“My phone habits are, I’d like to think, better than most. I seldom take my phone out in company and it’s a rare site to see me scrolling through social media. But when I’m walking to or from work, standing in an elevator, or eating by myself, I’ll often be checking emails, texting friends, or reading articles.”
A tiny (one-centimeter-square) biosensor chip developed at EPFL is designed to be implanted under your skin to continuously monitor concentrations of pH, temperature, and metabolism-related molecules like glucose, lactate and cholesterol, as well as some drugs.
The chip would replace blood work, which may take hours — or even days — for analysis and is a limited snapshot of conditions at the moment the blood is drawn.
Using a new technique they call “in-air microfluidics,” University of Twente scientists succeed in printing 3D structures with living cells. This special technique enable the fast and ‘on-the-fly’ production of micro building blocks that are viable and can be used for repairing damaged tissue, for example. The work is presented in Science Advances.
Microfluidics is all about manipulating tiny drops of fluid with sizes between a micrometer and a millimeter. Most often, chips with tiny fluidic channels, reactors and other components are used for this: lab-on-a-chip systems. Although these chips offer a broad range of possibilities, in producing emulsions for example—droplets carrying another substance – the speed at which droplets leave the chip is typically in the microliter per minute range. For clinical and industrial applications, this is not fast enough: filling a volume of a cubic centimeter would take about 1000 minutes or 17 hours. The technique that is presented now, does this in a couple of minutes.
Right now, you’re carrying around the most powerful computer in existence – the human brain. This naturally super-efficient machine is far better than anything humans have ever built, so it’s not surprising that scientists are trying to reverse-engineer it. Rather than binary bits of information, neuromorphic computers are built with networks of artificial neurons, and now an MIT team has developed a more lifelike synapse to better connect those neurons.
For simplicity’s sake, computers process and store information in a binary manner – everything can be broken down into a series of ones and zeroes. This system has served us well for the better part of a century, but having access to a whole new world of analog “grey areas” in between could really give computing power a shot in the arm.
You can start getting pumped about the next generation of graphics cards, as Samsung has announced that it’s building the first-ever 16-gigabit GDDR6 chips using its 10-nanometer class technology. The news isn’t a complete surprise, as Samsung previously said that GDDR6 was coming when it unveiled 8-gigabit DDR4 RAM chips last month and won a CES 2018 Innovation Award in November.
“Beginning with this early production of the industry’s first 16Gb GDDR6, we will offer a comprehensive graphics DRAM line-up, with the highest performance and densities, in a very timely manner,” said Samsung’s Senior VP Jinman Han. The company also did a minor tease, saying the chips “will play a critical role in early launches of next-generation graphics cards and systems.”
The voracious demand from bitcoin mining has pushed the GeForce GTX 1070 from a $380 suggested retail price to $890.
Continue reading “Samsung starts producing GDDR6 RAM for next-gen graphics cards” »
Over the past year, Google has demonstrated its desire to step up its hardware game. The company bought HTC’s Pixel team for $1.1 billion, designed its own imaging chip for the Pixel 2 and also hired a key Apple chip designer. Bloomberg reports that in its bid to gain an edge on the competition, Google has quietly snapped up UK startup Redux, a small team focused on delivering sound and touch feedback via mobile displays.
According to filings, Google took control of the startup back in August and then subsequently shut down the company’s website. Previous demonstrations show Redux playing back music via a tablet device, which possesses tiny actuators that vibrate the screen and effectively turn it into a loudspeaker. By eliminating the need for smartphone speakers, Google may be able free up more space for batteries and other important components inside future smartphones.
From afar, it looks like a steampunk chandelier. An intricate collection of tubes and wires that culminate in a small steel cylinder at the bottom. It is, in fact, one of the most sophisticated quantum computers ever built. The processor inside has 50 quantum bits, or qubits, that process tasks in a (potentially) revolutionary way. Normally, information is created and stored as a series of ones and zeroes. Qubits can represent both values at the same time (known as superposition), which means a quantum computer can theoretically test the two simultaneously. Add more qubits and this hard-to-believe computational power increases.
Last November, IBM unveiled the world’s first 50-qubit quantum computer. It lives in a laboratory, inside a giant white case, with pumps to keep it cool and some traditional computers to manage the tasks or algorithms being initiated. At CES this year, the company brought the innards — the wires and tubes required to send signals to the chip and keep the system cool — so reporters and attendees could better understand how it works. The biggest challenge, IBM Research Vice President Jeffrey Welser told me, is isolating the chip from unwanted “noise.” This includes electrical, magnetic and thermal noise — just the temperature of the room renders the whole machine useless.
