Uma of the Coimbatore Institute of Technology and S. Annadurai of the Government College of Technology say that their approach can significantly reduce information loss while reversing blurring caused by lens aberrations and faults and reducing noise that distorts the appearance of an image.
They suggest that distortions in an image due to atmospheric disturbances between camera and distant subjects could be unravelled and a photo taken on a hot, hazy day made acceptable.
The researchers point out that earlier attempts at this kind of inverse filtering of an image rely on the image having a high signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio.
According to them, other approaches require huge amounts of computing power and are generally untenable.
They say that this is especially true in the fledgling field of artificial vision, whether robotic or prosthetic.
However, they add, some success with neural networks has been achieved.
Uma and Annadurai have developed a modified recurrent Hopfield neural network that builds and extends the work of others to allow them to quickly process an image, and reduce distortion, noise and blurring.
When they tested their approach on square grayscale images just 256 pixels across, they were able to reverse severe blurring and noise deliberately added to the original photographic sample to much more acceptable levels in a short time using limited computing resources than was possible with previous neural network approaches or any other inverse filtering techniques.
An analysis of the before and after quality shows that quality is improved by between 39 and 67 per cent using the team’s approach, and results take half the time of other methods that produce lesser improvements.
The success bodes well for image processing, in various fields including vision research, art, homeland security, and science.
A research article describing the new approach has been published in the journal International Journal of Signal and Imaging Systems Engineering. (ANI)
London, July 2 (ANI): Swiss researchers have made an optical transistor that uses one laser beam to control another, an instrument that could form the heart of a future generation of ultrafast light-based computers.
Conventional computers are based on transistors, which allow one electrode to control the current moving through the device and are combined to form logic gates and processors.
According to a report in New Scientist, the new component achieves the same thing, but for laser beams, not electric currents.
A green laser beam is used to control the power of an orange laser beam passing through the device.
This offers another possible route to light-based rather than electronic, computing.
Such “photonic” computing is desirable because components using optical fibres carrying light could be much faster than those using wires to carry electricity.
However, previous attempts to make optical transistors for such circuits only produced very weak effects.
The new device could change that.
To make their device, Vahid Sandoghdar and colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, suspended tetradecane, a hydrocarbon dye, in an organic liquid.
They then froze the suspension to -272 degrees Celsius using liquid helium – creating a crystalline matrix in which individual dye molecules could be targeted with lasers.
When a finely tuned orange laser beam is trained on a dye molecule, it efficiently soaks up most of it up – leaving a much weaker “output” beam to continue beyond the dye.
But when the molecule is also targeted with a green laser beam, it starts to produce strong orange light of its own and so boosts the power of the orange output beam.
This effect is down to the hydrocarbon molecule absorbing the green light, only to lose the equivalent energy in the form of orange light.
“That light constructively interferes with the incoming orange beam and makes it brighter,” said Sandoghar’s colleague Jaesuk Hwang.
Using the green beam to switch the orange output beam from weak to strong is analogous to the way a transistor’s control electrode switches a current between “on” and “off” voltages, and hence the 0s and 1s of digital data.
Doing it with a single molecule means billions could be packed into future photonic chips. (ANI)
Washington, July 1 (ANI): A team led by Yale University researchers has created the first rudimentary solid-state quantum processor, taking another step toward the ultimate dream of building a quantum computer.
They also used the two-qubit superconducting chip to successfully run elementary algorithms, such as a simple search, demonstrating quantum information processing with a solid-state device for the first time.
“Our processor can perform only a few very simple quantum tasks, which have been demonstrated before with single nuclei, atoms and photons,” said Robert Schoelkopf, the William A. Norton Professor of Applied Physics and Physics at Yale.
“But this is the first time they’ve been possible in an all-electronic device that looks and feels much more like a regular microprocessor,” he added.
Working with a group of theoretical physicists led by Steven Girvin, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics and Applied Physics, the team manufactured two artificial atoms, or qubits (“quantum bits”).
While each qubit is actually made up of a billion aluminum atoms, it acts like a single atom that can occupy two different energy states.
These states are akin to the “1″ and “0″ or “on” and “off” states of regular bits employed by conventional computers.
