Hiroshima University researchers unveil a $70 smartphone radiation detector as Japan cautiously revives nuclear power.
Category: mobile phones
$99,000 smart observatory captures the cosmos with Canon optics
One would think that a US$99,000 telescope requires specialist training and a thick instruction manual. But the new Hyperia from French company Vaonis flips that assumption on its head. It’s powerful enough for professional observatories yet runs entirely from a simple smartphone app.
Vaonis has been bringing astrophotography to the masses for years now. The company has stripped away the complexity, allowing anyone to snap spectacular images of galaxies and nebulae hundreds of light-years away without wrestling with multi-component setups requiring serious technical chops – all wrapped in Vaonis’s trademark minimalist design.
The Hyperia started as a custom build for the Palais de la Découverte in Paris, which needed a next-gen digital observatory. After wrapping up the installation, Vaonis saw the bigger picture and decided to sell the system commercially.
Software allows scientists to simulate nanodevices on a supercomputer
From computers to smartphones, from smart appliances to the internet itself, the technology we use every day only exists thanks to decades of improvements in the semiconductor industry, that have allowed engineers to keep miniaturizing transistors and fitting more and more of them onto integrated circuits, or microchips. It’s the famous Moore’s scaling law, the observation—rather than an actual law—that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit tends to double roughly every two years.
The current growth of artificial intelligence, robotics and cloud computing calls for more powerful chips made with even smaller transistors, which at this point means creating components that are only a few nanometers (or millionths of millimeters) in size. At that scale, classical physics is no longer enough to predict how the device will function, because, among other effects, electrons get so close to each other that quantum interactions between them can hugely affect the performance of the device.
AI sheds light on mysterious dinosaur footprints
A new app, powered by artificial intelligence (AI), could help scientists and the public identify dinosaur footprints made millions of years ago, a study reveals.
For decades, paleontologists have pondered over a number of ancient dinosaur tracks and asked themselves if they were left by fierce carnivores, gentle plant-eaters or even early species of birds?
Now, researchers and dinosaur enthusiasts alike can upload an image or sketch of a dinosaur footprint from their mobile phone to the DinoTracker app and receive an instant analysis.
Silicon Is Coming to Smartphone Batteries for a Big Energy Boost
A novel lithium-ion battery that uses silicon in its anodes may have the highest energy density of any battery currently commercially available. Its manufacturer, Enovix, says it has shipped the new battery to a leading smartphone company for a debut in mobile phones later this year.
Many of the lithium-ion batteries that power everything from mobile devices to electric cars use graphite in their anodes. However, for decades, researchers have investigated silicon as a replacement for this graphite. In theory, silicon offers roughly 10 times the energy density of graphite in lithium-ion batteries.
“Basically, graphite holds on to lithium using holes in its structure,” says Raj Talluri, CEO of Enovix. “In contrast, with silicon in the anodes—usually a silicon oxide or a silicon carbide—lithium actually chemically combines with the silicon to form a new material. This lets a silicon-based anode hold on to much more lithium than graphite during charging. When the battery discharges, the silicon material goes back to its original state.”
How does HSV-2 shedding affect immunity in female genital tract tissues?
Here, Jennifer M. Lund & team report immune cells mobilize and co-localize in the vaginal epithelium, expressing cytotoxic, inflammatory and immunoregulatory genes that may promote tissue homeostasis to limit damage:
The image shows visualization of cells on a representative tissue section for spatial transcriptomics.
Address correspondence to: Jennifer M. Lund, 1,100 Fairview Ave. N., E5-110, Seattle, Washington 98,109, USA. Phone: 206.667.2217; Email: [email protected]. Or to: Jairam R. Lingappa, 908 Jefferson St., Box 359,927, Seattle, Washington 98,104, USA. Phone: 206.520.3822; Email: [email protected].
Abstract: Caught in the crossfire: cardiac complications of cancer therapy
In this Review, Emilio Hirsch discuss the mechanisms and therapeutic strategies for cardiotoxicity caused by chemotherapy, targeted agents, and immune modulators.
1Department of Molecular Biotechnology and Health Sciences, Molecular Biotechnology Center “Guido Tarone”, University of Torino, Torino, Italy.
2University of Arizona College of Medicine, Tucson, Arizona, USA.
Address correspondence to: Emilio Hirsch or Alessandra Ghigo, Via Nizza 52, 10126, Turin, Italy. Phone: 39.011.670.6425; Email: [email protected] (EH). Phone: 39.011.670.6335; Email: [email protected] (AG). Or to: Hossein Ardehali, 3,838 North Campbell Avenue, Building 2, Tucson, Arizona 85,719, USA. Phone: 520.626.6453; Email: [email protected].
Analog hardware may solve Internet of Things’ speed bumps and bottlenecks
The ubiquity of smart devices—not just phones and watches, but lights, refrigerators, doorbells and more, all constantly recording and transmitting data—is creating massive volumes of digital information that drain energy and slow data transmission speeds. With the rising use of artificial intelligence in industries ranging from health care and finance to transportation and manufacturing, addressing the issue is becoming more pressing.
A research team led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst aims to address the problem with new technology that uses old-school analog computing: an electrical component known as a memristor.
“Certainly, our society is more and more connected, and the number of those devices is increasing exponentially,” says Qiangfei Xia, the Dev and Linda Gupta professor in the Riccio College of Engineering at UMass Amherst. “If everyone is collecting and processing data the old way, the amount of data is going to be exploding. We cannot handle that anymore.”
New Android malware uses AI to click on hidden browser ads
A new family of Android click-fraud trojans leverages TensorFlow machine learning models to automatically detect and interact with specific advertisement elements.
The mechanism relies on visual analysis based on machine learning instead of predefined JavaScript click routines, and does not involve script-based DOM-level interaction like classic click-fraud trojans.
The threat actor is using TensorFlow.js, an open-source library developed by Google for training and deploying machine learning models in JavaScript. It permits running AI models in browsers or on servers using Node.js.
Ultrafast spectroscopy reveals step-by-step energy flow in germanium semiconductors
Whether in a smartphone or laptop, semiconductors form the basis of modern electronics and accompany us constantly in everyday life. The processes taking place inside these materials are the subject of ongoing research. When the electrons in a semiconductor material are activated using light or an electrical voltage, the excited electrons also set the atomic lattice in motion. This results in collective vibrations of the atoms, known as phonons or lattice vibrations, which interact with each other and with the electrons themselves.
These tiny lattice vibrations play a vital role in how energy flows and dissipates through the material—in other words, in how efficiently the energy is redistributed and how strongly the material heats up. Different approaches can be used to control and monitor the propagation of lattice vibrations—and therefore to make the semiconductor more effective and more efficient.
Detailed knowledge of the mechanisms of energy loss and potential overheating is essential in order to design new materials and devices that heat up less, recover faster or respond to external excitation more precisely. A team led by Professor Ilaria Zardo from the University of Basel reports on the unprecedented accuracy they achieved in measurements of energy flow processes within the semiconductor germanium, which is frequently used in computer technology. Their paper is published in Advanced Science.