Lifeboat Foundation

Marilyn Monroe famously sang that diamonds are a girl’s best friend, but they are also very popular with quantum scientists—with two new research breakthroughs poised to accelerate the development of synthetic diamond-based quantum technology, improve scalability, and dramatically reduce manufacturing costs.

While silicon is traditionally used for computer and mobile phone hardware, diamond has unique properties that make it particularly useful as a base for emerging quantum technologies such as quantum supercomputers, secure communications and sensors.

However there are two key problems; cost, and difficulty in fabricating the single crystal diamond layer, which is smaller than one millionth of a meter.

Did you know your Pixel had this? Did you know any phone had this? Google now wants you to know about it.

ETH Computer scientists have developed a new AI solution that enables touchscreens to sense with eight times higher resolution than current devices. Thanks to AI, their solution can infer much more precisely where fingers touch the screen.

Quickly typing a message on a smartphone sometimes results in hitting the wrong letters on the small keyboard or on other input buttons in an app. The touch sensors that detect finger input on the touch screen have not changed much since they were first released in mobile phones in the mid-2000s.

Continue reading “Improving touch screens with AI” »

This amazing research out of MIT could have big implications for gadgets and fashion.

Tokyo (AFP)

Paralysed from the neck down, the man stares intently at a screen. As he imagines handwriting letters, they appear before him as typed text thanks to a new brain implant.

The 65-year-old is “typing” at a speed similar to his peers tapping on a smartphone, using a device that could one day help paralysed people communicate quickly and easily.

Researchers in Singapore have found a way of controlling a Venus flytrap using electric signals from a smartphone, an innovation they hope will have a range of uses from robotics to employing the plants as environmental sensors.

Luo Yifei, a researcher at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU), showed in a demonstration how a signal from a smartphone app sent to tiny electrodes attached to the plant could make its trap close as it does when catching a fly.

“Plants are like humans, they generate electric signals, like the ECG (electrocardiogram) from our hearts,” said Luo, who works at NTU’s School of Materials Science and Engineering.

The findings could lead to faster, more secure memory storage, in the form of antiferromagnetic bits.

When you save an image to your smartphone, those data are written onto tiny transistors that are electrically switched on or off in a pattern of “bits” to represent and encode that image. Most transistors today are made from silicon, an element that scientists have managed to switch at ever-smaller scales, enabling billions of bits, and therefore large libraries of images and other files, to be packed onto a single memory chip.

But growing demand for data, and the means to store them, is driving scientists to search beyond silicon for materials that can push memory devices to higher densities, speeds, and security.

The fight against gadget waste is being spurred on by new printable electronics made from wood ink.

The pace of those improvements has slowed, but International Business Machines Corp on Thursday said that silicon has at least one more generational advance in store.

IBM introduced what it says is the world’s first 2-nanometer chipmaking technology. The technology could be as much as 45% faster than the mainstream 7-nanometer chips in many of today’s laptops and phones and up to 75% more power efficient, the company said.