Because of the counterintuitive laws of quantum mechanics, however, scientists can effectively place qubits in a “superposition” of multiple states at the same time, allowing for greater information storage and processing power.
These sorts of computations, though simple, have not been possible using solid-state qubits until now in part because scientists could not get the qubits to last long enough.
While the first qubits of a decade ago were able to maintain specific quantum states for about a nanosecond, Schoelkopf and his team are now able to maintain theirs for a microsecond-a thousand times longer, which is enough to run the simple algorithms.
To perform their operations, the qubits communicate with one another using a “quantum bus”-photons that transmit information through wires connecting the qubits-previously developed by the Yale group.
“The key that made the two-qubit processor possible was getting the qubits to switch “on” and “off” abruptly, so that they exchanged information quickly and only when the researchers wanted them to,” said Leonardo DiCarlo, a postdoctoral associate in applied physics at Yale’s School of Engineering and Applied Science and lead author of the research paper.
Next, the team will work to connect more qubits to the quantum bus.
“The processing power increases exponentially with each qubit added, so the potential for more advanced quantum computing is enormous,” Schoelkopf said. (ANI)
Fremont, July 1 (ANI/Business Wire India): Virage Logic Corporation, the semiconductor industry’s trusted IP partner, announced it has expanded its presence in India with the appointment of CoreEL as its sales representative.
CoreEL joins a growing global network of sales representatives that complement and expand the reach of Virage Logic’s direct sales channel.
CoreEL’s more than 15 years experience working with India’s networking, telecom, computing, consumer, industrial, defense and automotive customers make them ideally suited to represent Virage Logic’s broad portfolio of silicon proven IP.
“As the semiconductor industry continues to globalize and more semiconductor companies rely on their India-based teams to make SoC design project decisions, the time was right to bring CoreEL on board to service our growing India customer base,” said Jai Iyer, Virage Logic’s vice president of Asia sales.
“We are confident that the combination of CoreEL’s strong technology and design services experience will enable them to provide the superior sales and support services Virage Logic’s customers worldwide have come to expect,” added Iyer.
“India is rich in engineering talent and a target for companies worldwide to tap into the engineering resources,” said Vishwanath Padur, vice president of Sales and Marketing for CoreEL.
“With Virage Logic’s highly differentiated IP offering – including embedded SRAMs, embedded NVMs, embedded memory test and repair, logic libraries, memory development software, and interface IP solutions – we look forward to being able to provide even greater value to our extensive customer base as we help them address their SoC design challenges,” added Padur. (ANI)
Washington, June 29 (ANI): A team led by Yale University researchers has created the first rudimentary solid-state quantum processor, taking another step toward the ultimate dream of building a quantum computer.
They also used the two-qubit superconducting chip to successfully run elementary algorithms, such as a simple search, demonstrating quantum information processing with a solid-state device for the first time.
“Our processor can perform only a few very simple quantum tasks, which have been demonstrated before with single nuclei, atoms and photons,” said Robert Schoelkopf, the William A. Norton Professor of Applied Physics and Physics at Yale.
“But this is the first time they’ve been possible in an all-electronic device that looks and feels much more like a regular microprocessor,” he added.
Working with a group of theoretical physicists led by Steven Girvin, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics and Applied Physics, the team manufactured two artificial atoms, or qubits (“quantum bits”).
While each qubit is actually made up of a billion aluminum atoms, it acts like a single atom that can occupy two different energy states.
These states are akin to the “1″ and “0″ or “on” and “off” states of regular bits employed by conventional computers.
Because of the counterintuitive laws of quantum mechanics, however, scientists can effectively place qubits in a “superposition” of multiple states at the same time, allowing for greater information storage and processing power.
These sorts of computations, though simple, have not been possible using solid-state qubits until now in part because scientists could not get the qubits to last long enough.
While the first qubits of a decade ago were able to maintain specific quantum states for about a nanosecond, Schoelkopf and his team are now able to maintain theirs for a microsecond-a thousand times longer, which is enough to run the simple algorithms.
To perform their operations, the qubits communicate with one another using a “quantum bus”-photons that transmit information through wires connecting the qubits-previously developed by the Yale group.
