Vaughan, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Simpson Querrey Biomedical Research Center 8–516303 E. Superior St., Chicago, Illinois 60,611, USA. Phone: 312.503.1531; Email: [email protected].
Category: mobile phones
Electric ‘nose’ can smell when your food’s gone bad
Most of us have used the sniff test to decide whether a slightly expired bottle of milk or a week-old box of takeout is still good to eat. But while the human nose can be quite astute, it doesn’t always catch everything. Each year, millions of people in the U.S. are sickened by food-borne pathogens that thrive in undercooked or spoiled food.
Luckily for our collective stomachs, a new “electronic nose” developed at UC Berkeley can detect the scents associated with spoiled food much more accurately than the human nose. It can also sniff out the presence of common food allergens, like walnuts and peanuts, which can be deadly for those with sensitivities. The nose is described in a new study published in the journal Science Advances.
“I think ‘smart’ fridges—which come with sensors that you can control on your phone—would be a great application for this kind of technology,” said study lead author Carla Bassil, a Ph.D. student in electrical engineering and computer sciences at Berkeley and a member of the Javey Research Group. “How great would it be if your fridge could tell you, ‘Hey, your broccoli’s going to go bad soon, so you should probably eat that,’ Or, ” Your chicken is on its last day’?”
New Rokarolla Android malware targets 217 banking, crypto apps
A new Android banking trojan named Rokarolla is targeting 217 banking and cryptocurrency applications using an extensive set of 137 commands.
The malware is distributed via malicious websites purporting to provide the Google Chrome or TikTok app, and can take complete administrative control of a compromised device.
Its capabilities include stealing lock screen credentials, contact lists, and SMS data, as well as using keyloggers to continuously record user input.
Organic molecule with ultranarrow emission spectrum could lead to better LEDs
Over the past several decades, light sources have gradually transitioned to light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, and inorganic LEDs are now used across a wide range of applications. In parallel, organic LEDs, or OLEDs, have become widely used in display technologies.
OLEDs in particular offer significant advantages in devices such as smartphones, including higher resolution and lower power consumption. All LEDs operate based on spontaneous emission, which is inherently broadband, and OLEDs in particular produce broad emission spectra.
Narrowing this spontaneous emission toward a monochromatic limit would greatly increase its utility, a goal that has long been a central pursuit in photonics. For example, a narrower emission would achieve more highly saturated colors in LED-based displays.
Semiconductors enter ‘multi-tasking’ era: New device cuts required components by 75% and quadruples processing speed
Less than two decades after smartphones fit into the palm of our hands, artificial intelligence is now running on devices worn on our wrists. The challenge is that while devices continue to shrink, the amount of data they must process and the number of functions they must perform are growing exponentially. A research team at POSTECH (Pohang University of Science and Technology) has found a promising way to address this contradiction.
A team led by Professor Byoung Hun Lee of the Department of Electrical Engineering and the Department of Semiconductor Engineering at POSTECH, together with Dr. Jae Hyeon Jun of the Department of Electrical Engineering, has developed a transistor technology that enables a single semiconductor device to perform multiple circuit functions simultaneously. The new approach significantly simplifies circuit design and increases data processing speed fourfold compared with conventional methods. The findings were published in Advanced Functional Materials.
One of the key challenges in the semiconductor industry is integrating more functions into smaller chips. As the number of functions increases, so do the number of circuits and transistors required. However, when adding new functions to previously fabricated semiconductor chips, back-end-of-line processing must be conducted at temperatures below 400 C to protect the existing chip structure.
Microsoft claims new quantum chip 1,000 times better than before
At the heart of quantum computing are qubits, which offer the promise of answering questions that defeat today’s machines, but are notoriously delicate and unstable.
Microsoft says the qubits on Majorana 2, its new chip, survive for an average of 20 seconds, rather than the milliseconds of Majorana 1.
That means the new chip is 1,000 times more reliable — an improvement in performance the tech giant compares to the difference between a phone that needs charging every day to one which needs charging every few years.
AI paired with tiny optical device corrects distorted light for sharper imaging
Blurry light from lens imperfections is a problem everywhere, from microscopes to telescopes to smartphone cameras. Using a tiny yet carefully engineered optical element and artificial intelligence, University of California San Diego engineers have built a way to spot and correct those distortions from a single image—a step that could make advanced optical systems faster, smaller and easier to use.
“We used a combination of fundamental physics, nanofabrication and machine learning to make hidden distortions easier to detect and correct,” said senior author Abdoulaye Ndao, an electrical and computer engineering faculty member in the Jacobs School of Engineering and an affiliate of the Qualcomm Institute at UC San Diego.
“Our fast, robust solution is tiny and easy to integrate into different optical systems,” he continued. “The weight is almost nothing, because the size of the sample can be one by one centimeter and half a millimeter thick.”
