Fermi Inc. has signed deals to begin production of four big nuclear-power reactors that would be used for a private data center grid campus in the Texas Panhandle.
Category: computing – Page 12
Scientists smash record in stacking semiconductor transistors for large-area electronics
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST; Saudi Arabia) researchers have set a record in microchip design, achieving the first six-stack hybrid CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) for large-area electronics. With no other reported hybrid CMOS exceeding two stacks, the feat marks a new benchmark in integration density and efficiency, opening possibilities in electronic miniaturization and performance.
A paper detailing the team’s research appears in Nature Electronics.
Among microchip technologies, CMOS microchips are found in nearly all electronics, from phones and televisions to satellites and medical devices. Compared with conventional silicon chips, hybrid CMOS microchips hold greater promise for large-area electronics. Electronic miniaturization is crucial for flexible electronics, smart health, and the Internet of Things, but current design approaches are reaching their limits.
Living computers powered by mushrooms
Mushrooms are known for their toughness and unusual biological properties, qualities that make them attractive for bioelectronics. This emerging field blends biology and technology to design innovative, sustainable materials for future computing systems.
Turning Mushrooms Into Living Memory Devices
Researchers at The Ohio State University recently discovered that edible fungi, such as shiitake mushrooms, can be cultivated and guided to function as organic memristors. These components act like memory cells that retain information about previous electrical states.
Mesoscale volumetric fluorescence imaging at nanoscale resolution by photochemical sectioning
I first explored this amazing work back when it was a preprint! Wang et al. herein developed VIPS (volumetric imaging via photochemical sectioning), a way of using UV light to remove layers of expanded tissue-hydrogel, allowing combination of high-resolution lattice-light sheet microscopy with expansion microscopy. Link: [ https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adr9109]
In my opinion, this technology has enormous future promise for high-throughput connectomics! They will need to improve their labeling density so that higher expansion factors can be used, but this problem is well-studied and I think the issue will likely be solvable with additional resources/effort.
Optical nanoscopy of intact biological specimens has been transformed by recent advancements in hydrogel-based tissue clearing and expansion, enabling the imaging of cellular and subcellular structures with molecular contrast. However, existing high-resolution fluorescence microscopes are physically limited by objective-to-specimen distance, which prevents the study of whole-mount specimens without physical sectioning. To address this challenge, we developed a photochemical strategy for spatially precise sectioning of specimens. By combining serial photochemical sectioning with lattice light-sheet imaging and petabyte-scale computation, we imaged and reconstructed axons and myelin sheaths across entire mouse olfactory bulbs at nanoscale resolution.
Pressure turns Ångström-thin semiconducting bismuth into a metal, expanding options for reconfigurable electronics
Two-dimensional (2D) materials, sparked by the isolation of Nobel-prize-winning graphene in 2004, has revolutionized modern materials science by showing that electrical, optical, and mechanical behaviors can be tuned simply by adjusting the thickness, strain, or stacking order of such 2D materials. From transistors and flexible display to neuromorphic chips, the future of electronics is expected to be significantly empowered by 2D materials.
In a new study published in Nano Letters titled “Pressure-Driven Metallicity in Ångström-Thickness 2D Bismuth and Layer-Selective Ohmic Contact to MoS2,” researchers led by SUTD have discovered that a gentle squeeze is enough to make bismuth—one of the heaviest elements in the periodic table—switch its electrical personality.
Using state-of-the-art density functional theory (DFT) simulations, the team showed that when a single layer of bismuth, only a few atoms thick, is compressed or “squeezed” between surrounding materials, the atoms reorganize from a slightly corrugated (or buckled) structure into a perfectly flat one. This structural flattening, though subtle, has dramatic electronic consequences: it eliminates the energy band gap and allows electrons to move freely, turning the material metallic.
Amazon: This week’s AWS outage caused by major DNS failure
Amazon says a major DNS failure was behind a massive AWS (Amazon Web Services) outage that took down many websites and online services on Monday.
As BleepinComputer reported earlier this week, this incident impacted a critical Northern Virginia data center in the US-EAST-1 region, affecting users worldwide, including the United States and Europe, for over 14 hours.
According to a post-mortem published on Thursday, a race condition caused a major DNS failure in Amazon DynamoDB’s infrastructure, specifically within its DNS management system that controls how user requests are routed to healthy servers, which led to the accidental deletion of all IP addresses for the database service’s regional endpoint.
Uncertainty-aware Fourier ptychography enhances imaging stability in real-world conditions
Professor Edmund Lam, Dr. Ni Chen and their research team from the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering under the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) have developed a novel uncertainty-aware Fourier ptychography (UA-FP) technology that significantly enhances imaging system stability in complex real-world environments. The research has been published in Light: Science & Applications.
Fourier ptychography, widely regarded as a cornerstone of computational imaging, enables wide field-of-view and high-resolution imaging with broad applications ranging from microscopy to X-ray and remote sensing. However, its practical implementation has long been hindered by misalignments, optical aberrations, and poor data quality—challenges common across computational imaging fields.
The team’s UA-FP framework innovatively incorporates uncertainty parameters into a fully differentiable computational model, enabling simultaneous system uncertainty quantification and correction and significant enhancement of imaging performance—even under suboptimal or interference-prone conditions. This advancement represents not only an advance in ptychography but also a transformative development for computational imaging as a whole.
Metal organic frameworks enable a key step toward greener lighting and display technologies
Scientists at Oregon State University have taken a big step toward lighting and display technologies that are more energy efficient and better for the planet. The work centers around crystalline, porous materials known as metal organic frameworks, often abbreviated as MOFs, and points toward next-generation materials that may end reliance on rare earth metals.
The study by Kyriakos Stylianou, associate professor of chemistry in the OSU College of Science, and graduate students Kyle Smith and Ankit Yadav appears in Nature Communications.
The findings are important because displays—ubiquitous in communications, computing, medical monitoring and many other aspects of everyday life—and lighting contribute heavily to global energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. The rare earth metals that underpin those technologies—europium, terbium, yttrium, cerium, gadolinium and others—are expensive and environmentally hazardous to mine and process.
Scientists discover way to pause ultrafast melting in silicon using precisely timed laser pulses
A team of physicists has discovered a method to temporarily halt the ultrafast melting of silicon using a carefully timed sequence of laser pulses. This finding opens new possibilities for controlling material behavior under extreme conditions and could improve the accuracy of experiments that study how energy moves through solids.
The research, published in the journal Communications Physics, was led by Tobias Zier and David A. Strubbe of the University of California, Merced, in collaboration with Eeuwe S. Zijlstra and Martin E. Garcia from the University of Kassel in Germany. Their work focuses on how intense, ultrashort laser pulses affect the atomic structure of silicon—a material widely used in electronics and solar cells.
Using advanced computer simulations, the researchers showed that a single, high-energy laser pulse typically causes silicon to melt in a fraction of a trillionth of a second.