Computers

Ultrasmall integrated circuits have revolutionized mobile phones, home appliances, cars, and other everyday technologies. To further miniaturize electronics and enable advanced functions, circuits must be reliably fabricated in three dimensions. Achieving ultrafine 3D shape control by etching into silicon is difficult because even atomic-scale damage reduces device performance. … [Read more...] about Old silicon learns new tricks

Using synchrotron radiation at SPring-8 -- a large-scale synchrotron radiation facility -- Tohoku University, Toshiba Corporation, and the Japan Synchrotron Radiation Research Institute (JASRI) have successfully imaged the magnetization dynamics of a hard disk drive (HDD) write head for the first time, with a precision of one ten-billionth of a second. The method makes possible … [Read more...] about New hard disk write head analytical technology can increase hard disk capacities

In the digital age, data traffic is growing at an exponential rate. The demands on computing power for applications in artificial intelligence such as pattern and speech recognition in particular, or for self-driving vehicles, often exceeds the capacities of conventional computer processors. Working together with an international team, researchers at the University of Münster … [Read more...] about Light-carrying chips advance machine learning: International team of researchers uses photonic networks for pattern recognition

They are as thin as a hair, only a hundred thousand times thinner -- so-called two-dimensional materials, consisting of a single layer of atoms, have been booming in research for years. They became known to a wider audience when two Russian-British scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 for the discovery of graphene, a building block of graphite. The special … [Read more...] about Physicists observe competition between magnetic orders

Getting control of COVID-19 will take more than widespread vaccination; it will also require better understanding of why the disease causes no apparent symptoms in some people but leads to rapid multi-organ failure and death in others, as well as better insight into what treatments work best and for which patients. To meet this unprecedented challenge, researchers at … [Read more...] about COVID-19 unmasked: Math model suggests optimal treatment strategies

A new advanced computing technique using routine medical scans to enable doctors to take fewer, more accurate tumour biopsies, has been developed by cancer researchers at the University of Cambridge. This is an important step towards precision tissue sampling for cancer patients to help select the best treatment. In future the technique could even replace clinical biopsies with … [Read more...] about ‘Virtual biopsies’ could replace tissue biopsies in future thanks to new technique

Given a list of cities and the distances between each pair of cities, how do you determine the shortest route that visits each city exactly once and returns to the starting location? This famous problem is called the "traveling salesman problem" and is an example of a combinatorial optimization problem. Solving these problems using conventional computers can be very … [Read more...] about A bit too much: Reducing the bit width of Ising models for quantum annealing: Scientists find a way to make Ising models easier to implement physically for solving combinatorial optimization problems

If everything moved 40,000 times faster, you could eat a fresh tomato three minutes after planting a seed. You could fly from New York to L.A. in half a second. And you'd have waited in line at airport security for that flight for 30 milliseconds. Thanks to machine learning, designing materials for new, advanced technologies could accelerate that much. A research team at Sandia … [Read more...] about Advanced materials in a snap: Machine learning could lop a year off technology design cycle

Drones, robots and autonomous systems can transform the natural world in and around cities for people and wildlife. International research, involving over 170 experts and led by the University of Leeds, assessed the opportunities and challenges that this cutting-edge technology could have for urban nature and green spaces. The researchers highlighted opportunities to improve … [Read more...] about A robotic revolution for urban nature

Researchers at Paderborn University have developed a new method of distance measurement for systems such as GPS, which achieves more precise results than ever before. Using quantum physics, the team led by Leibniz Prize winner Professor Christine Silberhorn has successfully overcome the so-called resolution limit, which causes the "noise" we may see in photos, for example. … [Read more...] about Breaking through the resolution barrier with quantum-limited precision: Researchers develop new method of measurement