Building upon its leadership position in robotics research and development, and in recognition of the increasing benefits robots are bringing to society, Carnegie Mellon University has established “The Robot Hall of Fame” to honor noteworthy robots, both real and fictional, along with their creators.
A basic discovery in magnetic semiconductors could result in a new generation of devices for sensors and memory applications — and perhaps, ultimately, quantum computation — physicists from the California Institute of Technology and the University of California at Santa Barbara have announced. The new phenomenon, called the giant planar Hall effect, has to do with what happens when the spins of current-carrying electrons are manipulated. For several years scientists have been engaged in exploiting electron spin for the creation of a new generation of electronic devices –hence the term “spintronics” — and the Caltech-UCSB breakthrough offers a new route to realizing such devices.