Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: computing – Page 607

But have you ever wondered: how well do those maps represent my brain? After all, no two brains are alike. And if we’re ever going to reverse-engineer the brain as a computer simulation—as Europe’s Human Brain Project is trying to do—shouldn’t we ask whose brain they’re hoping to simulate?

Enter a new kind of map: the Julich-Brain, a probabilistic map of human brains that accounts for individual differences using a computational framework. Rather than generating a static PDF of a brain map, the Julich-Brain atlas is also dynamic, in that it continuously changes to incorporate more recent brain mapping results. So far, the map has data from over 24,000 thinly sliced sections from 23 postmortem brains covering most years of adulthood at the cellular level. But the atlas can also continuously adapt to progress in mapping technologies to aid brain modeling and simulation, and link to other atlases and alternatives.

In other words, rather than “just another” human brain map, the Julich-Brain atlas is its own neuromapping API—one that could unite previous brain-mapping efforts with more modern methods.

Read more | >

Materials science researchers, led by electrical engineering professor Shui-Qing “Fisher” Yu, have demonstrated the first electrically injected laser made with germanium tin.

Used as a semiconducting material for circuits on , the could improve micro-processing speed and efficiency at much lower costs.

In tests, the laser operated in pulsed conditions up to 100 kelvins, or 279 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

Read more | >

Electronic components that can process information with high levels of efficiency are crucial for the development of most contemporary devices and computational tools. Reconfigurable electronics, flexible systems that can change configurations to best utilize available hardware resources, are a possible solution for enhancing processing efficiency.

Researchers at Nanjing University and the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan have recently designed new reconfigurable circuits with advanced shape-morphing and information processing capabilities. These logic and neuromorphic circuits, presented in a paper published in Nature Electronics, were fabricated using 2-D tungsten diselenide, an commonly used in the development of electronics.

“Current mainstream reconfigurable circuits (such as the field programmable gate array, FPGA) are based on traditional silicon circuits, using P-type or N-type field effect transistors with ‘fixed’ electrical characteristics,” Feng Miao, the researcher who led the study, told TechXplore. “For example, PN junction is always reverse-biased, and varying the drain polarity does not add new switching functionalities. Thus, these reconfigurable circuits need to use a lot of transistor resources to build complex circuit structures and eventually realize reconfigurable computing capabilities at the circuit level.”

Read more | >

The life-givers of integrated circuits and quantum devices in silicon are small structures made from patches of foreign atoms called dopants. The dopant structures provide charge carriers that flow through the components of the circuit, giving the components their ability to function. These days the dopant structures are only a few atoms across and so need to be made in precise locations within a circuit and have very well-defined electrical properties. At present manufacturers find it hard to tell in a non-destructive way whether they have made their devices according to these strict requirements. A new imaging paradigm promises to change all that.

The imaging mode called broadband electric force microscopy, developed by Dr. Georg Gramse at Keysight technologies & JKU uses a very sharp probe that sends into a silicon chip, to image and localize structures underneath the surface. Dr. Gramse says that because the microscope can use waves with many frequencies it can provide a wealth of previously inaccessible detail about the electrical environment around the dopant structures. The extra information is crucial to predicting how well the devices will ultimately perform.

The imaging approach was tested on two tiny dopant structures made with a templating process which is unique in achieving atomically sharp interfaces between differently doped regions. Dr. Tomas Skeren at IBM produced the world’s first electronic diode (a circuit component which passes current in only one direction) fabricated with this templating process, while Dr. Alex Kölker at UCL created a multilevel 3D with atomic scale precision.

Read more | >

Artificial molecules could one day form the information unit of a new type of computer or be the basis for programmable substances. The information would be encoded in the spatial arrangement of the individual atoms—similar to how the sequence of base pairs determines the information content of DNA, or sequences of zeros and ones form the memory of computers.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) have taken a step towards this vision. They showed that atom probe tomography can be used to read a complex spatial arrangement of ions in multivariate metal-organic frameworks.

Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are crystalline porous networks of multi-metal nodes linked together by organic units to form a well-defined structure. To encode information using a sequence of metals, it is essential to be first able to read the metal arrangement. However, reading the arrangement was extremely challenging. Recently, the interest in characterizing metal sequences is growing because of the extensive information such multivariate structures would be able to offer.

