Lifeboat Foundation

Forward-looking: As consumers increasingly turn toward digital distribution and data center operators try various storage methods, optical discs haven’t stopped evolving. A recently published paper explains how manufacturers could make DVD-like discs that hold the equivalent of hundreds or thousands of Blu-rays.

Researchers at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology have developed an optical disc with a capacity of over a petabit of data, equivalent to well over 100 terabytes. Although the technology is primarily proposed for enterprise use, it could potentially become accessible to consumers after overcoming significant obstacles.

The scientists were able to significantly increase the capacity of an optical disc by implementing a 3D planar recording architecture. The technology uses a highly transparent, uniform photoresist film doped with aggregation-induced emission dye and stimulated by femtosecond lasers.

Spin waves offer a new approach to digital computing’s counterpart.

Microsoft is a big win for Intel’s chip foundry business.

Intel said on Wednesday that Microsoft plans to use its services to manufacture a custom computing chip and that the company expects to beat an internal deadline of 2025 to overtake its biggest rival, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, in advanced chip manufacturing.

Dr. Jean Ristaino: “We searched those descriptions by keywords, and by doing that we were able to recreate the original outbreak maps using location coordinates mentioned in the documents. We were also trying to learn what people were thinking about the disease at the time and where it came from.”

Can plant diseases be tracked through analyzing past reports? This is what a recent study published in Scientific Reports hopes to address as a team of researchers at North Carolina State University (NCSU) attempted to ascertain the causes behind blight disease on plants, known as Phytophthora infestans, that resulted in the Irish potato famine during the 1840s. This study holds the potential to help scientists and farmers not only better understand the causes of blight disease in plants, but also how they might be able to predict them in the future.

Image of a blight lesion on a potato leaf. (Credit: Jean Ristaino, NC State University)

Continue reading “Tracking the Trajectory of Late Blight Disease: A Text Mining Study from 1840s to Modern Times” »

The electron is the basic unit of electricity, as it carries a single negative charge. This is what we’re taught in high school physics, and it is overwhelmingly the case in most materials in nature.

But in very special states of matter, electrons can splinter into fractions of their whole. This phenomenon, known as “fractional charge,” is exceedingly rare, and if it can be corralled and controlled, the exotic electronic state could help to build resilient, fault-tolerant quantum computers.

To date, this effect, known to physicists as the “fractional quantum Hall effect,” has been observed a handful of times, and mostly under very high, carefully maintained magnetic fields. Only recently have scientists seen the effect in a material that did not require such powerful magnetic manipulation.

Optica l computing via free-space-based structured optical materials allows to access optical information without the need for preprocessing or optoelectronic conversion. In this Perspective, the authors describe opportunities and challenges in their use for optical computing, information processing, computational imaging and sensing.

Firefly Aerospace sent a Lockheed Martin payload to the wrong orbit in December, and it is now ‘implementing corrections’ for future missions.

Researchers from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore (NTU Singapore) have created a low-cost tool that can capture power from wind energy as moderate as a light breeze.

The gadget can create a voltage of three volts and energy power of up to 290 microwatts when exposed to winds with speeds as low as 2 meters per second (m/s). This is enough to power a commercial sensor device and allow it to transfer data to a smartphone or computer.