Fortifying computer chips for space travel

Space is cold, dark, and lonely. Deadly, too, if any one of a million things goes wrong on your spaceship. It’s certainly no place for a computer chip to fail, which can happen due to the abundance of radiation bombarding a craft. Worse, ever-shrinking components on microprocessors make computers more prone to damage from high-energy radiation like protons from the sun or cosmic rays from beyond our galaxy.

It’s a good thing, then, that engineers know how to make a spaceship’s microprocessors more robust. To start, they hit them with high-energy ions from particle accelerators here on Earth. It’s a radiation-testing process that finds a chip’s weak spots, highlighting when, where, and how engineers need to make the microprocessor tougher.

Physicists catch magnetic wave that offers promise for energy-efficient computing

A team of physicists has taken pictures of a theorized but previously undetected magnetic wave, the discovery of which offers the potential to be an energy-efficient means to transfer data in consumer electronics.

The research, which appears in Physical Review Letters, was conducted by scientists at New York Univ., Stanford Univ. and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

"This is an exciting discovery because it shows that small magnetic waves—known as spin-waves—can add up to a large one in a magnet, a wave that can maintain its shape as it moves," explains Andrew Kent, a professor of physics at NYU and the study's senior author. "A specialized x-ray method that can focus on particular magnetic elements with very high spatial resolution enabled this discovery and should enable many more insights into this behavior."

A new step towards computers of the future

Future computers will require a magnetic material which can be manipulated rapidly by breaking the strong magnetic coupling. A study has been published in Nature Communications in which Swedish and German scientists demonstrate that even the strongest magnetic coupling may be broken within picoseconds. This will open up an exciting new area of research.

The element gadolinium is named after the Uppsala chemist Johan Gadolin who discovered the first rare-earth metal yttrium in the late 1700s. Gadolinium is in the same class of elements and it has unique magnetic properties which make it especially interesting for magnetic data storage. Its most useful property is that it has the greatest spin magnetic moment of any element since there are two different magnetic moments on every atom. These spin moments are coupled in parallel so strongly that no existing magnetic field on earth could break the coupling.

Computers Judge Personality Better than Humans

Your Facebook likes allow computer models to judge your personality better than your coworkers, friends and family, according to study published in Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences.

People leave digital footprints daily: from browsing history and online purchases to GPS locations and social media accounts.

According to the study, this allows machines to gauge human personalities without usual social-cognitive skills. In the study, the computer only needed 10 likes to beat a person’s work colleague, 70 likes to be more accurate than a person’s friend and 250 likes to beat a spouse.

Learning spoken language for technology

Every language has its own collection of phonemes, or the basic phonetic units from which spoken words are composed. Depending on how you count, English has somewhere between 35 and 45. Knowing a language’s phonemes can make it much easier for automated systems to learn to interpret speech.

In the 2015 volume of Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers describe a new machine-learning system that, like several systems before it, can learn to distinguish spoken words. But unlike its predecessors, it can also learn to distinguish lower-level phonetic units, such as syllables and phonemes.

Designing switchable electric and magnetic order for low-energy computing about it

Scientists at the Univ. of Liverpool have developed a new material that combines both electrical and magnetic order at room temperature, using a design approach which may enable the development of low-energy computer memory technologies.

Researchers from the university's School of Physical Sciences achieved this scientific advance by designed control of the distribution of the atoms within the solid state.

This new material has implications for information storage and processing applications.

Information can be stored in computers in two distinct ways—one relies on the order of atomic-scale magnets in a solid material, the other of atomic-scale electrical charges.

Machine Learning Aids Digital Business

Technology is the foundation of most business innovation: It fuels growth, improves product time-to-market and enables customers to be conveniently served. For digital businesses—where it’s either innovate or die—technology is paramount to success.

Until recently, only large corporations and firms with large client bases have used the insights from big data analysis as a strategic tool. However, it’s now more attainable for small- to medium-sized business. In addition, Cloud computing has revolutionized the way data is stored—critical files and data can be accessed from a centralized database through any Internet-enabled device.

“These emerging technology trends allow digital businesses to easily improve their products and services where they never find themselves without the data functionality or communication they need,” says Sanjay Parthasarathy, COE of Indix in an interview with R&D Magazine.

New insights into HIV-1 vaccine design

Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory have created a computational model that could change the way that researchers look at possibilities for an HIV-1 vaccine.

“An effective HIV-1 vaccine has proven elusive, partly due to the difficulty of causing an immune response that can neutralize the diverse viral strains circulating in the human population,” said Alan Perelson, of Los Alamos’ Theoretical Biology and Biophysics Group. “Harnessing the power of broadly neutralizing antibodies, which emerge years into a chronic HIV infection, could help overcome this challenge.”

Shishi Luo and Perelson, published their findings in the paper “Competitive exclusion by autologous antibodies can prevent broad HIV-1 antibodies from arising.”

Linking Two Brains for a Game

What if you knew what someone was saying without them opening their mouth?

Located in different buildings on the Univ. of Washington’s campus, approximately one mile apart, two human test subjects sat in front screens. Over the Internet, they played a game akin to 20 questions, but no oral communication was involved. Instead, the inquirer selected questions from the screen. Respondents, outfitted in an electroencephalography cap, answered the yes or no question by fixing their eyes on flashing LED lights situated on the sides of the monitor. Transmitted back to the inquirer, the answer activated a magnetic coil situated behind the inquirer’s head, stimulating the visual cortex. The intensity of the burst of light, known as a phosphene, indicated whether the respondent’s answer was yes or no.