“The key that made the two-qubit processor possible was getting the qubits to switch “on” and “off” abruptly, so that they exchanged information quickly and only when the researchers wanted them to,” said Leonardo DiCarlo, a postdoctoral associate in applied physics at Yale’s School of Engineering and Applied Science and lead author of the research paper.
Next, the team will work to connect more qubits to the quantum bus.
“The processing power increases exponentially with each qubit added, so the potential for more advanced quantum computing is enormous,” Schoelkopf said. (ANI)
London, June 27 (ANI): A team of researchers led by a scientist of Indian origin has created new ‘superatoms’ with magnetic properties for the first time, a breakthrough that could be used to make “spintronic devices”, faster computer processors and denser memory storage.
According to a report in New Scientist, the research was led by Shiv Khanna from Virginia Commonwealth University.
Superatoms were discovered in the 1980s when Walter Knight and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, found that groups of sodium atoms can share electrons amongst themselves.
The electrons form a collective “supershell” that coats the cluster.
Until now, clusters that copy the magnetic properties of other elements have proved more difficult to design.
Magnetism is caused by the spin of an atom’s electrons, which are arranged in shells, or orbitals, around the atom’s nucleus.
Their net spin determines the strength of the atom’s magnetic “moment,” and because they tend to occur in pairs that cancel each other out, it is the atom’s unpaired electrons that contribute to its magnetic moment.
Unpaired electrons, however, will make an atom, or a superatom, more likely to react with others in an attempt to fill its orbitals and become stable.
As a result, stability and magnetism have long been thought to be mutually exclusive.
A team led by Shiv Khanna at Virginia Commonwealth University has come up with a way around the problem.
Khanna’s team worked out that encapsulating an atom of vanadium in a cage of eight caesium atoms would create a stable supershell of electrons around the entire cluster.
This would prevent the vanadium atom’s unpaired electrons from reacting with other atoms, maintaining its magnetism.
The arrangement would yield a magnetic moment of five Bohr magnetons, which is the same as an atom of manganese.
“What we have done is expand the range of possible magnetic materials,” said Khanna.
Khanna’s magnetic superatoms are only calculations at this point, but he has funding from the Department of Energy to make them a reality.
He hopes the clusters can be used to give researchers a new dimension of control in designing new materials.
For example, stable magnetic clusters could one day be used in new “spintronic” devices, which compute or store information using magnetic moments rather than simply electrical charge.
Encoding data in this way means the devices can be far smaller than those used to make conventional electronic components, potentially providing an overall boost in computing power. (ANI)
Washington, June 25 (ANI): Physicists have found that lasers can be used to drastically prolong the shelf life of quantum bit memory, the 0s and 1s of quantum computers, by 1,000 times.
These precarious bits, formed in this case by arrays of semiconductor quantum dots containing a single extra electron, are easily perturbed by magnetic field fluctuations from the nuclei of the atoms creating the quantum dot.
This perturbation causes the bits to essentially forget the piece of information they were tasked with storing.
A quantum dot is a semiconductor nanostructure that is one candidate for creating quantum bits.
The scientists, including the University of Michigan’s Duncan Steel, used lasers to elicit a previously undiscovered natural feedback reaction that stabilizes the quantum dot’s magnetic field, lengthening the stable existence of the quantum bit by several orders of magnitude, or more than 1,000 times.
Because of their ability to represent multiple states simultaneously, quantum computers could theoretically factor numbers dramatically faster and with smaller computers than conventional computers.
For this reason, they could vastly improve computer security.
“In our approach, the quantum bit for information storage is an electron spin confined to a single dot in a semiconductor like indium arsenide,” said Steel.
“One of the serious problems in quantum computing is that anything that disturbs the phase of one of these spins relative to the other causes a loss of coherence and destroys the information that was stored,” he added.
A major cause of information loss in a popular class of semiconductors called 3/5 materials is the interaction of the electron (the quantum bit) with the nuclei of the atoms in the quantum dot holding the electron.
Trapping the electron in a particular spin, as is necessary in quantum computers, gives rise to a small magnetic field that couples with the magnetic field in the nuclei and breaks down the memory in a few billionths of a second.
By exciting the quantum dot with a laser, the scientists were able to block the interaction of these magnetic fields.
The laser causes an electron in the quantum dot to jump to a higher energy level, leaving behind a charged hole in the electron cloud.
