systems

For the more than 5 million people in the world who have undergone an upper-limb amputation, prosthetics have come a long way. Beyond traditional mannequin-like appendages, there is a growing number of commercial neuroprosthetics -- highly articulated bionic limbs, engineered to sense a user's residual muscle signals and robotically mimic their intended motions. But this … [Read more...] about Inflatable robotic hand gives amputees real-time tactile control: Prosthetic enables a wide range of daily activities, such as zipping a suitcase, shaking hands, and petting a cat.

Scientists at DESY have built a compact electron camera that can capture the inner, ultrafast dynamics of matter. The system shoots short bunches of electrons at a sample to take snapshots of its current inner structure and is the first such electron diffractometer that uses Terahertz radiation for pulse compression. The developer team around DESY scientists Dongfang Zhang and … [Read more...] about Table-top electron camera catches ultrafast dynamics of matter: Terahertz enhanced electron diffractometer

The discovery of isotopes in the early 20th century marked a key moment in the history of physics and led to a much more refined understanding of the atomic nucleus. Isotopes are 'versions' of a given element of the periodic table that bear the same number of protons but a different number of neutrons, and therefore vary in mass. These differences in mass can radically alter … [Read more...] about Heavily enriched: An energy-efficient way of enriching hydrogen isotopes in silicon

Quantum engineers from UNSW Sydney have removed a major obstacle that has stood in the way of quantum computers becoming a reality: they discovered a new technique they say will be capable of controlling millions of spin qubits -- the basic units of information in a silicon quantum processor. Until now, quantum computer engineers and scientists have worked with a … [Read more...] about ‘Missing jigsaw piece’: Engineers make critical advance in quantum computer design

People's personality -- such as how extroverted or introverted they are -- and their gender can be linked to how they interact online, and whether they prefer interacting with a system rather than with other people. In a study, a team of researchers found that people considered websites more interactive if they had tools to facilitate communication between users, often referred … [Read more...] about Gender, personality influence use of interactive tools online: Are ‘people persons’ also ‘machine persons’ when they interact online?

Robots that need to use their arms to make their way across treacherous terrain just got a speed upgrade with a new path planning approach, developed by University of Michigan researchers. The improved algorithm path planning algorithm found successful paths three times as often as standard algorithms, while needing much less processing time. A new algorithm speeds up path … [Read more...] about Faster path planning for rubble-roving robots

New research published in Scientific Reports has revealed that a simple but robust algorithm can help engineers to improve the design of cellular materials that are used in a variety of diverse applications ranging from defence, bio-medical to smart structures and the aerospace sector. The way in which cellular materials will perform can be uncertain and so calculations to help … [Read more...] about New algorithm can help improve cellular materials design

As reported in a new article in Nature Reviews Physics, instead of waiting for fully mature quantum computers to emerge, Los Alamos National Laboratory and other leading institutions have developed hybrid classical/quantum algorithms to extract the most performance -- and potentially quantum advantage -- from today's noisy, error-prone hardware. Known as variational quantum … [Read more...] about Progress in algorithms makes small, noisy quantum computers viable

One of the most interesting phenomena in quantum mechanics is "quantum entanglement." This phenomenon describes how certain particles are inextricably linked, such that their states can only be described with reference to each other. This particle interaction also forms the basis of quantum computing. And this is why, in recent years, physicists have looked for techniques to … [Read more...] about Best of both worlds — Combining classical and quantum systems to meet supercomputing demands: Scientists detect strongly entangled pair of protons on a nanocrystalline silicon surface, potentially enabling new levels of high-speed computing