Read more | >

In research published in Science Advances, a group led by scientists from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science (CEMS) have used the principle of magneto-rotation coupling to suppress the transmission of sound waves on the surface of a film in one direction while allowing them to travel in the other. This could lead to the development of acoustic rectifiers—devices that allow waves to propagate preferentially in one direction, with potential applications in communications technology.

Devices known as rectifiers are extremely important in technology development. The best known are electronic diodes, which are used to convert AC into DC electricity, essentially making electrification possible.

In the current study, the group examined the movement of acoustic waves—movements of sound like the propagation of earthquakes over the surface of the Earth—in a . There is interplay between the surface acoustic waves and spin waves, disturbances in magnetic fields within the material that can move through the material.

Read more | >

NUS physicists have demonstrated the control of magnetism in a magnetic semiconductor via electrical means, paving the way for novel spintronic devices.

Semiconductors are the heart of information-processing technologies. In the form of a transistor, semiconductors act as a switch for , allowing switching between binary states zero and one. Magnetic materials, on the other hand, are an essential component for information storage devices. They exploit the spin degree of freedom of electrons to achieve memory functions. Magnetic semiconductors are a unique class of materials that allow control of both the electrical charge and spin, potentially enabling information processing and memory operations in a single platform. The key challenge is to control the electron spins, or magnetisation, using electric fields, in a similar way a transistor controls electrical charge. However, magnetism typically has weak dependence on electric fields in magnetic semiconductors, and the effect is often limited to .

A research team led by Prof Goki EDA from the Department of Physics and the Department of Chemistry, and the Centre for Advanced 2-D Materials, NUS, in collaboration with Prof Hidekazu KUREBAYASHI from the London Centre for Nanotechnology, University College London, discovered that the magnetism of a magnetic semiconductor, Cr2Ge2Te6, shows exceptionally strong response to applied electric fields. With electric fields applied, the material was found to exhibit ferromagnetism (a state in which electron spins spontaneously align) at temperatures up to 200 K (−73°C). At such temperatures, ferromagnetic order is normally absent in this material.

Read more | >

O,.o well then anything could be a computer even a mushroom or a rock :3.

A complex process can modify non-magnetic oxide materials in such a way to make them magnetic. The basis for this new phenomenon is controlled layer-by-layer growth of each material. An international research team with researchers from Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) reported on their unexpected findings in the journal Nature Communications.

In solid-state physics, oxide layers only a few nanometres thick are known to form a so-called two-dimensional electron gas. These thin layers, separated from one another, are transparent and electrically insulating materials. However, when one grows on top of the other, a conductive area forms under certain conditions at the interface, which has a metallic shine. “Normally this system remains non-magnetic,” says Professor Ingrid Mertig from the Institute of Physics at MLU. The research team has succeeded in controlling conditions during growth so that vacancies are created in the atomic layers near the interface. These are later filled in by other atoms from adjoining atomic layers.

The and explanations for this newly discovered phenomenon were made by Ingrid Mertig’s team of physicists. The method was then experimentally tested by several research groups throughout Europe—including a group led by Professor Kathrin Dörr from MLU. They were able to prove the magnetism in the materials. “This combination of computer simulations and experiments enabled us to decipher the complex mechanism responsible for the development of magnetism,” explains Mertig.

Read more | >

1. Dark horses of QC emerge: 2020 will be the year of dark horses in the QC race. These new entrants will demonstrate dominant architectures with 100–200 individually controlled and maintained qubits, at 99.9% fidelities, with millisecond to seconds coherence times that represent 2x\u200a-3x improved qubit power, fidelity and coherence times. These dark horses, many venture-backed, will finally prove that resources and capital are not sole catalysts for a technological breakthrough in quantum computing.”,” protected”:false},” excerpt”:{“rendered”:”

Quantum computing will represent the most fundamental acceleration in computing power that we have ever encountered, leaving Moore’s law in the dust.

Read more | >

“We are impressed with the early results demonstrated as we scale Loihi to create more powerful neuromorphic systems. Pohoiki Beach will now be available to more than 60 ecosystem partners, who will use this specialized system to solve complex, compute-intensive problems.” –Rich Uhlig, managing director of Intel Labs

Why It’s Important: With the introduction of Pohoiki Beach, researchers can now efficiently scale up novel neural-inspired algorithms — such as sparse coding, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), and path planning — that can learn and adapt based on data inputs. Pohoiki Beach represents a major milestone in Intel’s neuromorphic research, laying the foundation for Intel Labs to scale the architecture to 100 million neurons later this year.

Read more | >