This hole, or space vacated by an electron, also has a magnetic field due to the collective spin of the remaining electron cloud.
It turns out that the hole acts directly with the nuclei and controls its magnetic field without any intervention from outside except the fixed excitation by the lasers to create the hole. (ANI)
Washington, June 21 (ANI): You may see smaller, faster, more powerful, and less energy consuming electronic devices emerge in future, thanks to a new discovery by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Describing their work in the journal Science, the researchers have revealed that it involves a method to measure intrinsic conducting properties of ferroelectric materials, which for decades have held tremendous promise but have eluded experimental proof.
They believe that with this work, they may be on a path that will see barriers tumble.
“For years, the challenge has been to develop a nanoscale material that can act as a switch to store binary information. We are excited by our discovery and the prospect of finally being able to exploit the long-conjectured bi-stable electrical conductivity of ferroelectric materials,” said ORNL Wigner Fellow Peter Maksymovych.
“Harnessing this functionality will ultimately enable smart and ultra-dense memory technology,” added the expert who has jointly authored this study report with Stephen Jesse, Art Baddorf and Sergei Kalinin at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences.
The researchers claim that this is the first time that any group of researchers have demonstrated a giant intrinsic electroresistance in conventional ferroelectric films, where flipping of the spontaneous polarization increased conductance by up to 50,000 percent.
Ferroelectric materials can retain their electrostatic polarization and are used for piezoactuators, memory devices and RFID (radio-frequency identification) cards.
“It is as if we open a tiny door in the polar surface for electrons to enter. The size of this door is less than one-millionth of an inch, and it is very likely taking only one-billionth of a second to open,” Maksymovych said.
As authors write, the key distinction of ferroelectric memory switches is that they can be tuned through thermodynamic properties of ferroelectrics.
“Among other benefits, we can use the tunability to minimize the power needed for recording and reading information and read-write voltages, a key requirement for any viable memory technology,” Kalinin said.
Maksymovych pointed out that numerous previous works have demonstrated defect-mediated memory, but defects cannot easily be predicted, controlled, analyzed or reduced in size.
Ferroelectric switching, however, surpasses all of these limitations and will offer unprecedented functionality.
The authors believe that using phase transitions such as ferroelectric switching to implement memory and computing is the real fundamental distinction of future information technologies. (ANI)
Washington, June 21 (ANI): Your computer can be put to good use even when its not in use, for now it’s possible to donate the idle time to cutting-edge biomedical research aimed at finding a cure for HIV, Parkinson’s, arthritis, and breast cancer.
University of Delaware’s “Docking@Home” project, led by Michela Taufer, assistant professor of computer and information sciences, allows people to donate their computer’s idle time to perform scientific calculations that will aid in creating new and improved medicines to thwart these major diseases.
Taufer explained that researchers should create molecular models and simulate their interactions to reveal possible candidates for effective drugs, which could then be put under laboratory testing. And such a simulation is called “docking”.
As there are infinite combinations of molecules and their binding orientations, simulating them requires tremendous computing power.
Supercomputers often have a long waiting line or are too expensive to use for extended periods, said Taufer.
Thus, researchers have turned to citizen volunteers for help, which enables them to distribute the hundreds of thousands of computing tasks across a large number of computers.
Although the research is still in the validation stage, the process is aimed at studying new drugs.
“We are transforming a process in nature into computer steps-an algorithm,” explained Taufer.
To volunteer your computer’s idle time to do scientific calculations, it takes only a few simple steps highlighted on the project Web page (http://docking.cis.udel.edu/).
One can install a free, open-source software program called BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing), developed at the University of California, and link up to the Docking Server at the University of Delaware to become part of the network.
The computer’s idle cycles are accessed automatically when it is not in use.
Currently, the 6,000 volunteers worldwide who currently are involved in UD’s Docking@Home project are contributing to the completion of some 30,000 docking tasks per day, said Taufer. (ANI)
Washington, June 21 (ANI): You may see smaller, faster, more powerful, and less energy consuming electronic devices emerge in future, thanks to a new discovery by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Describing their work in the journal Science, the researchers have revealed that it involves a method to measure intrinsic conducting properties of ferroelectric materials, which for decades have held tremendous promise but have eluded experimental proof.
