Lifeboat Foundation

More information on DARPA’s efforts in build new interface standards for modular design & practical circuit blocks.

Is it possible to develop chip technology that combines the high-performance characteristics of ASICS with the speedy, low-cost features of printed circuit boards?

Scientists at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency this week said they were looking for information on how to build interface standards that would enable modular design and practical circuit blocks that could be reused to greatly shorten electronics development time and cost.

Continue reading “DARPA tackling reusable, modular chipset technology” »

Although BMI is nothing new; I never get tired of highlighting it.

Now the group has come up with a way for one person to control multiple robots.

Continue reading “Is MIND-CONTROL the future of warfare?” »

Another option to a really old problem.

‘Specially structured synthetic clays capable of immobilizing radioactive species by ion exchange has been developed by Sridhar Komarneni, a materials scientist and Distinguished Professor of Clay Mineralogy.’

According to our best theories of physics, the universe is a fixed block where time only appears to pass. Yet if the flow of time is an illusion, how do we account for the distinction between past, present and future? In June, 60 physicists gathered for four days at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics to debate this another questions about the mysteries of time.

Open the hood of just about any electronic gadget and you probably will find printed circuit boards (PCBs)—most often in a leaf-green color—studded with processing, memory, data-relaying, graphics, and other types of chips and components, all interconnected with a labyrinth of finely embossed wiring. By challenging the technology community to integrate the collective functions hosted by an entire PCB onto a device approaching the size of a single chip, DARPA’s newest program is making a bid to usher in a fresh dimension of technology miniaturization.

“We are trying to push the massive amount of integration you typically get on a printed circuit board down into an even more compact format,” said Dr. Daniel Green, manager of the new program, whose acronym, “CHIPS,” is itself a typographic feat of miniaturization; the program’s full name is the Common Heterogeneous Integration and Intellectual Property (IP) Reuse Strategies Program. “It’s not just a fun acronym,” Green said. “The program is all about devising a physical library of component chips, or chiplets, that we can assemble in a modular fashion.”

A primary driver of CHIPS is to develop a novel, industry-friendly architectural strategy for designing and building new generations of microsystems in which the time and energy it takes to move signals—that is, data—between chips is reduced by factors of tens or even hundreds. “This is increasingly important for the data-intensive processing that we have to do as the data sets we are dealing with get bigger and bigger,” Green said. Although the program does not specify applications, the new architectural strategy at the program’s heart could open new routes to computational efficiencies required for such feats as identifying objects and actions in real-time video feeds, real-time language translation, and coordinating motion on-the-fly among swarms of fast-moving unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

Every day, modern society creates more than a billion gigabytes of new data. To store all this data, it is increasingly important that each single bit occupies as little space as possible. A team of scientists at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at Delft University managed to bring this reduction to the ultimate limit: they built a memory of 1 kilobyte (8,000 bits), where each bit is represented by the position of one single chlorine atom.

“In theory, this storage density would allow all books ever created by humans to be written on a single post stamp”, says lead-scientist Sander Otte.

Continue reading “Atomic data storage is still way off from practicality — 500 Terabits per square inch at -196˚C in a vacuum chamber” »

Computadores qu nticos a temperatura ambiente.

É aí que entra a naftalina — mais especificamente, o material resultante da queima do naftaleno. A combustão gera um material à base de carbono, um pó fino que pode ser disperso em solventes como água ou etanol e depositado diretamente sobre uma pastilha de silício — depois de seco e visto ao microscópio o material se transforma em uma série de nanoesferas.

Bálint Náfrádi, da Universidade Politécnica Federal de Lausane, na Suíça, juntamente com colegas da Austrália e da Alemanha, descobriu que esse material consegue manter estáveis os spins dos elétrons em seu interior por até 175 nanossegundos — considera-se que a computação qu ntica pode se tornar prática a temperatura ambiente com qubits que sejam estáveis por mais do que 100 nanossegundos.

Continue reading “Naftalina viabiliza computador quântico a temperatura ambiente” »

SENS has a fund match for its current campaign on lifespan.io, if you are concerned about cancer like me and you want to help directly fund a lab working on solutions please think about donating. smile

There is a month left to go in the SENS crowdfunding campaign that aims to accelerate development of an important component of a universal cancer therapy, a way to block the mechanisms of telomere lengthening that every type of cancer depends upon. The SENS Research Foundation and Lifespan.io volunteers are looking for donors to put up matching funds of a few thousand dollars or more, in order to take that news and that inducement to a number of conferences and other events over the next few weeks. More than 150 people have donated to the campaign to date, and we’d like to triple that number in the next 30 days.

To start things off, I’ll offer up $2,000 of my own funds: the next $2,000 in donations to this SENS cancer research initiative will be matched dollar for dollar. That is a start, and if you can join in to help out, please contact me to let me know. Can you help to make a difference here?

Continue reading “Matching Fund Donors Sought for SENS Universal Cancer Therapy Crowdfunding” »

Light-absorbing glow-in-the-dark road markings have replaced standard street lighting on a 500 meter stretch of highway in The Netherlands. This project is the first stage of a concept first unveiled back in 2012 by designer and innovator Daan Roosegaarde, who presented his ‘Smart Highway’ plans during Dutch Design Week. Roosegaarde’s design took top honors in the 2013 INDEX: Awards, and we’re excited to see it finally hit the streets!