WASHINGTON, Feb. 28 — With worldwide Internet data traffic increasing by 50 percent each year, telecommunications companies that handle this digital torrent must be able to economically expand the capacities of their networks while also adapting to…
Cambridge, Mass. – February 28, 2011 – There was a time when a laptop could weigh 10 pounds and still sell — a time when a cell phone was larger than a pocket — and a time when an iPod only played music.
Today’s consumers expect mobile devices…
As much as 90 percent of variation in adult height may be caused by genetic inheritance, but a multitude of genes are involved. Most of these have yet to be discovered.
Now a new meta-analysis of data from more than 100,000 people has identified …
Researchers from Queen Mary, University of London, the University of Fribourg and the Paul Scherrer Institut (Villigen, Switzerland) have shown that a magnetically polarised current can be manipulated by electric fields.
Published this week in the…
Electrical engineers generated short, powerful light pulses on a chip — an important step toward the optical interconnects that will likely replace the copper wires that carry information between chips within today’s computers. University of…
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — University of Illinois researchers are using a new kind of microsensor to answer one of the weightiest questions in biology — the relationship between cell mass and growth rate.
The team, led by electrical and computer engin…
Optical gyroscopes, also known as rotation sensors, are widely used as a navigational tool in vehicles from ships to airplanes, measuring the rotation rates of a vehicle on three axes to evaluate its exact position and orientation. Prof. Koby Scheue…
Used in a variety of products from credit cards to satellite televisions, secure chips are designed to keep encoded data safe. But hackers continue to develop methods to crack the chips’ security codes and access the information within.
Thi…
Were our early mammalian ancestors vegetarians, vegans or omnivores? It’s difficult for anthropologists to determine the diet of early mammalians because current fossil analysis provides too little information. But a new method that measures the…
SANTA CRUZ, CA–A tiny optical device built into a silicon chip has achieved the slowest light propagation on a chip to date, reducing the speed of light by a factor of 1,200 in a study reported in Nature Photonics (published online September 5 and …
The life of the silicon chip industry may last 10 or more years longer, thanks to a new manufacturing process developed by NASA scientists. The novel method, announced in the April 14 issue of the journal Applied Physics Letters, includes use of extremely tiny carbon ‘nanotubes’ instead of copper conductors to interconnect parts within integrated circuits (ICs). Carbon nanotubes are measured in nanometers, much smaller than today’s components. A nanometer is roughly 10,000 times smaller than the width of an average human hair. ICs are very small groups of electronic components made on silicon wafers.
Researchers have discovered how to transfer the optical properties of silicon crystal sensors to plastic, an achievement that could lead to the development of flexible, implantable devices capable of monitoring the delivery of drugs within the body, the strains on a weak joint or even the healing of a suture. The discovery is detailed in the March 28 issue of Science by a team that pioneered the development of a number of novel optical sensors from silicon wafers, the raw starting material for computer chips.