They believe that with this work, they may be on a path that will see barriers tumble.
“For years, the challenge has been to develop a nanoscale material that can act as a switch to store binary information. We are excited by our discovery and the prospect of finally being able to exploit the long-conjectured bi-stable electrical conductivity of ferroelectric materials,” said ORNL Wigner Fellow Peter Maksymovych.
“Harnessing this functionality will ultimately enable smart and ultra-dense memory technology,” added the expert who has jointly authored this study report with Stephen Jesse, Art Baddorf and Sergei Kalinin at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences.
The researchers claim that this is the first time that any group of researchers have demonstrated a giant intrinsic electroresistance in conventional ferroelectric films, where flipping of the spontaneous polarization increased conductance by up to 50,000 percent.
Ferroelectric materials can retain their electrostatic polarization and are used for piezoactuators, memory devices and RFID (radio-frequency identification) cards.
“It is as if we open a tiny door in the polar surface for electrons to enter. The size of this door is less than one-millionth of an inch, and it is very likely taking only one-billionth of a second to open,” Maksymovych said.
As authors write, the key distinction of ferroelectric memory switches is that they can be tuned through thermodynamic properties of ferroelectrics.
“Among other benefits, we can use the tunability to minimize the power needed for recording and reading information and read-write voltages, a key requirement for any viable memory technology,” Kalinin said.
Maksymovych pointed out that numerous previous works have demonstrated defect-mediated memory, but defects cannot easily be predicted, controlled, analyzed or reduced in size.
Ferroelectric switching, however, surpasses all of these limitations and will offer unprecedented functionality.
The authors believe that using phase transitions such as ferroelectric switching to implement memory and computing is the real fundamental distinction of future information technologies. (ANI)
hrensburg, Germany (dpa) – Acer is introducing its newest computer – a “net-top” device it calls the Aspire R3600 Revo.
The super-small computer measures in at 18x18x3 centimetres and comes with an Intel Atom processor, reports the company’s German offices. It runs with Nvidia’s Ion chips and comes with at least two gigabytes (GB) of memory and a 160 GB hard drive. However, it lacks a DVD drive.
The computer connects to the internet via either gigabit LAN or WLAN and will sell for 300 euros (405 dollars). (dpa)
Melbourne, May 20 (ANI): The 18-year-old Romanian girl who sold her virginity online for 20,000 dollars has revealed the details about her night with the winning bidder.
Pretty Alina Percea had auctioned her virginity on a website so that she could afford to study computing at university, reports The Daily Telegraph.
The auction’s winner was a 45-year-old Italian businessman who made a bid of 8,782 pounds.
The businessman paid for Alina, who underwent two medical examinations to prove her virginity, to fly to Venice where the couple toured the sights before spending a night in a luxury hotel.
Alina said: “I liked the man and got on with him well. He didn’t look 45, and he seemed much younger.
“We spoke in English as I can’t speak Italian and he can’t speak Romanian. He paid me a lot of compliments throughout the day, and he was very funny and charming. We got on very well, and I was pleased he’d won.
“He told me he had a good job, but he didn’t say if he was married or had a family, and I didn’t ask him.”
Alina, who was inspired to auction herself on a German erotic website after reading how American woman Natalie Dylan, 22, from San Diego, had put her virginity up for sale for 5million dollars, had hoped to raise as much as 100,000 dollars through the controversial sale but still plans to go to university.
“The bidding lasted two weeks,” she told Closer magazine.
“I hoped I’d meet a nice man, like in the film Pretty Woman,” Alina says.
“At the arrivals lounge, a man came over, smiled, handed me a box of chocolates and said: ‘Welcome to Venice.’ He looked much younger than 45, short, but nicely dressed, with dark hair, green eyes and a kind smile,” she added.
The two went sightseeing, then to a five-star hotel where they had unprotected sex.
“We kissed, then undressed each other. I’d never done that before, so I was nervous. He laid me on the bed and started kissing my body, then we had sex.
I was attracted to him, so I enjoyed it, even though it was quite painful. We only had sex once, then fell asleep.
Next morning, we had breakfast together like any other couple, and I took the morning-after pill. He told me he’d like to see me again, and I agreed,” she revealed.(ANI)
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